Search results for ""Author John Yau""

Far-ranging and thought-provoking essays on the relation of art and ethnic identity. This first collection by award-winning author John Yau, drawn from decades of work, includes essays about Black, Asian, Latinx, and Native American artists: sculptors Luis Jimenez and Ruth Asawa; “second generation Abstract Expressionists” such as the Black painter Ed Clark and the Japanese American painter Matsumi Kanemitsu; the performance artists James Luna and Patty Chang; the photographers Laurel Nakadate and Teju Cole; and a generation of Asian American artists that has emerged during the last decade. While identity is at the fore in this collection, Yau’s essays also propose the need for an expansive view of identity, as in the essay “On Reconsidering Identity,” which explores the writings of Lydia Cabrera and Edouard Glissant, and the possibilities of creolisation versus the reductiveness of Aime Cesaire’s Negritude.Please Wait by the Coat Room is for serious readers interested in the art and artists of color that many mainstream institutions and critics misrepresented or overlooked. It presents a view guided by the artists’ desire for autonomy and freedom in a culture that has deemed them undesirable or invisible.

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The remarkable plein air paintings of Liu Xiaodong (b.1963), which chronicle everyday lives within our diverse modern world, are the focus of this first monograph of his career to date. Immersing himself in communities around the globe, Xiaodong seeks to present people who often sit on the fringes of society who find themselves marginalised within a contemporary world striving for homogenisation. At first glance a traditional realist painter, closer examination reveals an artist exploring a range of media while interrogating the opportunities presented by modern technology. The result is an outstanding body of work, often monumental in scale, that examines, reconsiders, and extends observational painting in fresh directions, while bringing into question the lines between fact and fiction, the traditional and the contemporary, to create a wholly original vision.

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This book presents a comprehensive view of the work of American painter Philip Taaffe (b.1955), who has expanded the parameters of painting through his use of silkscreen, linocuts, collage, stencils, gouache, chine-collé, marbling, acrylic, enamel, watercolour and gold leaf. Possessing many technical skills, Taaffe has moved decisively between unique pictorial inventions and appropriations, as well as overlaying divergent modes of representation, through cultural patterns found in ornament, and biomorphic abstraction. John Yau's insightful text is the first to look at every part of Taaffe's artistic development, from the works he made at Cooper Union while a student of Hans Haacke, to the present. It pays special attention to Taaffe's acquisition of different techniques, as well as investigating his various sources of inspiration, which include the work of experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner and Harry Smith, the Natural History illustrations of Ernst Haeckel, and the ancient art of paper marbling.

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A diverse and cacophonous poetry collection tackling subjects from identity to current events. At once comic and cantankerous, tender and discomfiting, piercing and irreverent, Genghis Chan on Drums is a shape-shifting book of percussive poems dealing with aging, identity, PC culture, and stereotypes about being Chinese. Employing various forms, John Yau’s poems traverse a range of subjects, including the 1930s Hollywood actress Carole Lombard, the Latin poet Catullus, the fantastical Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo’s imaginary sister, and a nameless gumshoe. Yau moves effortlessly from using the rhyme scheme of a sixteenth-century Edmund Spenser sonnet to riffing on a well-known poem-rant by the English poet Sean Bonney, and to immersing himself in the words of condolence sent by a former president to the survivors of a school massacre. Yau’s poems are conduits through which many different, conflicting, and unsavory voices strive to be heard.

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The newest monograph dedicated to the striking new work of internationally acclaimed abstract painter Suzan FreconSuzan Frecon features new paintings, which highlight the artist’s ongoing exploration of the interaction of shape, color, texture, and light. Painted over long periods of time, these works are the result of a deliberative process guided by a deep understanding of color and the properties of paint. Frecon has been exploring the issues of horizontality and verticality, asymmetrical balances, and interacting arrangements of color for over five decades. The result is an ongoing dialogue that yields new and surprising paintings at every turn.Frecon’s knowledge of color is deeply rooted in art history; her selection of color brings with it an understanding of the scientific properties of pigments as well as their use by Renaissance painters. Esteemed poet and critic John Yau explores this inspiration in his illuminating essay, in which he teases out the connections between these bold abstract works and historic figurative paintings. Highlighting Frecon’s interest in these paintings for their form and color rather than their narrative, Yau offers a new and intriguing way of looking at both present and past.

