This collection features books and book contributions written by faculty in the Department of Visual & Performing Arts at Fairfield University.
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The Taylor Mac Book: Ritual, Realness and Radical Performance
David Román and Sean F. Edgecomb
This is the first book to dedicate critical attention to the work of influential theater-maker Taylor Mac. Mac is particularly celebrated for the historic performance event A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, in which Mac, in fantastical costumes designed by collaborator Machine Dazzle, sang the history of the United States for 24 straight hours in October 2016. The MacArthur Foundation soon thereafter awarded their “genius” award to a “writer, director, actor, singer, and performance artist whose fearlessly experimental works dramatize the power of theater as a space for building community . . . [and who] interacts with the audience to inspire a reconsideration of assumptions about gender, identity, ethnicity, and performance itself.”
Featuring essays, interviews, and commentaries by noted critics and artists, the volume examines the vastness of Mac’s theatrical imagination, the singularity of their voice, the inclusiveness of their cultural insights and critiques, and the creativity they display through stylistic and formal qualities and the unorthodoxies of their personal and professional trajectories. Contributors consider the range of Mac’s career as a playwright, performer, actor, and singer, expanding and enriching the conversation on this much-celebrated and deeply resonant body of work.
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Seize the Beat: The Evolution of American Music
Brian Q. Torff
The story of American popular music is steeped in social history, race, gender and class, its evolution driven by ephemeral connection to young audiences. From Benny Goodman to Sinatra to Elvis Presley to the Beatles, pop icons age out of the art form while new musical styles pass from relevance to nostalgia within a few years. At the same time, perennial forms like blues, jazz and folk are continually rediscovered by new audiences.
This book traces the development of American music from its African roots to the juke joint, club and concert hall, revealing a culture perpetually reinventing itself to suit the next generation.
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Charles Ludlam Lives!: Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company
Sean F. Edgecomb
Playwright, actor and director Charles Ludlam (1943–1987) helped to galvanize the Ridiculous style of theater in New York City starting in the 1960s. Decades after his death, his place in the chronicle of American theater has remained constant, but his influence has changed. Although his Ridiculous Theatrical Company shut its doors, the Ludlamesque Ridiculous has continued to thrive and remain a groundbreaking genre, maintaining its relevance and potency by metamorphosing along with changes in the LGBTQ community.
Author Sean F. Edgecomb focuses on the neo-Ridiculous artists Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, and Taylor Mac to trace the connections between Ludlam’s legacy and their performances, using alternative queer models such as kinetic kinship, lateral historiography, and a new approach to camp. Charles Ludlam Lives! demonstrates that the queer legacy of Ludlam is one of distinct transformation—one where artists can reject faithful interpretations in order to move in new interpretive directions.
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Adolf Dehn: Midcentury Manhattan
Philip Eliasoph
Book Description: Adolf Dehn (1895–1968), an American lithographer and watercolorist, captured the golden age of Manhattan in images that reflect the spirit, pulse, and unique tonalities of the city he made his home. Moving adeptly between the mediums of lithography, drawing, and painting, his expert renderings of the city’s burlesque theaters and Harlem nightclubs, extraordinary skyline, teeming harbor, and the bucolic refuge of Central Park, attest to the skill of this exceptional, adventurous, and intrepid artist. The Artist Book Foundation is pleased to announce the publication of this important monograph on a uniquely American artist that includes an extensively researched essay by Philip Eliasoph, PhD, an art historian in Fairfield University’s Visual & Performing Arts department and the author of numerous scholarly books, catalogues, articles, and reviews. In 2016, Eliasoph designed and authored the Arts & Visual Culture blog for the New York Times. He is also an elected member of the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art, UNESCO’s art critic organization based in Paris. Henry Adams contributed an illuminating foreword. Adams is the Ruth Coulter Heede Professor of Art History at Case Western Reserve University and the author of 14 art-related books and catalogues, as well as hundreds of articles on art and artists. He has also served as the curator of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art. This is a book for lovers of New York City and beyond that celebrates a prolific artist and his fascination for the metropolis with a fresh, new appreciation of its culture, commerce, urban design, and the eternal romance of art.
