Diversity & Inclusivity Resources at The Ringling Art Library

"'Meet Me' provides an overview of a program unfolding in the galleries at MoMA, commentary from experts in the fields of art, aging, and Alzheimer's, research findings regarding the efficacy of the Meet Me at MoMA program, and guides for developing and implementing art programs in a variety of settings."--Page 9. "The accompanying kit, comprised of art modules and reproductions of works in MoMA's collection, serves as a complement to the book. We've designed the modules to inspire meaningful interactive experiences that encourage participation and self-expression."--Page 9

Disability and Contemporary Performance presents a remarkable challenge to existing assumptions about disability and artistic practice. In particular, it explores where cultural knowledge about disability leaves off, and the lived experience of difference begins. Petra Kuppers, herself an award-winning artist and theorist, investigates the ways in which disabled performers challenge, change and work with current stereotypes through their work. She explores freak show fantasies and 'medical theatre' as well as live art, webwork, theatre, dance, photography and installations, to cast an entirely new light on contemporary identity politics and aesthetics. This is an outstanding exploration of some of the most pressing issues in performance, cultural and disability studies today, written by a leading practitioner and critic.

Matthias Buchinger (1674-1739) performed on more than a half-dozen musical instruments, some of his own invention. He exhibited trick shots with pistols, swords and bowling. He danced the hornpipe and deceived audiences with his skill in magic. He was a remarkable calligrapher specializing in micrography--handsome, precise letters almost impossible to view with the naked eye--and he drew portraits, coats of arms, landscapes and family trees, many commissioned by royalty. Amazingly, Buchinger was just 29 inches tall, and born without legs or arms. He lived to the ripe old age of 65, survived three wives, wed a fourth and fathered 14 children. Accompanying the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Wordplay: Matthias Buchinger's Inventive Drawings from the Collection of Ricky Jay, the book is a cabinet containing a single, multifaceted wonder, refracted through author Ricky Jay's scholarship and storytelling. Alongside an unprecedented and sumptuously reproduced selection of Buchinger's marvelous drawings and etchings, Jay delves into the history and mythology of the "Little Man," while also chronicling his encounters with the many fascinating characters whom he meets in his passionate search for Buchinger. Ricky Jay is considered one of the world's great sleight-of-hand artists. His career is further distinguished by his accomplishments as author, actor and historian of "unusual entertainments." He has appeared in films directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, Gus Van Sant and David Mamet. His Jay's Journal of Anomalies and Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women were New York Times "Notable Books." The subject of the documentary Ricky Jay: Deceptive Practices, Jay is the only conjurer to be profiled in the PBS series American Masters.

Conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker have fascinated the world since the nineteenth century. In her captivating book, "Chang and Eng Reconnected," Cynthia Wu traces the OC Original Siamese TwinsOCO through the terrain of American culture, showing how their inseparability underscored tensions between individuality and collectivity in the American popular imagination.a Using letters, medical documents and exhibits, literature, art, film, and family lore, Wu provides a trans-historical analysis that presents the Bunkers as both a material presence and as metaphor. She also shows how the twins figure in representations of race, disability, and science in fictional narratives about nation building. As astute entrepreneurs, the twins managed their own lives; nonetheless, as "Chang and Eng Reconnected" shows, American culture has always viewed them through the multiple lenses of difference."

Twins Chang and Eng Bunker (1811-1874), conjoined at the sternum by a band of cartilage and a fused liver, were "discovered" in Siam by a British merchant in 1824. Yunte Huang depicts the twins, arriving in Boston in 1829, first as museum exhibits but later as financially savvy showmen.Their rise from freak-show celebrities to rich southern gentry; their marriage to two white sisters, resulting in twenty-one children; and their owning of slaves is here not just another sensational biography but an excavation of America's historical penchant for finding feast in the abnormal, for tyrannizing the "other"--a tradition that, as Huang reveals, becomes inseparable from American history itself.

Born in Sinaloa, Mexico, Julia Pastrana (1834-1860) was a gifted singer, musician and dancer who could converse in English, Spanish and French. She also suffered from one of the most extreme cases of hypertrichosis terminalis on record and severe gingival hyperplasia: her face and body were covered with thick hair and her jaw was disproportionately large. Pastrana toured North America and Europe billed as "The Ugliest Woman in the World." After her death, her body was exhibited throughout Europe and the US. Until her recent repatriation to Sinaloa, her body was kept at the University of Oslo, Norway. Pastrana's story raises issues around beauty, ownership, science and racism, human rights, colonialism, sexism and indigenous rights. Artist Laura Anderson Barbata has brought together scholars and experts from various fields to explore these and other topics as they relate to Pastrana's extraordinary story.

When Charles S. Stratton was born in 1838, he was a large baby, perfect in every way. But then he stopped growing. At age four, though a happy and mischievous child, he was just over two feet tall and weighed only fifteen pounds--the exact same size he had been as a seven-month-old baby. It was then that the notorious showman P.T. Barnum dubbed him Tom Thumb and put him on display, touring him around the world as a curiosity. A natural performer, Charley became enormously popular and wealthy, more so than any other performer before him. In this spirited biography--the first on its subject--George Sullivan recounts the fascinating adventures of Tom Thumb, and raises challenging questions about what constitutes exploitation--both in the 19th century and today.

