Michael Duncan

The Roman Republic was one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of civilization. After its founding in 509 BCE, Rome grew from an unremarkable Italian city-state to the dominant superpower of the Mediterranean world. Through it all, the Romans never allowed a single man to seize control of the state. Every year for four hundred years the annually elected consuls voluntarily handed power to their successors. Not once did a consul give in to the temptation to grab absolute power and refuse to let it go. It was a run of political self-denial unmatched in the history of the world. The disciplined Roman republicans then proceeded to explode out of Italy and conquer a world filled with petty tyrants, barbarian chieftains, and despotic kings. But the very success of the Republic proved to be its undoing. The republican system was unable to cope with the vast empire Rome ruled. Bankrolled by mountains of imperial wealth and without a foreign enemy to keep them united, ambitious Roman leaders began to stray from the republican austerity of their ancestors. Almost as soon as they had conquered the Mediterranean, Rome would become engulfed in violent political conflicts and civil wars that would destroy the Republic less than a century later. The Storm Before the Storm tells the story of the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic--the story of the first generation that had to cope with the dangerous new political environment made possible by Rome's unrivaled domination over the known world. The tumultuous years from 133-80 BCE set the stage for the fall of the Republic. The Republic faced issues like rising economic inequality, increasing political polarization, the privatization of the military, endemic social and ethnic prejudice, rampant corruption, ongoing military quagmires, and the ruthless ambition and unwillingness of elites to do anything to reform the system in time to save it--a situation that draws many parallels to present-day America. These issues are among the reasons why the Roman Republic would fall. And as we all know, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic

The Storm Before the Storm

A stolen text...When the Book of Aleth is stolen, Aaron, captain of the Royal Guard, is ordered by Emperor Therion to reclaim the ancient tome. The mission thrusts Aaron into a world he's never known--a world of elves and dwarves, races long thought extinct; a world where everything he has known and believed is a lie. A secret past... Forced to challenge his long-held beliefs, Aaron and his companions, two soldiers of the Royal Guard and two men of the Dwarvish kingdom of Brekken-Dahl, set out on a quest to recover the Book. Aaron resolves to discover the truth, and rescue the empire he is sworn to protect.

Book of Aleth, Part One

Shadows

Ian Berry

This full-scale survey of Corita Kent's work includes prints and ephemera from all phases of her life, revealing her importance as an activist printmaker and a sylistic innovator in graphic design. Artist, activist, teacher, and devout Catholic Corita Kent (1918-1986) eloquently combined her passions for faith and politics during her rich and varied career. As a teacher at LA's Immaculate Heart College, she fostered a creative and collaborative arts community and developed an interest in printmaking. Her posters, murals, and signature serigraphs combined messages of love and faith with images from popular culture and inventive use of type and color. For Kent, printmaking was a populist medium to communicate with the world around her. This activist spirit came most alive in the 1960s, when her posters and murals addressed subjects like racism and poverty, U.S. military brutalities in Vietnam, and conflicts between radical and conservative positions in the Catholic Church. Even after the war, and after she had left the church, she continued to be active in Boston's urban issues, producing prints and commissioned works until her death in 1986. Full of the lively, colorful work that was so iconically hers, this volume presents four decades of a life dedicated to serving others through and with the language of art. This book accompanies a traveling exhibition: Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio June 6 - August 31, 2014 Baker Museum at Artis-Naples, Naples, Florida September 27, 2014 - January 4, 2015 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania January 31 - April 19, 2015 Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, California June 14 - November 1, 2015

The Art of Corita Kent

Someday is Now

Isabelle Dervaux

While Surrealism was becoming out of fashion in Europe in the 1930s, it enjoyed a growing popularity on the other side of the Atlantic. This text traces the history of this movement in the United States from about 1930 to 1950 by examining its manifestations throughout the country.

