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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Double Life documents and brings to life works by the internationally celebrated artists Jérôme Bel, Wu Tsang and Haegue Yang. It explores possibilities for performance without living bodies.

Exhibited works include an immersive light and sculpture installation, a 16mm film loop, live and recorded dance presentations, and a newly commissioned video installation. The works in Double Life blur the boundaries between staged narratives and real-world encounters, and transform quotidian materials and situations into memorable experiences. They reference a range of temporalities and operate in spaces between the visual and performing arts, fiction and documentary, encounter and record, feeling and representation. Here, bodies traverse boundaries, and through their actions the physical and sociopolitical capacities of the term movement are offered for consideration. Similarly, as essayist Litia Perta writes, these works urge us to consider ways in which objects might also be responding.

Both Ends Burning documents an exhibition of new work by Amy Bessone, Thomas Houseago, Matthew Monahan and Lara Schnitger. Bessone, Houseago, Monahan and Schnitger are dedicated to exploring and challenging notions of the figure. Finding a lack of rigor in current trends regarding figuration they look to face their practices without ironic distractions. Together they have decided to take a no-holds-barred approach to their work and find territories not before explored. Each artist confronts figuration from different angles and with various techniques. In this exhibition they continue this dialogue and the intertwining narratives between their work. Thomas Houseago, Matthew Monahan and Lara Schnitger will each be presenting new sculpture and Amy Bessone will show new paintings. Includes an interview with Amy Bessone, Thomas Houseago, Matthew Monahan, Lara Schnitger, and David Kordansky.

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

The understated design of this book allows the quiet elegance of Wes Mills’ drawings to captivate viewers. High quality reproductions of forty-eight drawings made between 1994 and 2003 float in the center of muted white pages. The titles and dates of each piece, printed in a warm transparent gray, manage to both pick up some of the delicate tonalities in the drawings and to disappear altogether. A complete index of the drawings is included at the back and essays by Hipólito Rafael Chacón and Ann Wilson Lloyd discuss the work’s aesthetic and art historical significance. Mills’ marks require a fine sustained attention, the kind of attention that this exquisitely made monograph can’t help but cultivate in a reader.

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

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.

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

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.

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

At the beginning of the 1970s, after applying looping lines in acrylic on shaped supports made of Styrofoam, DiDonna began working with a vocabulary of dots and dashes on monochromatic grounds. Initially, he worked in oil on canvas, but soon switched to acrylic before turning to oil on linen in the mid-70s. Although a number of critics have seen the influence of Agnes Martin, Brice Marden and Larry Poons on DiDonna's paintings from this period, he repurposes them in ways that clearly establish that he has defined a significantly different path for himself. Meticulous, meandering and devotional, the dots coalesce into an image even as they separate into distinct abstract marks.

Chase-Riboud was born in Philadelphia and trained in art and architecture at Tyler School of Art at Temple University, the American Academy in Rome, and Yale University. After receiving her M.F.A. from Yale, she moved to Paris, where she quickly garnered attention for her abstract, surrealist figural sculptures and drawings. In 1969 Chase-Riboud began her groundbreaking series of Malcolm X sculptures, in which she combines undulating cast bronze forms with knotted and braided fiber elements. The imposing sculptures, named in memory of the assassinated civil rights leader, set material and thematic opposites into dynamic interaction—bronze and silk; fixed and flowing; hard and soft; brash and hushed; monumental and intimate.

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.

The October Cycle, California painter Enrique Martínez Celaya's most recent work, unapologetically challenges the postmodern denial of meaning. Proactive and strong, Celaya's paintings affirm life and the individual self, rather than deconstructing them. Published in conjunction with Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery/University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where Celaya's traveling exhibition appeared from Nov 21 2003–Jan 26 2004.

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.

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.

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.

Pat Passlof was a student at Black Mountain College during the Summer Institute of 1948, when she studied closely with Willem de Kooning, Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, M.C. Richards and Merce Cunningham. Passlof’s time at BMC was central to her development as an artist. After BMC, she continued her studies with de Kooning as his private student in New York City. In some circles, Pat is known first for her role as the wife of painter Milton Resnick, an association which has, to some degree, eclipsed her own prolific career as a painter. However, before the beginning of her relationship with Resnick, Passlof’s influence on the New York School was strong. She was a driving force behind the cooperative exhibitions of the Tenth Street galleries, organizing collective outreach efforts and galvanizing collaboration. Passlof left her mark as a practicing painter, teacher and writer–a path that she continues to forge today. “Selections 1948-201” will honor Passlof’s lifelong commitment to painting and provide much-needed recognition of her work as a teacher and writer about art.
Black Mountain College Museum, 2012
Softcover, 58 pp.,
11 x 8 3/8 in.
ISBN: 0977413850

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.

