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Frank Feltens

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Books by Frank Feltens

Mindful Eye, Playful Eye

Switch off your phone, take a deep breath, and prepare for adventure. Mindful Eye, Playful Eye invites readers on a thoughtful journey through museums, with 101 practices designed to nurture the development of attention, creativity, and compassion. This book encourages a playful and reflective approach to the museum experience of viewing art, sculptures, fossils, jewelry, aircraft, and more, including suggestions to:

  • Imagine an object features prominently in a film or novel. What role does it play in a love story, thriller, and sci-fi?
  • Pose to mirror a piece and consider the sensations that arise.
  • Encounter as many objects as you can while holding your breath.
  • Switch between scientific and empathic modes of viewing an object.

Activities include instructions for both individual and partnered exploration. Whether frequenting a favorite museum or exploring an unfamiliar one, this book will enrich solo trips and add a unique element of connection to romantic or friend dates. Practices are divided into 5 categories:
  • Body: explores how your body responds to museum objects.
  • Vision: challenges established visual habits and encourages experimentation.
  • Mind: focuses on thoughts and feelings that animate your inner world.
  • Imagination: encourages you to imagine new ways of being.
  • Action: transforms you into an art maker and performance artist.

The practices can be performed in any museum in the world. Mindful Eye, Playful Eye empowers museumgoers to encounter museum collections, themselves, and each other with heightened awareness, centeredness, and a sense of unabashed joy.
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Staging the Supernatural

Staging the Supernatural presents striking, eerie nineteenth-century woodblock prints from Japan that feature ghosts, demons, and other supernatural entities. The book digs into the country’s rich folkloric traditions and how they were brought to life on stage, with insightful essays that explore the depiction of spirits through the centuries, the relationship between printed images and cultural imagination, and how kabuki and Noh theater performances reflect Japan’s deep connection to and shifting notions of the supernatural.

The detailed art invites readers to admire the artistic quality and techniques employed to accentuate supernaturalism, including embossing, mica application, and metallic pigments. The prints offer a window into Japan’s 19th-century pop culture and will appeal to fans of contemporary anime and manga, which is often influenced by these images. The book is artfully constructed, with an open spine exposing yellow-ochre thread stitching and a translucent vellum dustjacket printed with ghostly art that adds an ethereal touch. Equal part art and commentary, the book includes:

  • 40 gorgeous woodblock prints with extended text entries
  • Introduction from Pearl Moskowitz, who gifted many of the featured prints to the museum in 2021
  • Essay from museum curator Kit Brooks that explores special effects in kabuki theater ghost plays and their representation in souvenir woodblocks
  • Essay from museum curator Frank Feltens on Tsukioka Kōgyo, the first artist to render the eerie atmosphere of Noh plays in prints

Spooky, fascinating, and fun, this is an ideal book for lovers of Japanese art, folklore, horror, and history.
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Hokusai's Brush

Hokusai's Brush is a companion to the Freer Gallery of Art's yearlong exhibition that celebrates the artist's fruitful career. The Freer, home to the world's largest collection of paintings by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, has put on view for the first time in a decade his incredible and rarely seen sketches, drawings, and paintings. Together with essays that explore his life and career, Hokusai's Brush offers an in-depth breakdown of each painting, providing amazing commentary that highlight Hokusai's mastery and detail.

While best known for his woodblock print series "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" and particularly the widely recognizable "The Great Wave off Kanagawa," Hokusai is said to have produced 30,000 pieces of art. He lived to ninety years old, and his last words were reportedly to say that if heaven were to grant him another five or ten years, then he could become a true painter. Every stunning page of Hokusai's Brush is a testament to the humility of that statement, emphasizing his artistry and skill, the likes of which shaped the Impressionist movement by inspiring artists such as Monet, Degas, and van Gogh.

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