Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in American Material Culture
On The Black Book As Durational: Noah Purifoy’S Desert Library, Paul Benzon
On The Black Book As Durational: Noah Purifoy’S Desert Library, Paul Benzon
Criticism
What happens to a library in the desert? How does it transform as a material object under these pressures, and what might these transformations tell us about its capacity for bearing and registering history? This article considers these questions in relation to the artist Noah Purifoy’s found-object installation Library of Congress, one of approximately thirty works that make up the ten-acre space of the Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Art in Joshua Tree, California. The museum consists of a wide range of found-object sculptures, all deeply enmeshed within the space of the desert. The museum, and indeed Purifoy’s …
Pipestone Books: Indigenous Materialisms And Bibliographical Methods, Daniel Radus
Pipestone Books: Indigenous Materialisms And Bibliographical Methods, Daniel Radus
Criticism
This article argues that the methods of bibliographical scholarship would be enriched with further attention to Indigenous ontological traditions. It does so via an analysis of a small tablet of pipestone that in 1957 was carved into the shape of an open book by Ephraim Taylor, a Dakota artist. The article first establishes that, for the Dakotas, pipestone is a vibrant and animate material, a sentient trace of ancestral kin. The article then aligns the pipestone sculpture with an archive of books whose material traits have been altered by Indigenous readers, arguing ultimately that a sophisticated account of these books—and …