Kara Walker is among the most complex and prolific American artists of her generation. Over the past decade, she has gained international recognition for her room-sized tableaux, which depict historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence and subjugation and are made using the paradoxically genteel eighteenth-century art of cut-paper silhouettes. Set in the antebellum American South, Walker's compositions play off of stereotypes to portray, often grotesquely, life on the plantation, where masters, mistresses and slave men, women and children enact a subverted version of the past in an attempt to reconfigure their status and representation. Over the years, the artist has used drawing, painting, colored-light projections, writing, shadow puppetry, and, most recently, film animation to narrate her tales of romance, sadism, oppression and liberation. Her scenarios thwart conventional readings of a cohesive national history and expose the collective, and ongoing, psychological injury caused by the tragic legacy of slavery. Deploying an acidic sense of humor, Walker examines the dialectics of pleasure and danger, guilt and fulfillment, desire and fear, race and class. This landmark publication accompanies Walker's first major American museum survey. It features critical essays by Philippe Vergne, Sander L. Gilman, Thomas McEvilley, Robert Storr and Kevin Young, as well as an illustrated lexicon of recurring themes and motifs in the artist's most influential installations by Yasmil Raymond, more than 200 full-color images, an extensive exhibition history and bibliography, and a 36-page insert by the artist.

Walker Art Center, 2007
Hardcover, 432 pp.,
6.5 x 9.5 in.
isbn: 9780935640861

A photography book by Kathryn Kerr.

Ed Ruscha: Industrial Strength is published on the occasion of the artist's completion of Industrial Strength Sleep, a 23-foot by 9-foot tapestry created at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia and based on his 1989 painting of the same name.

In his introductory essay, curator Paul Schimmel explains the artist's process: Though Ruscha has consistently pushed the boundaries of his own iconography, which typically comprises concrete words and phrases, it is in fact his range of materials and processes that has characterized the ever-changing and restless nature of his practice.

The piece--which took three years to complete--was produced at Flanders Tapestries in Wielsbeke, Belgium; Mary Anne Friel, Master Printer at The Fabric Workshop, oversaw production. The publication also includes an essay by art historian and critic Thomas E. Crow.

Over the course of his nearly 40-year career, Ruscha, who was the United States representative at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, has consistently used the expansive landscape of Los Angeles--where he has lived and worked since the late 1950s--in his paintings as a backdrop for the often humorous vernacular phrases with which he communicates a particular urban experience.

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.

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.

Catalogue published 2009 by Sperone Westwater for an exhibition by the contemporary sculptor Evan Penny. Essay by Kenneth E. Silver.

Jason Hanasik’s project, I slowly watched him disappear, is the first part of a three part examination of the military body/masculinity. This first part focuses on the fantasy of the military body/masculinity seen through the eyes of Sharrod, a NJROTC recruit attending a high school in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia. Shot over the course of four years, Hanasik’s project examines the concerns of Sharrod as he navigates his freshman to senior year under the watchful (and sculpting) eye of the military machine. Jason Hanasik has an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BFA Summa Cum Laude from the State University of New York at Purchase. Hanasik’s work has been shortlisted for the Aperture Portfolio Prize and the Smithsonian’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Prize. He was one of the 2011 Magenta Foundation US Winners and he has exhibited his work widely across the United States. +KGP, 2015 Softcover, 10.0 x 8.5 in ISBN: 9780988418332

Johannes Kahrs was born 1965 in Bremen, Germany. He lives and works in Berlin. Kahrs takes a photo, a video projection or a film still as the starting point of his drawings and oil paintings. He catches fragments of images of politics, show biz, and advertising to reform, re-interpret, and further fictionalize the represented idea by shifting tones and gradations of grey and black pastel, leaving contours blurred. As he experiments with the original from of the image, he detaches the picture from its original meaning. Hence, he finishes with an almost unrecognisable representation and completely new recording of reality. Luhring Augustine, 2012 Illustrated Softcover, ISBN 978-3-907638-21-7

