Sculpted Ambiances in Africana Landscape

Sculpted Ambiances in Africana Landscape centers on ambiance as it affects the expanded sculptural field, particularly filling a gap in aesthetics left by a lack of focus on sculptures and installations in the Africana world and elsewhere.

This book differentiates ambiance from other affective states and emotions and explores its production. It provides an introduction to the history of ambiance and vividly demonstrates, through immersive and experiential writing, how ambiance manifests in different artistic situations and social settings. The book considers the neglected and unique importance of sculptural ambiance to the history of Africana visual culture, and what these works mean in terms of their social, historical, cultural, political, and ecological imagination of space. The book is written in an episodic style and begins with a description of an image before presenting an analysis of the artist?s style and staging for ambient experience.

This book will benefit college and university students; scholars of art, architecture, aesthetics, philosophy, geography, anthropology, and sociology; and curators and galleries.

Introduction

1. Concentricity

2. Aura

3. Atmosphere

4. Ambiance

5. Space

6. Envelopment

7. Attunement

8. Sculpted Ambiances

9. Topology

10. Staging

11. Structure of the Book

Chapter One: Aurality

1. Aura

2. Atmosphere

3. Transcendence

4. Qualia

5. Audire

6. Sprit

Chapter Two: Mirageness

1. Freedom

2. History

3. Staging

4. Elemental

5. Materiality

6. Nature

7. Ambient Light

8. Memory

Chapter Three: Earthiness

1. Poetic Ambiance

2. Allure

3. Shadow

4. Assemblage

5. Cityscapes

6. “Sense”

7. Milieu

8. Storm

9. Openness

Chapter Four: Tactility

1. Something

2. Monument

3. Decoration

4. Domination

5. Moment

6. Design

Chapter Five: Vitality

1. Projection

2. Allure

3. Peace

4. Care

5. Anxiety

6. Embodiment

Chapter Six: Sacredness

1. Spiritual

2. Origins

3. Masks

4. Ambiance

5. Syncretism

Conclusion

George Joshua Orwel, a philosopher and writer, is on the adjunct faculty of Hunter College and City Tech, City University of New York. He is writing a book on David Driskell as a Sylvia and Eddie Brown research fellow at the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of Visual Arts & Culture of African Americans & the African Diaspora, University of Maryland, College Park, MD.