Here are 11 books that Outdoor Art fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am an art historian and the author of various books about modern art, including Styles, Schools & Movements: The Essential Encyclopaedic Guide to Modern Art and three editions of Destination Art. I coined the phrase ‘Destination Art’ in order to discuss artworks in which location is an integral ingredient, as is the journey to find them. I had noticed projects like these happening all over the world, but often in a quiet way. They needed someone to shine the light on them – so I did! My goal is to educate, enthuse and excite – and to continue my mission of spreading the word about intriguing and inspiring art projects.
This is Hogan’s account of her road trip in search of famous, almost mythical, land art pieces, such as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels. Travelling on her own she found some of the artworks – and a lot out about herself. Brave? Foolish? Probably both. But for the reader, certainly an entertaining and informative chronicle of her travels and discoveries.
Erin Hogan hit the road in her Volkswagen Jetta and headed west from Chicago in search of the monuments of American land art: a salty coil of rocks, four hundred stainless steel poles, a gash in a mesa, four concrete tubes, and military sheds filled with cubes. Her journey took her through the states of Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. It also took her through the states of anxiety, drunkenness, disorientation, and heat exhaustion. "Spiral Jetta" is a chronicle of this journey. A lapsed art historian and devoted urbanite, Hogan initially sought firsthand experience of the monumental earthworks…
I am an art historian and the author of various books about modern art, including Styles, Schools & Movements: The Essential Encyclopaedic Guide to Modern Art and three editions of Destination Art. I coined the phrase ‘Destination Art’ in order to discuss artworks in which location is an integral ingredient, as is the journey to find them. I had noticed projects like these happening all over the world, but often in a quiet way. They needed someone to shine the light on them – so I did! My goal is to educate, enthuse and excite – and to continue my mission of spreading the word about intriguing and inspiring art projects.
Both reference book and travel guide, this second edition includes over 90 sculpture parks in 27 European countries. The parks featured are those that have an ‘art and nature’ element, in which artists collaborate with nature, working in and with nature to create artworks and situations that help us think about and enjoy both. One to take with you on your next trip around Europe!
There is a continually increasing interest in parks and gardens in which modern sculptures and nature form a special symbiosis. Landscapes are an inspiring ambiance for works of art, which in turn add something to the parks and gardens, thus creating a very unique interaction between art and nature.
This guide is the second edition and presents more than 90 parks in 27 European countries, now also including Finland, Hungary, and Poland among others. The parks presented include classics such as the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence and the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, as well as spectacular new schemes such as…
I am an art historian and the author of various books about modern art, including Styles, Schools & Movements: The Essential Encyclopaedic Guide to Modern Art and three editions of Destination Art. I coined the phrase ‘Destination Art’ in order to discuss artworks in which location is an integral ingredient, as is the journey to find them. I had noticed projects like these happening all over the world, but often in a quiet way. They needed someone to shine the light on them – so I did! My goal is to educate, enthuse and excite – and to continue my mission of spreading the word about intriguing and inspiring art projects.
Art critic Gayford’s engaging and entertaining essays recount his adventures over the years when meeting artists and visiting destination art sites around the world, such as Brancusi’s Endless Column in Romania and the Chinati Foundation in Texas. A great storyteller, his writing is both chatty and informative and the book is a pleasure to read.
Bestselling author of Modernists & Mavericks Martin Gayford recounts some of the extraordinary journeys he has made in the name of art.
In the course of a career thinking and writing about art, Martin Gayford has travelled all over the world both to see works of art and to meet artists. Gayford's journeys, often to fairly inaccessible places, involve frustrations and complications, but also serendipitous encounters and outcomes, which he makes as much a part of the story as the final destination. Entertaining and informative, Gayford includes trips to see Brancusi's Endless Column in Romania, prehistoric cave art in France,…
I am an art historian and the author of various books about modern art, including Styles, Schools & Movements: The Essential Encyclopaedic Guide to Modern Art and three editions of Destination Art. I coined the phrase ‘Destination Art’ in order to discuss artworks in which location is an integral ingredient, as is the journey to find them. I had noticed projects like these happening all over the world, but often in a quiet way. They needed someone to shine the light on them – so I did! My goal is to educate, enthuse and excite – and to continue my mission of spreading the word about intriguing and inspiring art projects.
Zappaterra presents creative places around the world in which to experience culture. Her selection includes unexpected locations and outdoor spaces as well as art museums and galleries. She has also included some interesting trails to draw out specific themes or artists. Lots to intrigue and inspire a visit or further research!
Discover hundreds of the most interesting and memorable art experiences from around the world!
