Across the country, schools that integrate the arts into the fabric of the school day and across the curriculum defy educational odds and expectations. These schools demonstrate that the arts are profoundly cognitive and engaging and that arts integration is a strategy within the reach of schools even in the poorest communities. Putting the Arts in the Picture makes a powerful and original argument for placing the arts at the center of educational renewal. The authors investigate the success of arts integrated schools and the programs that have supported them, and explain why arts integration has such cognitive power. Putting the Arts in the Picture places arts integration within the long arc of efforts to realize the democratic promise of public education and examines how other nations have mobilized the arts to focus young people’s need to learn and grow. Throughout, the authors suggest practical strategies—for educators, policymakers, school reformers, philanthropists, and parents—that can make arts integration broadly available to the children who need it most.

Putting the Arts in the Picture: Reframing Education in the 21st Century

Arts & Photography

Nick Rabkin

Robin Redmond

History & Criticism

Columbia College Chicago Press

Aware of the decline and imminent demise of many integrated steel mills in the United States and fascinated by their monumental architecture, machinery, and the culture of work, Joseph Elliott photographed the mills in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, from 1989 until final shutdown. Working with historian Lance Metz, he amassed more than 1,000 large format photographs and hundreds of archival images and documents, in an effort to preserve a record of the development, workings, and human dimensions of an integrated steel plant typical of machine age America.
A steel mill is a visually thrilling place, and Elliott’s meticulously designed photographs embody much more than a technical record. The scale, architecture, and material qualities of the site are compelling referents for an audience of the post-industrialage. An essay by art historian Betsy Fahlman situates Elliott’s work in the context of the industrial sublime. This book will appeal all who are fascinated with industrial art and archaeology, and will be an inspiration for the preservation and re-use of these relic structures.

The Steel: Photographs of the Bethlehem Steel Plant, 1989-1996

Elliott, Joseph E. B.

Photography & Video

Through the influences of vanity, aging, and insecurities, many find fault with their own faces and few achieve their own notions of perfection. Yet, in the course of such self-criticism, most people take for granted their own ability to explore and employ the full range of facial expressions and the range of emotions those expressions convey.In About Face Sage Sohier’s photographs portray people who have varying degrees of facial paralysis, a condition that usually occurs on just one side of the face and can result from a multitude of causes, including Bell’s palsy, tumors, strokes, accidents, and congenital nerve damage. Working in a clinic in Boston that provides physical therapy, Botox treatments, and sometimes surgery, Sohier documents patients before treatment, and in some cases captures their progress over time, witnessing hope and excitement as they regain the ability to smile, speak, and eat.

About Face

Sohier, Sage

The creation of art is deeply personal yet remains strongly rooted within the collaborative meeting of teacher and student. Over centuries, techniques and encouragement have been passed along from experienced mentors to budding novices. Those who can take on this educator role have the power to inspire new artists and have a lasting impact. The Teaching Artist Handbook series is designed to help working artists develop the skills needed to be effective educators. Practical and experience-based, this debut volume in the series is designed so that any artist, no matter the medium, will be able to fully conceptualize, create, and implement an effective teaching methodology that reflects his or her own expertise and interests. This collection of essays is written by authors who are all active teaching artists and have inside knowledge and experience. They provide extensive lists of techniques, tools, and ideas drawn from classroom practice. The authors also tackle the questions of what and how to teach and how to assess one’s own teaching, encouraging readers to respond critically and ultimately develop their own style.

Teaching Artist Handbook: Volume 1: Tools, Techniques, and Ideas to Help Any Artist Teach

Jaffe, Nick

Barniskis, Becca

Cox, Barbara Hackett

Chicago’s old Comiskey Park, home to the White Sox until 1990, is as essential to the city’s cultural history as it is to baseball’s. From the first day that Thomas W. Harney set out to photograph fans in the ballpark, he felt at home there, owing to memories of games with his father and grandfather. It became his ongoing subject, as well as a setting that would inspire his growing reputation as a street photographer.The sequence of portraits Harney took of White Sox fans between 1973 and the last game played at the park—September 30, 1990—captures the essence of baseball fandom: pregame excitement, exploration of the ballpark, the quiet moments in between plays, the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat. Most importantly, these portraits capture the aura of “Old Comiskey,” a ballpark that looms large in the memories of Chicagoans and baseball fans alike. 

