New Contemporary Art @ IPL

Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration

2011-12-01T15:04:00.001-08:00

Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration features a series of works by six contemporary Pakistani artists: Aisha Khalid, Hasnat Mehmood, Muhammad Imran Qureshi, Nusra Latif Qureshi, Talha Rathore, and Saira Wasim. At the core of the exhibition was a series of collaboratively-produced paintings initiated as a creative experiment by Muhammad Imran Qureshi in 2003. He contacted the five other Pakistani painters, all alumni of the miniature department at the National College of Arts in Lahore, but now living in different cities around the world, with the suggestion that each artist start two new paintings made on wasli (rag paper). Each work was then sent to another artist in the group, who applied another layer of imagery, marks, or other processes, and passed it along until all of the artists had added to each of the twelve paintings. Karkhana included these twelve miniature paintings, and five additional paintings by each of the six artists. The original Karkhana collaboration was inspired by the cooperative nature of miniature painting practiced in South Asia's pre-modern courts. T he past two decades have witnessed a vibrant revival of miniature painting; artists have revitalized the pictorial tradition, negotiating a fine balance between historical practices and post-modern conceptual concerns. These paintings are an experiment in artistic collaboration revealing improvisation, acts of creative destruction, semiotic play, and dynamic adaptation. The book includes full-color reproductions of the works in the exhibition and essays by co-curators Jessica Hough, Hammad Nasar, and Anna Sloan, as well as by Qamar Adamjee, B. N. Goswamy (introduction), Salima Hashmi, Sandhya Jain, Dr. John Seyller, and Virginia Whiles.

Catherine Opie: 1999 & In and Around Home

2011-12-01T15:03:00.001-08:00

In this exhibition, Catherine Opie debuted a new series of intimate and political photographs titled In and Around Home. This new body of work was shown alongside 1999, a series taken while on a road trip across the U.S. at the millennium. Together, the series examine America through landscape and identity—some images are iconic while others portray a much more intimate look at what America means in the home. This body of work is political in nature and represents the American political landscape from the perspective of a gay artist/mother/activist at an important moment in her career. This work is also very personal and gives the viewer a unique opportunity to see both the private world and public world of the artist through the artist's eyes. The book contains every photograph from the two bodies of work--79 images in all, each on its own page. Notable author A.M. Homes (Safety of Objects, Music for Torching) contributed an original piece of short fiction for the catalogue, which also includes interpretive essays by the curators, Elizabeth Armstrong from Orange County Museum of Art, and Jessica Hough from The Aldrich.

Fred Wilson: Black Like Me

2011-12-01T15:01:00.001-08:00

Known for his signature style of using found objects as a vehicle for cultural and institutional critique, in 2002 Fred Wilson began to use glass in order to continue his exploration of racial and ethnic marginalization in a more personal and introspective manner. Wilson exploits the stunning opacity of black glass combined with its fluid sensibility to invoke not only his subjective experience, but also the shadows of black experience and history. The new work exhibits a stunning material presence, animating Wilson's continuing inquiry into human nature. The title of the exhibition, Black Like Me, was taken from John Howard Griffin's groundbreaking 1961 book of the same name. A white civil-rights activist, Griffin dyed his skin black and traveled throughout the south to directly understand the nature of racial prejudice. The book includes an artist interview conducted by Richard Klein, an essay by Huey Copland, and color illustrations.

Michael Lundgren: Transfigurations

2011-12-01T14:59:00.001-08:00

Historically, landscape photography was used as a means of documenting geographic and scientific exploration. Later it transitioned into a way to record nature and the spectacle of human progress. Rarely has it been employed more abstractly to convey an atavistic or ecstatic experience as it is in the new work of Michael Lundgren. This volume collects the Phoenix-based photographer's images of the Sonoran desert, which he has been shooting since 2003. Using the desert's constant flux to his advantage, Lundgren records the shifting effects of light and atmosphere to create stunning black-and-white images. These photographs express a lust for the primitive, and they reinvigorate the realm of landscape photography with notions of the sublime. Lundgren elaborates in his statement: "The landscape is only discernible because of the presence of what is fundamentally absent. Myth and metaphor remain unfixed, open." This volume includes a text by the acclaimed critic, historian and best-selling author, Rebecca Solnit, as well as an afterword by the noted scholar and professor William Jenkins, who curated the influential 1975 New Topographics exhibition.

