In the past decade, the Chinese-North Korean border region has undergone a gradual transformation into a site of intensified cooperation, competition, and intrigue. These changes have prompted a significant volume of critical scholarship and media commentary across multiple languages and disciplines. Drawing on existing studies and new data, this volume brings much of this literature into concert by pulling together a wide range of insight on the region's economics, security, social cohesion, and information flows. Drawing from multilingual sources and transnational scholarship, the volume is enhanced by the extensive fieldwork undertaken by the editors and contributors in their quest to decode the borderland. In doing so, the volume emphasizes the link between theory, methodology, and practice in the field of Area Studies and social science more broadly.

Will Barnet’s artistic career as a painter and printmaker spanned nearly eight decades of continuous creativity. Few artists, other than perhaps Picasso or Monet, can claim such an extended period of uninterrupted and innovative art making. From the darkness of the Great Depression to the opening decade of the twenty-first century, his oeuvre reflects his unique interpretation of the art world’s evolving genres: Social Realism, Modernism, Abstract Expressionism, and ultimately representational Minimalism with the human figure as his primary subject. Barnet was devoted to making art every day and worked diligently even at the very end of his life. “The Old Masters are still alive after 400 years, and that’s what I want to be,” he once said. “At the age of 10 or 12, I discovered that being an artist would give me an ability to create something which would live on after death.” Live on it does; in addition to his acclaimed body of work, he influenced a broad spectrum of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, James Rosenquist, Cy Twombly, and Ethel Fisher, and he held teaching positions at the Cooper Union, Yale University, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Barnet’s works can be found in nearly every major public collection in the United States, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery of Art. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including the first Artist’s Lifetime Achievement Award Medal given on the occasion of the National Academy of Design’s 175th anniversary. He was also awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama in 2011. The Artist Book Foundation is delighted and honored to announce the upcoming publication of Will Barnet, the first comprehensive monograph on the artist in nearly 40 years. With scholarly essays by the four distinguished authors, an extensive plate section, a comprehensive chronology, lists of awards and exhibitions, as well as a detailed bibliography, this monograph will be a thorough presentation of Barnet’s iconic images and consistently evolving style while celebrating his unquenchable joie de vivre.