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Receptions of Antiquity, Constructions of Gender in European Art, 1300-1600
Marice Rose and Alison C. Poe
Receptions of Antiquity, Constructions of Gender in European Art, 1300-1600 presents scholarship in classical reception at its nexus with art history and gender studies. It considers the ways that artists, patrons, collectors, and viewers in late medieval and early modern Europe used ancient Greek and Roman art, texts, myths, and history to interact with and shape notions of gender. The essays examine Giotto's Arena Chapel frescoes, Michelangelo's Medici Chapel personifications, Giulio Romano's decoration of the Palazzo del Te, and other famous and lesser-known sculptures, paintings, engravings, book illustrations, and domestic objects as well as displays of ancient art. Visual responses to antiquity in this era, the volume demonstrates, bore a complex and significant relationship to the construction of, and challenges to, contemporary gender norms. -- Publisher
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Unmasking Theatre Design: A Designer's Guide to Finding Inspiration and Cultivating Creativity
Lynne Porter
Every great design has its beginnings in a great idea, whether your medium of choice is scenery, costume, lighting, sound, or projections. Unmasking Theatre Design shows you how to cultivate creative thinking skills through every step of theatre design - from the first play reading to the finished design presentation. This book reveals how creative designers think in order to create unique and appropriate works for individual productions, and will teach you how to comprehend the nature of the design task at hand, gather inspiration, generate potential ideas for a new design, and develop a finished look through renderings and models. The exercises presented in this book demystify the design process by providing you with specific actions that will help you get on track toward fully-formed designs. Revealing the inner workings of the design process, both theoretically and practically, Unmasking Theatre Design will jumpstart the creative processes of designers at all levels, from student to professionals, as you construct new production designs. -- Publisher's Description
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Robert C. Jackson Paintings
Philip Eliasoph
The paintings of Robert C. Jackson are introduced by Philip Eliasoph in the artist’s first monograph. Using paintings from artists as diverse as Andrew Wyeth and Jasper Johns, Eliasoph’s extensive knowledge of American art places Jackson’s artwork into a historical context. This beautifully illustrated book includes more than 130 images of the artist’s paintings with details, photographs of the artist at work, sketchbook reproductions, and an interview with the artist himself. Eliasoph colorfully proclaims, “The paintings we are about to examine are inescapably a bundle of contradictions, satirical complexities, and witty subterfuge. Essentially, Jackson is a uniquely self-realized painter. His feisty independence is fortified with healthy dosages of non-conforming eccentricity, with a small touch of screwball nuttiness.” The foreword by Professor Henry Adams reveals a similar sentiment, “Notably, this is also the sort of strange mix of sensibilities one finds in the best American novelists, such as Mark Twain.”
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James Prosek: An Un-Natural History
Jill J. Deupi
Jill Deupi is the Editor and a contributing author, "Un-Natural History".
Book description: Fully illustrated catalog for the "James Prosek: Un-Natural History" exhibition at Fairfield University's Bellarmine Museum of Art (October 21-December, 2011), Fairfield, CT. Includes essays by three Fairfield University faculty members: Jill Deupi (Director, Bellarmine Museum of Art and Assistant Professor of Art History), Brian Walker (Associate Professor of Biology), and Scott Lacy (Assistant Professor of Anthropology). Seventeen full-color plates of works included in the exhibition as well as installation shots of the show.
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Colleen Browning: The enchantment of Realism
Philip Eliasoph
Browning has a distinct brand of figurative painting, with subjects ranging from worshipers in a Guatemalan church to graffiti-covered Harlem subway cars to still life compositions. Her work is largely recognized for its superior command of materials and media and for her unwavering devotion to understanding the human condition. She was a prominent contributor to the realist revival of the 1990s, and she continued to paint until the very last years of her life. In the 1950s, her work was shown at the Edwin Hewitt Gallery in New York, the destination for realist art of the decade, and she won numerous annual exhibition awards, including the Carnegie International. Her work was included in the National Academy of Design's yearly exhibitions, and she exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial exhibitions, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Kennedy Galleries in New York. She was elected a National Academician in 1966 and served as an officer at the Academy. This is the first extensive study of her life and work produced during her 50-year career.
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Robert Vickrey: The magic of Realism
Philip Eliasoph
A comprehensive survey of the 60-year career of a master of tempera painting, an artist who was included in nine Whitney Museum of American Art Annual Exhibitions. 80 color plates show off the brilliant, light-infused compositions of Vickrey's paintings. Monograph places Vickrey in the context of twentieth-century American art.
Robert Vickrey's unique vision and meticulous, painstaking technique sustained him throughout a sixty-year career. Widely considered to be a master of egg tempera, he used the same labor-intensive medium as Renaissance painters, including Giotto and Cennini. But Vickrey's concerns were distinctly twentieth-century in the subjects and themes he chose, from childhood innocence to the dichotomy of urban versus country living.
