Exhibition catalog from a 2008 exhibition at McKee Gallery of the work of Jeanne Silverthorne, with an essay by Raphael Rubinstein. McKee Gallery, 2008 44 pp., color illustrations Softcover, No ISBN

The fourth layer of Unmonumental", Montage: Unmonumental Online demonstrates how the field of Internet-based art has become a vast, diverse, nuanced one—a discipline that responds to new forms of commerce, identity, and culture, and creates a critical space within a burgeoning new medium.

The catalogue captures the ephemeral digital assemblages of the fourteen featured artists in full-color screen shots with accompanying artist bios and descriptions.

Interviewed by Stephen Ellis, essay by Charles Hagen David Reed is interviewed by friend and fellow painter Stephen Ellis. In their conversation, they discuss Reed’s experiences in art school, his love for Baroque painting, the influence of CinemaScope in his compositions, and his desire to inject painting with contemporary ideas and ways of looking while retaining its rich connections with the past. Reed: “I’m very interested in the sense that one event in painting leads to another in a process that happens in time, as it does in film. I want to put time back into abstract painting so that you have to go through a decoding process in order to understand what the painting is about.

Luke Abiol's project Winters Berlin is a series of large format photographs made over a period of seven years while living in Germany. These photographs look into the history that saturates Berlin's structures and streets.

Abiol is particularly interested in the layers of the city that - when peeled away - introduce the viewer to countless traces of Berlin's inhabitants. Stories are derived from space and histories are formed.

Luke Abiol was born in San Francisco, came of age in New York, started a family in Berlin and now finds himself back in San Francisco. Luke observes the traces that industry, war, nature and time have left upon our urban spaces–then leaves his own traces to be read by others.

This collection of short stories by groundbreaking curator and author Marcia Tucker--who died in 2006 at the age of 66--was produced during her many residencies at The Acadia Summer Arts Program in Maine.

Tucker was the founder of New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art, where she served as Director from its inception in 1977 until 1999. Her motto, Act first, think later--that way you'll have something to think about, was a guiding principle in running the institution, where she organized such major exhibitions as A Labor of Love (1996) and Bad Girls (1994). After resigning from her post in 1999, Tucker continued to write, teach, lecture--and perform occasional stand-up comedy. Upon her death, Lisa Phillips, the current Director of the New Museum wrote, In her life and in her work, which were very intertwined, she was a kind of magnet who understood the power of people and brought them together around shared passions. She was and still is a force to be reckoned with.

A collection of remarkable paintings created mostly without paint. Since the mid1990s, Sergej Jensen (b. in Copenhagen in 1971) has been offering one of the most remarkable responses to the question of what painting can still be today. Painting in the classical sense plays only a minor role: in lieu ofcanvas, Jensen uses jute, coarse cotton, and jeans. He incorporates spots on fabrics, which turn the expressive gesture of his paintings into a sign of wear from real life. Jensen sews fabrics together, leaving the seams visible to evoke the fleeting impression of a drawing and he colors others with gouache, acrylics, and markers, but Jensen more often applies materials foreign to painting, suchas patches, paper money, spices, beads, and glitter. Hanging his fabrics from windows, Jensen lets the sun and rain contribute a patina and treats them withchlorine and paints mixed with bleach to reduce their brilliance.

Tom Friedman (b. 1965, Saint Louis, MO) makes work that explores ideas of perception, logic, and possibility. His often painstakingly rendered sculptures and works on paper inhabit the grey areas between the ordinary and the monstrous, the infinitesimal and the infinite, the rational and the uncanny. His work is deceptive, its handmade intricacy masked by a seemingly mass-produced or prefabricated appearance. Luhring Augustine 2012 11.25 x 9.75 inches, 272 pages, illustrations Hardcover, ISBN 978-0-9771150-6-8

Tranquil Aftermath features the work of Brooklyn, New York based painter Jonathan Weiner. Through allegory, surrealism and a distinctive style, Jonathan explores themes facing New York's contemporary society: violence, alienation, morality and power. Jonathan LeVine Gallery, 2006 10 x 8 inches, 72 pp., color illustrations Hardcover ISBN 978-0974803265

Since the early 1980s, Sean Scully has made work comprised of blocks and bands of color laid down in grid structures that are mediated through an intuitive organic response to the medium. The hand of the artist is strongly present in surfaces that are rich, luminous, and infused with an essence of humanity, sensuality and intimacy that embraces their materiality. The painted surfaces are applied in numerous layers, which through their translucency reveal the history of their making. In recent years, Scully has felt the need to disrupt and subvert evidence of an all-over pattern, which has led to the establishment of a disordered geometry in a palette that is both gloomy and fiery.

This catalogue features Sean Scully's paintings from 1989-1990.

