Art & Books 2012 Selections Announced!

Readers, rejoice! Our book club is back on a bimonthly basis. Join us every other month to discuss great books and enjoy light refreshments. We’re proud to announce that our new partner—the Norfolk Public Library—will stock copies of our bimonthly selection for your reading (and budgeting) pleasure.  Book club selections may also be found at other local public libraries and are available for purchase at major retailers such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble. The bookclub meets from 6:30-8:00 in the Chrysler Museum of Art's Gifford Room, which is located next to the library. The cost is free to museum members and $5 for all others. Hope to see you there!

Here are the bookclub selections and dates for the Jean Outland Chrysler Museum Library book club for 2012:

March 28, 2012: Child of the Fire: Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject by Kirsten Pai Buick

Child of the Fire is the first book-length examination of the career of the nineteenth-century artist Mary Edmonia Lewis, best known for her sculptures inspired by historical and biblical themes. Buick illuminates Lewis’s fraught but active participation in the creation of a distinct “American” national art, one dominated by themes of indigeneity, sentimentality, gender, and race.


May 16, 2012: Birth of Venus: A Novel by Sarah Dunant
 
The Birth of Venus is a tour de force, the first historical novel from one of Britain’s most innovative writers of literary suspense. It brings alive the history of Florence at its most dramatic period, telling a compulsively absorbing story of love, art, religion, and power through the passionate voice of Alessandra, a heroine with the same vibrancy of spirit as her beloved city.



July 25, 2012: A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemmingway
 
Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingway’s most enduring works. Widely celebrated and debated by critics and readers everywhere, the restored edition of A Moveable Feast brilliantly evokes the exuberant mood of Paris after World War I and the unbridled creativity and unquenchable enthusiasm that Hemingway himself epitomized.

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September 26, 2012: The Painter from Shanghai by Jennifer Cody Epstein

Down the muddy waters of the Yangtze River and into the seedy backrooms of "The Hall of Eternal Splendor," through the raucous glamour of prewar Shanghai and the bohemian splendor of 1920s Paris, and back to a China ripped apart by civil war and teetering on the brink of revolution: this novel tells the story of Pan Yuliang, one of the most talented—and provocative—Chinese artists of the twentieth century.


November 28, 2012: Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton

In a series of beautifully paced narratives, Sarah Thornton investigates the drama of a Christie's auction, the workings in Takashi Murakami's studios, the elite at the Basel Art Fair, the eccentricities of Artforum magazine, the competition behind an important art prize, life in a notorious art-school seminar, and the wonderland of the Venice Biennale. Thornton's entertaining ethnography will change the way you look at contemporary culture.

*Book descriptions are from Amazon.com