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THE COPAN SCULPTURE MUSEUM
Ancient Maya Artistry in Stucco and Stone

Barbara W. Fash

"An excellent book that tells us two inspiring stories. One is how a handful of dedicated experts helped to conceive, design, and build a new museum in rural Honduras while providing a model of how to partner intelligently and respectfully with a community that benefits not only from the presence of a world-class museum, but also deepens its own connection with its ancient cultural heritage. The second story is of the spectacular stone sculpture of the Mayan site of Copan…Barbara Fash…gives us a thorough introduction to ancient Mayan culture, while offering a wealth of archaeological detail, much of it fascinating."
—Museum Magazine
>> read the full review

"The Maya site of Copan has long been known for its spectacular stone sculpture. Barbara Fash’s new book places these powerful works of art within a fascinating broader cultural context, drawing upon recent advances in archaeological and epigraphic research. Generously illustrated, the volume is accessible to the nonspecialist and indispensable to anyone interested in the art of the ancient Americas."
—Joanne Pillsbury, Director of Pre-Columbian Studies, Dumbarton Oaks

"Abundant historical, archaeological, and exhibition photographs handsomely illustrate this book and are essential to the text…The book provides a requisite starting point for anyone interested in gaining familiarity with Copan’s vast imagery and an essential foundation for any further, serious academic study on the topic." 
—Eulogio Guzmán
>> read the full review on the Revista website

Opened in 1996, the Copan Sculpture Museum was initiated as an international collaboration to preserve Copan’s original stone monuments. Its exhibits represent the best-known examples of building façades and sculptural achievements from the ancient kingdom of Copan. The creation of this on-site museum involved people from all walks of life: archaeologists, artists, architects, and local craftspeople. Today it fosters cultural understanding and promotes Hondurans’ identity with the past. InThe Copan Sculpture Museum, Barbara Fash—one of the principle creators of the museum—tells the inside story of conceiving, designing, and building a local museum with global significance. Along with numerous illustrations and detailed archaeological context for each exhibit in the museum, the book provides a comprehensive introduction to the history and culture of the ancient Maya and a model for working with local communities to preserve cultural heritage.

Summer 2011. Available now
Co-published with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University
Paper $35.00
216 pages / 198 color illustrations, 34 line illustrations, 35 halftones, and 2 maps
 

RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics
59/60: Spring/Summer 2011

NEW

Edited by Francesco Pellizzi

RES 59/60 includes: 
“The making of architectural types” by Joseph Rykwert

“Traces of the sun and Inka kinetics” by Tom Cummins and Bruce Mannheim 

“Inka water management and display fountains” by Carolyn Dean 

“Guaman Poma’s pictures of huacas” by Lisa Trever

“Peruvian nature up close” by Daniela Bleichmar

“Narrative in the ‘Battle Mural’ at Cacaxtla” by Claudia Brittenham 

“Codex Teotenantzin and pre-Hispanic images of the Sierra de Guadalupe” by Leonardo Lopez Lujàn and Xavier Noguez 

“Under the sign of the cross in the kingdom of Kong,” by Cécile Fromont

 “Hunters, Sufis, soldiers, and minstrels” by Cynthia Becker 

“The painting of a statue of Herakles” by Clemente Marconi

“Eucharistic morphology in the Middle Ages” by Aden Kumler

“The history of anthropophagy in Christianity” by Beate Fricke

“The votive scenario” by Christopher Wood

“Notes on pseudo-script in pre-European art” by Alexander Nagel

“Dürer’s Folds” by Christopher P. Heuer

“To conceive of in pictures” by Anselm Haverkamp

“Primitivism, humanism, and ambivalence” by Karen Kurczynski and Nicola Pezolet

“Struth's early citiscapes” by Paula Carabel

Contributions to Lectures, Documents, and Discussions by Tanja Klemm, Esther Schomacher and Jan Söffner; Chiara Cappelletto; Boris Groys; David Gersten; Remo Guidieri; and Morton Feldman and Francesco Pellizzi.

Paper $60.00

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HOUSE OF LOVE

Dayanita Singh
Text by Aveek Sen

"These pictures are like stills for a silent movie for which you write the title cards. The more you look at them the more you see. No, that’s not quite right, actually. The more you look at them, the more you imagine."
—Mark Feeney, Boston Globe
>> read the entire review

>> read the MetroWest review

House of Love is a work of photo fiction by Dayanita Singh. Working closely with writer Aveek Sen, whose prose follows a journey of its own, Singh explores the relationship between photography, memory, and writing. House of Love, designed to blur the lines between an art book of photographic images and a work of literary fiction, is a book whose images demand to be read, not just seen, and whose texts create their own sensory worlds. The combination creates a new vocabulary for the visual book.

The “House of Love” itself is the Taj Mahal, but the Taj Mahal as a recurring motif that stands for a range of meanings—meanings made up of the truths and lies of night and day, love and illusion, attachment and detachment. Through images of cities both visible and invisible, people real and surreal, Singh creates her own mysterious and ineffable, strange yet familiar language, using her trademark black-and-white photography and her newer nocturnal color work.

Spring 2011
Cloth $45.00
198 pages, 63 color and 48 black & white illustrations
Co-published with Radius Books

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THE MOCHE OF ANCIENT PERU
Media and Messages

Jeffrey Quilter

"A new volume in the award-winning Peabody Museum Collection Series presents a refreshing analysis of Moche works from the magnificent collection at Harvard's Peabody Museum. In the richly illustrated [book] archaeologist Jeffrey Quilter gives readers a thorough introduction to this fascinating culture and explores current thinking about Moche politics, history, society, religion, and art."
—artdaily.org

Peru’s ancient Moche culture is represented in a magnificent collection of artifacts at Harvard’s Peabody Museum. In this richly illustrated volume, Jeffrey Quilter presents a fascinating introduction to this intriguing culture and explores current thinking about Moche politics, history, society, and religion.

Quilter utilizes the Peabody’s collection as a means to investigate how the Moche used various media, particularly ceramics, to convey messages about their lives and beliefs. His presentation provides a critical examination and rethinking of many of the commonly held interpretations of Moche artifacts and their imagery, raising important issues of art production and its role in ancient and modern societies.

The most up-to-date monograph available on the Moche—and the first extensive discussion of the Peabody Museum’s collection of Moche ceramics—this volume provides an introduction for the general reader and contributes to ongoing scholarly discussions. Quilter’s fresh reading of Moche visual imagery raises new questions about the art and culture of ancient Peru.

Winter 2011
Peabody Museum Collections Series
Paper $21.95
172 pages / 70 color illustrations; 15 halftones

JUST REPRESENTATIONS

Robert Gardner
Edited by Charles Warren
Essay by Caleb Gardner

"A book of marvelous adventures with a camera and a series of meditations on diverse ways of life and making art by a wise and compassionate man."
—Charles Simic

This book presents selected writings by acclaimed filmmaker Robert Gardner. There are journals written during filmmaking expeditions, observing and reacting to diverse ways of life. There are accounts of film projects envisioned and planned but not completed. There are essays on ways of life in premodern cultures that Gardner has observed firsthand. Also included are his voiceover narrations from the films "Dead Birds" "Rivers of Sand," which come to life in a new way on the page. In an interview, letters, and articles, Gardner addresses the subject of filmmaking and reflects on film's relation to anthropology and, more broadly, to the human project to understand reality.

Fall 2010
Paper $22.00