Surrealism USA

Abstract painting meets theosophical spirituality in 1930s New Mexico: the first book on a radical, astonishingly prescient episode in American modernism Founded in Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, in 1938, at a time when social realism reigned in American art, the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG) sought to promote abstract art that pursued enlightenment and spiritual illumination. The nine original members of the Transcendental Painting Group were Emil Bisttram, Robert Gribbroek, Lawren Harris, Raymond Jonson, William Lumpkins, Florence Miller Pierce, Agnes Pelton, Horace Towner Pierce and Stuart Walker. They were later joined by Ed Garman. Despite the quality of their works, these Southwest artists have been neglected in most surveys of American art, their paintings rarely exhibited outside of New Mexico. Faced with the double disadvantage of being an openly spiritual movement from the wrong side of the Mississippi, the TPG has remained a secret mostly known only to cognoscenti. Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group aims to address this slight, claiming the group's artists as crucial contributors to an alternative through-line in 20th-century abstraction, one with renewed relevance today. This volume provides a broad perspective on the group's work, positioning it within the history of modern painting and 20th-century American art. Essays examine the TPG in light of their international artistic peers; their involvement with esoteric thought and Theosophy; the group's sources in the culture and landscape of the American Southwest; and the experience of its two female members.

Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group

Published on the occasion of the exhibition held at Museum of Art, Santa Monica, Calif., Sept. 17-Nov. 26, 2005; Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, Utah, Jan. 10-March 15, 2006; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, Kansas, April 21-July 9, 2006; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, Calif., Oct. 17-Dec. 10, 2006; and Grey Art Gallery, New York, Jan. 16- March 31, 2007.

Wallace Berman & His Circle

Semina Culture

Irving Norman

"Social realism at its most vivid and vibrant. Images from an artist who witnessed a century of human struggle. Amazing glimpses of an age of change Stunning retrospective collection of a surrealist master. Not a well-known figure, Irving Norman created monumental works that depicted the world he saw and experienced throughout the decades from World War I into the 70's. There is a dark vision shaped by the wars and enormous change of his times as he saw it - war, revolution, industrialization, and the pace and crush of modern life. This collection attempts to bring Norman to a new position and appreciation among modern American masters."--GoogleBooks.

Irving Norman's Social Surrealism

Dark Metropolis

Contains Shadows: Book of Aleth, part one and Revelation: Book of Aleth, part two.Shadows: Book of Aleth, part oneA stolen text... When the Book of Aleth is stolen, Aaron, captain of the Royal Guard, is ordered by Emperor Therion to reclaim the ancient tome. The mission thrusts Aaron into a world he's never known--a world of elves and dwarves, races long thought extinct; a world where everything he has known and believed is a lie.A secret past... Forced to challenge his long-held beliefs, Aaron and his companions, two soldiers of the Royal Guard and two men of the Dwarvish kingdom of Brekken-Dahl, set out on a quest to recover the Book. Aaron resolves to discover the truth, and rescue the empire he is sworn to protect. Revelation: Book of Aleth, part two."We have lost much of what we once were." A new alliance... After escaping the dwarvish prison in Brekken Dahl, Aaron, Lorik, and two dwarves continue their quest to recover the Book of Aleth, now fallen into enemy hands. To avoid Therion's forces, the band forges deep under the shattered hills into long-forgotten passages, where foul creatures wait in the darkness. An ancient prophecy... Although each step is fraught with danger and betrayal, the mission must succeed. The travelers encounter beings, both friend and foe, straight from myth and legend. And when a member of the group falls, a new ally of a race thought extinct joins the quest. In the ruins of Kellen Dahl, a discovery is made...to restore hope and a future a

Book of Aleth Parts One and Two

Of Revelation and Shadow

Where Waters Touch

James Maynard

William Breazeale

Christopher Wagstaff

After meeting in San Francisco in 1950, they soon created a domestic life based on mutual intellectual and aesthetic interests. In reexamining myths through a synthesis of art and literature, their deeply interrelated works stand as crucial assemblages of the meaning of our time. An Opening of the Field presents a rich cross-section of Jess's paintings and collages and Duncan's colourful abstract drawings, as well as a gallery of works by the artists and poets who were intimates in their circle, including Helen Adam, James Broughton, Patricia Jordan, R. B. Kitaj, Michael McClure, Jack Spicer, Dean Stockwell and many others. Essays by Michael Duncan and Christopher Wagstaff examine the artists' lives and works; William Breazeale interprets the complexity of a major Jess collage; and James Maynard offers a synopsis of the poetry scene of the time. Concise biographies are included for each of the artists and poets featured in the "circle."

Michael Duncan

Books

Your next favorite book is out there