Books in the Art History Publication Initiative series

Focusing on the work of Italian artists Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, and Piero Manzoni, Jaleh Mansoor demonstrates and reveals how abstract painting in post-WWII Italy critiqued the economic violence of the Marshall Plan and American hegemony, broke with fascist-associated futurism, and anticipated Italian social unrest in the 1960 and 1970s.

Chad Elias analyzes a generation of artists working in Lebanon who interrogate Lebanon's civil war (1975-1990), showing how their appropriation and creation of images challenge divisive political discourse, give a voice to those silenced and forgotten, and provide the means to reimagine Lebanon's future.

Painter, photographer, and cofounder of AFRICOBRA Wadsworth A. Jarrell tells the definitive history of the group's creation, history, and artistic and political principles and the ways it captured the rhythmic dynamism of black culture and social life to create uplifting art for all black people.

In Mounting Frustration Susan E. Cahan uncovers the moment when the civil rights movement reached New York City's elite art galleries. Focusing on three controversial exhibitions that integrated African American culture and art, Cahan shows how the art world's racial politics is far more complicated than overcoming past exclusions.

Jessica L. Horton explores how the artists of the American Indian Movement (AIM) generation remapped the spatial, temporal, and material coordinates of modernity by placing colonialism's displacement of indigenous people, objects, and worldviews at the center of their work.

Ana Maria Reyes examines how the polarizing art of Beatriz Gonzalez disrupted Cold War aesthetic discourses and the politics of class and modernization in 1960s Colombia.

Ronak K. Kapadia examines multimedia visual art by artists from societies besieged by the US war on terror, showing how their art offers queer feminist critiques of US global warfare that forge new aesthetic and social alliances with which to sustain critical opposition to the global war machine.

Susan Laxton writes a new history of surrealism in which she traces the centrality of play to the movement and its ongoing legacy, showing how its emphasis on chance provided the means to refashion artistic practice and everyday experience.

Lily Woodruff examines the development of artistic strategies of political resistance in France in the decades following World War II, showing how artists countered establishment ideology, challenged traditional art institutions, appealed to direct political engagement, and grappled with French intellectuals' modeling of society.

Allison Moore examines the tensions between the local and the global in the art photography movement that blossomed in Bamako, Mali, in the 1990s, showing contemporary Malian photography to be a rich example of Western notions of art meeting traditional cultural precepts to forge new artistic forms, practices, and communities.