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The first comprehensive monograph on the master contemporary Korean American sculptor, from his seminal wire sculptures to his never-before-seen early works formed of steel. John Pai (b. 1937) is a prolific multimedia artist whose handmade three-dimensional sculptures are, paradoxically, still objects that seem to exist in a state of movement and transformation. This full-career survey of Pai s inventive work consists of his rarely seen early work up to the present. Pai s incredibly intricate, three-dimensional abstract 'drawings in space' are made of endless lengths of individual steel or copper rods and textured sheets made from hundreds of rods welded together. Unlike many contemporary sculptors who draw a sketch and let metalworkers do the actual construction, Pai continues to do all his work himself?from choosing the materials to the labor-intensive process of welding and bending the metals into complex and sometimes massive forms. Immigrating from Korea to the US at age 11, Pai showed his prodigious talent for art at a young age. He received a scholarship to attend Pratt Institute, and in the 1960s, Pai became the youngest professor appointed to the faculty at Pratt. Leading its fine arts and sculpture programs for nearly four decades, Pai proved a talented and beloved educator, nurturing generations of sculptors and fostering the burgeoning Korean artistic community in New York with those such as his contemporary Nam June Paik, reflecting a sensibility outside the mainstream of American art.

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The Vermeer of California’s Light and Space movement: the first comprehensive monograph on Helen Pashgian’s infinitely subtle and mutable sculpture Over the course of her career, Pasadena-based artist Helen Pashgian (born 1934) has produced a significant oeuvre of sculptures comprised of vibrantly colored columns, discs and spheres, which often feature an isolated element appearing suspended, embedded or encased within them. Using an innovative application of industrial epoxies, plastics and resins, Pashgian’s works are characterized by their translucent surfaces that appear to filter and somehow contain illumination. “One must move around to observe changes,” she testifies: “coming and going, appearing and receding, visible and invisible—a phenomenon of constant movement.” This book documents Pashgian’s vast body of work, dating from the 1960s to now, with historic and new photographs of the artist’s spheres and discs. An essay by John Yau and a chronology built on new research is also included.

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H is here, in the truest sense, the alpha and omega. Helmut Federle uses the first letter of his first name as a format-filling, artistic matrix on canvases measuring between forty and fifty centimetres. Since his early days as an artist in the late 1970s, he has created seventy variations of Liegendes H (Reclining H). The basic form of three lines and two squares enumerates the variations of expressions in painting. Their synopsis plays with figure and ground, forming an inventive collection of painterly techniques and the atmospheres they evoke. At the same time, the subtitles for the individual works seem to hint at the specific horizons of experience in their creation. They lend each work a poetic dimension, as one tries to imagine the artist’s world in the planes of colour. Thus, each picture represents Helmut and is, in its mysterious originality, a fascinating haiku.

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A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent charts a territory built of speculative histories, indeterminate landscapes, and mock narratives, all of them at the threshold linking exterior and interior worlds. Their logic is highly grammatical and slyly confounding, perfectly clear and drawn from dream. It is here, “between / what is occluded and what has elapsed,” that Mahrer’s ambiguous, disordered subjects begin their journeys.

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Elliott Green's radiant landscapes depict a world in unceasing motion The autodidact painter Elliott Green (born 1960) came to New York City at age 21 to learn how to paint from scratch. Eight years later, an unsolicited envelope of 35mm slides he sent to an Upper East Side gallery resulted in a show, and his paintings were hanging alongside Warhols and de Koonings. In 2011, while in Italy as a recipient of the Rome Prize, he painted the first of the 112 landscapes featured in this volume. His work developed a new sense of space and landscape, characterized by panoramic, far-reaching vistas and geophysical features such as mountains, reservoirs and skies that seem to melt impossibly into pure gesture. Green's panoramas reveal worlds within worlds and convey emotion-in-nature with ferocity and frailty. Six commentaries by John Yau, David Ebony, Jana Prikryl, Arne Svenson, Gary Lucidon and Michael Rubiner reflect on the artist's work with illuminating perspectives. The book features French folds and four foldout posters.

