Photography does more than simply represent the world. It acts in the world, connecting people to form relationships and shaping relationships to create communities. In this beautiful book, Margaret Olin explores photography's ability to "touch" us t...

Of one and a half million surviving photographs related to Nazi concentration camps, only four depict the actual process of mass killing perpetrated at the gas chambers. "Images in Spite of All" reveals that these rare photos of Auschwitz, taken clan...

In "The Cruel Radiance", Susie Linfield challenges the idea that photographs of political violence exploit their subjects and pander to the voyeuristic tendencies of their viewers. Instead she argues passionately that looking at such images – and lea...

Subversive, funny, and effortlessly droll, Jules Feiffer's cartoons were all over New York in the 1960s and '70s – featured in the "Village Voice", but also cut out and pinned to bulletin boards in offices and on refrigerators at home. Feiffer descri...

Between 1777 and 1816, botanical expeditions crisscrossed the vast Spanish empire in an ambitious project to survey the flora of much of the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. While these voyages produced written texts and compiled collect...

Spanning a decade of its subject's multifaceted career, "Cosima von Bonin: Character Appropriation" features the Kenya-born, Germany-based artist's signature textile paintings, architectural sculptures, and absurdly outsized stuffed animals. In addit...

Taking as its impetus a group of important new acquisitions at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, "Precarious Worlds" explores thematic connections between some of the most influential artists working in Germany today. Works by Franz Ackermann, Cosi...

"Blast Counterblast" is a multifaceted, fascinating examination of the way intellectuals interact – through influence, through argumentation, and through criticism. Looking at both Wyndham Lewis's modernist publication "BLAST" and Marshall McLuhan's...

For over a century the Chicago art community has struggled to define itself in relation to other urban art centers. While prominent American artists past and present have had strong connections to Chicago, many left to make their reputations elsewher...

From the fundamental rights proclaimed in the American and French declarations of independence to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Hannah Arendt's furious critiques, the definition of what it means to be human has been hotly debated...