Search results for ""Author Elissa Auther""

Machine Dazzle, to my mind, [is] a true theatrical genius who has created some of the most inventive costumes and sets I have ever seen. Hilton Als Machine Dazzle is the much in-demand designer and artist behind popular cabaret, drag, and performance stars such as Taylor Mac and transgender icon Mx. Justin Vivian Bond. For the first time, his over-the-top stage creations, made for himself and others, are collected in one volume alongside stage environments, ephemera, and photos from his fascinating career. In Machine Dazzle s world, costumes are transformative objects with world-making capacity. The artist s queer maximalism encapsulates a more is better attitude to making and creating which looks to counter elitist notions that spectacle and extravagance are vapid. For him these associations are embraced as queer for their affirmation of hybridity over purity and the rejection of hierarchies of every kind, cultural and otherwise. On the occasion of a major exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design, curator Elissa Auther brings together a rich collections of essays and reminiscences from fellow performers, historians and cultural critics that consider every aspect of Machine Dazzle s rich body of work.

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This is the first volume to document and contextualize Sonya Clark’s large-scale, collaborative artworks. These projects demonstrate Clark’s career-long commitment to addressing the urgent issue of racial inequality in American society and her philosophy of creatively engaging the viewer in reflection on the nation’s history of slavery and our roles in dismantling systemic racism today. As an extension of her abiding commitment to issues of history, race, and reconciliation in her work, Clark is also distinctive as an artist for her use of textiles and other everyday materials, which she aligns with the intertwined histories of art and craft. For marginalized people (African Americans and women, in particular) handwork has been essential to survival and consequently has functioned, and continues to function, as an important means of creating a group identity. Hence, for Clark, craft is essential to the question of equality.

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Minter’s art skews glamour with consumerist critique Marilyn Minter is famed for her glossy, hyper-realistic paintings, photographs and video works—seductive images that borrow the language of fashion and advertising photography, exploring the boundaries of desire, sensuality and body anxiety in the age of consumption. Close-up imagery of mouths, feet, splashes and puddles, rendered in high-gloss enamel on sheets of metal, subversively questions the pathology of glamour. Produced in conjunction with the first major museum retrospective on her work, Pretty/Dirty examines every period of the artist's 40-year career, from her beginnings with the controversial porn paintings, initially rejected by the critical establishment, to her later large-scale photorealistic works. Essays from the exhibition's curators examine the trajectory of Minter's development and her engagement with debates over the representation of the female body. Texts from musicians, artists, writers and curators speak to Minter's wide-ranging influence: reflections from the likes of artist K8 Hardy, musician and author Richard Hell, and poet Eileen Myles, as well as an artist interview with writer Linda Yablonsky. Illustrated with hundreds of full-color reproductions, and with a complete biography and bibliography, Pretty/Dirty charts a new perspective on the career of this exciting and continually evolving artist. Marilyn Minter (born 1948) has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, at venues including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005, the Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, in 2009 and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, in 2010. Her video "Green Pink Caviar" was exhibited in the lobby of MoMA for over a year, and was also shown on digital billboards on Sunset Boulevard in LA, and the Creative Time MTV billboard in Times Square, New York.

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A timely and expansive survey of a groundbreaking American art movement that overturned aesthetic hierarchies in a riot of color and ornamentation The Pattern and Decoration movement emerged in the 1970s as an embrace of long-dismissed art forms associated with the decorative. Pioneering artists such as Miriam Schapiro (1923–2015), Joyce Kozloff (b. 1942), Robert Kushner (b. 1949), and others appropriated patterns, frequently from non-Western decorative arts, to produce intricate, often dizzying or gaudy designs in media ranging from painting, sculpture, and collage to ceramics, installation art, and performance. This dazzling book showcases an astonishing array of works by more than 40 artists from across the United States, examining the movement’s defiant adoption of art forms traditionally viewed as feminine, craft-based, or otherwise inferior to fine art. In addition to offering an overview of the Pattern and Decoration movement as it is commonly recognized, this volume considers artists of the period who are not typically associated with the movement. Rethinking the significance of patterns and the decorative in postwar American art, this panoramic view provides new insights into abstraction, feminism, and installation art. Essays explore the movement’s feminist methods and values, including Miriam Schapiro’s “femmage” practice; its impact on contemporary abstract painting; and its relationship to postmodern architecture and design. Artist biographies, an exhibition history, and reprints of historically significant writings further establish With Pleasure as the most expansive publication on the subject.Published in association with The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los AngelesExhibition Schedule:Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (October 27, 2019–May 11, 2020)Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College (June 26–November 28, 2021)

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In the heady and hallucinogenic days of the 1960s and ’70s, a diverse range of artists and creative individuals based in the American West—from the Pacific coast to the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest—broke the barriers between art and lifestyle and embraced the new, hybrid sensibilities of the countercultural movement. Often created through radically collaborative artistic practices, such works as Paolo Soleri’s earth homes, the hand-built architecture of the Drop City and Libre communes, Yolanda López’s political posters, the multisensory movement workshops of Anna and Lawrence Halprin, and the immersive light shows and video-based work by the Ant Farm and Optic Nerve collectives were intended to generate new life patterns that pointed toward social and political emancipation. In West of Center, Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner bring together a prominent group of scholars to elaborate the historical and artistic significance of these counterculture projects within the broader narrative of postwar American art, which skews heavily toward New York’s avant-garde art scene. This west of center countercultural movement has typically been associated with psychedelic art, but the contributors to this book understand this as only one dimension of the larger, artistically oriented, socially based phenomenon. At the same time, they reveal the disciplinary, geographic, and theoretical biases and assumptions that have led to the dismissal of countercultural practices in the history of art and visual culture, and they detail how this form of cultural and political activity found its place in the West.A companion to an exhibition originating at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, this book illuminates how, in the western United States, the counterculture’s unique integration of art practices, political action, and collaborative life activities serves as a linchpin connecting postwar and contemporary artistic endeavors.

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