Search results for ""Author Helen Molesworth""

During the 1960s, artists from Alan Kaprow and Yoko Ono to Andy Warhol and Richard Serra stopped making "art" as it has been thought of since the Renaissance. They staged performances that mixed everyday life with theater and in yet other, often ironic, ways challenged the system of marketing, display, and aesthetic discourse that ascribes exceptional monetary as well as cultural value to paintings and sculpture. Work Ethic, published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art, brings together a cross section of such radical endeavors and opens a fresh perspective on their genesis and meaning. Most of the avant-garde interventions considered in Work Ethic entailed performances and other procedures generally interpreted as linking a "dematerialization" of the object with the free play of concepts. By contrast, Helen Molesworth and her collaborators in Work Ethic set such activities in the context of the workplace and contend that they engage issues of management, production, and skill that accompanied the emergence of the information age. The result is a major breakthrough in understanding the structures and ambitions of a wide range of art-making. Work Ethic reproduces all the diverse material—Bruce Nauman videotapes to Roxy Paine’s painting machine—in the Baltimore exhibition and provides insightful discussion of each piece’s history, structure, and significance. Four essays introduce topics, like utopian fantasies of pleasurable work, that are of general relevance to setting the material into a postindustrial context. Throughout this catalogue, there is as well a lively dialogue on the museum’s relationship to art that questions the rules of both the workplace and the art world. The exhibition, "Work Ethic," will be at The Baltimore Museum of Art from October 12, 2003, to January 11, 2004, and at the Des Moines Center for the Arts from May 15 to August 1, 2004.

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A dynamic new look at the legendary college that was a major incubator of the arts in midcentury America In 1933, John Rice founded Black Mountain College in North Carolina as an experiment in making artistic experience central to learning. Though it operated for only 24 years, this pioneering school played a significant role in fostering avant-garde art, music, dance, and poetry, and an astonishing number of important artists taught or studied there. Among the instructors were Josef and Anni Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Karen Karnes, M. C. Richards, and Willem de Kooning, and students included Ruth Asawa, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly. Leap Before You Look is a singular exploration of this legendary school and of the work of the artists who spent time there. Scholars from a variety of fields contribute original essays about diverse aspects of the College—spanning everything from its farm program to the influence of Bauhaus principles—and about the people and ideas that gave it such a lasting impact. In addition, catalogue entries highlight selected works, including writings, musical compositions, visual arts, and crafts. The book’s fresh approach and rich illustration program convey the atmosphere of creativity and experimentation that was unique to Black Mountain College, and that served as an inspiration to so many. This timely volume will be essential reading for anyone interested in the College and its enduring legacy.Published in association with the Institute of Contemporary Art, BostonExhibition Schedule:The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (10/10/15–01/24/16)Hammer Museum, UCLA (02/21/16–05/14/16)Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University (09/17/16–01/01/17)

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Face to Face presents a selection of portraits of artists by three of the most prominent portrait artists of our time. Bringing together the diverse and distinctive work of Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe, and Catherine Opie, this book forms an investigation into the charged genre of portraiture and its various approaches, navigating tensions between intimacy and publicity. While the three artists collected here share a wide set of historical touchstones, each deploys the camera differently: Dean exploits cinema's capacity for duration; Lacombe takes her cameras out on assignment; Opie works in the tradition of the studio photograph. Often overlapping in the subjects depicted, Face to Face offers an opportunity to look closely at bracing, intimate, and resonant portraits of the seminal thinkers and makers that these artists have encountered across the fields of music, painting, photography, film, and literature, among them Hilton Als, Maya Angelou, Richard Avedon, Joan Didion, David Hockney, Joan Jonas, Fran Lebowitz Patti Smith, Kara Walker, and many others. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York, the book includes essays by the exhibition's curator, Helen Molesworth, and the artist and writer Jarrett Earnest

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Known for her intricate and distinct artistic language, Asawa produced numerous sculptures, drawings, and prints that are built on simple, repeated gestures that accumulate into complex compositions. Her works on paper and “continuous” looped-wire sculptures suggest a field of fluctuating positive and negative forms, a means of reshaping how we perceive the world. Personal motifs reappear throughout in the most comprehensive look at the artist’s oeuvre to date––ceramic casts of faces of her family, friends, and neighbors; the carved front door Asawa and her family made for their home; and drawings of her children, grandchildren, and husband sleeping––all providing an expansive look into the artist’s life.A document of the breathtaking and surprising exhibition Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible, organized by Helen Molesworth, this book records and expands upon the show, offering new insight from writers and curators with a selection of sixty-four works from Asawa’s spectacular oeuvre. With an introduction by Molesworth, this book features focused texts from Makeda Best, Taylor Davis, Ruth Erickson, Briony Fer, Jennifer L. Roberts, and John Yau.

