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The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics

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Poets often have responded vitally to the art of their time, and ever since Susan Stewart began writing about art in the early 1980s, her work has resonated with practicing artists, curators, art historians, and art critics. Rooted in a broad and learned range of references, Stewart's fresh and independent essays bridge the fields of literature, aesthetics, and contemporary art.

Gathering most of Stewart's writing on contemporary art—long and short pieces first published in small magazines, museum and gallery publications, and edited collections— The Open Studio illuminates work ranging from the installation art of Ann Hamilton to the sculptures and watercolors of Thomas Schütte, the prints and animations of William Kentridge to the films of Tacita Dean. Stewart's essays are often the record of studio conversations with living artists and curators, and of the afterlife of those experiences in the solitude of her own study. Considering a wide variety of art forms, Stewart finds pathbreaking ways to explore them. Whether she is following central traditions of painting, drawing, sculpture, film, photography, and printmaking or exploring the less well-known realms of portrait miniatures, collecting practices, doll-making, music boxes, and gardening, Stewart speaks to the creative process in general and to the relation between art and ethics.

The Open Studio will be read eagerly by scholars of art, poetry, and visual theory; by historians interested in the links between contemporary and classic literature and art; and by teachers, students, and practitioners of the visual arts.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

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About the author

Susan Stewart

86 books68 followers
Susan Stewart (born 1952) is an American poet, university professor and literary critic.

Professor Stewart holds degrees from Dickinson College (B.A. in English and Anthropology), the Johns Hopkins University (M.F.A. in Poetics) and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D. in Folklore). She teaches the history of poetry, aesthetics, and the philosophy of literature, most recently at Princeton University.

Her poems have appeared in many journals including: The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tri-Quarterly, Gettysburg Review, Harper's, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, and Beloit Poetry Journal.

In the late 2000s she collaborated with composer James Primosch on a song cycle commissioned by the Chicago Symphony that premiered in the fall of 2009. She has served on the judging panel of the Wallace Stevens Award on six occasions.

In 2005 Professor Stewart was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

About her work, the poet and critic Allen Grossman has written, "Stewart has built a poetic syntax capable of conveying an utterly singular account of consciousness, by the light of which it is possible to see the structure of the human world with a new clarity and an unforeseen precision, possible only in her presence and by means of her art."

(from Wikipedia)

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December 7, 2011
My brain needs to lift some art theory weights.
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