Winner of the French Voices Award for excellence in publishing and translation. A timely book about dictatorships, propaganda and friendship. Imagine Art Spiegelman meets Chris Marker, told in gorgeous “tricolor” photography, a knock out! — Richard McGuire

This exquisitely composed photo-novel by French artist-writer Anouck Durand—collaged from photographic archives, personal letters and propaganda magazines—tells a true story that begins in Albania during World War II, stops in China during the Cold War, and ends in Israel as Communism crumbles. When the Nazis invaded Albania, young partisan Refik Veseli and his Muslim family hid Jewish photographer Mosha Mandil and his wife, while Mosha’s two small children posed as Refik’s siblings. Despite the dire circumstances, Mosha instilled in Refik a great passion for photography and a friendship was forged in the crucible of war.

After liberation, the Mandils left for Israel, inviting Refik to join them, but he stayed behind to contribute to his new nation, not knowing that he would never see his dear friend again. Artist-writer Durand begins the story decades later in 1970, when Refik, having risen in the ranks as a state photographer, is allowed to travel to China and attempts to mail Mosha a letter, free of the Albanian censors. In a deft construction of the fictional, personal and historical, Durand imagines Refik’s voice and inhabits private thoughts that seem haunted by the specter of surveillance. With nuance and restraint, she weaves his story of enduring friendship with Mosha into another in which the blunt alteration of history and extraordinary acts of censorship take place on a grand scale, as two ostracized regimes—China and Albania—attempt and ultimately fail to embrace. In Eternal Friendship, the obscured path is the most revelatory, images that seem to have one message have many, and photography—used at the behest of merciless state powers—becomes a tool for resistance, liberation and human connection.

Emerging from the Beat aesthetic of the early 1950s, the Kienholz oeuvre embraces the spontaneity of jazz, the intensity of Abstract Expressionism, and the homemade approach of do-it-yourself modernism. The Kienholzes probed the dark edges of postwar society, confronting war, racism, institutional indifference, sexuality, and cruelty. Published on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Kienholz: A Retrospective reproduces in more than four hundred illustrations, a selection of works ranging from intimate collages to life-size tableaux, created between 1954 and 1994. The eight texts in the catalogue - by art and social historians, artists, and friends - offer critical insights into the Kienholz work as well as personal reminiscences. Nancy Reddin Kienholz has also contributed an extended chronology, written especially for this publication. L.A. Louver, 1996 8.4 x 5.8 inches, 300 pp. color illustrations Softcover, ISBN 978-0874270990

This monograph celebrates the Waterfall paintings of Pat Steir (born 1940), begun in 1989. Steir pours a mixture of pigment, oil and turpentine down a vertical canvas and waits for it to coalesce between layers, resulting in stratified compositions and overlapping color. Includes a text by Raphael Rubinstein. Cheim & Read, 2014 13 x 10 inches, 64 pp., color illustrations Hardcover, ISBN 9780991468102

This catalog records a three-part survey show by the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, featuring leading and lesser-known figures of Abstract Expressionism.

Artist and writer Robert Seydel often used various personas and fictional constructs in a vast and multi-layered body of work that incorporated collage, drawing, photography, narrative and lyric writing. His primary alter ego Ruth Greisman made hundreds of exquisite collages, a selection of which Seydel collected in the artist’s book Book of Ruth (Siglio, 2011). As Ruth, Seydel explores the boundaries between the salvaged and the lost, the unknown and the unknowable, art that is made and art that is found. A Picture Is Always a Book is a first-person, fictional archive, collecting over seventy of Ruth’s “journal pages,” luminescent and startlingly original writings—typed up on paper purloined from old photo albums, adorned with drawings in colored pencils, oil pens, white-out and ink stamps—that penetrate Ruth’s consciousness with visceral honesty and poetic precision. With the acrobatics of her emblem the hare, Seydel’s Ruth makes leaps from the banalities of her daily life into an expansive, alchemical imagination that embraces the shape-shifting of meaning, the occult in letters, and the magical invocations of animals—domestic and hallucinatory. For Ruth, the creation of self is tenuous, the artistic impulse implacable, and the distance between the ecstatic and melancholic “infra-thin.” She writes, “I’ll invent who I am, against what is. My time and name: a Queens of the mind.”

A Picture Is Always a Book accompanies the exhibition “Robert Seydel: The Eye in Matter,” which will open at the Queens Museum of Art in July 2015 and the Center for Paper and Book Arts at Columbia College Chicago in 2016. The exhibition debuted at Smith College Neilson Library in Fall 2014.