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'Molesworth remains a rare breed: a curator who can actually write.' - Art in America An illustrated reader featuring a collection of essays from trailblazing curator and writer Helen Molesworth – the first book of her collected writings Over the past three decades, Helen Molesworth’s singular voice and lively curatorial vision has established her as one of the most dynamic and influential voices in the art world. This generously illustrated reader – the first ever collection of her writings – presents 24 essays from the past 30 years, gathered from exhibition catalogs and art publications such as Artforum, Documents, frieze, and October. The volume opens with a new essay that lays out Molesworth’s belief in art’s unique capacity for merging knowledge and feeling. It also includes new critical and reflective commentary on her past writing, an innovative approach that will position Open Questions as an indispensable volume for viewing and thinking about contemporary art for generations to come.

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This long-awaited volume celebrates the work of Kerry James Marshall, one of America's greatest living painters. Born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in Birmingham, Alabama, and witness to the Watts riots in 1965, Marshall has long been an inspired and imaginative chronicler of the African American experience. Best known for large-scale interiors, landscapes, and portraits featuring powerful black figures, Marshall explores narratives of African American history from slave ships to the present and draws upon his deep knowledge of art history from the Renaissance to twentieth-century abstraction, as well as other sources such as the comic book and the muralist tradition. With luscious color and brushstrokes and highly detailed patterning, his direct and intimate scenes of black middle-class life conjure a wide range of emotions, resulting in powerful paintings that confront the position of African Americans throughout American history. Richly illustrated, this monumental book features essays by noted curators as well as the artist, and more than 100 paintings from throughout the artist's career arranged thematically by subject: history painting; beauty, as expressed through the nude, portraiture, and self-portraiture; landscape; religion; and the politics of black nationalism.

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Long awaited, the first survey of the work of one of America's foremost contemporary fine art photographersFor almost 40 years, Catherine Opie has been documenting with psychological acuity the cultural and geographic identity of contemporary America. This unique artist monograph presents a compelling visual narrative of Opie's work since the early 1980s, pairing images across bodies of work to form a full picture of her artistic vision. With more than 300 beautiful illustrations and made in close collaboration with Opie, the book marks a turning point in the consideration of this artist's work to date.

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“Doing is living. That is all that matters.”—Ruth Asawa Throughout her long and prolific career American artist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) developed innovative sculptures in wire, a medium she explored through increasingly complex forms using craft-based techniques she learned while traveling in Mexico in 1947. In 1949, after studying at Black Mountain College, Asawa moved to San Francisco and created dozens of wire works, among them an iconic bronze fountain—the first of many public commissions—for the city’s Ghirardelli Square. Bringing together examples from across Asawa’s full and extraordinary career, this expansive volume serves as an unprecedented reorientation of her sculptures within the historical context of 20th-century art. In particular, it includes careful consideration of Asawa’s advocacy for arts education in public schools, while simultaneously focusing on her vital—and long under-recognized—contributions to the field of sculpture. Insightful essays explore the intersection of formal experimentation and identity to offer a fresh assessment of this celebrated artist. Richly illustrated with exquisite new installation views, Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work introduces original scholarship that traces the dynamic evolution of form in the artist’s work.Published in association with the Pulitzer Arts FoundationExhibition Schedule:Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis (09/14/18–02/16/19)

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Providing a crucial record of the painter Noah Davis’s extraordinary oeuvre, this monograph tells the story of a brilliant artist and cultural force through the eyes of his friends and collaborators. Despite his exceedingly premature death at the age of 32, Noah Davis created emotionally charged work that places him firmly in the canon of great American painting. Stirring, elusive, and attuned to the history of painting, his compositions infuse scenes from everyday life with a magical realist atmosphere and contain traces of his abiding interest in artists such as Marlene Dumas, Kerry James Marshall, Fairfield Porter, Mark Rothko, and Luc Tuymans. This catalogue is published on the occasion of the 2020 exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, which travels to the Underground Museum in Los Angeles, a space that Davis founded with his wife, artist Karon Davis. In her introduction, catalogue essay, and interviews with important figures in Davis’s life, curator Helen Molesworth shows how the artist’s generosity and sense of responsibility galvanized a uniquely supportive artistic community, culture, and vision. Through color illustrations and archival photographs, the book captures the intimate yet expansive spirit of a studio visit with the artist.