Sydney and Flora features Geoffrey Biddle's photographs of his aunt and uncle, Flora and Sydney Biddle, on the occasion of his uncle's 80th Birthday. The startling color images, in which he superimposes photographs of his uncle with photographs of his aunt, explore love, aging, life and death, the complexities of family ties, and the power of the family unit. Indeed, as Biddle explains, ''photographing my family–'figuring out my family'–was the first thing that interested me about taking pictures, and it has been the consistent thread through my career.'' The publication includes essays by Susanna Moore and Geoffrey Biddle. Tuttle Point Press, 2009 10 x 10 inches, 106 pp., color illustrations Hardcover, ISBN 978-1-933527-30-7

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.

Comprised of entirely Googled images of Abraham Lincoln, the book shows our sixteenth president sequentially turning his famous profile from right to left. Harrison’s hefty collection of images encapsulates the obscurities of our digital age, a parade of absurd representations attesting to the over-commodification of American history. Among the more traditional portrait-style depictions of Lincoln, are peculiar appropriations– a Lincoln toe ring, a Lincoln cake, a Lincoln egg, a Lincoln coffee mug, a Lincoln emoticon, a Lincoln pillow, a Lincoln hulk. It begs the question, what prompts us to venerate our cultural heroes in such ways? Transposing the image of a socio-political icon into kitsch formats, assimilating his recognizable physiognomy into sarcastic patriotic gestures. The images are all presented as they were found online, their formats untampered with and recontextualized in print.

Together with fellow German artist Otto Piene, Mack co-founded the ZERO group in 1957, which sought a renewal in art amidst the ruins of post-war Germany. Created in the formative years of ZERO, Mack’s metal reliefs were made in his first studio in Düsseldorf at 69 Gladbacher Straße, which served as both an experimental laboratory for art and was the site of ZERO’s first exhibitions – “Abendausstellungen,” or “Evening Exhibitions” – that lasted the duration of one night.

Mack’s metal reliefs are characterized by their shimmering industrial surfaces, made from aluminum, Plexiglas, wood, glass and stainless steel: all materials that were radically unfamiliar for sculpture at the time. His aim was to abandon the traditional idea of pictorial space and focus instead on an overall surface play of light, reflection and vibration, in the process creating immaterial effects from material form.

In 1914, Marcel Duchamp purchased a bottle rack, called it a sculpture, put his name to it, and the readymade artwork was born. It Is What It Is. Or Is It? considers the legacy of the readymade in contemporary artistic practice as the form approaches its 100th anniversary, and attempts to recuperate the radicality of Duchamp's foundational gesture. Taking stock of the readymade's simple materiality and its economy of means, this catalogue includes work by 18 artists working in a variety of media from sculpture to photography, painting, video and installation-based works. It Is What It Is. Or Is It? includes works by Ellen Altfest, Fayçal Baghriche, Bill Bollinger, William Cordova, Latifa Echakhch, Daphne Fitzpatrick, Claire Fontaine, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rachel Hecker, Jamie Isenstein, Luis Jacob, Patrick Killoran, Jirí Kovanda, Klara Lidén, Catherine Murphy and Pratchaya Phinthong. Contemporary Art Museum Houston, 2012 8 x 10 inches, 136 pp., color illustrations Softcover, ISBN 9781933619378

Robert Whitman (born 1935 in New York City) is an American artist best known for his seminal theater pieces of the early 1960s combining visual and sound images, actors, film, slides, and evocative props in environments of his own making.

Due to the unusual ephemeral nature of most of Whitman's oeuvre, relatively little of it is easily accessible to us today. Playback has therefore involved the artist extensively in restoring and reconstructing works. The exhibition and the book are the product of a six-year effort, some of it nearly archaeological, to rehabilitate aged film and outdated equipment into an exhibitable form as the artist intended it. This book comes with a DVD including The American Moon, Flower, Prune Flat, and an interview with the artist as well as commentary on the films.

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.

