VAPA (Visual And Performing Arts): Digital Design, Drama, Stagecraft, Art, Band, Orchestra, Symphony ...
Welcome to the resources page for Las Lomas' VAPA department. Choose from the following links to find subject guides for specific assignments within the department.
Sign in using the same username and password used for all LL database subscriptions. (Email Ms. Moore if you need it.) Next, click on FINE ART IMAGES to search for high-quality fine art images from leading museums and galleries.
"Creativity takes courage." ~ Henri Matisse
The Dance (first version), 1909, The Museum of Modern Art, New York City
African Wax Print Textiles by
As colorful and varied as the fabric it explores, this insightful book looks at traditional African textiles and reveals a complicated history that spans generations and continents. This groundbreaking book reveals the complex origins of African wax print fabrics. In beautifully illustrated chapters, Anne Grosfilley traces the process of printing and dying the fabric, involving wax or indigo, to its West Indian roots. She also explores the differences of mass-produced and artisanally sourced fabrics, tracking where textiles go from the manufacturing centers to markets and cities throughout Africa and the world. Grosfilley offers the fruits of her own passionate research as she profiles a variety of individuals from rural venders to trendsetting fashionistas. This eye-opening study celebrates the enormous variety of African fabric styles and uses, and explores the complex interconnections between the continent and colonialism and between modern technology and Old World practices.
Drawing: Faces and Features by
With drawing tips, techniques, and 16 step-by-step projects, Faces & Features is the perfect resource for beginning artists ready to enhance their drawing skills.
Alice Neel: Uptown by
Known for her portraits of family, friends, writers, poets, artists, students, singers, salesmen, activists, and more, Alice Neel created forthright, intimate, and, at times, humorous paintings that quietly engaged with political and social issues. Alice Neel, Uptown, writer and curator Hilton brings together a body of paintings and works on paper of African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and other people of color for the first time. Highlighting the innate diversity of Neel's approach, the selection looks at those whose portraits are often left out of the art-historical canon and how this extraordinary painter captured them; "what fascinated her was the breadth of humanity that she encountered," Als writes. The publication, which opens with a foreword by Jeremy Lewison, advisor to The Estate of Alice Neel, explores Neel's interest in the diversity of uptown New York and the variety of people amongst whom she lived. This group of portraits includes well-known figures such as playwright, actress, and author Alice Childress; the sociologist Horace R. Cayton, Jr.; the community activist Mercedes Arroyo; and the widely published academic Harold Cruse; alongside more anonymous individuals of a nurse, a ballet dancer, a taxi driver, a businessman, and a local kid who ran errands for Neel. In short and illuminating texts on specific works written in his characteristic narrative style, Als writes about the history of each sitter and offers insights into Neel and her work, while adding his own perspective. A contemporary and personal approach to the artist's oeuvre, Als's project is "an attempt to honor not only what Neel saw, but the generosity of her seeing." This catalogue is published on the occasion of the 2017 exhibitions of Neel's paintings and drawings at David Zwirner, New York, and Victoria Miro, London.
Wayne Thiebaud by
Wayne Thiebaud: 1958-1968 examines Thiebaud's ongoing impact on contemporary art through in-depth analysis of the paintings and drawings made at the launch of his career, at a seminal moment when the art world was moving beyond Abstract Expressionism and redefining itself. By questioning Thiebaud's relationship to Pop art, his self-imposed distance from the movement, and the popular urge to affiliate him with it, Teagle explores the role of his painting in the traffic of images at the end of the twentieth century. Organized in close cooperation with the artist, this is the first study of the emergence of Thiebaud's mature style and the only museum exhibition to date to delve into a specific period of his production, a time that coincides with the start of his teaching career at University of California at Davis. Thiebaud's art, like that of the celebrated Pop artists with whom he shared early exhibitions, is ripe for critical reappraisal. The "soft" nature of Thiebaud's famous subjects, his creamy pies and dripping ice creams, positioned his art as fodder for social-political review on occasion, but rarely for serious historical analysis. Since the beginning of his career Thiebaud reminded critics of his formal interests and his deep affiliation with the history of painting. This exhibition takes as its starting point an understanding of Thiebaud's painterly language--its historical sources and contemporary affiliations. Shaped around the seminal exhibitions that marked Thiebaud's entrance onto the stage of contemporary art, it concludes with a close reading of the artists' expanded subject matter presented in a major traveling exhibition in 1968. Portraits and landscapes now joined the food that prevailed in early exhibitions, and all pictured in the artist's now signature style of objects deployed in neutral space, bounded by halated light and casting long shadows of saturated color. With contributions by Margaretta Lovell, Alexander Nemerov, Francesca Wilmott, and Arielle Hardy. Published in association with the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis.Exhibition dates: Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis: January 16-May 13, 2018
Handbuilt, a Potter's Guide by
Learn how to make pottery without a wheel, dig and process local clays, and make natural glazes.
The Mandala Book by
The Mandala Book is a visual symphony, filled with 500 stunning mandalic images from nature and civilization. Drawing from history, science, religion, and art, Lori Bailey Cunningham leads a journey that spans from prehistoric petroglyphs to Carl Jung, from tiny particles of matter to entire galaxies. She explains the concepts of mandalas, showing how they are at the root of life itself.
Chuck Close Prints by
This essential volume on Chuck Close's innovative and groundbreaking techniques presents a life's work in printmaking by one of the most influential artists of our time. Since the retrospective exhibition of Chuck Close's prints first began touring in 2003, it has visited some 20 venues around the world, even as the artist has persisted in working prolifically and brilliantly in various print media. Revealing the full arc of Close's career in printmaking, including his most recent work and technical achievements, this book features everything from woodcuts, Woodbury types, and anamorphic etchings to felt hand-stamp prints, pulp-paper multiples, and watercolor pigment prints. With a thorough introduction, an essay by the distinguished scholar Richard Shiff, and interviews with the artist and master printmakers, this classic study will stand as the definitive reference on Close's print practice for years to come.