"Burrowing into the pop-detritus archive somewhere between Ray Johnson’s mail art and Tom Phillips’s Humument project, Seydel’s Book of Ruth describes an allusive fantasy about his aunt and alter ego Ruth Greisman, her brother Saul, and their escapades with Joseph Cornell." —The New Yorker

Foreword by Veit Görner. Essays by Michael Wilson and Anne Prenzler. Mathew Marks Gallery, 2004 11.1 x 9.1 in, 96 pp. color illustrations Hardcover, ISBN 1880146436

“Ab Ovo” is a multi-media visual arts project organized by Steven Hull. Hull was inspired by his two children for “Ab Ovo” or “From the Egg,” and chose to use the children’s story as the goal and framework for the show. Nineteen visual artists were given the MMPI-2TM (Minnesota Multi Phasic Personality Inventory). The test, developed over 60 years ago, remains the most widely used measure of pathology by the U.S. legal system. Customized for child custody settings, the tests produced personality profiles which were anonymously and randomly assigned to nineteen writers. They were in turn asked to base children’s stories on them. The stories were then illustrated by a second group of 19 visual artists. The gallery installation featured the illustrations, an audio track of the writers reading their stories, and a picnic table designed by Dewey Ambrosino at which viewers could sit while they peruse the test results, which have been made anonymous. The tests, stories and illustrations are being published in this hardcover book “Catalogue Raisonne: Ab Ovo,” with a forward by Hull and an introduction by Susan Morgan. Published 2005.

Test Subjects: Julie Ault, Ellen Birrell, Derek Boshier, Candice Breitz, Inka Essenhigh, Charles Gaines, Steven Hull, Mike Kelley, Mary Kelly, Glenn Ligon, Simon Leung, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Jonathan Momk, Dario Robleto, Jim Shaw, Martha Rosler, Michael Smith, Georgina Starr, Bruce Yonemoto. Participants: Gail Pickering, Gail Swandlund, Ion Birch, Rachel Kushner, Marcos Rosales, Millie Wilson, Paul Noble, Trinie Dalton, Henry Taylor, Sean Dower, Soo Kim, Tony White, Isabell Heimerdinger, wayne Lindberg, Ivan Morley, Mady Schutzman, Kelly Barrie, Leslie Davis, Kaz Oshiro, Vincent Johnson, Lamar Peterson, Kimberly Nichols, Thomas Lawson, Stewert Lindh, Junko Shimizu, Jim Krusoe, Marnie Weber, Betty Nguyen, Paul P., Marina LaPalma, Hiroki Otsuka, Terri Phillips, Tanya Haden, Ben Ehrenreich, Scott Cassidy, Benjamin Weissman, Michael Mahalchick, Lynne Tillman.

In Liu Ye's Bamboo Bamboo Broadway, the artist continues to engage the history of modernism, while referencing the tradition of abstraction in historical Chinese painting.

Here, Liu Ye introduces new genres such as landscape and still-life painting to his oeuvre. The centerpiece of the show is a nine-part painting of abstracted and simplified details of a bamboo plant which spanned the gallery’s double-height wall.

Born in Beijing in 1964, Liu Ye came of age during the Cultural Revolution, a period between 1966 and 1976. His father was a children’s book author, and one afternoon, Liu Ye discovered a collection of Western literature hidden in a black chest beneath his parents’ bed. Although these books were banned at the time, Liu Ye nonetheless studied their illustrations intensely. As a young adult, the artist went on to study industrial design and mural painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts before moving to Germany to pursue an MFA at the Hochschule der Kunst in Berlin from 1990 to 1994. He later spent time in Amsterdam as an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie, where he first encountered works of art by Mondrian, Vermeer, Klee, and Dick Bruna. In 2007, the Kunstmuseum in Bern, Switzerland hosted a major solo exhibition of his work.

Constellation Congress documents a three-part exhibition of work by Koo Jeong A (b. 1967). For over twenty years, Koo Jeong A has been steadily and rigorously constructing a visual language of evocative riddles and playful environments that highlight the idiosyncrasies of the world around us. In the artist's work, nothing is ordinary; on the contrary, any object—be it a pile of charcoal, a piece of iron, or a puddle of water—is given dignity and reverence and incites the surprise of a first encounter.

Her presentation for Dia at The Hispanic Society will be the fourth in Dia’s multiyear series of projects by contemporary artists for the Society’s Beaux-Arts buildings, in Washington Heights. Occupying the Society’s East Building Gallery, Koo Jeong A’s installation will comprise new multimedia works that were commissioned by Dia. These will include architectural interventions loosely evoking feng shui principles and a dual-projection video installation. Additionally, Koo Jeong A created an olfactory artwork, Before the Rain (2010) in collaboration with perfumer Bruno Jovanovic, of International Flavors & Fragrances, Inc., that employed ingredients such as dry woods, minerals, fern, musk, tar, and lichens, among others. The publication includes a text by exhibition curator Yasmil Raymond and newly commissioned essays by art historian Molly Nesbit and Harvard University Professor of Astronomy Dimitar Sasselov, among others.

An Escape Towards Liberty by Thomas Lawson is a collaboration with artist Andrea Bowers and was published by Nothing Moments Press in the fall of 2007. This book is a collection of stories about exploration, imperialism and the false promises of adventure. A romance of voyage but not a lovely one. Thomas Lawson is an artist, writer, magazine editor, and Dean of the School of Art at California Institute for the Arts. He emerged as a central figure in ideological debates at the turn of the 1980s about the viability of painting through critical essays, such as Last Exit: Painting".

