After many decades of struggle, women have attained a strong presence in today's art world, as evidenced by the many exhibitions devoted to their work. Loosely based on the two-part Bad girls exhibition at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan, Reclaiming the body goes beyond the scope of the exhibition to include other significant contributors to feminist art. The film spans three generations of artists, from Louise Bourgeois to Janine...

A surprising and scandalous story of how the interaction within a group of exceptional and uniquely talented characters shaped and changed American thought at the close of the Civil War. Benfey takes the seemingly arbitrary image of the hummingbird and traces its "route of evanescence" as it travels in circles to and from the creative wellsprings of the age: from the naturalist writings of abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson to the poems of his...

The Realisms of Berenice Abbott provides the first in-depth consideration of the work of the photographer Berenice Abbott. She is best known for her 1930s documentary images of New York City, but in this book, Terri Weissman examines a broad range of Abbott's work, including her portraits from the 1920s, her little-known and uncompleted projects from the 1930s, and her experimental science photography from the 1950s. Weissman argues that Abbott consistently...

"In 1952, John Cage shocked audiences with 4'33", his compositional ode to the ironic power of silence. From Cage's minimalism to Chris Burden's radical performance art two decades later (in one piece he had himself shot), the post-war American avant-garde shattered the divide between low and high art, between artist and audience. They changed the cultural landscape. Feast of Excess is an engaging and accessible portrait of 'The New Sensibility,'...

In 'Moved to Tears', Rebecca Bedell overturns received ideas about sentimental art. Countering its association with trite and saccharine Victorian kitsch, Bedell argues that major American artists-from John Trumbull and Charles Willson Peale in the eighteenth century and Asher Durand and Winslow Homer in the nineteenth to Henry Ossawa Tanner and Frank Lloyd Wright in the early twentieth-produced what was understood in their time as sentimental art....