Covering two volumes, with more than 300 photographers featured and 507 pages and 382 compelling images, as well as an introduction by Charlotte Cotton, this is one catalogue you may want to add to your table-top collection.

Five curatorial essays on contemporary photography serves to complete the exhibitions in the volumes, and give voice to the illustrations.

Some of the artists featured are : Nicole Belle, Matthew Brandt, Sheila Pree Bright, Jeff Brouws, Emilio Chapela, Tim Davis, Myra Greene, Leslie Hall, Todd Hido, Peter Holzhauer, Whitney Hubbs, Susanne Jirkuff, Eirik Johnson, Adria Julia, Erika Larson, Jason Lazarus, An-My Lê, Kalup Linzy, Matt Lipps, Craig Mammano, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Joey Lehman Morris, Richard Mosse, Laurel Nakadate, Nic Nicosia, David Oresick, Trevor Paglen, Greta Pratt, Michael Robinson, Victoria Sambunaris, Asha Schechter, Michael Schmelling, Christina Seely, Paul Shambroom, RJ Shaughnessy, Tema Stauffer, Will Steacy, Greg Stimac, Jane Tam, Hank Willis Thomas, Brian Ulrich, Sandra Valenzuela, and Augusta Wood.

http://2010biennial.fotofest.org/biennial-catalogue.aspx

My new book, Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art is out this month with Routledge, NYC. Please find the flyer which has a code for a 20% discount. I would appreciate it if you would please encourage your college and university libraries to get a copy.

I will be having a book launch at Paragraphe Books (2220 McGill College Avenue) in Montreal, Quebec, Canada (corner of McGill College and Sherbrooke Street  West) on Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 6:30pm. I hope that some of you can make it!

Charmaine Nelson
Associate Professor of Art History
McGill University
Montreal, Canada

From the publisher:

Child of the Fire is the first book-length examination of the career of the nineteenth-century artist Mary Edmonia Lewis, best known for her sculptures inspired by historical and biblical themes. Throughout this richly illustrated study, Kirsten Pai Buick investigates how Lewis and her work were perceived, and their meanings manipulated, by others and the sculptor herself. She argues against the racialist art discourse that has long cast Lewis’s sculptures as reflections of her identity as an African American and Native American woman who lived most of her life abroad. Instead, by seeking to reveal Lewis’s intentions through analyses of her career and artwork, Buick illuminates Lewis’s fraught but active participation in the creation of a distinct “American” national art, one dominated by themes of indigeneity, sentimentality, gender, and race. In so doing, she shows that the sculptor variously complicated and facilitated the dominant ideologies of the vanishing American (the notion that Native Americans were a dying race), sentimentality, and true womanhood.

Buick considers the institutions and people that supported Lewis’s career—including Oberlin College, abolitionists in Boston, and American expatriates in Italy—and she explores how their agendas affected the way they perceived and described the artist. Analyzing four of Lewis’s most popular sculptures, each created between 1866 and 1876, Buick discusses interpretations of Hiawatha in terms of the cultural impact of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha; Forever Free and Hagar in the Wilderness in light of art historians’ assumptions that artworks created by African American artists necessarily reflect African American themes; and The Death of Cleopatra in relation to broader problems of reading art as a reflection of identity.

“Child of the Fire marks a dramatic change in how scholars approach artists marginalized by race, ethnicity, or gender. In the field of American art, most studies of such artists have assumed that their art directly expresses or reflects their racial, ethnic, and gender identities, usually understood in terms of late-twentieth-century identity politics. While these heroic narratives of self-expression and cultural resistance are a necessary first step in recovering such artists from oblivion, the time has come for a more sophisticated analysis of how these artists actually worked and what they achieved. Kirsten Pai Buick provides that.”—Kirk Savage, author of Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America

“Child of the Fire is a tour de force. Kirsten Pai Buick has written a brilliant, historically and culturally grounded investigation into one of the most fascinating people of the nineteenth century. Despite the challenge of a subject as elusive and enigmatic as Mary Edmonia Lewis, Buick brings Lewis’s work back where it belongs: into the fold of nineteenth-century American art, albeit from the vantage point of a knowing, African American, female, expatriate, Catholic iconoclast.”—Richard J. Powell, author of Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture

Kirsten Pai Buick is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of New Mexico.

Dear powerHouse follower—

You are, with any luck, a retailer, a reviewer, a promoter, or just someone vigorously involved in the visual arts, and have been following us through our varied publications over the years and the copious press we made with them, and perhaps recall the risks, the successes, maybe even the élan to which we aspired in bringing to market interesting artists’ visual ideas and narratives in this lonely practice of independent illustrated book publishing…
You have witnessed many changes over the years: you’ve seen us produce era-defining tomes of urban culture, fashion, portraiture, and historic monographs; you perhaps saw us evolve from being simply an American illustrated book publisher to one incorporating a visual space bringing books to life (first in that rat haven Hudson Square area and now at the cavernous Arena on the dynamic Brooklyn waterfront). But that all pales in some ways to what is coming next.

powerHouse is going to Random House. More precisely, the pH back end—warehouse services and sales representation to the book and specialty trades—will be unified for the first time under the awesome forces belonging to the last and greatest storied pantheon of conglomerate trade publishing on the planet. What does that mean? We might be doing more trade-like items—might—but more likely, we will be teaching our corporate compatriots how to hand-sell and hand-promote compelling visual books like ours, and in turn learn from them how to best position and leverage these beautiful books’ publication for the widest possible exposure to trade, academic, non-trade, and niche markets in ways we may never have known possible.

It’s a wonderful new world in these strange times; we intend to make the most of it. Please join us.