Renate Aller: Oceanscapes – One View, Ten Years

2011-12-01T14:57:00.001-08:00

German-born photographer Renate Aller has been photographing the Atlantic Ocean for over a decade from a single point on the fabled Hamptons’ coastline. Her images capture the infinitely shifting colors and textures of the sky and the water, and the beauty and grandeur of the ocean, providing a rich document of what has drawn people to this area for generations. While Aller's viewpoint is static, the changing weather and light allow for a diverse series of images that open up a vast 'visual library' of memories and associations. Includes color plates and an essay by Richard B. Woodward.

Beaumont’s Kitchen: Lessons on Food, Life and Photography with Beaumont Newhall

2011-12-01T14:56:00.001-08:00

Considered by many to be the father of the history of photography, Beaumont Newhall was known by his intimate circle as a great chef and gracious host as well. This beautifully designed volume contains a substantial selection of Newhall’s articles and recipes culled from his weekly column, “Epicure Corner,” which appeared in The Brighton-Pittsford Post in Rochester, New York, from 1956–1969, along with a handsome selection of black and white photographs by the Newhall circle of photographers. Introduction by David Scheinbaum.

Johnnie Winona Ross

2011-12-01T14:54:00.001-08:00

Johnnie Winona Ross's quiet, contemplative and painstakingly produced paintings have created a stir in the contemporary art world. Often compared with Agnes Martin for both his Minimalist sensibility and his connection to New Mexico, Ross's reputation has grown swiftly in recent years. The paintings are reductive, but evidently process-oriented in their layering. Ross begins by pouring thin rivulets of paint down tilted canvases with the streams of paint branching out as they flow towards the bottom to create organic forms. He then scrapes away most of the pigment, leaving faint traces of color, so that sometimes as many as 30 sanded and repainted layers will accrue. Ross's paintings convey a spacious and tranquil palette grounded in these highly worked surfaces. This first major publication on Ross's work also features an essay by Carter Ratcliff.

Violet Isle: Alex Webb & Rebecca Norris Webb

2011-12-01T14:50:00.001-08:00

This multi-layered portrait of “the violet isle”—a little-known name for Cuba inspired by the rich color of the soil there—presents an engaging, at times unsettling document of a vibrant and vulnerable land. It combines two separate photographic visions: Alex Webb’s exploration of street life, and Rebecca Norris Webb’s fascination with the unique, quixotic collections of animals she discovered there. The result is an insightful and intriguing blend of two different aesthetics. An essay by Pico Iyer and an afterward by the artists are printed in both Spanish and English. The softcover book contains 70 color illustrations and is held in a hard, cardboard slipcase.

Mapping Water: Judy Tuwaletstiwa

2011-12-01T14:48:00.001-08:00

Mapping Water, as its name implies, explores the concept of heading into uncharted territory. How do you create a memoir of a moving, living being—or manifest the unconscious process of an artist? How do you map water? Rather than reiterating the events of a life or merely reproducing images of the artist's work, Mapping Water is a view into Judy Tuwaletstiwa's mind, thoughts, and art; expressed in a series of sections. Throughout the book are the artist’s own words—haunting and lyrical—that unify all of this material into a provocative and very unique project. The book moves between text, poetry, drawing, painting, photography, and sculpture with 150 color reproductions.

Land/Art New Mexico

2011-12-01T14:45:00.001-08:00

In the summer and fall of 2009 a group of New Mexico arts organizations joined together to present LAND/ART, which explored the relationship between land, art, and community through exhibitions, site-specific art works, lectures and performances. Focusing on “environmental” or “Land” art, the collaboration sought to address our changing relationship to nature, and to offer a new or previously unconsidered understanding of the places in which we live. The book features documentation of projects and exhibitions, including 110 color photos, as well as an introduction by Bill Gilbert and Kathleen Shields and essays by Lucy Lippard, William L. Fox, Nancy Marie Mithlo and MaLin Wilson-Powell.

