Need Help?
For individual research help, schedule an appointment to meet with a librarian.
Search the Library Catalog
Search Tips
Search for books on your topic in the library catalog. You can also search by the name of the artist, the title of the work, or the historical era (including the medium, technique, or style).
Select 'Request Item' to have books from other NOVA libraries sent to Loudoun for pick up.
eBooks are accessible through the catalog. If you see any in your search results, click 'Online access' to open.
Suggested Books & eBooks
Paula Modersohn-Becker: The First Modern Woman Artist by
Considered one of the most important of the early German modernists, the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) challenged traditional representations of the female body in art. She was the first modern woman artist to paint herself nude, as well as mothers and children nude. She also created the first self-portrait while pregnant in the history of art. Modersohn-Becker painted the life she was living as a woman and artist and led the way for generations of women artists. Tragically, her life and career were cut short at age thirty-one, following complications from childbirth. Diane Radycki examines the artist's fascinating biography, highlighting her friendships with poet Rainer Maria Rilke and sculptor Clara Rilke-Westhoff as well as her personal anguish, including years in an unconsummated marriage, a disappointing affair, and irresolution about motherhood. Radycki also details the genres of Modersohn-Becker's work: figure (especially nudes), still life, and landscape; and the reception of her work following her death. This new book is an authoritative source on Modersohn-Becker, who Radycki convincingly portrays as the first significant woman artist in the history of modernism.
Call Number: N6888.M5 R33 2013
Ai Weiwei: According to what? by
A leading figure among Chinese artists of his generation, Ai Weiwei creates art that poses fundamental questions about the ways in which art and culture interrelate with society and how society interrelates with individual existence. As a result of his internationally acclaimed work and his direct engagement with Chinese policies and politics, Ai has been thrust into the global spotlight. Featuring his most significant works since 2000, this catalog offers insight into the artist's use of simple forms and artistic methods reminiscent of Conceptual and Minimal art, his preoccupation with the traditional design of furniture and other daily objects, and his iconoclastic attitudes toward traditional values and political authority. The book includes works in sculpture, photography, video, and site-specific architectural installations, making it an invaluable resource on Ai's enormously diverse oeuvre.
Call Number: N7349.A5 A4 2012
The Dinner Party: Judy Chicago and the Power of Popular Feminism, 1970-2007 by
Judy Chicago's monumental art installation The Dinner Party was an immediate sensation when it debuted in 1979, and today it is considered the most popular work of art to emerge from the second-wave feminist movement. Jane F. Gerhard examines the piece's popularity to understand how ideas about feminism migrated from activist and intellectual circles into the American mainstream in the last three decades of the twentieth century. More than most social movements, feminism was transmitted and understood through culture--art installations, Ms. Magazine, All in the Family, and thousands of other cultural artefacts. But the phenomenon of cultural feminism came under extraordinary criticism in the late 1970s and 1980s Gerhard analyses these divisions over whether cultural feminism was sufficiently activist in light of the shifting line separating liberalism from radicalism in post-1970s America. She concludes with a chapter on the 1990s, when The Dinner Party emerged as a target in political struggles over public funding for the arts, even as academic feminists denounced the piece for its alleged essentialism. The path that The Dinner Party travelled--from inception (1973) to completion (1979) to tour (1979-1989) to the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum (2007)--sheds light on the history of American feminism since 1970 and on the ways popular feminism in particular can illuminate important trends and transformations in the broader culture.
Publication Date: 2013
