Fifty Years Inside an Artist's Mind: The Journal of Athena Tacha

by Tacha, Athena; Spear, Richard

• ISBN13: 9781098326708
• ISBN10: 1098326709
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2020-09-01
• Publisher: BookBaby

Summary

Athena Tacha's Journal continues to a long tradition of artists' letters, diaries, and journals – from Ghiberti, Leonardo, Cellini, Delacroix, and Van Gogh to Smithson and Oldenburg -- that record reflections on the natural world and the artists' creations. In her Journal, Tacha reveals how nature inspired her art as she read avidly about all aspects of the universe, from microbes to black holes, in an effort "to discover the formal laws of the universe that underlie all aspects of nature" and to incorporate that understanding into her work. This Journal follows her fifty-year journey into the frontiers of science and offers as well witty, astute observations on life -- from toenails, bowels and sex to aging, from plants and birds to camels – along with vividly evocative notes on her worldwide travels. Written with unflinching candor and handsomely illustrated, Tacha's Journal will be of interest to everyone engaged with contemporary art, the intersection between art and science, and the critical thinking and formation of artists.

Author Biography

Born in Greece in 1936, Athena Tacha was educated in art at the School of Fine Arts, Athens (MFA), in art history at Oberlin College (MA), and in aesthetics at the Sorbonne in Paris (PhD). She was one of the first artists to develop environmental site-specific sculpture in the early 1970s and won over forty public art commissions from Alaska to Florida. Her sculpture, photographic, and text-based conceptual art have been exhibited worldwide and is represented in leading museum and private collections. Among the major publications on her work are Dancing in the Landscape. The Sculpture of Athena Tacha, 2000; Athena Tacha: From the Public to the Private, 2010, a bilingual catalogue of her major retrospective in Greece; and Visualizing the Universe: Athena Tacha's Proposals for Public Art Commissions, 1972–2012, 2017.

Richard Spear is author of Caravaggio and his Followers; Domenichino; The "Divine" Guido: Religion, Sex, Money and Art in the World of Guido Reni; and (with Philip Sohm and others) Painting for Profit: the Economic Lives of Seventeenth-Century Italian Painters, the basis of Dipingere per profitto. Le vite economiche dei pittori nella Roma del Seicento. His most recent book is Caravaggio's 'Cardsharps' on Trial: Thwaytes v. Sotheby's.

A graduate of the University of Chicago and Princeton, Spear is Affiliate Research Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. Previoiusly he taught at Oberlin College, where he directed the Allen Art Museum. He served as Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin and, among numerous awards, won grants from the Fulbright Program, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the National Humanities Center, and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations (Bellagio Center).