"A quintessential Realist, Vickrey endeavoured to explore the human condition within a distinctively American environment," writes author Philip Eliasoph, who argues that Vickrey's work built a bridge from Surrealism and New Objectivity to Magic Realism. Described by the New York Times as the "world's most proficient craftsman in tempera painting, [and] an immaculate technician," Vickrey's oeuvre is the "fiercely independent work of one of its most unorthodox and even most daring inventors," according to Eliasoph.
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In Love With Voices: A Jazz Memoir
Brian Q. Torff
In the early 70s, an idealistic young man – Brian Torff – arrived in New York to pursue his passion for music. During an excursion to Long Island, Brian found his dream instrument: a 1775 re-built Nicola Galliano bass.
Such was the beginning of a career that led Torff from Café Carlyle to Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and the White House. He has toured worldwide with the greatest: from Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme, George Shearing, and Erroll Garner to Stephane Grappelli, Benny Goodman, Mary Lou Williams, and Marian McPartland.
As Brian notes, “bass players do a lot of observing from the back of the bandstand.” It is this supportive role that qualifies Torff to share his insight into jazz music, and its many personalities. Torff takes us beyond the music by adding depth with his vision of American music, and paints vivid portraits of the musicians with whom he played.
Torff’s memoir is one of creativity, and determination mixed with timing, and plain good luck. His sharp narrative not only brings the legends of jazz to life, but reading about them here will certainly motivate you to add some music to your collection.
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Art of Ancient Cyprus: The Cesnola Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Vassos Karageorghis, Joan Mertens, and Marice Rose
Marice Rose is a contributing author, "Hellenistic and Roman terracotta figurines and pottery".
Book Description: The Cesnola Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the richest and most varied representation, outside Cyprus, of Cypriot antiquities. These works were purchased by the newly established Museum in the mid-1870s from General Luigi Palma di Cesnola, a Civil War cavalry officer who had amassed the objects while serving as the American consul on Cyprus. This catalogue features some 500 pieces from the Cesnola Collection, illustrated in superb new color photography. Dating from about 2500 B.C. to about A.D. 300, these works rank among the finest examples of Cypriot art from the prehistoric, Geometric, Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods. They represent every major medium worked in antiquity—stone, copper-based metal, clay, faience, glass, gold and silver, ivory, and semiprecious stones.
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Elaine Anthony: An Eternal Present" in Shared Beginnings, Separate Passages: Retrospective Exhibitions of the Work of Carol Anthony and Elaine Anthony
Philip Eliasoph
Philip Eliasoph is a contributing author, "Elaine Anthony: An Eternal Present"
Book description: This catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition, "Shared beginnings/Separate passages : retrospective exhibitions of the work of Carol Anthony and Elaine Anthony", at the Neuburger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY, 4 February - 14 April, 1996, together with a separate catalogue devoted to the work of Carol Anthony"--t.p. verso
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Art of the Western World: Television Course Faculty Guide
Beatrice Rehl and Philip Eliasoph
Philip Eliasoph and Beatrice Rehl are co-authors of Art of the Western World: Television Faculty Guide which accompanies a PBS/BBC video series: Art of the Western World.
Video Series description: Examines the works of art that have come to define the Western visual tradition from ancient Greece to the present day.
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![Robert Vickrey: Lyrical Realist [videorecording] by Richard Camp, Philip Eliasoph, and Scott Vickrey](https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/visualandperformingarts-books/1016/thumbnail.jpg "Robert Vickrey: Lyrical Realist [videorecording] by Richard Camp, Philip Eliasoph, and Scott Vickrey")
Robert Vickrey: Lyrical Realist [videorecording]
Richard Camp, Philip Eliasoph, and Scott Vickrey
A documentary of the American artist's life and work. Co-produced and co-directed by Richard Camp, Philip Eliasoph, and Scott Vickrey.
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![Steven Dohanos' Portrait of America [videorecording] by Philip Eliasoph](https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/visualandperformingarts-books/1013/thumbnail.jpg "Steven Dohanos' Portrait of America [videorecording] by Philip Eliasoph")
Steven Dohanos' Portrait of America [videorecording]
Philip Eliasoph
Stevan Dohanos' portrait of America [videorecording] / produced by the Fairfield University Media Center in cooperation with Connecticut Public Television ; from a concept by Philip Eliasoph.
Portrays Stevan Dohanos, the artist and the man. His patriotism and interest in Americana is demonstrated in illustrations and stamps he drew.
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Paul Cadmus, yesterday & today
Philip Eliasoph
Exhibition catalogue produced in conjunction with the exhibition ... organized by the Miami University Art Museum ... [held] September 12-October 25, 1981