Ed Moses

2011-12-01T14:44:00.001-08:00

Ed Moses is a member of the generation of California-based abstract artists that came of age in the mid-twentieth century, following in the tradition established by Richard Diebenkorn and Sam Francis. His career has spanned over fifty years, since his first exhibition in 1957 at the legendary Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Rather than maintain one distinct style, Moses has repeatedly renewed his approach to his art, which has ranged from his early, delicate abstract drawings to his architectural grid work and resin paintings of the 1970s, the Apparitions paintings of the late 1980s and early 1990s and the huge canvases that he is producing now. Consistent features of Moses' work are an emphasis on gesture and mark-making and an intimate connection with his materials. Moses has had numerous shows throughout his long career, but this is his first major monograph. The book includes 120 color illustrations, an interview with the artist and an introduction by Frances Colpitt and Barbara Haskell.

David Taylor: Working The Line

2011-12-01T14:42:00.001-08:00

In 2008, David Taylor received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his ongoing examination of the U.S.–Mexico border. His investigation is organized around the documentation of a series of approximately 260 obelisks that mark the international boundary as it extends from El Paso/Juarez to San Diego/ Tijuana. In the process of his work, Taylor earned remarkable access to U.S. Border Patrol facilities, agents and routine operations. This has given Taylor a unique view into overlapping issues of border security, human and drug smuggling, the continuing construction of the border fence and its impact on the land. This book captures the complexity of the terrain, the politics, and the human dynamics involved. While the images are documentary in nature, they are so formally and visually compelling that the work ultimately transcends genre. Two books are held in a cardboard slipcover: the hardcover “Working,” of color photographs and an essays by Hannah Freiser and Luis Alberto Urrea published in both Spanish and English; and the accordion-fold booklet “The Line”, featuring a collection of U.S. border monuments.

Joan Watts

2011-12-01T14:40:00.001-08:00

Michael Light: Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack

2011-12-01T14:36:00.001-08:00

For the last several years, Michael Light has been photographing both settled and unsettled areas of the American West from small rented airplanes, including an amazing series of black and white images taken of the Bingham Mine and Garfield Stack over the course of a single day. As with his other work, this series continues his interest in geology, mapping, vertigo, and human impact on the land, and is startling for both the amazing nature of the subject as well the sheer beauty of the images. This catalogue contains 22 full-page black and white illustrations and an essay by Trevor Paglen.

States of Mind: Dan and Lia Perjovschi

2011-12-01T14:35:00.001-08:00

The art of Dan and Lia Perjovschi is of singular significance in the development of experimental art in Romania since the late 1980's. The Perjovschis' work matured under the double pressures of Romanian socialism and Soviet communism. Both artists forged original and challenging forms of visual expression in drawing, performance, installation, and conceptual practices, as well as in the analysis and use of mass media (especially television and newspapers). Dan is internationally renowned for large- and small-scale drawing installations of hundreds of cartoon-like figures that comment on local, national and international cultural and current affairs. He is also the foremost political cartoon satirist in Romania. Lia is well known for her performance and conceptual art. This catalogue includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, videos, installations and conceptual art from 1986 to the present, as well as newly commissioned works. The color and black and white images are supported by several essays.

Barbara Probst: Exposures

2011-12-01T14:33:00.001-08:00

This catalogue, co-published by MoCP and Steidl, is the first publication of Barbara Probst’s Exposures (2000-2006) series. The series dissects the relationship between the photographic “moment” and perceived reality by showing a single action from numerous points of view. Probst arranges for multiple photographers to take pictures of the same subject from varying angles (and distances) at precisely the same moment. The multiple exposures are more than a meditation on the event being recorded — the images examine the act of reading photographs as documents of the actions or people they depict. While one may suggest voyeuristic qualities, another incorporates the slipshod framing of a snapshot. In this way Probst’s sequences point out that the different ways we “direct” a photograph (by the position, settings, kind of film, etc.) can produce images with entirely disparate spheres of meaning. The images, which are sometimes presented on fold-out pages, are supported by two essays and an interview with the artist.

