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Art History Faculty Release Robert Williams: Conversations

Robert Williams Conversations book cover

Image courtesy of the University Press of Mississippi.

Robert Williams: Conversations, edited by LSU art historians Joe Givens and Darius Spieth, has been published by the University Press of Mississippi.

Exploring the works of prolific artist Robert Williams, the book includes interviews with Williams, founder of Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine and coproducer of ZAP Comix who is known for his underground comix cartoons and oil paintings. He has been called “the originator of Lowbrow Art.”

“A legendary figure of underground comix, Robert Williams (b. 1943) is an important social chronicler of American popular culture. The interviews assembled in Robert Williams: Conversations attest to his rhetorical powers, which match the high level of energy evident in his underground comix and action-filled canvases.” Read more.

Givens is an art history instructor in the LSU School of Art. An advocate for marginalized artists, he specializes in the scholarly investigation of overlooked and neglected art movements. In 2014, Juxtapoz magazine praised Givens’s underground art course as “the only known class in existence where modern and contemporary art that emerged from outside the traditional historical canon is thoroughly explored.”

Spieth is a professor of art history and the San Diego Alumni Association Chapter Alumni Professor. A specialist in modernism, Spieth focuses his scholarship on the interrelationships between art, intellectual history, and economics. Major monographs include Revolutionary Paris and the Market for Netherlandish Art (Brill, 2018) and Napoleon’s Sorcerers: The Sophisians (University of Delaware Press, 2007). Spieth is also subject editor for Art Markets, Law and Economics for the Grove Dictionary of Art (Oxford University Press). He has been repeatedly named LSU’s “Favorite Professor” by The Reveille The Mag‘s campuswide polls.

Robert Williams: Conversations is part of the Conversations with Comic Artists Series, and is a collaborative project between Givens, Spieth, and Williams.

 

LSU Art History Program