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Material Culture and Public Humanities: Featured Resources

This Research Guide supports the Material Culture and Public Humanities program at Virginia Tech which prepares graduates to interpret material culture and engage communities within informed historical and cultural frameworks, so that they are prepared for a wide range of careers in museums, historical societies, and community and cultural organizations.

 

Featured Books

Exhibition Design

The way in which the contemporary exhibition is designed is fast changing - previously aloof cultural institutions are making use of technologies and techniques more commonly associated with film and retail. Exhibition Design features a wide variety of examples from around the world, from major trade and commerce fairs, to well-known fine art institutions, to small-scale artist-designed displays.

Being Material

Explorations of the many ways of being material in the digital age. In Being Material, artists and technologists explore the relationship of the digital to the material, demonstrating that processes that seem wholly immaterial function within material constraints.

Exhibitions for Social Justice

Exhibitions for Social Justice assesses the state of curatorial work for social justice in the Americas and Europe today. Analyzing best practices and new curatorial work to support all those working on exhibitions, Gonzales expounds curatorial practices that lie at the nexus of contemporary museology and neurology.

The Museum Is Not Enough

The Museum Is Not Enough is the result of collective reflections on architecture, contemporary social concerns, institutions, and the public undertaken by the CCA in recent years. Building on years of thematic investigations and of a continued questioning of the role of cultural institutions and the issues they face today, the book puts forward the CCA's own positions and opens them up to a dialogue with designers, curators, photographers, publishers, and other institutions who ask themselves similar questions.

Ways of Curating

Hans Ulrich Obrist curated his first exhibit in his kitchen when he was twenty-three years old. Since then he has staged more than 250 shows internationally, many of them among the most influential exhibits of our age. Ways of Curating is a compendium of the insights Obrist has gained from his years of extraordinary work in the art world.

Curatopia

What is the future of curatorship? Is there a vision for an ideal model, a curatopia, whether in the form of a utopia or dystopia? Or is there a plurality of approaches, amounting to a curatorial heterotopia? This pioneering volume addresses these questions by considering the current state of curatorship.

Exhibition Catalogs

The Art & Architecture Library maintains a collection of exhibition catalogs with a focus on leading museum exhibits, diverse artists, and new media art. The catalogs are discoverable through Discovery. Use the subject heading "exhibition catalogs" as shown in the image below to search for this material. 

 

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Interlibrary Loan Services

All current Virginia Tech students, faculty, and staff, regardless of your location, may request through ILLiad for materials:

  • not owned by Virginia Tech (books, articles from journals and conference proceedings, book chapters, standards, and technical papers)
  • owned by Virginia Tech but are unavailable for use (print books)
  • owned by Virginia Tech and available in print (scans of articles from journals and conference proceedings, book chapters, standards, and technical papers)

We ship requests via UPS to users outside the immediate Blacksburg area (Montgomery, Giles and Pulaski counties).

Articles, book chapters, and many technical papers are delivered in PDF format to your ILLiad account. Occasionally, due to copyright restrictions, a paper copy of an article or standard is held for your at the Newman User Services Desk or sent o the mailing address listed on your account.