Search results for ""Author Alex Gartenfeld""

The first monograph on the powerful painting of Janiva Ellis, exploring abstraction, figuration, race and social acceleration This volume introduces the work of American painter Janiva Ellis, who participated in the New Museum Triennial 2018 and the Whitney Biennial 2019. Featuring a suite of new paintings created over the past year, Rats is published on the occasion of the first solo museum exhibition for Ellis, whose paintings use formal themes of speed and transformation to explore fractured states of personal and cultural perception. Her works produce abundant imagery, invented as well as appropriated. She draws from a broad array of material, including art history and pop culture, to comment on the insidious nature of white supremacist mythology and its denial of itself as a brutal social and structural force. The humor in her work aims to create space for release as well as renewal. Ellis uses figuration to paint Blackness expansively, communicating the complexity of navigating such a lopsided and violent landscape.

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One of the great conceptual artists of the twenty-first century, Terry Adkins (1953–2014) was renowned for his pioneering work across mediums, from sculpture, drawing, and site-specific installation to photography, video, and performance. Terry Adkins: Infinity is Always Less Than One accompanies the first institutional posthumous exhibition of Adkins's sculptural production. While Adkins is often recognized for his musical and performative practice, this exhibition focuses on his complex memorials and monuments to historical figures. The exhibition showcases four of his major series, dedicated to four distinct figures: Bessie Smith, John Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jimi Hendrix. These series are presented alongside a group of early sculptures to reveal the development of the Adkins's mature practice. The exhibition highlights Adkins's crucial contributions to sculpture and to cultural protest, featuring major works that have not been viewed in decades. It explores significant periods and influences in Adkins's career, beginning with transitional hand-wrought sculptures and continuing with his major immersive installations. His often elegiac and always resonant objects challenge dominant historical narratives and prompt a rethinking of ways of being and moving in the world that are shaped by the legacies of displacement and the sociability and community that happen despite it. Adkins's work also enlarges the historical legacies of the postwar avant-garde while reminding us of the immaterial legacies that are passed on through ritual and sound. Contributors. Alex Gartenfeld, Kobena Mercer, Gean Moreno, Nizan Shaked, and Greg Tate A Publication of ICA Miami Distributed by Duke University Press

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Chakaia Booker: The Observance accompanies the first comprehensive museum survey of the American artist. The publication explores the artist’s signature form—monumental works made of rubber—while showcasing her innovations across mediums. Featuring an expansive range of Booker’s sculptures, including totemic and anthropomorphic assemblages fabricated from cast-off tires, the volume highlights Booker’s ongoing expression of ecological and technological concerns, examinations of racial and economic disparities, and her interest in the symbolism of the automobile in American culture. The exhibition and accompanying publication Chakaia Booker: The Observance include some of Booker’s most topical works, including Chu Ching (2012), which depicts a cross on a wheelbarrow resembling Jesus being dismounted from the cross, as well as two rarely seen series of paintings that explore landscape and language. The artist’s photographic series, Foundling Warrior Quest (2010) and Graveyard Series (1995), are also featured to explore the importance of performance and mythology in her practice. Anchoring the presentation is The Observance (1995), an immersive installation made of deconstructed rubber tires and tubes—Booker’s first work in this signature material, chosen by the artist for its associations with riots.

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Rarely seen installation works that exemplify this pioneering artist’s critical focus on Black identity and Black feminism Showcasing a lesser-known aspect of Saar’s art, Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight provides new insights into her explorations of ritual, spirituality and cosmologies, as well as themes of the African diaspora. Featured here are significant installations created by Saar from 1980 to 1998, including Oasis (1984), a work that will be reconfigured at ICA Miami’s Saar exhibition for the first time in more than 30 years. With compelling scholarship and rich illustration—combining new installation photography and archival material—the monograph provides a fresh look at this significant artist’s critical and influential practice. Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight reinforces and celebrates Saar’s standing as a visionary artist, storyteller and mythmaker, and the ongoing significance and relevance of her work to the most pressing issues in America today. Betye Saar (born 1926) is renowned for pioneering Black feminism and West Coast assemblage in her visionary artistic practice, through dense, complexly referential objects. For over six decades, Saar’s work has led dialogues on race and gender, reflecting changing cultural and political contexts. Most recently, solo presentations have been hosted by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Saar’s work was prominently featured in We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, and in Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern, London, which traveled to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Brooklyn Museum; The Broad, Los Angeles; and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

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Published to mark the artist’s first solo US museum show, Paulo Nazareth: Melee presents an engaging and timely look at the artist’s multifarious work. The exhibition, held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami in 2019, explored how Nazareth’s work engages the complex colonial and racial histories of the Americas. An artist who works across mediums, Nazareth uses performance and sculpture to critique the colonial experience and its afterlives in Brazil and the Americas. His durational performances and installations draw from his joint African and Indigenous heritage to highlight marginalized historical legacies, progressive political figures, non-Western worldviews, and potential methods of nonexploitative living and relating. Nazareth’s work assumes a new poignancy in light of the return of repressive political forces and the racial reckoning that our historical moment demands. This beautifully produced volume offers over one hundred color illustrations in addition to newly commissioned scholarship. Paulo Nazareth: Melee is the first exhaustive catalogue of Nazareth’s work, solidifying his place as one of today’s most important global artists.

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Early works, regional projects and acclaimed series from Allan McCollum, whose work often blurs boundaries between unique artifacts and mass production Since the late 1960s, the American artist Allan McCollum (born 1944) has created works that examine the art object’s relationship to uniqueness, context and value, as well as to the museum that collects, values and preserves it. Allan McCollum: Works since 1969, which accompanies a major survey of the artist's work, brings together new scholarship, documentary material and in-depth information on McCollum’s decades-long career, adding to the broader historical and theoretical interpretation of the artist’s important practice. McCollum’s celebrated works can be interpreted in infinite ways and have significant impact on the understanding of the role of art and material culture in society. Throughout his career the artist has explored various economies and contexts that structure collections and presentations of objects. Interested in how material artifacts become charged with meaning, McCollum understands these objects as vehicles of self-assurance and self-representation within communities. This book traces the artist’s career through numerous illustrations, supplementary material and texts, focusing on three key components—early work, “regional projects” and the artist’s most iconic series.

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