Home Home Money Grid uses seemingly identical imagery of a still life to allow us to see the differences in the photographic process as well as in the images themselves.

One of the most exciting and intuitive painters of his generation, channeling a uniquely American perspective on our current moment. Jules de Balincourt burst onto the art scene in the early 2000s and has been a critical and commercial success since then. What curators and critics saw in the work was a painterly language that was as singular as it was insightful—a faux-naif style to communicate highly developed and sophisticated ideas about the nature of government and communities, no doubt inspired by post 9/11 America as well as the artist’s very unconventional upbringing in quasi-hippy communes of Southern California in the late 1970s. In this most comprehensive book on the artist’s work accompanying a major mid-career retrospective, the entirety of the artist’s oeuvre is considered. Layered throughout the book are Balincourt’s many reference materials, everything from newspaper clippings to textiles from South America. In a comprehensive essay, Richard Flood addresses the various aspects of the artist's work.

From tribes to chains; from community to cargo; from farms to ships to plantations; from South to North; from slavery to freedom - the migration routes of black people from Africa to America form the subject of Betye Saar's series, Migrations/Transformations, exhibited by Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in 2006. In seventeen mixed media collages and assemblages, Saar narrates seventeen distinctive journeys. By layering carefully selected clues - a gold button, an African mask, a slave ship diagram, a weathered photograph, a pressed leaf, a tattered American flag - she constructs fictional biographies of nameless characters that represent the historical passages of millions. Haunted by memories of Africa or the trauma of the Middle Passage, Saar's journeys remind us that history is not simply the recording of past events - it is a living, breathing entity, filling the space of our present and shaping contemporary identities. Born in Los Angeles in 1926, Saar is known for voicing her political, racial, religious, and gender concerns in an effort to reach across the barriers of art and life, to bridge cultural diversities, and forge new understandings. This fully illustrated color catalogue with an artist statement and essays by Whitfield Lovell, Tracye Saar-Cavanaugh, Lowery Stokes Sims, and Sean Ulmer accompanied the exhibition

Kim Abeles' assemblage work engages history, memory, truth and the natural world. In this interview, Abeles discusses her wide-ranging interests, from primitive technologies to the Dead Sea Scrolls to Calamity Jane and memorabilia. Interviewed by Michael McMillen. A.R.T. Press, 1988 32 pp., illustrations ISBN 0-923183-01-9

The Archive Project honors and supports artists who have fought and those who continue to fight the battle against HIV/AIDS. As Nick Debs, ex-Executive Director of Visual AIDS, writes, ''We must document everything, including the kitchen sink. And we must remember the kitchen sink is beautiful.''

Improvisations - 1945 features a selection of thirty works on paper and paintings, all dating from 1945. A student of Neo-Plasticism, von Wiegand's work from this period demonstrates her experimentation with the technique of automatism as well as her awareness of and respect for the avant-garde abstractions of European modernists including Jean Arp, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, and Piet Mondrian.

Since 1992, the Dia Center for the Arts has presented the Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art, an example of Dia's ongoing commitment to cross-disciplinary critical discourse. This fourth volume of collected theoretical and critical essays focuses on Dia's exhibitions from 2001 through 2002, with contributions by Alexander Alberro, Jan Avgikos, Colin Gardner, Dave Hickey, Rosalind Krauss, Miwon Kwon, Ulrich Loock, Richard Shiff and Dirk Snauwaert. These writers analyze the work of artists such as Roni Horn, Alfred Jensen, Bruce Nauman, Max Neuhaus, Panamarenko, Jorge Pardo, Gerhard Richter, Bridget Riley, Diana Thater and Gilberto Zorio. Dia Center for the Arts, 2009 200 pp., illustrations Softcover, ISBN 9780944521793

This exhibition includes eleven new paintings depicting images of fighter pilots and airplanes, classic motifs in Malcolm Morley's oeuvre since the early 1990s. Morley portrays aerial combat in dynamic scenes of movement and action. Morley is acknowledged as one of the earliest innovators of “super-realism,” which developed as a counterpoint to Pop Art in the 1960s. Over the course of his career, Morley has defied stylistic characterization, moving by turns through so-called abstract, realist, neo-romantic, and neo-expressionist painterly modes, while being attentive to his own biographical experiences. This exhibition catalog includes an essay by Brooks Adams.

This group exhibition explores the various facets of abstraction produced from 1950 to 1965. Artists included are: Norman Bluhm, Jay DeFeo, Beauford Delaney, Burgoyne Diller, Fritz Glarner, Grace Hartigan, Eva Hesse, Lee Krasner, Norman Lewis, Boris Margo, Alfonso Ossorio, Anne Ryan, Charles Seliger, Alma Thomas, Mark Tobey, Esteban Vicente, and Charmion von Wiegand.