Portraits from the Park: Comiskey Park Photographs, 1973-1990

Harney, Thomas W.

In 1975 the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape crystallized a new view of the American West: the sublime “American” vistas of Ansel Adams were replaced and subverted by images of a landscape inundated with banal symbols of humanity. Organized by William Jenkins for the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, New Topographics showcased such photographers as Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke. Their pictures, illustrating the vernacular, human-made world of contemporary America, punctured the myth of the pristine, wild American landscape—and definitively changed the course of landscape photography. 
Reframing the New Topographics offers the first substantive analysis of this shift and the continuing influence of an exhibition that not only reshaped the look and subject matter of landscape photography, but also foreshadowed environmentalism’s expansion beyond the mere preservation of wilderness. The essays in this anthology will add an important new dimension to the studies of art history and visual culture.

Reframing the New Topographics (Center for American Places - Center Books on American Places)

When the Johnson Publishing Company, best known for Jet and Ebony, moved into its iconic building on Michigan Avenue, the structure symbolized a bold entry into both the Chicago skyline and the city’s cultural environment. This emblematic building was the first in Chicago designed and owned by African Americans, a modernist masterpiece that in 1980 theWashington Post called, “practically a monument—sometimes an ostentatious one—to black success.”David Hartt was given unprecedented access to the building, much of which retains its ’70s design, from bright gold accents to vintage see-through furniture. His resulting photographs take viewers on a rich and revealing tour. They capture the distinct physical characteristics while also illuminating the power structures and ideological purposes they once represented. Hartt’s collection also serves as an unexpected final documentation. Not long after Hartt captured these images, the Johnson Publishing Company announced it was selling its building and moving north. Stray Light is a time capsule of a historic building that once symbolized a bright future. 

Stray Light

Hartt, David

While more conventional art can be tucked neatly away on gallery walls, houses have a much larger footprint. And when a home outlives its most basic function of providing shelter, a decision has to be made as to whether it is ultimately worth saving. Modernist homes like those designed by Paul Rudolph face an additional challenge as products of a stark, concrete-laden brutalist style now seen by many to be cold and uninviting. Photographer Chris Mottalini visited three abandoned Rudolph homes awaiting demolition. His photos present these onetime symbols of opulence and power at their most vulnerable and defeated. Rich, full-color photos show sunlight playing across shattered windows, dusty stairs, and ruined living rooms, presenting a view of modernism that few have seen before. The photos speak to the ephemeral nature of contemporary taste, and its uneasy relationship with history, as well as the consequences of modernism on our visual lexicon. And in a final coda, the pictures themselves serve to preserve these masterpieces long after time and tastes move on.

After You Left / They Took It Apart: Demolished Paul Rudolph Homes

Mottalini, Chris

In Midstream, photographer Richard Wasserman documents the entire length of the 156-mile Chicago River and gives readers a glimpse into a mostly hidden landscape. As the twentieth century was drawing to a close and the city’s industrial manufacturing era was rapidly waning, Wasserman took note of increased efforts to clean, beautify, and conserve the river, and he felt an urgent need to preserve the memory of Chicago’s brawling past. As the project progressed and the photographer found himself captivated by the river’s extraordinarily diverse uses and visually rich landscape, he grew determined to capture the river in its entirety, in its varying moods and seasons, and from every possible vantage point during a time of rapid transformation. Midstream is the culmination of this ten-year project, in which there was always one more location to explore and another moment to capture. The result is a remarkable record of the Chicago River, revealing the nature of the waterway as it changed throughout the seasons and in relation to the dramatic extremes of Chicago weather. Scenes that had been hidden by foliage in the summer were unveiled in the winter when the trees shed their leaves. During dry spells when the water level fell, artifacts that were usually submerged became visible and offered tantalizing hints of the past. Wasserman’s experiences along the riverbanks varied by location: in forest preserves he captured images of deer, beaver, and muskrats in the midst of idyllic flora; in dense urban areas his subjects were nineteenth-century factories and warehouses, many of which have been converted to offices and apartments, standing shoulder to shoulder with gleaming new office towers and condominium buildings. With an essay by Julia S. Bachrach, Midstream will be a significant resource and a lasting documentation of the Chicago River during the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Midstream: The Chicago River 1999-2010

Wasserman, Richard

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