This groundbreaking study by Harvard neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone explores the inner workings of vision, demonstrating that how we see art depends ultimately on the cells in our eyes and our brains. In Vision and Art, Livingstone explains how great painters fool the brain: why Mona Lisa's smile seems so mysterious, Monet's Poppy Field appears to sway in the breeze, Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie blinks like the lights of Times Square, and Warhol's Electric Chair pulses with current. Drawing on history and her own cutting- edge discoveries, Livingstone offers intriguing insights, from explanations of common optical illusions, to speculations on the correlation of learning disabilities with artistic skill. By skillfully bridging the space between science and art, Vision and Art will both arm artists and designers with new techniques that they can use in their own craft, and thrill any reader with an interest in the biology of human vision.

Provides tactile diagrams with accompanying audio narrative. Suggestions for further reading, art appreciation and art learning activities, curriculum integration activities, and text of the companion audio narrative are included in the Teacher's Supplement.

Until recently, the Dutch draughtsman Johan Thopas, who was born in 1626 both deaf and dumb, was only known to a small group of connoisseurs, dealers and collectors. However, his remarkable, subtle and technically refined portrait drawings on parchment deserve a wider audience. This handsome publication, the first devoted to his work, will prove to be an eye opener for any art lovers. Beginning with his earliest works (two beautiful miniatures of 1646 in the Fondation Custodia in Paris), Thopas produced incredibly refine drawings, usually with lead point on parchment. He had an almost magic control of the lead point, and his sense of texture and the way he was able to achieve this with minimal means is astounding, setting him apart from other draughtsmen in the Dutch Golden Age. Thopas was also able to capture brilliantly the characters of his sitters - such as the sulky husband and trouser-wearing wife in the 1684 companion pieces in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Apart from lead-point drawings, Thopas made several drawings in color, on parchment and on Japanese paper. In most cases these drawings were done after life, although we do know that the large commission he received from the Bas-Kerckrinck family in Amsterdam included several drawings that were done after existing portraits. Furthermore, he produced at least one brilliant copy after a painting by Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, Venus, Mars and Cupid, and even a painting, portraying a dead child. He must have made more paintings and certainly more drawings than the seventy we know today (all of which are catalogued and illustrated here). In this exhibition his only known painting and the one mythological drawing are accompanied by thirty of his most beautiful portraits, from private collections in the US, Canada, United Kingdom and the Netherlands, as well as well-known museums and print rooms, such as the Albertina in Vienna, the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum, the Städel in Frankfurt or the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The author of the catalogue, Prof. Dr Rudolf E.O. Ekkart, is regarded as the most important connoisseur in the field of Dutch sixteenth- and seventeenth-century portraiture and the author of many important monographs and other publications in the field of Dutch portraiture. He was Director of the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD) in The Hague between 1990 and 2012 and gained momentum as Chairman of the Committee that carried his name and proved responsible for the return of many looted works of art that were returned to the heirs of many Jewish collectors in The Netherlands. Included in the book are Dutch and German translations of the essays.

Essential reading for all professionals concerned with museums and the cultural heritage, with the architecture and design of museums and for those providing service for the disabled. The volume provides access to some of the best practice in the provision for the disabled, and sets out an agenda for future action in museums worldwide.

With its focus on a specific place and time (Vienna in 1900) and on a specific theme (madness), Madness and Modernity sets out to explore artistic, social and psychological themes which provide insights into the madness-modernity nexus that manifested itself in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century.

Drawings and painting by artists with mental disorders.

This abundantly illustrated volume offers an exploration of the depictions of illness and healing in Western artworks that range from Egyptian wall carvings to medieval manuscripts, and from paintings and sculpture by the great masters of the Renaissance such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci to twentieth-century artists such as Matisse and Magritte. Thematic chapters cover the examination of patients and their various maladies including disabilities and mental illnesses; healing and medical treatments; and the sufferings of patients and their hopes for cures and recovery. Psychological anguish--as represented in The Expulsion of Adam and Eve by Masaccio and Munch's The Scream--is treated along with the physical manifestations of pain. This volume, the seventeenth in the popular Guide to Imagery series, offers analyses by both an art historian and a practicing physician who comment, respectively, on the cultural context in which specific artworks were created and the level of technical knowledge available at that time, an approach that makes for a fascinating look at a topic that has figured frequently in the Western artistic tradition.

Self-taught and working in isolation until his death in 1973, Henry Darger realized an elaborate fantasy world of remarkable beauty and strangeness, through hundreds of paintings and an epic written narrative. Angel-like Blengins with butterfly wings, natural catastrophes, innocent girls, and murderous soldiers all appear in Darger's scenes, which are reproduced in this book in double-page and gatefold spreads. In the volume's introductory essay, Klaus Biesenbach examines the radical originality of Darger's art, including his use of collage, incorporation of religious themes and iconography, and frequent juxtaposition of innocence with violence. An essay by Brooke Davis Anderson illuminates Darger's source materials and techniques. Michael Bonesteel puts Darger's life in the context of his work and selects key texts to accompany the illustrations. The book also includes for the first time the text of Darger's History of My Life,A" the artist's autobiography. The only book of its kind, Henry Darger offers an authoritative, balanced, and insightful look at an American master.