Audiobooks by Rick Kinsel

Ralston Crawford: Torn Signs

"Ralston Crawford (1906–1978) was born in St. Catharines, Ontario, and grew up in Buffalo, New York. The son of a ship captain, he had an innate love of the sea and traveled extensively throughout his life. Crawford received wide acclaim for his early Precisionist paintings of urban, industrial landscapes, such as Overseas Highway, 1939, a painting of the 113-mile highway through the Florida Keys, which was published in Life magazine the same year. He remains perhaps best known for these works, but over the course of a career that spanned five decades, he was constantly exploring new ways to record and reimagine his experiences. Crawford began experimenting with photography in 1934, but his breakthrough in the medium came in 1938, the year he created Torn Signs, Philadelphia, an image of a ripped and pasted-over “Post No Bills” sign. The simultaneous buildup and decay of weathered advertisements papered across cities from New York to Pamplona, Spain, spoke to Crawford. He returned frequently to the motif in the last 30 years of his life, creating an incredible body of work that became his longest-running series. This audiobook includes a PDF that features many works from the catalogue for easy reference. "

Emily Schuchardt Navratil, John Crawford, Rick Kinsel, William C. Agee (Author), Daniel K. Isaac (Narrator)

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Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery

"Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery establishes a new model for exhibition development and curation that centers the voices and living traditions of Native American people of what is now the Southwestern United States. The Vilcek Foundation worked closely with the School for Advanced Research (SAR) and the Indian Arts Research Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the exhibition, curated by the Pueblo Pottery Collective. The Pueblo Pottery Collective is a collective of more than 60 Native American community members from twenty-two Pueblo communities in the Southwest, including potters, designers, and other artists, writers, poets, community leaders, and museum professionals. A small selection of non-Pueblo museum professionals were facilitators and writers for this project and are also part of this collective. The collective was established specifically for the development of the traveling exhibition, to provide insights and perspective on selected works from two major collections of Pueblo pottery: the collection of the Indian Arts Research Center and the Vilcek Collection. Essays range from recollections on the practices of gathering clay and preparing pigments to poetry and essays reflecting on the works and their meanings.  “Grounded in Clay emphasizes the underlying, multifaceted, and nuanced understandings that the Pueblo Indian people of the American Southwest have of one of the more ubiquitous and resilient forms of our material culture—pottery,” writes curator Joseph Aguilar. “Historical memories and our understanding of pottery and other cultural patrimonies are tantamount to a form of Indigenous intellect—a physical, spiritual, and intellectual worldview that is inextricably linked to land, people, and history.” This audiobook features the voices of the Pueblo Pottery Collective themselves and includes an accompanying PDF with works from the catalogue for easy reference."

Elysia Poon, Pueblo Pottery Collective, Rick Kinsel (Author), Members Of The Pueblo Pottery Collective (Narrator)

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Marsden Hartley: Adventurer in the Arts

"Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) was proud to call himself an American artist, but he dreamed of travel to Europe, believing that he would learn more there than in his home state of Maine, or even in New York. His rise to prominence as a specifically American modernist was based largely on the visual influences that he encountered in 1912-15 in the vibrant cities of Paris, Berlin, and Munich, which he then synthesized through a New England perspective. Solitary by nature, Hartley never lost his wanderlust, and throughout his life found inspiration in many other landscapes and cultures, including in southern France, Italy, Bermuda, New Mexico, Mexico, and Canada. Marsden Hartley: Adventurer in the Arts offers a fresh appraisal of this pioneering modernist, whose work continues to be celebrated for its spirituality and experimentation. Rick Kinsel’s introduction provides an overview of the manifold ways in which Hartley’s peripatetic life shaped his artistic vision. Essays by William Low, Emily Schuchardt Navratil, and Kinsel explore works and artifacts in the Marsden Hartley Memorial Collection of Bates College Museum of Art in Maine; Hartley’s love of the circus, a recurrent theme that reflected his desire for escape; and the painting Schiff, created in Berlin in 1915 with imagery from both Native American material culture and German folk art. The catalogue section, by Navratil, features descriptions of paintings, drawings, photographs, and postcards, arranged into six country- or state-themed chapters, with a concluding chapter on Hartley’s possessions, which - because he had no permanent home of his own - held extraordinary significance for him. This audiobook includes a PDF that features many works from the book for easy reference."

Dan Mills, Emily Schuchardt Navratil, Rick Kinsel, William Low (Author), Daniel K. Isaac (Narrator)

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