CONVERSION TO MODERNISM: The Early Work of Man Ray

2011-12-01T14:32:00.001-08:00

Known as a glamorous and nearly legendary pioneer of Manhattan modernism, a Paris sophisticate and high-style innovator in photography, an alluring Hollywood art world émigré in the 1940s, Man Ray has seldom been thought of as a New Jersey artist. This book delves into his early works, and recalls how his time in New Jersey was seminal in his development as a leading modernis

CUT/Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video

2011-12-01T14:30:00.001-08:00

The moving picture—both film and, increasingly, television—has been ‘the’ medium of the twentieth century. Indeed, film is at once a means of documenting and of constructing our reality. The artists in CUT: Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video have taken this material of our daily lives and, through manipulation, revealed film’s power both to communicate and to shape reality. The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue explore the appropriation of preexisting film and recorded footage and the strategies of sampling and editing taken up by a range of contemporary artists in the creation of their own works of art. The techniques of looping, repetition, erasure and compression allow them to actively manipulate their medium, while their use of found footage supplants the typical primacy of the director with that of the editor. Editing and shaping moving images that already exist in the world thus becomes a powerful and revealing act, one that exposes the inherent manipulative power of the medium itself. Featured artists include Douglas Gordon, Candice Breitz, Omer Fast, Paul Pfeiffer, Pierre Huyghe, and Christian Marclay, among others. In addition to color and black and white still frames, the catalogue contains three informative essays and a profile of each artist.

PUBLIC & PRIVATE

2011-12-01T14:29:00.001-08:00

Public & Private is a set of two beautiful books, each clothbound with photo-printed silk and housed together in an elegant slipcase. Public: Five Outdoor Paintings 1993-2003 documents projects the artist conducted in public spaces at Long Island University, the Islip Art Museum, and the Rose Art Museum. On the grounds surrounding these museums, campus galleries and art buildings, Wagner marked times of day by painting shadows cast at particular moments, marked her own presence by drawing arcs on the ground, and added her own markings to lichen covered rocks. Private: More Notes on Paint 1983-2003 documents a single project carried out over the course of twenty years in the yard of Wagner’s studio on Gravelly Lake in Tacoma, Washington. In August of 1983, she painted eight large squares of different yellows in oil pastel, chalk, watercolor, and oil paint on the wooden fence, and eight small squares of blues making up a grid on yet another part. Methodically documented every year, the photographs are arranged chronologically and also in fold-out grids, creating lyrical collages out of the empirical evidence of decay.

Charles Ray: Log

2011-12-01T14:26:00.001-08:00

This catalogue presents Ray's life-size sculpture of a fallen log he discovered by the side of the highway in California. After visiting it many times, Ray decided to move the log in pieces to his studio, where he made molds of the pieces and produced a fiberglass replica of the log. Eventually, he sent the fiberglass replica to Japan where a master woodworker and his apprentices carved the final wooden sculpture out of Japanese cypress. The book includes an essay by the artist.

Jess: To and From the Printed Page

2011-12-01T14:25:00.001-08:00

Jess: To and From the Printed Page focuses on the artist simply known as "Jess" (1923-2004), and celebrates his lively and lifelong dialogue with poets, poetry and printed matter. Published to accompany the iCI touring exhibition, it features collages made for publication, the books and magazines in which they were reproduced, as well as many previously unreproduced paintings, drawings and assemblages. The book offers a fresh perspective on Jess's work by specifically addressing the interrelation between his art and the California literary culture of which he was a part. It also explores the intimacy of the collaborations and conversations in which he participated over five decades, and points to his effect on younger artists today--through his use of "pop" materials in collage and paint, his early homoerotic themes and his enjoyment of the book format as a compositional vehicle.

High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975

2011-12-01T14:24:00.001-08:00

In the late 1960s, the New York art world was, famously, an exhilarating place to be. New forms, including performance and video art, were making their debuts, and sculpture was developing in startling ways. In the midst of it all, experimental abstract painting was pressing art's most iconic medium to its limits and beyond. High Times, Hard Times fills a gap in coverage of this moment in history, recapturing its liveliness and urgency with more than 42 key pieces by 38 artists who were living and working in New York at the time. Many of those featured artists have contributed personal statements reflecting on the work, its meaning and the social scene that surrounded it, including Lynda Benglis, Mel Bochner, Roy Colmer, Mary Corse, David Diao and Peter Young, Guy Goodwin, Harmony Hammond, Mary Heilmann, Cesar Paternosto, Howardena Pindell, Dorothea Rockburne, Carolee Schneemann, Alan Shields, Joan Snyder, Franz Erhard Walther and Jack Whitten, as well as one curator and one critic, Marcia Tucker and Robert Pincus-Witten. The critic Katy Siegel and the painter David Reed have written essays that focus, respectively, on the work's explosive artistic and political context, and the experience of being a young painter living in New York during these years. Additional pieces by Dawoud Bey and Anna Chave focus on race and gender in that milieu. Color illustrations of every featured work, along with supplementary historic photographs from the period, ephemera, biographies, a timeline and a bibliography round out a beautiful, much-needed book, a complete reference on a crucial era.

Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence

2011-12-01T14:22:00.001-08:00

First hosted by Museo de Arte del Banco de la República in Bogotá, Columbia, the Phantasmagoria exhibition and this accompanying catalogue explore the themes and mysticisms that link art and the history of illusion. The catalogue features art works that utilize a variety of non-traditional media, including smoke, theatrical lighting, and cinema, presented alongside drawings and sculptures. Participating artists include Christian Boltanski, Jim Campbell, Michel Delacroix, William Kentridge, and Rosângela Rennó, among others. In addition to full photographic documentation of the show, the book includes an essay by José Roca and a short fiction piece by renowned author Bruce Sterling.

Lucas Blalock : Toward a Warm Math

2011-12-01T14:21:00.001-08:00

Lucas Blalock’s photographic work is interested in reflection and surface. The realness and authenticity of the photograph is brought into question as an image is mirrored, layered and re-photographed. The series begins to function, at times, like op art as geometric patterned fabric, translucent objects, and mirrors interact. An essay by John Houck precedes the 21 color images in this artist book.

Twelve Artists from the German Democratic Republic

2011-12-01T14:19:00.001-08:00

This catalogue documents the first American show of art from the German Democratic Republic. The exhibition featured twelve artists’ work, including Max Uhlig's expressionist, nearly abstract portraits, Theodor Rosenhauer's delicate still-lifes, and pieces by Gerhard Altenbourg, Carlfriedrich Claus, Bernhard Heisig, Walter Libuda, Willi Sitte, Wolfgang Smy, Heinrich Tessmer and Thomas Ziegler. The book contains 70 color plates, contributions by Peter Nisbet, Dore Ashton, Hermann Raum and Peter Selz, and provides a timeline with black and white images of the development of fine art in the German Democratic Republic.

Gary Schneider: Portraits

2011-12-01T14:17:00.001-08:00

One of the most thought-provoking photographers working today, South-African-born Gary Schneider creates unique luminescent portraits that transform their specific subject matter and probe the enigmatic character of identity. This remarkable book is the first to examine Schneider's innovative portrait work.
Curator of Photography Deborah Martin Kao discusses Schneider's re-presentations of 19th-century studio portraits, his handprint photograms, and his fragmented face portraits—all of which reveal as much about the language of photography as they do about the subjects being depicted. She shows how Schneider portrays the collaboration between artist and subject, seen in his use of a light pen to sculpt or trace his subjects over long exposures, and in his prints that display traces of movement in time. Kao also discusses Schneider's work with scientists to create negatives from which he makes strikingly beautiful images of blood, DNA, and strands of hair, and how these represent a fascinating evolution in traditional thinking about the nature of photographic portraiture.
The book also features an interview with Schneider that provides insight into his life and working methods, presenting a revelatory look at an extraordinary contemporary photographer.

Christopher Wool: Roma Termini

2011-12-01T14:15:00.001-08:00

Christopher Wool (born in Chicago in 1955 and now based in New York) is best known for his paintings of large, black, stenciled letters on white canvases. For the works featured in this exhibition catalogue, however, Wool calls upon a wide range of styles and painterly techniques. In these new works (exhibited by Gagosian’s Rome gallery in 2010) the artist conflates the oppositional foundations of modern painting—the directness and immediacy of human mark-making—with the mediating effects of mechanical and digital reproduction. Silkscreen is the foundation on top of which he employs a surprising array of actions—including rolling, dripping, dragging, and spray-painting—to wrest increasingly muscular iterations from his established repertoire. Wool paints layer upon layer of white and off-white over silk-screened elements used in previous works, such as enlargements of details of photographs and Polaroids of his own paintings (or, as Tommaso Pincio describes in his catalogue essay, “layers of painting photographed and applied over other passages of actual painting, and vice versa). The artist’s intense, protracted process emerges as both substance and subject of the work, making manifest the tension between painting and erasing, gesture and removal, depth and flatness. The essay by Pincio—appearing in both English and Italian—introduces numerous color plates, as well as Wool’s black-and-white photographs of Rome.

