The Culture of Violence

Gregory Green builds homemade book and suitcase bombs, Leon Golub paints monumentally trenchant street scenes, Richard Misrach shoots color photographs of Playboy magazines used for target practice, and Sue Williams sculpts a heartbreakingly abused woman in fetal position. The Culture of Violence presents a broad, multicultural, interdisciplinary approach to the subject of violence as manifested in the media, in the lives of children and their families, and the work of these and other artists, including Bruce Nauman, Ida Applebroog, Mel Chin, Kristin Oppenheim, and Lucinda Devlin. Organized around thematic categories that cut across class and gender and range from political to personal expressions of violence, including terrorism and hate crimes, government-sanctioned execution, youth and gang violence, street crime, and domestic violence, The Culture of Violence includes a conversation on violence and culture in medieval epics and contemporary media, and a proscriptive essay on coping with family violence.