Amazing Art Adventures offers us art and culture as an experience both within and beyond the gallery, opening a door to unexpected adventures - art fairs, festivals, installations, art trails, galleries, art islands, monuments, sculpture parks and museums.
Aimed at all of us who travel to learn about new places and cultures, the book gathers together hundreds of unforgettable art experiences around the world, acting as an inspirational travel guide for anyone interested in art. From the Lightning Field in New Mexico to an art island…
I’m a Tokyo-based writer who first came to Japan during university to live with a host family and study the language. After a stint in Shanghai, Japan brought me back in 2012 and I’ve lived here ever since. I’ve cycled across remote Okinawan islands, wandered Kyoto’s cobblestone lanes, and trekked to mountaintop temples in heavy snow. But some of my best memories have happened over homemade plum wine at a friend’s dinner table. I’ve written two books published by Moon Travel Guides and countless articles on Asia, with some being chosen for “best of” lists by The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, andReal Clear World.
Written by the 20th century’s leading interpreter of things Japanese, this travel memoir has a timeless, elegiac quality. Donald Richie lived in Tokyo, but he based this work on a series of trips through the waterways and fishing villages of the glittering Inland Sea. Beyond his beautiful sketches of the seascape itself, his warm, human interactions with fishermen, aunties, merchants, and monks give voice to a disappearing side of Japan. They also serve as a mirror into the metaphorical inland sea within himself––the good, bad, and ugly––which he freely reveals. Seeing the world Richie describes vanish evermore in the decades since, the book’s resonance only grows with age. This is why I find myself diving back into it again and again.
"An elegiac prose celebration ...a classic in its genre."-Publishers Weekly In this acclaimed travel memoir, Donald Richie paints a memorable portrait of the island-studded Inland Sea. His existential ruminations on food, culture, and love and his brilliant descriptions of life and landscape are a window into an Old Japan that has now nearly vanished. Included are the twenty black and white photographs by Yoichi Midorikawa that accompanied the original 1971 edition. Donald Richie (1924-2013) was an internationally recognized expert on Japanese culture and film. Yoichi Midorikawa (1915-2001) was one of Japan's foremost nature photographers.
Having written several books on cultural history, I was puzzled in the late 1990s by the insistence of most American curators, art historians, and gallerists that there could not possibly be any spiritual content in modern artbecause the modernproject (beginning, they assert, with the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874) was all about the rejection of tradition, religion, etc. This overarching narrative has dominated the professional art world since World War II. I knew it was false because I was aware that many prominent modern artists had spiritual interests, which were expressed in their art. So began a 17-year-long research quest focused on what the artists themselves had said.
Most of the impressive artists in this exhibition catalogue did not call themselves Surrealists, but they all were engaged in the initial Surrealist project: to go beyond the tight constraints of Western “reason” to explore the subtle dynamics of the larger gestalt. Toward this end, many of them became interested in esoteric spirituality, portraying the female body as a site of creative energy as well as psychic and cosmological power. Some of them depicted shamanic initiation; some painted serenely detached goddess figures manifesting aspects of the physical world. More than 200 works were included in the exhibition. The featured artists include Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo, Maya Deren, Lee Miller, Yayoi Kusama, and Francesca Woodman. Capsule biographies with striking photographic portraits of these extraordinary women close the book.
The surrealist movement in art is most often identified with male artists, many of whom objectified women in their paintings, casting them as sexual or symbolic ideals. Conversely, the female artists of the movement delved primarily into their own subconscious and dreams. This volume features the work of 48 Mexican and U.S.-based women artists whose contributions to the surrealist movement span more than four decades and whose work was both influential and radical in its own right. Thematically arranged, it includes more than 250 full-colour images along with several essays exploring the effects of geography and gender on the movement.…
Travel teaches and molds us. It certainly changed my own life.
At age 19, I picked up my backpack and schoolbooks and moved from America to Austria. That experience opened my eyes to the world, and I’ve never looked back.
Today, I’m a travel journalist, author, and editor at Go World Travel Magazine. I’m always on the lookout for fascinating tales of travel, but I especially appreciate learning from other female adventurers. They continue to inspire me.
I hope these books will inspire you, too.
Mia Kankimäki’s thoughtful travel memoir explores female adventurers of the past, from Karen Blixen of Out of Africa to Yayoi Kusama, an artist who voluntarily lived in a psychiatric hospital for decades. Kankimäki confronts her own personal demons while considering the challenges these mighty women faced as they journeyed into places unknown.
The Women I Think About at Night is part travel essay, part history lesson, and an all-around enjoyable narrative about female adventures who defied cultural norms to build the lives they wanted.
In this "thought-provoking blend of history, biography, women's studies, and travelogue" (Library Journal) Mia Kankimaki recounts her enchanting travels in Japan, Kenya, and Italy while retracing the steps of ten remarkable female pioneers from history.
