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Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America
 
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Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America [Paperback]

Lucy Lippard (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)


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Book Description

October 31, 1990
In America today there is a little-known explosion of creative art by women and men from many different ethnic backgrounds. Mixed Blessings is the first book to discuss the crosscultural process taking place in the work of Latino, Native-, African-, and Asian-American artists. Rich with illustrations of artworks in many different mediums, and filled with incisive quotes and unsettling reports, it is more than a book about art, it is a complex meditation on the relationships of people to their cultures.

Lucy R. Lippard, one of our most original and insightful writers on art, challenges conventional approaches and explores the role of images in a changing society. Among her subjects are the uncertainty of exile; the confusion of identity in attempts to climb out of the melting pot; and art that speaks for itself, reversing stereotypes and reclaiming history and memory. Mixed Blessings is a book that will affect how we think of ourselves and each other.


Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Attempting to examine how Native, African, Asian and Latino Americans "see themselves and others" and to analyze "the ways cross-cultural activity is reflected in the visual arts," Lippard ( Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory ) has compiled a daunting amount of information about the history, religion and aesthetic traditions of these cultures. But she includes so many artists, working in a wide variety of media, that the reader, inundated, tends to lose sight of her broader themes. In the chapter on cultural mixing, for example, Lippard segues from a discussion on tribalism and ethnocentrism to an appreciation of graffiti as a form of creative expression to a brief history of painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. With this excess of data, there is probably something to pique everyone's interest, but readers will have to sift through to find it. Other topics embrace the relationship between primitivism and popular culture, the link between traditional tribal ceremonies and contemporary performance art, and issues of racism and miscegenation. The photographs provide adequate illustration, but the tangential captions distract the reader even further.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"This is more than a book about art. I call it a round dance of cultural concepts, ideas, and meanings that prove what American art is really up to in these last days of the century. Lippard affirms that the melting pot was an idea that never happened; in this beautiful book we experience a crossroads of memory expressed in form, color, spirit, words.What a gift!" -- Joy Harjo, poet and associate professor, University of Arizona

"Lucy Lippard's intellectual devotion to the power of women and persons of color enacted and idealized within their works of visual art has brought her to level of discourse that is rich in democratic possibility and promise. I love this book, in short, and recommend it highly." -- Robert Farris Thompson, professor of African and African-American art history, Yale University

Product Details

  • Paperback: 278 pages
  • Publisher: Pantheon (October 31, 1990)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0679729666
  • ISBN-13: 978-0679729662
  • Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.9 x 0.7 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #982,764 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Average Customer Review
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant Art Images but Scattered Analysis, December 23, 2009
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Amy E. Story (Cleveland, OH USA) - See all my reviews
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I used this book as part of a Philosophy of Art class that I teach aimed at sophomores and juniors in college. I chose the book because it is full of fabulous images from multicultural artists, and I thought I would be able to use Lippard's analysis to spark theoretical discussion. The prose in the book, however, is so scattered and so lacking in theoretical bite that I found the book far more frustrating than it was useful. If you are looking for a minor primer in some varieties of multicultural art and are mostly interested in the images, then the book would be great. If you want theoretical analysis, logical organization of ideas, clear and sensible themes, then you had better look elsewhere.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent text required by Academy of Art University course, March 8, 2007
Covers minority art, lots of colored pictures and artist comments/barriers in representation and discrimination. A must read for all artists.
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