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Designed as a companion to the hugely successful monograph Noah Davis, this volume offers further insight into the impact and legacy of the revolutionary Los Angeles artist and activist. ---------- “Embedding his dreams on canvas and in the community, visionary American artist Noah Davis created a mighty legacy.” — Rachel Willcock, ArtReview (2022) ---------- Looking to literature, film, architecture, and art history, Noah Davis imbued his ethereal paintings with emotion and imagination. Muted colors, fantastic scenes, and blurred subjects create an intoxicating vision. Attuned to the power of his medium, Davis layered his paintings—figuratively and literally—using a unique dry paint application to depict quotidian life at an enigmatic, almost magical remove. Featuring sumptuous close-ups throughout, this important new book brings into focus the rich, painterly variety and luminous detail of Davis’s canvases. With a special focus on the groundbreaking Underground Museum, which Noah Davis co-founded with his wife, Karon Davis, Noah Davis: In Detail includes a special conversation, moderated by Helen Molesworth, between Fred Moten, Glenn Ligon, Thomas Lax, and Julie Mehretu. This renowned group of artists and thinkers share personal experiences of the powerful and emotional impact of The Underground Museum and its connection to the larger artistic environs of Los Angeles. Franklin Sirmans contributes a new essay and Lindsay Charlwood, a lifelong friend of Noah’s, authors a chronology of his life, contextualizing his artistic and social achievements.

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With a career spanning over three decades, internationally acclaimed artist Alexis Rockman is well known for his complex, large scale paintings and works on paper depicting the collision between civilization and nature. The artist synthesizes elements of human history, natural science and landscape painting; a passionate interest in climate change and globalization; and a healthy dose of art history and science fiction, to create images that reveal our world balancing on the precipice. Beyond their lush surfaces, radiant washes of color, and technical inventiveness belies a dark humor, an intense curiosity and a probing intelligence that serves to heighten the power and urgency of his invented narratives. Works on Paper is the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s graphic work, documenting his extraordinary accomplishments as a draftsman through a meticulous selection of watercolors, gouaches, oil drawings, field studies, and sketchbooks. Designed in close collaboration with the artist, the book reproduces 120 works, many of which have never before been published. Included are his earliest watercolors from the 1980s, often of hybrid and mutated animals; Field Drawings, created in Guyana and other remote locations from mud sourced on site; the ominously beautiful and apocalyptic Weather Drawings; painterly works relating to his epic The Great Lakes Cycle; and Lost at Sea, his most recent body of work reimagining famed and historic shipwrecks. The book includes a visual appendix of Rockman's graphic influences, with commentary by the artist. Works on Paper is a valuable addition to scholarship on the artist, providing a critical understanding of a visionary oeuvre made at the intersection of art, nature and science.

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A Decorated Chronology accompanies the first American museum exhibition of Los Angeles–based artist Lari Pittman in more than 15 years. It comprises a range of recent work and a selection of earlier paintings. Over the past three decades, Pittman has developed a body of work that is internationally celebrated for its exuberant use of color and painstakingly rendered detail to address such contentious subjects as sexuality, desire and violence. His multilayered depictions of images and signs--ranging from human figures and body parts to animals, plants, furniture, text and even credit cards--meditate on the overwhelming richness and sadness of everyday life. Embracing the critical potential of figurative painting, Pittman provides incisive commentary on the medium’s ability to intertwine the personal with the political.

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A new focus on the sublime landscapes in Lisa Yuskavage’s voluptuous figure paintings Though she is arguably best known for the voluptuous female nudes that populate her paintings, Lisa Yuskavage’s work is just as focused on the ethereal settings in which these subjects appear. Yuskavage creates finely detailed landscapes that blur the line between the fantastical and the familiar, melding abstraction with realism to depict self-contained worlds. These outdoor scenes defy conventions of landscape painting with surreal color palettes of lush greens and delicate pinks, cast in a gauzy light quality that highlights the almost magical nature of her paintings. Published in conjunction with a joint exhibition between the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado and the Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland, this volume includes color reproductions of Yuskavage’s paintings and watercolors from the early 1990s to the present, as well as an interview between Yuskavage and fellow artist Mary Weatherford.Based in New York City, American artist Lisa Yuskavage (born 1962) received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1986. In the years since, her signature style of figure painting has developed something of a cult following for its attention to art historical tradition and a decidedly contemporary, pop culture-based approach to the representation of the female form. Her work has been in solo exhibitions around the world. Yuskavage is represented by David Zwirner.

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