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

In the film and photographic series Pine Flat constructed over a three year period, Sharon Lockhart addresses the experience of an American childhood, using the stunning landscape of America's Sierra Nevada Mountains to bring home the close relationships of children with their natural surroundings. Lockhart began by constructing a portrait studio in a small rural community, and extending an open invitation to local children, and then by immersing herself in their environment and noting the complexity of their interactions. Her highly descriptive, almost painterly portraits, taken over the course of several years, abjure narration for the pleasure of the gaze and the notion of temporality. The studio remains a constant, its black backdrop, cement floor and natural lighting; a theatrical setting that allows the children to develop a different kind of relationship to the camera. Those stills stand in stark contrast to the pictorialism of a series showing the community's majestic natural surroundings, and to the portraits on 16mm film that accompany them, which are both literally and figuratively moving. Charta, 2006 Hardcover, 148 pp. 9.5 x 11.5 in. ISBN: 9788881586035 Donated by: Blum & Poe

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

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.

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

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

What makes something a work of art? This was the question that philosopher Arthur C. Danto (1924–2013) asked himself after seeing Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box at a 1964 exhibition at the Stable Gallery in New York City. The philosophy of art was not Danto’s primary area of inquiry at the time, but Warhol’s work prompted him to return to this question over several decades. Danto, professor of philosophy at Columbia University since the 1960s and art critic at The Nation from 1984 to 2009, delivered the previously unpublished lectures presented in this volume at the Acadia Summer Arts Program in Mount Desert Island, Maine, from 1997 through 2009. They explicate the ideas that he set forth in professional philosophical papers and books, including The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), which describes his philosophy of art. Informal yet deeply thought-provoking, these lectures explore how Danto analyzed art through a philosophical lens, yielding an approach that differs from most other contemporary art criticism. Danto’s thoughts on art go beyond formal analysis and taste judgments, instead focusing on questions about the nature of art and attempting to define what a work of art is. These lectures present some of his most notable ideas in terms that those with no training in philosophy can readily understand.

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

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.

This catalog documents new installations by Stan Douglas and Douglas Gordon in an exhibition titled ''Double Vision.''

Stan Douglas' Win, Place, or Show takes as its point of departure the fundamental transformation of civic space in North America during the postwar era, initiated at an institutional level under the rubric of urban renewal. Two dock workers share a tenth-floor, one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver. The endlessly looping, six-minute work chronicles an antagonistic conversation that flares up on a wet day-off. After erupting into physical violence, it then lapses into weary irritation, only to be rekindled into a smouldering verbal friction. ''But the work is less concerned with the narration of the event than with the space of its unfolding, Douglas argues, ''like the obsessive remembrance and reconsideration of a traumatic incident in one's life that cannot be resolved because its true cause was elsewhere, and remains unavailable to the space of memory.''

While Stan Douglas uses time in the guise of history and historical memory, Douglas Gordon often shifts and manipulates time scales, starting with found material, such as a feature-length film. Gordon's new work, ''left is right and right is wrong and left is wrong and right is right,'' takes as its point of departure a little-known film made in 1949 by Hollywood director Otto Preminger titled ''Whirlpool.'' Psychic disorder, the core theme of this narrative, is a subject of central importance in Gordon's art for it provides the occasion, in works based sometimes in fact, sometimes in fiction, for a study of fundamental existential dilemmas; between good and evil, freedom and necessity, or existence and nonexistence. By means of such disarmingly simple means he gives incisive, aphoristic form to psychological trauma, moral predicament, and the passage from one mental state to its pathological contrary.

British artist Lucy Williams is known for redefining the concept of collage through her intricate, mixed media bas-reliefs of unpopulated mid-century Modernist architecture. McKee Gallery, 2014 9 x 9 inches, 16 pp., color illustrations Softcover, no ISBN

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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 accompanies the Gordon Kurtti Project, an exhibition at Participant Inc, curated by Carl George of Allied Productions.

Gordon Stokes Kurtti produced a brief yet concentrated burst of artistic output in the early ‘80s before his life was cut short by HIV/AIDS. This exhibition is the first to collect his drawings and paintings, as well as his work in film, performance, and poetry, tracing Kurtti’s lasting impact on the East Village art scene.

The catalog includes essays by Cynthia Carr and fellow Allied members Jack Waters, Peter Cramer, and Carl George.

This catalog features black and white photographs by Wynn Bullock from 1940 to 1973. Bullock's career showed a deep connection with nature in and around the Central Coast of California. His photographs demonstrate a deep understanding of light, not only as a source of illumination, but also as a symbol of the energy of life. This catalogue includes an essay by Keith F. Davis.