Joel Shapiro is an American sculptor known for his dynamic work composed of simple rectangular shapes. Craig F. Starr Gallery, 2013 9 x 7 inches, unpaginated, illustrations Softcover, No ISBN

Glenn Ligon is one of the most significant American artists of his generation. Much of his work relates to abstract expressionism and minimalist painting, remixing formal characteristics to highlight the cultural and social histories of the time, such as the civil rights movement. The exhibition brings together artworks and other material he references in his own work and writings, or work with which he shares certain affinities. This publication is both a comprehensive exhibition catalogue, which fully illustrating all works in the exhibition from artists including Chris Ofili, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Lorna Simpson, Felix Gonzalez- Torres and Jasper Johns, accompanied by newly commissioned texts by Glenn Ligon, Francesco Manacorda, Alex Farquharson, and Gregg Bordowitz; and an anthology of around 20 texts selected/excerpted by Glenn Ligon.

Fluxus is an international avant-garde collective or network of artists and composers founded in the 1960s. Established by the Lithuanian/American artist George Maciunas, Fluxus began as a small network of artists and composers, and was characterised as a shared attitude rather than a movement. Rooted in experimental music, it was named after a magazine which featured the work of musicians and artists centred around avant-garde composer John Cage.

Fluxus had no single unifying style. Artists used a range of media and processes adopting a ‘do-it-yourself’ attitude to creative activity, often staging random performances and using whatever materials were at hand to make art. Seeing themselves as an alternative to academic art and music, Fluxus was a democratic form of creativity open to anyone. Collaborations were encouraged between artists and across artforms, and also with the audience or spectator. It valued simplicity and anti-commercialism, with chance and accident playing a big part in the creation of works, and humour also being an important element.

This book compiles materials drawn from the Ellsworth Snyder Collection of Fluxus Multiples and Ephemera.

Carroll Dunham (b. 1949, New Haven, CT) has eschewed the conventions of abstract and figurative painting, establishing a trademark style and vast body of work that are both deeply original and enormously influential. His early works, painted on wood veneer, used the existing textures of the knotted grain to create elaborate compositions recalling both fantastic organic forms and the popular imagery of cartoons. Mining the unconscious and variously pursuing psychologically charged themes, these psychedelic depictions evolved over the years from primordial amoeba-like forms to quasi-figurative biomorphisms. A formalist by nature, Dunham’s paintings and drawings are studies in control—his line has become a protagonist in itself—nothing is accidental, whether executed in gentle pencil shading, audacious crayon scribble, or painterly ink and gouache.

Terry Allen (born May 7, 1943)[1] is an American Texas country and outlaw country singer-songwriter, painter and conceptual artist from Lubbock, Texas. This exhibition catalog documents his 1991 show at L.A. Louver.

Published to accompany Marden’s first exhibition in New York in five years, and his most significant since the Cold Mountain exhibition at the Dia Center for the Arts in 1991. Contains over 70 full-color plates of paintings, drawings, and etchings completed between 1997 and 2002. Mathew Marks Gallery, 2002 11.2 x 12.5 inches, 120 pp., color illustrations Hardcover, ISBN 978-1880146361

A photography book by Kathryn Kerr.

McDermott & McGough are contemporary artists known for their work in painting, photography, sculpture and film. They are known for using alternative historical processes in their photography, particularly the 19th century techniques of cyanotype, gum bichromate, platinum and palladium. Among the subjects they approach are popular art and culture, religion, medicine, advertising, and fashion. This catalog includes an essay by literature scholar Wayne Koestenbaum.

Initially a prominent member of the De Stijl group with Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, César Domela's approach evolved into three dimensional abstraction described as ''enriched Constructivism.'' His harmonious integration of materials forms a transcendent visual polyphony. Each individual material was chosen after extensive, almost obsessive, consideration of its physical properties of color, texture, opacity, sheen, and what musicians refer to as ''timbre,'' a specific resonance. RAM Publications, 2007 136 pp., illustrations Harcover, ISBN 393685968X

Active in Moscow since 1976, the Collective Actions group played a key role in the development of performance art in the Soviet Union. Inspired by the work of John Cage, the organizers invited audiences to take part in minimal, outdoor actions in fields and forests on the edges of the city. These spatio-temporal events directed viewers' attention to the pure contemplation of their own perceptions, and over time, the actions produced a great variety of documentary material. Collective Actions: Audience Recollections from the First Five Years 1976-1981 concentrates on the early period of field actions when the problems of documentation—how to capture and convey ephemeral action to non-participants—were just beginning to be considered. Soberscove Press, 2012 8 x 8 inches, 116 pp., color illustrations Softcover, ISBN 978-0982409053

Everything has a purpose that helps to define its shape: form follows function.'' – Andrew Spence

In this interview with Colin Thomson, abstract painter Andrew Spence discusses his artistic development and his experiences living in New York, Los Angeles, and Oklahoma. The interview is profusely illustrated with reproductions of Spence's work, and some of the architecture and industrial designs that directly inform it. The publication includes an essay by Richard Armstrong.

