The Lost Generation | La generación perdida accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College. The modern artistic ceramic movement in Cuba, almost exclusively comprised of women artists (including Amelia Peláez, Mirta García Buch, and María Elena Jubrías), emerged toward the end of the 1940s and continued into…
While shopping in the used-book store the Monkey s Paw in Toronto, Leanne Shapton happened upon a 1956 edition of the stalwart reference book The Native Trees of Canada, originally published in 1917 by the Canadian Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources. Most people might simply view the book as a dry cataloging of a…
Brooklyn-born Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) was one of the most important artists of the 1980s. A key figure in the New York art scene, he inventively explored the interplay between words and images throughout his career, first as a member of SAMO, a graffiti group active on the Lower East Side in the late 1970s, and…
Toshiko Takaezu (1922–2011) was an American artist whose multidisciplinary work in ceramics, painting, sculpture, weaving, and installation innovatively drew from the natural world, combining expressionist energies with influences from East Asia. The closed ceramic forms for which she is best known are effectively abstract paintings in the round. Her reputation as a ceramic artist, however,…
Dame Tracey Emin DBE is known for her frank, confessional style and for transforming her inner world into intimate works of art. She has become one of the most celebrated artists in the world, a household name, and part of the Art establishment. Her practice includes painting, drawing, film, photography, sewn appliqué, sculpture, and neon,…
Los Angeles–based contemporary artist Uta Barth (b. 1958) has spent her decades-long career exploring the complexities and limits of human and mechanical vision. At first, her photographs appear to be deceptively simple depictions of everyday objects—light filtering through a window, tree branches bereft of leaves, a sparsely appointed domestic interior—but these images, visually spare yet…
In groundbreaking controversial works such as Touch and Tap Cinema and Action Pants: Genital Panic, Valie Export was one of the first feminist artists to reconsider the ways in which the female body is depicted in conventional film and media.This volume considers how Export’s photography plays into these projects, as a means of documentation, as…
Collage is an artistic language comprising found images, fragmentary forms, and unexpected juxtapositions. While it first gained status as high art in the early twentieth century, the past decade has seen a fresh explosion of artists using this dynamic and experimental approach to image making. Organised in an A-Z sequence by artist, the book features…
The first monograph on the work of celebrated and influential Kenyan-American artist Wangechi MutuWangechi Mutu s remarkable body of work touches on such issues as sexuality, ecology, politics, and the rhythms and chaos that govern the world. Her paintings, sculptures, and collages, often enriched with culturally-charged materials including tea, synthetic hair, Kenyan soil, feathers, and…
Wangechi Mutu takes viewers on journeys of material, psychological and sociopolitical transformation; this volume explores her most recent groundbreaking work. Over the past two decades, Mutu has created chimerical constellations of powerful female characters, hybrid beings and fantastical landscapes. With a rare understanding of the need for powerful new mythologies beyond simple binaries and stereotypes,…
One of the most influential artists of his time and ours, Andy Warhol is nearly as renowned for what he said as for what he did. Indeed, he is so quotable that things he never said are endlessly and plausibly attributed to him, including, fittingly, the most celebrated fake Warhol saying―“In the future, everyone will…
Wendy Red Star (born 1981) made her first big move off the Crow reservation to attend Montana State University in Bozeman. During one of her study sessions she discovered an image of Medicine Crow, an Apsáalooke chief, in a random book in the university library. Enamored by his image, she made a xerox copy and…
William Kentridge (born 1955) has been creating poignant, clever and visually arresting works across a variety of mediums for more than five decades. This book focuses on his long-standing relationships with printmaking and poster design. Over the past three years, South African scholar Warren Siebrits began compiling a five-volume catalogue raisonné of Kentridge’s prints and…
Helen Rosenau (1900–1984) was part of the influential migration of European Jewish intellectuals who fled to Britain and the United States during the 1930s, bringing with them exciting innovations in art history’s methods. Only Rosenau, however, centred gender in her analysis. The result—her book Woman in Art: From Type to Personality—is a feminist art-historical project, as…
In the sculptures of Berkeley-based artist Woody De Othello (born 1991), everyday domestic artifacts–tables, chairs, television remotes, telephone receivers, lamps, air purifiers–are anthropomorphized in glazed ceramic, bronze, wood and glass. Othello s scaled-up representations of these objects often slump over, overcome with gravity, as if exhausted by their own use. Informed by his own Haitian…
From Bartana’s early video vignettes to her most recent project What if Women Ruled the World? (2017), by way of her monumental trilogy And Europe Will Be Stunned (2007–11) with which she represented Poland at the 54th Venice Biennale, the book highlights the artist’s fascination with the ways that social rituals shape both individual identities and collective memory. Bartana’s…