Arts

For historians of medieval Iberian art and architecture, María Rosa Menocal’s most important legacy lies in her work’s normalization of a culturally decentralized, multidisciplinary frame through which medieval visual objects became part of a broadly shared network of cultural production that was unrestricted by firm boundaries between particular polities or “faith groups.” While Menocal was not the first to advance such an approach, her persuasive promotion of it in works such as The Ornament of the World and the co-authored The Arts of Intimacy dovetailed closely with concurrent trends within the discipline of art history: new attentiveness to the variability of the Iberian cultural economy; a renewed concern with questions of reception and meaning; revived emphasis on close, contextual readings; and an openness to extra-disciplinary methodologies. The conceptual and disciplinary flexibility that Menocal’s work encouraged now lies at the very heart of current work on Iberian visual culture

The arithmetic of hyperelliptic curves

We summarise recent advances in techniques for solving Diophantine problems on hyperelliptic curves; in particular, those for finding the rank of the Jacobian, and the set of rational points on the curve

Introduction: Layered Landscapes

This Special Issue of Arts investigates a series of creative projects focused upon and sited within certain peripheral landscapes of northern Britain ..

Practices of Remembrance: The Experiences of Artists and Curators in the Centenary Commemoration of World War I

The centenary of World War One was marked in the UK by an unprecedented national investment in the creative arts as a vehicle for remembrance. This scale of funding for commemorative arts, not least under a government whose mantra had been economic “austerity”, demonstrates the importance that the nation-state placed on remembrance and on engaging the public in acts of memory through the arts. In the aftermath of the centenary, funding bodies have commissioned evaluations of this programming. These evaluations have focused on audiences reached, organisations benefitted, and social transformation. What remain occluded by the reports are the experiences of the artists themselves and the curators with whom they worked. In this article I explore the personal and affective experiences of several artists and curators whose work contributed to this national programme of remembrance. I ask: to what extent did artists and curators consciously engage with prior artistic responses to World War One? How did the context of collective commemoration and memory-making inform their practice and the works produced? What did their involvement in this programme of national remembrance make them feel? What were the narratives of the war they wanted to tell? To begin to answer these questions, I draw on a series of one-to-one interviews conducted with a number of artists and curators who were involved in commemorative projects in the UK and overseas

A contribution to the moss flora of Ecuador

An annotated list of new records or otherwise interesting species from Ecuador is presented. The occurrence of rhizoidal tubers is reported for the first time in Anoectangium aestivum, Brachymenium chilense and Bryoerythrophyllum campylocarpum

Gymnostomiella tuberculosa (Renauld & Paris) Arts & P.Sollm. comb. nov.

Gymnostomiella tuberculosa (Renauld & Paris) Arts & P.Sollm. comb. nov. replaces Gymnostomiella burmensis E.B. Bartram

We Are in This Together: A Survey of Community Arts Partners in LA County Public Schools

The Los Angeles County Arts Commission surveyed teaching artists and arts organizations to find out who provided arts education services to LA County's 2,198 public schools in 2012. This survey found 139 arts organizations and 46 teaching artists providing arts education during the school day in 98 percent of all school districts and 53 percent of all schools in the County. While this is certainly an undercount of the total number of such arts organizations and teaching artists serving local public schools, it is a first step toward establishing a comprehensive list, and is the best data we have to date about this group of providers. Among the high level findings: 57 percent of all arts education provided by community arts partners was in visual art (32 percent) and music/opera (25 percent).More than 77 percent of arts education provided by community arts partners occured in elementary (K-8) grades. Arts education from community arts partners peaked in grades 3 through 5, and peak years varied by arts discipline.The four community arts pertners providing the greatest amount of arts educatio in LA County were the Autry Museum, Broad Stage, Music Center and Skirball Cultural Center.Nearly half of all community arts partners charge schools for their services at least some of the time

Arts Funding IV (Highlights)

Arts Funding IV: An Update on Foundation Trends examines changes in U.S. foundation support for arts and culture, arts-related humanities, and the media through 2001. The report also places foundation arts giving within the context of changes in public and private support for the arts and in foundation funding overall. In addition, Arts Funding IV provides estimates of total foundation giving for the arts in 2002 and suggests the direction of change in foundations' arts giving over the next few years

Race/Ethnicity and Arts Participation: Findings from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts

This report analyzes data from the 1982, 1985, 1992, 2002, and 2008 Surveys of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA). Analyses focus on differential arts participation by race/ethnicity and the effect of race/ethnicity on arts participation. Descriptive and inferential analyses explore trends in arts participation by race/ethnicity across the five rounds of SPPA data. The authors find that, generally, the numbers and proportions of all race/ethnic groups that participate in the arts through attendance at arts events and arts creation are declining over time. The proportion of arts audiences that is white is not declining, despite the fact that the proportion of the national population that is white is declining. Race/ethnic group, per se, is not a strong predictor of attendance at arts events, but it is a good predictor of arts creation activities. Whites and Asians have had arts learning experiences at a greater rate than have blacks and Hispanics. Appendices include: (1) Descriptive statistics, 1982-2008; (2) Participation rate in core arts domains, by race/ethnicity, 1992-2008; (3) Participation rate in core arts creation domain, by race/ethnicity, 1992-2008; (4) Race/ethnic composition of arts creators, by arts creation domain, 1992-2008; (5) Effects of race/ethnicity, educational attainment, and their interactions on specific arts participation (full results); (6) Effects of race/ethnicity, household income, and their interactions on specific arts participation (full results); (7) Effects of race/ethnicity on specific arts creation (full results); and (8) Analysis of logistic regression assumptions. (Contains 36 figures, 40 tables and 7 footnotes.

Experimental and Creative Approaches to Collecting and Distributing New Media Art within Regional Arts Organisations

This article is an overview of preliminary research undertaken for the creation of a framework for collecting and distributing new media art within regional art galleries in the U.K. From the 1960s, artists have experimented using computers and software as production tools to create artworks ranging from static, algorithmic drawings on paper to installations with complex, interactive and process-oriented behaviours. The art-form has evolved into multiple strands of production, presentation and distribution. But are we, as collectors, researchers, artists and enthusiasts facing an uncertain future concerning the integration of new media art into institutional cultural organisations? Recently, concerns have been raised by curators regarding the importance of learning how to collect new media art if there is to be any hope of preserving the artworks as well as their histories. Traditional collections management approaches must evolve to take into account the variable characteristics of new media artworks. As I will discuss in this article, although regarded as a barrier to collecting new media artworks, artists and curators at individual institutions have recently taken steps to tackle curatorial and collections management activities concerning the often unpredictable and unstable behaviours of new media artworks by collaboration and experimentation. This method has proved successful with some mainstream, university and municipal galleries prior to acquiring or commissioning new artworks into their collections. This paper purports that by collaboration, experimentation and the sharing of knowledge and resources, these concerns may be conquered to preserve and make new media art accessible for future generations to enjoy and not to lament over its disappearance