American Folk Art Museum, 1999 9.2 x 11 inches, 239 pp., color illustrations Hardcover, ISBN 978-0912161075

One is born with talent or with genius, but one makes himself an artist. Nothing is more difficult than this process of becoming an artist. For no matter how profound the instincts of the young artist, society and American folk ways are a strong befuddling drink: the creative road is strewn with wrecks, a veritable junk yard of old rusted bodies. – Clifford Odets, 1940 Known as a legendary cultural figure for his significant contributions to the American theater, Odets produced a remarkable body of paintings on paper from 1945 to 1956. Inspired by modern masters like Picasso, Matisse, Magritte and Klee – artists whom he admired and collected – Odets created magical scenes on sheets of writing paper. Odets worked at night while suffering from insomnia and writer’s block, and his paintings reveal his complex psyche. The exhibition is titled after Odets’ successful 1936 play, Paradise Lost, and his painting of the same name, which is the only visual work he created that shares a title with one of his dramatic works. The exhibition will include approximately forty paintings on paper that are colorful, anecdotal, disturbing, sexually charged, and humorous. His portraits expose a “punitive parent,” a “low comic,” and “the hermit” while fantasy landscapes capture both urban and rural America.

The founder of the Acadia Summer Arts Program, Marion Boulton Stroud, asked Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour to design and construct houses and other structures for the camp. The architects took as inspiration Maine's indigenous architecture, such as shingle houses and lobster shacks.

Judith Barry's Voice Off was awarded Best Pavillion at the 8th Cairo Biennale in 2001. Curated by Gary Sangster, director of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, the show staged how sound might be visualized. One side of the work was the women's side, with video images surrounded by sound; the other side was the men's side, which showed images of men listening. This catalog with its extensive essay by Sangster presents images from Voice Off as well as from Barry's many other video installations from the 1980s and 1990s. An interview between Barry and architect and designer Ken Saylor rounds out the catalog.

In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan devised the slogan “the medium is the message” as a way of acknowledging the distinct powers of different technologies. Today, McLuhan’s metaphor has become literal; the constant massage of the media has brought forth a desire for actual touch. The artists highlighted in Massage turn to various interfaces both digital and manual as a way of figuring the relationship between the various manners in which the body is inflected today.

In the first publication from Printed Matter's Publishing Program for Emerging Artists, Erin Cosgrove takes the romance novel for a ride through revolutionary terrain to produce a tempestuous tale of terrorism and true love. In the cloistered environment of an exclusive East Coast college, the young and the restless fall in love while romancing the ghosts of the Baader-Meinhof gang active in 1970s Germany. It’s a hilarious send up of the romance genre complete with earnest interjections from the author who supplies historical cliff notes and commentary for the confused. A page-turning tour de force of the dangerous passions and politics of the privileged.

This catalogue features recent pen, ink, and graphite drawings by Martin Wilner, the artist’s second solo show at the gallery. In his now decade-long body of work, Making History, Wilner creates highly-detailed diaristic drawings based on the monthly calendar. On the verso of each drawing are descriptive texts or images that are integral to the work. Wilner blends elements of cartoon, cartography, text, micrography, and music in an evolving process that transforms news events of compelling personal interest into drawing. Each work coalesces into its own mysterious narrative of the artist’s daily life.

Making History consists of a suite of 12 double-sided drawings focused on the visual dimension of music in concert with text, cartography and representational drawing. The drawings proceed through a series of single step variations from one month to the next. Using media sources selected daily, Wilner developed systems of encoding narrative into musical scores. The results are visual nocturnes based on everyday events that transcend their mundane and often troubling sources in the pursuit of something more lyrical.

This is the seventh annual exhibition in an ongoing series which explores and celebrates the vast accomplishments of twentieth-century African-American artists. African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, VI presents rare museum caliber works, many recently discovered and never before exhibited. Historically, in the United States, African-American artists have encountered a society which relegated them to its periphery, but the tide has begun to change. In recent years, there has been a remarkable surge of exhibitions, publications, and articles which have dramatically increased exposure and with this exposure has come the possibility for long overdue recognition. Presenting more than forty historic works by more than thirty artists, this exhibition aspires to continue the trend toward increasing education, awareness, and much-deserved appreciation. Artists included in this exhibition: Charles Alston, Benny Andrews, William Artis, Romare Bearden, John Biggers, Eldzier Cortor, Ernest Crichlow, Beauford Delaney, Joseph Delaney, William H. Johnson, Lois Mailou Jones, Jacob Lawrence, Hughie Lee-Smith, Norman Lewis, Archibald J. Motley, Jr., Marion Perkins, Horace Pippin, Betye Saar, Augusta Savage, Charles Sebree, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Alma Thomas, Bob Thompson, Bill Traylor, James VanDerZee, Laura Wheeler Waring, Charles White, and Hale Woodruff. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 2002 Softcover, 64 pgs No ISBN

