Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This well-illustrated volume documents an exhibition of installation art at the 1991 Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. Twenty-three artists visited Charleston over the course of a year, then transformed their experiences into works reflecting the city's diverse historic, cultural, and contemporary realities through the prism of their personal visions. Curator Jacob describes the individual projects and in her introductory essay explores the nature of site-specific exhibitions and the genesis of the Charleston project. Historian Rosengarten's ( All God's Dangers , LJ 1/15/75) fascinating essay on the history of Charleston is illustrated with a portfolio of black-and-white photographs by McWilliams. Despite the text's tendency toward revisionist jargon, the catalog is highly recommended for contemporary art and Southern culture collections.-- Martin R. Kalfatovic, Natl. Museum of American Art/Natl. Portrait Gallery Lib., Smithsonian Inst., Washington, D.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

This well-illustrated catalog of the visual arts exhibition of the Spoleto Festival surveys the work of almost two dozen artists intended to be installed in mostly nontraditional sites throughout the South Carolina city where the festival was held. The essay and informative entries by the curator Mary Jane Jacob provide a historical overview of site-specific art and details about each artist and work. Appropriately, for a book about art informed by a sense of place, there are also texts and photographic essays on Charleston and its ambience. The selected works are not confined to large-scale sculpture but include photography, video and text/image hybrids that expand the canon of what is normally regarded under the heading of site-specific. Regardless of medium, much of the art is inextricably linked to localized meanings, but many pieces reflect themes universal enough to be accessible to any critic or advanced student of contemporary sculpture. Although the book lacks biographical and bibliographical data, it is usefully comprehensive, documenting every work in the exhibition, something that most of the reviews and articles published during the exhibition's run failed to do. For upper-division undergraduate and graduate art students. R. J. Onorato; University of Rhode Island