Academic literature on the topic 'Arts and crafts movement – United States'

D. H. Lawrence’s essays ‘The Spinner and the Monks’ of 1913 and ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’ of 1924 offer evocative textual considerations of aesthetic mediation through acts of the body. In these essays, readers can understand ‘traditional’ aesthetic acts to be those that are not contrivances of modernity; through such acts, history is invoked in the now, as if unchanged. This chapter identifies Lawrence’s engagements with traditional aesthetics as unique experiences of the human sensorium. The examples this chapter examines – the first from Lawrence’s earliest trip outside England (Italy), and the second from New Mexico (in the Southwestern United States) – show how Lawrence progressively experienced and then wrote about ‘traditional’ aesthetic acts as having a unique capacity to engage with community, history and truth. They thus have broad implications concerning Lawrence’s movement toward a refined articulation of aesthetic difference and viscerally mediated relationships. Lawrence’s accounts of Hopi dance and Italian handiwork reveal an openness to the viscerally-mediating capacity of aesthetic experience. As a result of his multi-sensorial engagements, Lawrence experiences and textually records ‘traditional’ aesthetic performances or outputs as both meditating and transformational.

Throughout much of the NCAA’s first half century, the organization maintained an uneasy collection of commercialized schools that pursued highly competitive athletics for publicity and profit; liberal arts colleges that saw college athletics as a component of their educational and leadership missions; and smaller and medium-size state schools that wanted to play athletics for competitive glory but lacked the size, resources, and finances of the big-time powers. Unable to balance those three interests, the NCAA largely ignored the concerns of the latter two while devoting itself to the service of commercialized athletics. This fraught arrangement finally came asunder in the years after World War II when multiple pressures from scandals, racial criticisms, and growing pressure for access to the NCAA Basketball Tournament finally forced concessions. The concessions made in the mid- to late-1950s, however, did not reshape the balance of power in the NCAA, as the organization remained wholly committed to serving the interests of big-time commercialized athletics. In this regard the challenges faced by the NCAA mirrored the larger social and cultural upheaval in the United States following World War II. The civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and opposition to the war in Vietnam all challenged the authority of existing political and economic elites yet did not mark any fundamental shift in power in American life. The question, then, is not really how did the NCAA manage to survive but, rather, how did its critics ever hope to succeed?

What constitutes regional commerce? What creates and enhances a regional identity? In the United States, regions can be quite large and may even cover geographical territory from several surrounding counties or states. They are larger than any one individual company, shopping street, or district. Regional cooperation of commercial businesses is often manifested through special events, cooperative advertising with coordinated signage, extended opening hours, and special discounts that contribute to building a sense of community, and which eventually develop a sense of region. The political and environmental exigencies for the creation and expansion of regions have meant an increase in the popularity and importance of regions and a subsequent movement to enhance and differentiate their identities. We now see the rise of regional governments, water authorities, and educational institutions among many others. One little-explored idea has been the use of e-collaboration to forge, reinforce, and sustain a regional identity via the virtual world. Although geographical separation of many miles might dictate that bricks-and-mortar theatres cannot easily collaborate physically (i.e., they cannot share costumes, props, ushers, and so on), the possibility of e-collaboration opens potential opportunities for attracting wider audiences, reaching and ultimately casting fresh talent, and building reciprocal audiences who possess a passion for the arts and who have the means and desire to travel to attend performances throughout the geographical region. In this study, a methodology built on the conceptual foundation of metaphor research was used to comprehend and then interpret the Web presence of 15 nonprofit theatres that comprise the total regional theatre of southern New Jersey that exists on the Web. In order to add additional insight, our earlier research findings from working with off-Broadway and regional theatre festivals were extended to analyze the Web presence of the theatres in southern New We contribute to the literature by systematic and deep investigation of the strategic importance of the Web for nonprofit theatre groups in the southern New Jersey region. In addition, our use of the metaphor methodology in order to create a telling portrait of what transpires on the Web in relation to nonprofit organizations is also an original contribution. Our work is meant to heighten the awareness of administrators to the rapidly accelerating need for the strategic use of e-collaboration. We propose that with the use of the Web, administrators can move toward creating a regional theatre Web presence for South Jersey, one which would make use of an evolutionary metaphor. To this end, we suggest the use of an organism metaphor. Through the creation of reciprocal hyperlinks, theatres can be supported in improving their practice of colocation on the Web, wherein they will be taking strides to cooperate as a regional theatre community.

What constitutes regional commerce? What creates and enhances a regional identity? In the United States, regions can be quite large and may even cover geographical territory from several surrounding counties or states. They are larger than any one individual company, shopping street, or district. Regional cooperation of commercial businesses is often manifested through special events, cooperative advertising with coordinated signage, extended opening hours, and special discounts that contribute to building a sense of community, and which eventually develop a sense of region. The political and environmental exigencies for the creation and expansion of regions have meant an increase in the popularity and importance of regions and a subsequent movement to enhance and differentiate their identities. We now see the rise of regional governments, water authorities, and educational institutions among many others. One little-explored idea has been the use of e-collaboration to forge, reinforce, and sustain a regional identity via the virtual world. Although geographical separation of many miles might dictate that bricks-and-mortar theatres cannot easily collaborate physically (i.e., they cannot share costumes, props, ushers, and so on), the possibility of e-collaboration opens potential opportunities for attracting wider audiences, reaching and ultimately casting fresh talent, and building reciprocal audiences who possess a passion for the arts and who have the means and desire to travel to attend performances throughout the geographical region. In this study, a methodology built on the conceptual foundation of metaphor research was used to comprehend and then interpret the Web presence of 15 nonprofit theatres that comprise the total regional theatre of southern New Jersey that exists on the Web. In order to add additional insight, our earlier research findings from working with off-Broadway and regional theatre festivals were extended to analyze the Web presence of the theatres in southern New Jersey. We contribute to the literature by systematic and deep investigation of the strategic importance of the Web for nonprofit theatre groups in the southern New Jersey region. In addition, our use of the metaphor methodology in order to create a telling portrait of what transpires on the Web in relation to nonprofit organizations is also an original contribution. Our work is meant to heighten the awareness of administrators to the rapidly accelerating need for the strategic use of e-collaboration. We propose that with the use of the Web, administrators can move toward creating a regional theatre Web presence for South Jersey, one which would make use of an evolutionary metaphor. To this end, we suggest the use of an organism metaphor. Through the creation of reciprocal hyperlinks, theatres can be supported in improving their practice of colocation on the Web, wherein they will be taking strides to cooperate as a regional theatre community.