The focus of Leave Me in the Dark is a singular young woman, depicted either reading or embarking on a journey. As in Banned Book 2 (2008), Reading Girl (2008) and Ballet Lesson (2009), she is centrally placed against a saturated and mostly monochromatic background comprised of shades of grey, slate blue and black. Covered with layers of sheer glazes, these compositions have a contemplative and somewhat solemn tone. Although clearly figurative, the outline of the protagonist’s body and the features of her face have been optimally simplified. Furthermore, in works like Miss (2008) and Leave me in the Dark (2008), her body is concealed behind a sharply outlined trench coat, skirt, blouse or pair of pants. Positioned next to a square suitcase, rectangular book, or set of wooden toys, the composition is reduced to blocks of color, and geometric abstraction is achieved. Liu Ye suggests a somewhat narrative composition, but he also generates a nearly abstract arrangement that defies simplistic interpretation.

Catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Not Vital: 十 五, presented at Sperone Westwater, New York, 3 March - 31 March 2013. Features essay by Gian Enzo Sperone.

Not Vital features new stainless steel sculptures, HEADS, and a series of related drawings. Vital developed this striking sculptural series in his studio in the art district of Caochangdi, Beijing. These seven HEADS, all of a monochromatic palette, ranging from 4.5 to 6.2 feet in height, are pared down to simple contours. Only two of the works, HEAD Self-Portrait (2013) and HEAD Everton (2014), depict specific sitters. The flawlessly smooth, metallic finish, created using cutting-edge technology, establishes an austere and commanding presence. Seemingly both human and machine-like, the sculptures occupy an uneasy middle ground, on occasion ambiguous and disconcerting. These sculptures suggest Vital’s fascination with the fast-paced, highly productive, and raw nature of industrial China today. The abstracted and simplified shapes, however, also recall the earliest forms of sculptural representation, such as the iconic carved Moai statues of Easter Island and the ancient sculptural forms of Asian religious art. Not Vital (b. 1948, Sent, Engadin, Switzerland) studied in Paris and Rome before moving to New York in 1974.

Vital currently divides his time between Brazil, Chile, China, Niger and Switzerland. The artist’s work was featured in “Plateau of Humanity” at the 49th Venice Biennale, Italy (2001). Vital's major exhibitions have taken place at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany (2005); The Arts Club of Chicago, Illinois, (2006); KÖR Kunsthalle Wien public space Karlsplatz, Vienna, Austria (2009-2010); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2011); the Cabinet d’Arts Graphiques, Musées d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, Switzerland (2014); and the Museo d’arte di Mendrisio, Mendrisio, Switzerland (2014-2015). In 2013, 700 Snowballs, an installation of 700 individual glass balls, was on view on the Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, Italy. In autumn 2014, Vital’s Tongue will be featured in the Busan Biennale 2014, South Korea. Vital had his first solo show at Sperone Westwater in 1995, and “EVERTON” will be his seventh solo show at the gallery.

A catalog produced for the 2008 exhibition Animals by Tom Sachs. In ANIMALS, Sachs continues to explore his signature appropriation of popular consumer objects, iconography, and signage. Logos, such as Spyderco, Bösendorfer, and Raytheon, along with images of the U.S. dollar bill, are boldly inserted into his paintings and sculptures. In Assaulting (2007), a punitive warning is transformed into a formal composition. Also on view are a number of white foamcore 'paintings' reconstituted from smashed models of the popular animated characters Hello Kitty, Miffy, and My Melody. In discussing his work ethic with critic, Germano Celant, Sachs says: '…I often build things in the 'wrong' way. […] There is an honesty and a soulfulness to doing it yourself.' Design by Tom Sachs with glossary by Mark van de Walle. Sperone Westwater, 2008

A full-color catalog for the second exhibition of recent paintings and drawings by Copenhagen-based artist Tal R at Cheim & Read. Includes a story by Gary Indiana. Cheim & Read, 2014 94 pp., color illustrations Softcover, ISBN 9780991468157

In 1989, A.R.T. Press began documenting the social world of contemporary art by asking artists to interview one another.

Between Artists presents twelve lively pairings, including Kim Abeles interviewed by Michael McMillen, Vija Celmins interviewed by Chuck Close, Jimmy DeSana interviewed by Laurie Simmons, Judy Fiskin interviewed by John Divola, Felix Gonzalez-Torres interviewed by Tim Rollins, Mike Kelley interviewed by John Miller, Allan McCollum interviewed by Thomas Lawson, Anne Scott Plummer interviewed by Viola Frey, David Reed interviewed by Stephen Ellis, Laurie Simmons interviewed by Sarah Charlesworth, Pat Sparkuhl interviewed by Kim Abeles, and Andrew Spence interviewed by Colin Thomson. The publication offers rare insight into the issues that inform the work of contemporary artists in their own words.