David Smith

2011-12-01T14:14:00.001-08:00

This catalogue accompanies the 2010 Gagosian Gallery exhibition of David Smith’s monumental sculptures made between 1962 and 1964. Although trained as a painter, Smith shifted his focus to large-scale sculpture, which he often created by welding combinations of found objects and forged metal. As he explained: “The material called iron or steel I hold in high respect. What it can do in arriving at a form economically, no other material can do. The metal itself possesses little art history. What associations it possesses are those of this century: power, structure, movement, progress, suspension, destruction, brutality”. Smith frequently worked on several sculptural series simultaneously, insisting that they be understood as continuous parts of his concept, rather than as variations on a theme. Representative of the four major series that Smith was constructing at the time of his premature death—Voltri, Cubi, Primo Piano, and Gondola—the featured works give a concise indication of the depth and range of the artist’s vision. A text by the artist’s daughter, Candida Smith, is included.

Living, Looking, Making: Giacometti, Fontana, Twombly, Serra

2011-12-01T14:12:00.001-08:00

This exhibition catalogue presents four major artists from the 20th century whose art works bridge formal strategies and materials. It considers the common bonds shared by Alberto Giacometti, Lucio Fontana, Cy Twombly, and Richard Serra, and elaborates on their individual lives. Letters and personal documents complement color images from the exhibition.

Franz West: Early Work

2011-12-01T14:11:00.001-08:00

Franz West is widely considered to be one of Europe's most important contemporary artists, and he has reached that position without ever having needed to limit himself to a single medium or mode of expression. Like other artists who came of age in the midst of Conceptualism and Minimalism, his work has ranged widely and blurred the boundaries between art and life. The works showcased here, including autonomous sculpture and interactive pieces, were all made between 1972 and 1988, starting with the furniture with which he expanded our understanding of sculpture--a chair with a seat made of chains still stirs visceral reactions--and the photo-filled and always photogenic collages with which he seemed to join Pop. Early Work exemplifies the richness of West's early production, and Eva Badura-Triska's insightful essay traces through it the development of the theories and practices that continue to shape his work today.

Barnet Newman Drawings 1944-46

2011-12-01T14:06:00.001-08:00

This exhibition catalogue presents seven of the dozen or so drawings in crayon that Barnett Newman (1905 - 1970) produced in the years immediately following World War II. Having destroyed all works created prior to this date, these drawings mark what he determined as his artistic beginnings. For Newman each of these early drawings was an exploration of technique and imagery. Some drawings feature bird and plant-like figures; others embody an earthy palette with calligraphic scribbles across the page. Drawing was an invaluable discipline for Newman, who resisted certainty and prediction. These images exemplify his desire to begin anew and to create an alternate artistic vocabulary to geometric abstraction and surrealism. The catalogue includes an essay by critic and art historian, James Lawrence, and color illustrations of selected works in the exhibition.

Claes Oldenberg Drawings 1965-1973

2011-12-01T14:04:00.001-08:00

Oldenberg’s whimsy and imagination are on display in these drawings that often served as proposals for public sculptures. Pieces like “Study for Sculpture in the form of a Tube Supported by Its Contents” defies gravity while implying scale with its upward perspective. A baseball mitt, fans, and typewriter parts are also transformed from the mundane to the monumental in these eight pastel and watercolor drawings. What is constant across this range of subject matter is a highly imaginative, playful, and masterful approach to drawing. Oldenburg’s link between his imagination and materials is always profoundly clear and refreshingly economical: these works allow us to experience the straightforward, substantive pleasure of looking and wondering. Claes Oldenburg is an important founding member of the Pop Art movement. His landmark public sculptures and groundbreaking soft sculptures and performance pieces have become touchstones in the international cultural landscape. He is also widely regarded as one of the pre-eminent draftsmen of his generation. Indeed, his drawings have always held an important place in his studio practice, both as independent works of art and in relation to his public sculptures. An essay by James D. Herbert, an art historian, is also included.

