Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies
of the African Body

*PLEASE NOTE: CONTAINS MATURE CONTENT

Accompanying the Hood Museum's exhibition of the same name, this collection of essays is as richly insightful as it is beautifully produced. Eight contributors analyze representations of black women from separate but intersecting perspectives: the traditional African; the colonial; and the contemporary global. The essays, as well as artist commentaries, are supported by 128 color plates. Thompson's essay opens with the black female body on display in Europe and moves to the recovery of traditional African ideologies of womanhood, setting the stage for Amadiume's examination of traditional African art practices and Schildkrout's demonstration of cross-cultural exchange. Investigating western colonizations and imaginings of black women, Wallace-Sanders's analysis of representations of Mammy shifts the ground to the United States, while Willis considers how photographs from black family albums between the 1890s and 1940s countered racist images in popular culture. Thompson's closing meditation leads the reader back to the new, thought-provoking and often confrontational images of an empowered and outspoken black female presence at the heart of this exhibit. The originality of the images and interpretations make this catalogue essential to understanding how fully clothed the unclothed body truly is. *PLEASE NOTE: THIS BOOK CONTAINS NUDITY AND OTHER MATURE CONTENT.

CONTEMPORARY ART
2008, 12 x 9 inches, 376 pp, color illus.
Hardcover, ISBN: 978-0-295-98770-5
code: hood bw L-4
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OUT OF STOCK
Coming of Age in Ancient Greece:
Images of Childhood from the Classical Past

What was childhood like in ancient Greece? How were they schooled and what religious and ceremonial rites of passage were key to their development? These questions and many more are answered in this study, which features and discusses imagery and artifacts relating to childhood in ancient Greece. The book demonstrates that the Greeks were the first culture to represent children and their activities naturalistically in their art. Here we learn about depictions of children in myth as well as life, from infancy to adolescence, on ancient vases, coins, terracotta figurines, bronze and stone sculpture, and marble grave monuments. Essays by eminent scholars in the fields of Greek social history, literature, archaeology, anthropology and art history discuss a wide range of topics, including: the burgeoning role of childhood studies in interdisciplinary studies; the status of children in Greek culture; the evolution of attitudes toward children from the Bronze Age to the Hellenistic period as documented by literature and art; the relationships of fathers and sons and mothers and daughters; and the roles of cult practice and death in a child's existence.

ART HISTORY
2003, 12 x 9 inches, 352 pp, color illus.
Softcover, ISBN: 0-300-09960-6
code: hood age L-3

OUT OF STOCK
Sean Scully: The Art of the Stripe

Abstract painter Sean Scully has relentlessly pursued the possibilities offered by colored stripes, always remaining true to his assertion that "the stripe is a signifier of modernism." His continual variations on the theme of the painted stripe, bar, and block might be read as purely abstract, or as meditations on union and disunion; dependence and independence; or harmony and disharmony. This exhibition catalogue from the Hood Museum's 2008 exhibition explores Scully's work since the early 1970s and culminates with the first showing in America of the artist’s beautiful series Holly, made in memory and in honor of his mother. Along with over twenty large oil paintings, a small selection of photographs demonstrates Scully's fascination with the architectural structures of our built environment (railway lines, skyscrapers, grids of streets)—the inspiration of so much in his abstract images. The book includes interviews with the artist about his career, as well as essays on the stripe in Western abstract painting and in Scully’s art from the last four decades.

PAINTING
2009, 11 x 8.5 inches, 144 pp, color illus.
Hardcover, ISBN 978-0-944722-34-3
code: hood scul L-3

OUT OF STOCK
Frank Stella: Irregular Polygons, 1965-66

Frank Stella burst on the New York art scene in 1958, when some of his ‘black paintings’ were included in the exhibition Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art. Since then he has investigated pictorial ideas according to his principle, as he describes it, of “line, plane, volume, and point, within space.” Although based on simple geometries, the Irregular Polygons (1965-66) constitute one of the most complex artistic statements of Stella's career. The eleven compositions combine different numbers of shapes to create daringly irregular outlines. Stella made four versions of each composition, varying the color combinations. They mark a radical shift from the artist's earlier striped works in their use of large fields of color. The asymmetric canvases play with illusion, confronting Stella's previous emphasis on flatness while anticipating his career-long exploration of space and volume in both painting and sculpture. The exhibition includes one of each of the artist’s eleven monumental compositions for the Irregular Polygon (1965-66) series, along with preparatory drawings; his 1974 series Eccentric Polygons; and a selection of the artist’s latest works, the Polychrome Reliefs. Essays by Hood Museum Director and curator Brian Kennedy support the color images.

PAINTING
2010, 11 x 8.5 inches, 150 pp, color illus.
Hardcover, ISBN 978-0-944722-39-8
code: hood stel L-3

OUT OF STOCK
Marks of Distinction: Two Hundred Years of
American Drawings and Watercolors from the Hood Museum of Art

Approximately two hundred and fifty of the Hood Museums’s finest American watercolors and drawings, dating from 1769 to 1969, are beautifully illustrated and thoroughly documented in this catalogue. Many work are here published for the first time, while new scholarly research has enhanced our appreciation of others. This comprehensive collection boasts work by Benjamin West; James McNeill Whistler; John Singer Sargent; Maurice Pendergast; George Bellows; Joseph Stella; Paul Cadmus; Edwin Dickinson; David Smith; Lee Bontecou and Larry Rivers. The featured works reveal the rich variety of approaches, media, and subjects that have attracted American artists over the past two hundred years.

DRAWING/WATERCOLOR
2005, 12 x 9.5 inches, 282 pp, color illus.
Softcover, ISBN 1-55595-254-2
code: hood marks L-4