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Anton van Dalen: Community of Many chronicles the historic artist Anton van Dalen’s lifelong visual investigation informed by the influences of war, religion and migration, his devotion to nature, and his dedication to documenting the technological and cultural evolutions within our society across a variety of mediums, from drawing and sculpture to collage and painting. Born in the Netherlands in 1938 to a conservative Calvinist family, Anton witnessed first-hand the terrors of both technological and human destruction during the Second World War. Since he immigrated to New York in 1966 and settled in the East Village, Anton has served as witness, storyteller and documentarian of the dramatic cultural shifts in the neighbourhood through his masterfully honed and singular iconography. Featuring critical essays by John Yau and Tiernan Morgan, this heavily illustrated publication is the first comprehensive monograph on Anton van Dalen’s work that provides a language by which to discuss the consequences of human brutality towards nature and our entanglement with technology. Anton has been included in group exhibitions at notable institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New Museum, New York; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; and the New-York Historical Society. He has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at Temple Contemporary, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, Philadelphia; University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Exit Art, New York. His  Avenue A Cut-Out Theatre  has toured since 1995 both nationally and internationally and has been shown at numerous institutions including The Drawing Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and The New-York Historical Society.

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From psychedelic abstraction to paintings of water droplets: essential insight into one of Korea’s most celebrated painters Internationally acclaimed painter Kim Tschang-Yeul (1929–2021) spent most of his career in Paris after having fled his North Korean home during wartime. There his painting throughout the 1960s spanned diverse modes of abstraction, minimalism and photorealism, before the artist ultimately settled on the single motif that he would pursue for the rest of his life: the drop of water. As Kim explained, “the act of painting water drops is to dissolve all things within [these], to return to a transparent state of ‘nothingness.’” This landmark monograph, produced with the artist’s close involvement, collects works from throughout Kim’s long career. Beginning with his early biomorphic, psychedelic abstractions of the 1960s, up through his masterful photorealistic “water droplet” paintings as recently as 2017, this is the definitive presentation of Kim’s work. A detailed chronology tracks developments in the artist’s life and practice, alongside historical photographs, notes and sketches, and studio views.

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Carole A. Feuerman is celebrated as one of America's major hyper-realistic sculptors, alongside Duane Hanson and John De Andrea. Born 1945, she was educated in New York and Philadelphia and began as an illustrator before turning to sculpture in the 1970s, which soon earned her much recognition and early success. A pioneer of hyper-realism in sculpture, her work has been displayed in many group shows and solo exhibitions at private galleries and public museums, as well as at the major art fairs, in America, Europe, and Asia. Over five decades, Feuerman has created visual manifestations of stories telling of strength, survival, and balance. She works in marble, bronze, vinyl, painted resins, and stainless steel. Her work is marked by her thorough understanding of materials' characteristics and her ability to control them in the studio. Her subject matter is the human figure, most often a woman in an introspective moment of exuberant self-consciousness shaded by erotic lassitude. Feuerman's works represent a state of female mind rather that an alluring body meant to attract the male gaze. They suggest that women look at themselves differently from men looking at them, that a woman is more innately creative than a man. Many of Feuerman's figures have a fragmented quality, recalling those by Auguste Rodin, and the aesthetics of Surrealism. This is the most comprehensive survey of Feuerman's work in sculpture to date. Lavishly illustrated in colour throughout, it demonstrates the variety of materials and media she uses and highlights the specific qualities of her figures.

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Seven decades of incredibly dynamic sculpture in bronze and steel from the Chicago virtuoso—with full-color plates, archival materials and much more Sculptor Richard Hunt was only 35 years old at the time of his 1971 retrospective exhibition at MoMA—the first for an African American sculptor at the museum—and his continued work over the course of his nearly seven-decade-long career, ranging from small bronze and steel sculptures to large-scale public commissions, has cemented his place as one of the foremost artists of the 20th century. This book is the definitive look at Hunt’s work and career. Fully illustrated with more than 350 images, including historical photographs, installation images, images of Hunt in his studio, newspaper clippings and a plate section of significant works from throughout the artist’s career, this book also includes a section on his major public commissions, a recent interview with art historian Adrienne L. Childs and an illustrated biography and chronology by Hunt's biographer Jon Ott. Essays discuss Hunt’s attentiveness to antiquity, the ways in which his critical reception aligned with his practice and the relevance of his unique studio—a decommissioned electrical substation in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood—to the ethos of his artmaking. This volume is a testament to the monumental works and stature of one of our greatest living artists. Chicago artist Richard Hunt (born 1935) is one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century. Hunt has had over 150 solo exhibitions and is represented in more than 100 public museums. In 2022 the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago commissioned him to make a work for its collection.

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