Bruce Nauman: Drawings for Neons

2011-12-01T14:03:00.001-08:00

This book collects working drawings of Bruce Nauman’s neon sign sculptures. Known for his assertive subject matter, Nauman’s drawings in this show playfully juxtapose words and phrases that sound alike but whose meanings may seem unrelated. Nauman’s specific word choices are often aggressive, violent and provocative. These meanings are amplified by the large scale and bright colors of the works, both in the drawings and in their translations into neon. These drawings function simultaneously as plans for the fabrication of the neon sculptures and as autonomous artworks that exploit the inherent collapse of three dimensional space as it is translated into a two dimensional medium. Additionally, they contain pencil notations of scale, color, and composition, revealing Nauman’s private visions for his final sculptures. The drawings retain a captivating intimacy while remaining (like Nauman himself) subtle and elusive. There are four color illustrations of pastel, graphite, and colored pencil studies and an essay by Constance Lewallen in this short catalogue.

Jim Love: From Now On

2011-12-01T13:58:00.001-08:00

Jim Love: From Now On is the first publication to celebrate Houston sculptor Jim Love's work in over 20 years. Love first gained national recognition in 1961 when his work was included in The Museum of Modern Art's groundbreaking exhibition The Art of Assemblage. He began his career as an urban archaeologist of sorts, scouring junkyards for interesting castoffs and later welding original forms of iron and steel. Inspired by the Surrealist- and Dada-influenced practice of assemblage, he elevated ordinary objects to inventive and often amusing works of art that include his early "put togethers" from the 1950s; his signature bears, birds, and dogs that take on life's dilemmas; his range of work that explores flowers as a motif; and his portraits, theatrical tableaux, and designs for furniture and other functional objects. A central figure in Houston art circles from the 1950s until his untimely death in 2005, Love most notably collaborated with the collectors John and Dominique de Menil. Essays by Dominque de Menil, Don Quaintance, Lynn M. Herbert, Paula Webb, and Mel Chin precede color plates.

Mary Lee Bendolph: Gee’s Bend Quilts, and Beyond

2011-12-01T13:54:00.001-08:00

Mary Lee Bendolph’s extraordinary talent first garnered national attention when her work was featured among that of other quiltmakers from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, in the 2002 blockbuster exhibition and book The Quilts of Gee’s Bend. Hailed by the New York Times as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced,” the abstract quilts from this small, isolated African American community prompted a rethinking of commonly accepted artistic categories.
The exhibition, Mary Lee Bendolph, Gee’s Bend Quilts and Beyond, and its accompanying full-color, scholarly catalogue, examine Bendolph’s inspiration and creative process, as well as her profound connection to the cultural practices and expressive traditions from which her work arises. The catalogue is fully illustrated with color plates of quilts and sculptures by Bendolph and other Gee’s Bend quilters and includes three essays and artists’ biographies.

John Kelsey / Nicolas Guagnini

2011-12-01T13:38:00.001-08:00

The work of Nicólas Guagnini and John Kelsey manifests itself in distinctly different forms, yet the two share an affinity for playing with the roles and structures of the art world. The conversation includes discussions of some of their recurring topics and themes: gossip, the jeune-fille, institutional critique, the abject, humor and their participation in collaborative ventures (Orchard and Union Gaucha Productions for Guagnini and Reena Spaulings and Bernadette Corporation for Kelsey). Part of the ART Press Between Artists conversation-based series.

Bearing Witness

2011-12-01T13:36:00.001-08:00

The history of AIDS has yet to be completed; it is an unfinished and ongoing tragedy endured by people across the world. Addressed in a poignant photographic essay are thumbnail vignettes documenting the vast array of people who have or have died of aids. A disease that makes no choices among gender, race or age. Dimension: 91/4 x 10 inches, 75 duotone and color reproductions.

Laurie Simmons

2011-12-01T12:54:00.001-08:00

"Mommy, Barbie's bashing Ken with a rolling pin!" Internationally acclaimed photographer Laurie Simmons deftly uses dolls, the archetypal little girl's toy, to launch a critique of the norms of femininity, masculinity and gender that can reduce women and men to mindless stereotypes. A slyly powerful, even subversive piece of work. Limited edition of 400. Dimension: 8 ½ X 12 inches, 72 b&w and 68 color reproductions.

Felix Gonzales-Torres

2011-12-01T12:49:00.001-08:00

Born in Cuba, Felix Gonzalez-Torres is best known for public artworks which invite the viewer's participation. In this publication, illustrated with video and performance stills and reproductions; the artist talks about his commitment to social change and the role of the artist in society. One of the few indepth publications on this pivotal conceptual artist. Limited edition of 200. Dimension: 8 3/8 x 12½ inches, 63 b&w and color reproductions.