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Transcultural Histories of Art and Artisanal Epistemologies: Knowledge to Be Made (Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies)
Author(s): Claire Farago (Editor), Susan Lowish (Editor), Jens Baumgarten (Editor)
- Publisher: Routledge
- Publication Date: August 10, 2025
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 223 pages
- ISBN-10: 1032594497
- ISBN-13: 9781032594491
Book Description
This edited volume de-familiarizes European conceptions of artistry and thinks its history anew. It represents a rethinking on a global stage of some of the most fundamental assumptions in what were once arguably helpful methodological tools in art history.
As chapters in this book demonstrate, the category of artisanal knowledge opens up the history of culture, allowing discourse to be freed from a narrative of cultural development without excluding Art with a capital A from consideration. Our shared inquiry, approached through many different case studies involving many kinds of data and contexts, focuses attention on methodological aspects. Each chapter provides a sustained meditation on artisanal knowledge that includes intellectual, social, economic, and political factors without relying on universals, monolithic categories, hierarchies of genre and medium, or the use of binaries, least of all the global/local binary. As different as they are from one another, all the chapters in this book ask about various connectivities among peoples, ideas, things.
The book will be of interest to artists, critics, curators, and scholars working in art history, museum studies, history, material culture studies, performance studies, eco-criticism, Latin American studies, colonial studies, religious studies, anthropology, and Indigenous studies.
The Introduction and Coda of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Transcultural Histories of Art and Artisanal Epistemologies: Knowledge to be Made is an impressive collection of studies from across continents that compellingly persuades art historians to bring making to the center of our enquiry into art. By placing the individual artist within a distributed network of places, peoples, materials, and technologies, it effectively undermines the evolutionist underpinnings of the discipline that flaunts the creative ‘genius’ at its pinnacle. The book shows the way to a non-hierarchical, transculturally formed art history to argue that the world’s conceptual knowledge about art was not exclusively produced in European lexical repositories.”
Monica Juneja, Senior Professor of Art History, University of Heidelberg, Germany & Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities, Shiv Nadar University, India.
“Transcultural Histories of Art and Artisanal Epistemologies: Knowledge to be Made invites us to reflect on 'artisanal epistemologies', exploring forms of knowledge that emerge from doings and materialities that cross worlds and intertwine with living cosmologies. The authors courageously open up the discipline to fields of knowledge and being that lie beyond its boundaries, suggesting the possibility of a radical and transformative interculturality, not only of the discipline, but of the relationship to the world that art engenders.”
Fernanda Pitta, Assistant Professor at MAC USP
“The editors are to be congratulated on producing a brave, engaging, and original volume. The book is superbly and collaboratively edited so that it can be read as a coherent whole. The concept of the artisanal challenges the distinction between “intellectual” and “practical” intelligence. Artisanal knowledge as a transcultural concept does indeed provide the basis for the development of cross-cultural art histories that focus on practice.”
Howard Morphy, Australian National University
About the Author
Claire Farago (Ph.D., University of Virginia) is Professor Emerita at the University of Colorado Boulder. She has written widely on early modern art theory, historiography, cultural exchange, the materiality of the sacred, the history of style, and museology, including Writing Borderless Histories of Art: Human Exceptionalism and the Climate Crisis (2025).
Susan Lowish (Ph.D., Monash University, Melbourne) is Senior Lecturer in Australian Art History, University of Melbourne. She has published extensively on Indigenous collections, digital image archives for Australian art history, and rock art, including her award-winning book, Rethinking Australia’s Art History: The Challenge of Aboriginal Art (2018).
Jens Baumgarten (Ph.D., Hamburg University) is Professor of Art History at the Federal University of São Paulo, where he established one of the first autonomous departments of Art History in Brazil. He specializes in the early modern art history of Latin America and Europe, the historiography of art, and contemporary visual culture.