A fictional archive of altered photos, letters, collages and drawings, Frail Sister is a rescued history of a missing woman’s life. As a child, Constance Gale is put to work with her sister, performing as musical prodigies during the Great Depression. As a teenager, she escapes the confines of her impoverished life by joining the U.S.O. and touring a ravaged Italy during World War II. Men—some kind, some nefarious, some an ineluctable cocktail—write to Constance, smitten by her stage persona. Letters to and from Constance expose not only the quotidian reality of war but also the ubiquitous brutality it throws into relief. After the war, she returns to an unsparing life in New York City in which the violence persists and her ghosts multiply.

Artist and writer Karen Green’s second book originated in her search for a woman who had vanished: her Aunt Constance whom Green knew only from a few family photos and keepsakes. Finding almost no trace of her aunt, Green instead invents, appropriates and alters artifacts. Then she constructs an elliptical, arresting arrangement of these fragments to pursue a new inquiry: what becomes of a woman whose talent, ambition, and appetite defy what the world expects of her? How does she disappear? In this exquisitely woven, epistolary and visual fiction, Green imagines for her aunt a childhood in which she is bold, reckless, perspicacious, mischievous; an adolescence ripe with desire and scarred by violation and loss; and an adulthood in which she strives to sing above the din. Nimble, unnerving and darkly funny, Frail Sister examines the thin membrane between resiliency and fragility, the love of family and its betrayals, bringing a forgotten life into focus.

Karen Green is an artist and writer whose inventive, hybrid image-text works narrate the intimate spaces of human experience. Her first book Bough Down earned numerous accolades and a devoted readership. She lives in Northern California and New York City.

Pat Passlof: Paintings from the 1950s charts the earliest years of Passlof’s career from her studies with Willem de Kooning to her first exhibitions at the historic, artist-run March Gallery on Tenth Street. Passlof’s paintings from this period tell the story of a talented, audacious painter coming of age during a legendary decade of New York painting.

Elizabeth Harris Gallery, 2014
Softcover, 74pp.,
10 x 8 1/2 in.

Allan McCollum reviews his work from the 1970’s to the present and discusses his ongoing obsession with the question of what makes an object an “art object.” McCollum is best known for his multiples, which by sheer power of replication force us to rethink notions of identity and uniqueness. The artist is interviewed by Thomas Lawson. McCollum: “We live in a world filled with substitutions for things that are absent, since every copy, in a certain sense, only exists because the original is gone. So copies are always about something absent, and in that way, they carry a sense of mourning, death, or loss.”

Through her tiny, eccentric photographs, Judy Fiskin examines cultural artifacts and oddities: assorted pieces of furniture, highly aestheticized flower arrangements and stark examples of military architecture. Interviewed by John Divola. A.R.T. Press, 1988 40 pp., illustrations ISBN 0-923183-00-0

This artist's book, with color illustrations and accompanying text by associate curator Annetta Massie, is the first publication focused on this intriguing artist. Krisanamis, a Thai artist who has lived in the United States since 1991, taught himself English by reading the newspaper and marking out all the words he knew. This created a patterned page that became the substructure for his painting and collage combinations. In later works, traditional art materials share pictorial space with tactile ready-mades including cast-off papers, tea, and noodles on blankets, sheets, towels, and other unexpected backings.

Giulio Turcato: Blu Oltre features text by Giorgio Franchetti and 17 full color images of paintings dating from 1981-1989.

Giulio Turcato’s (1912-1995) paintings from the 1980s and early 1990s continuously sought an "other" dimension, painting "the colours that cannot be seen but that can be felt when placed together even in extreme terms, invented colours because they are roaming in the terrestrial aura and even beyond." In line with his research he developed his last series of the Cangianti. These pieces were part of the artist’s experiments with phosphorescent pigments that made his paintings visible in the dark.

Bilingual Italian / English Edition.

For his realistic sculptures, Viale uses marble to recontextualize banal objects, such as crates and tires, and to reinterpret art historical icons. Viale works alone, using machinery to roughly carve blocks of marble, and finishing the sculpture by hand. Includes an artist's interview with Alessandra Galasso.

Uslé’s abstractions are evocative of the colors, light and space of his Northern Spanish homeland, and the density, energy and unpredictability of New York City. This exhibition catalogue includes an essay by Octavio Paz.

Juan Uslé is widely recognized for vivid paintings and works on paper that engage the viewer with entrancing rhythmic patterns. These patterns are composed of systematic brushstrokes that exist in a dual state: embracing repetition while practicing singularity. Sourcing inspiration from memories both lived and dreamt, these patterns can be evocative of the vibrations in bustling New York City; echo the fluidity of bodies of water; or serve as a transcript of real time through a filmstrip-like recording of the artist’s own heartbeat. In over forty years, Uslé has approached his medium, which includes painting and photography, through representational and abstract lenses. In more recent years, the use of light to generate emotion rather than volume has been a central focus for the artist.