What can a forty-something childless woman do? Bored with her life and feeling stuck, Mia Kankimaki leaves her job, sells her apartment, and decides to travel the world, following the paths of the female explorers and artists from history who have long inspired her. She flies to Tanzania and then to Kenya to see where Karen Blixen-of Out of Africa fame-lived in the 1920s. In…
After flirting with careers as an archaeologist, pilot, concert pianist, and diplomat, I settled on photographer after just a few month’s residence in Heidelberg, Germany, while studying for my Masters in Comparative Literature. The camera provided close personal interaction with people, while hearing their stories from a wide variety of cultural perspectives and social environments. Introduced by parents, I formed an obsession with opera, Native American drum music, vinyl recordings, and historic places, particularly Georgia O’Keeffe country, “south of the border” from our Colorado base. My family of musicians and artists stopped, listened, and loved the light and land of the Four Corners. I self-define as a photojournalist-poet, a griot.
I first met Klyukin’s huge, foldable-section metal sculptures at the Venice Biennale.
I had heard of him, but was overwhelmed by the size and quantity—plus his writings that appeared on ceiling-height, painted fabric banners. Particularly of note: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,and his collection calledIn Dante Veritas,which pulls the characters and their sins out of Dante’s Inferno, and updates them in sculpture and words to the 21st Century.
This book presents the extraordinary three-dimensional “live sculptures” by the Russian architect, designer, writer and artist.
Having some engineering experience, Klyukin was able to experiment and derive a concept of connecting steel sheets on a non-existent, speculative axis without any actual fasteners. The principle of mobility of each individual piece was the basis for this technological innovation. Each sculpture created without physical fasteners is easily assembled and disassembled. This new experience brought new satisfaction. One of the statuettes done using the “live sculpture” technique, the Golden Madonnina, was used as the official award during Milan Design Week in 2017, a…
It was in 1972, while spending a summer with my wife in Falmouth (on Cape Cod), that I first discovered the 18th-century slate gravestones of New England. Anyone who visits these cemeteries will find it difficult not to be impressed by these monuments–which are among the oldest and most distinguished works of art produced by the craftsmen of the early American colonies. My fascination with them spiraled into many such trips in subsequent years, when I photographed much of this work, learned how to identify the stonecutters responsible for them, and determined the extent and locations of their production.
The Tashjians’ book challenged the idea that Puritans rejected visual art. Their study is important in documenting a new aesthetic, where the skull (death’s head) gives way to the winged faces of angels (cherubs), which were more gentle and sentimental in style rather than dark and threatening. Specific stonecutters discussed in this book include John Bull, William Codner, Zerrubbabel Collins, William Young, Henry Christian Geyer, Joseph Lamson and his shop, William Mumford, John Stevens and family, and Jonathan and Moses Worster. These are names well-known to anyone versed in this art form.
I was taken by the fact that new motifs in gravestone design could spread through the stonecutter community with such personalized innovations and styles. Further, in chapter 8: "The Icons of Essex," County provided a contrast with another style of cutting faces in stone. This book significantly broadened my view of stonecutting styles in New England. It also…
I've taught Drawing in universities since 1985. Currently, I work at IADE-Universidade Europeia in Lisbon, Portugal. Long before that, at the age of five, I drew a volcano. A mountain exploding on the top as a delirious shiny crown and lava running from its flanks making a pattern of vibrant reddish-yellow. Proudly, I showed it to my mother. She exclaimed: What a beautiful pineapple! I only retained the word ‘beautiful’ and never stopped drawing. Trained as an architect, I discovered the virtue of drawing what we see, while experiencing the act of being there. I also became a compulsive reader, perhaps to experience the act of being elsewhere.
Where else can we find 159 sheep and 49 lambs sketched by a celebrated modern sculptor?This flock is a treatise of graphic easiness and uncompromising observation exercises. A must-see for anyone armed with a ballpoint pen and a rural disposition. There are also texts by Moore himself and Kenneth Clark, the art historian dethroned by Berger as the great British Broadcasting cultural oracle. Although Clark suggests that Moore’s drawings show some love for the sheep, the latter’s text is a love letter to drawing, simply.
In February 1972 Henry Moore's sculpture studios in the English countryside at Much Hadham were filled with the preparations for his retrospective exhibition in Florence. He retreated to a small studio overlooking the fields where a local farmer grazed his sheep. The sheep came very close to the window, attracting his attention, and he began to draw them. Initially he saw them as four-legged balls of wool, but his vision changed as he explored what they were really like - the way they moved, the shape of their bodies under the fleece. They also developed strong human and biblical associations,…
