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 present 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 (Immersion)

7. African Ambiances

8. Sculpture (Sculpted Ambiances)

9. Staging (Curated Ambiances)

10. Natural Elements

11. Expanded Field of Sculpture

12. Structure of the Book

Chapter One: Aurality

1. Affective Aura

2. Atmosphere

3. Cultural Ambiance

4. Valeur D’ambiance

5. Sound Ambiance

6. Tree of Life

Chapter Two: Mirageness

1. Capture and Release

2. History

3. Staging

4. Elemental Milieu

5. Materiality: Icarus 13

6. Nature

7. Fire Walker Shadows

8. Untitled, Memory, and Forgetting

Chapter Three: Earthiness

1. Haiku

2. Allure of Floating Ballons

3. Shadows

4. Assemblage of Mrs. N’s Palace

5. Maquettes of Cityscapes

6. “Sense” and Ambiance

7. We are Numerous

8. Storm over Biafra

9. Xylem Pavilion

Chapter Four: Immersion

1. Touch

2. Monumental

3. Nile Sculpture

4. Metaphor

5. Myth

6. Hypnotic Room

7. Divine Space

Chapter Five: Vitality

1. War Victim

2. Rumors of War

3. Anyanwu

4. Spring Love and Grace

5. Lubugo

6. Coal Pot

Chapter Six: Sacredness (A Vision of America)

1. Bottle Tree

2. Origins

3. E Pluribus Unum

4. Ambiance

5. Syncretism

Conclusion

George Joshua Orwel, PhD, is an adjunct professor at the City University of New York and a part-time faculty at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in Visual Arts. He is working on a book about David Driskell’s philosophy as a 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.