On August 8, 2011, CCA alumna Adrienne Skye Roberts (MA Visual and Critical Studies 2009) began a six-week residency at the hip new Philadelphia Art Hotel, tracing her radical roots. "My grandfather, Joseph Roberts, was a Russian Jewish immigrant, a chairperson of the Communist Party, and general manager at the Communist newspaper the Daily Worker. He was prosecuted in 1953 under the Smith Act, wartime legislation passed to stop alien residents from trying to overthrow the U.S. by force.

Dubrovnik under Siege: Artists' Interactions with the Old City during the Yugoslav Army Aggression 1991-1992
LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing, 2010
Paperback, 76 pages, $68

Following attacks by the Yugoslav Army in 1991, local artists used the Old City of Dubrovnik -- its ruins, boarded-up monuments, and shop windows -- to create site-specific public artworks. Nensi Brailo (Visual and Critical Studies alumna) looks at three case studies to explore this phenomenon: the site-specific exhibitions of artist Ivo Grbic on the grounds of his home and studio which had been bombed, the impromptu collaborative public art project by professional and amateur artists that took place during Christmastime in December 1991, and Pavo Urban's photographs of the besieged city's architecture and citizens.

Cultural Confluences: The Art of Lenore Chinn
Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center, 2011
Paperback, 44 pages, $21.95

Edited by Jen Banta (MA Visual and Critical Studies 2009) this book maps the life and times of the Asian American artist Lenore Chinn via essays, reproductions of her exquisite realist paintings, and visual ephemera. Tirza True Latimer (Visual and Critical Studies chair) is one of the essayists. Chinn is an artist and community activist in San Francisco’s diverse LGBT and Asian American communities who paints her life and the lives of others in her social milieu. Her sensibility is informed not only by social justice issues, but also by Civil Rights and her experience of traditional Chinese culture in the bohemian 1970s.

Suggestions of a Life Being Lived: A Queer Exploration of Three Public Themes
SF Camerawork Publications, 2011
Hardcover, 64 pages, $19.95

Adrienne Skye Roberts (MA Visual and Critical Studies 2009) coedited this presentation of contemporary work that looks at queerness as a set of political alliances and possibilities. Untethered to institutions of sexual or gender normativity and in pursuit of greater freedoms, the work in this book represents queer activism, intentional and imagined communities, self-determinism, and DIY alternative world-making. The work looks outward toward collective and resistant expressions of queer community existing outside of dominant gay and lesbian culture.