Video and Books Contemporary International Glass: 60 Artists in the V&A Claude Horan: A Retrospective of Ceramic Works First American Art: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection of American Indian Art Archive
	Contemporary International Glass: 60 Artists in the V&A by Jennifer Hawkins Opie, 2004, V&A Publications, London, England. Harry N. Abrams, New York, NY, 800-345-1359. 144 pages, illustrated. $50. “Any art that engages with its audience in a thought-provoking way depends on some tension between the physical appeal of the materials, the skill in its production, and the intellectual ambitions of the artists,” writes Jennifer Hawkins Opie, senior curator of ceramics and glass at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in her introduction to this selection of recent international glass art in the museum. She succinctly traces the history of contemporary glass art and discusses the ongoing debate about this art form. The works, from the 1990s onward, are accompanied by either the artist’s statement or a critic’s comment. The book includes a list of glass artists, other than those in the illustrated section, whose work (1980-2004) is in the collection. TOP
	Claude Horan: A Retrospective of Ceramic Works 2004, The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, HI, 808-526-1322. 74 pages, essay by Marcia Morse, illustrated. $35 paperback. In a career of nearly 60 years, California-born Claude Horan has played an influential role in the development of contemporary ceramics in Hawaii: as a teacher for 30 years at the University of Hawaii, where he established the ceramics program—Toshiko Takaezu was one of his first students—as an artist producing functional and sculptural work and large-scale commissions, and as operator of an architectural ceramics business. This catalog presenting 156 works documents Horan’s 2004 retrospective, organized by the Contemporary Museum. TOP
	First American Art: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection of American Indian Art edited by Bruce Bernstein and Gerald McMaster, 2004, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, and New York, NY. University of Washington Press, Seattle, 206-543-4050. 263 pages, texts by Bernstein, McMaster, Margaret Dubin and Donald Kuspit, illustrated. $60. Accompanying an exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, George Gustav Heye Center, New York City, this beautifully photographed catalog highlights the collection of Charles and Valerie Diker, who for 30 years have been acquiring Native American art and displaying it alongside modern painting and sculpture. Though representing diverse tribal traditions and regions, the more than 200 mostly 19th-century objects are grouped under seven concepts—idea, emotion, intimacy, movement, integrity, vocabulary, composition. According to Bruce Bernstein and Gerald McMaster, who developed this paradigm in consultation with Native and non-Native artists and scholars, it is meant to depart from the conventional display of Indian art and enable it to be more readily seen as art, not artifact. Dubin’s essay traces the development of the Dikers’ collecting vision. Kuspit explores the spiritual import of the American Indian aesthetic.
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