a stunningly illustrated look at how blake's radical vision influenced artists of the beat generation and 1960s counterculture

in his own lifetime, william blake (1757-1827) was a relatively unknown nonconventional artist with a strong political bent. william blake and the age of aquarius is a beautifully illustrated look at how, some two hundred years after his birth, the antiestablishment values embodied in blake's art and poetry became a model for artists of the american counterculture.

this book provides new insights into the politics and protests of blake's own lifetime, and the generation of artists who revived and reimagined his work in the mid-1940s through 1970, or what might be called the "long sixties." contributors explore blake's outsider status in georgian england and how his individualistic vision spoke to members of the beat generation, hippies, radical poets and writers, and other voices of the counterculture. among the artists, musicians, and writers who looked to blake were such diverse figures as diane arbus, jay defeo, the doors, sam francis, allen ginsberg, jess, agnes martin, ad reinhardt, charles seliger, maurice sendak, robert smithson, clyfford still, and many others. this book also explores visual cultures around such galvanizing moments of the 1960s as woodstock and the summer of love.

william blake and the age of aquarius shows how blake's myths, visions, and radicalism found new life among american artists who valued individualism and creativity, explored expanded consciousness, and celebrated youth, peace, and the power of love in a turbulent age.

exhibition schedule:
mary and leigh block museum of art, northwestern university
september 23, 2017-march 11, 2018

free-roaming killer drones stalk the battlespace looking for organic targets. human combatants are programmed to feel no pain. highpower microwave beams detonate munitions, jam communications, and cook internal organs.

is this vision of future war possible, or even inevitable? in this timely new book, everett carl dolman examines the relationship between science and war. historically, science has played an important role in ending wars - think of the part played by tanks in breaching trench warfare in the first world war, or atom bombs in hastening the japanese surrender in the second world war - but to date this has only increased the danger and destructiveness of future conflicts. could science ever create the con-ditions of a permanent peace, either by making wars impossible to win, or so horrific that no one would ever fight? ultimately, dolman argues that science cannot, on its own, end war without also ending what it means to be human.

telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough. but for the first chronicle in the japanese vernacular, a tale of flowering fortunes (eiga monogatari), there was more to worry about than a good yarn. the health of the community was at stake. flowering tales is the first extensive literary study of this historical tale, which covers about 150 years of births, deaths, and happenings in late heian society, a golden age of court literature in women's hands. takeshi watanabe contends that the blossoming of tales, marked by the tale of genji, inspired eiga's new affective history: an exorcism of embittered spirits whose stories needed to be retold to ensure peace.

tracing the narrative arcs of politically marginalized figures, watanabe shows how eiga's female authors adapted the discourse and strategies of the tale of genji to rechannel wayward ghosts into the community through genealogies that relied not on blood but on literary resonances. these reverberations, highlighted through comparisons to contemporaneous accounts in courtiers' journals, echo through shared details of funerary practices, political life, and characterization. flowering tales reanimates these eleventh-century voices to trouble conceptions of history: how it ought to be recounted, who got to record it, and why remembering mattered.