Search results for ""University of Pennsylvania,Institute of Contemporary Art""

This volume features new and recent works by New York-based artists Ginny Casey (born 1981) and Jessi Reaves (born 1986) exploring the relationship between painting and sculpture, domestic objects and decorative surfaces, by reimagining the form and function of objects encountered in daily life.

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Since the 1980s, Douglas Blau has used words and pictures interchangeably to create a highly regarded and unique body of work. He emerged as a critic and curator in tandem with the Pictures Generation of artists. In 1987, his exhibition Fictions: A Selection of Pictures from the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries was the first in a maverick series to apply curatorial practice to the construction of explicit narratives. Blau creates picture epics and episodes from uniformly framed collages of printed matter: postcards, film stills, images of paintings and photographs, pictures of all kinds are cut and pasted into individual collage elements. These are composed into sequences based on formal and narrative associations that flow from frame to frame. Centuries of picture making appear distilled through Blau’s art into an essential repertoire of characters, plots, periods, styles, locations, and genres. Only the details and degrees of abstraction vary over time and through reproduction, the mechanics of which produce the shifts of tone, texture, and color that Blau orchestrates into each overall composition. This volume provides an overview of this pioneering collagist.

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From public-access television to social media: EAI’s groundbreaking history with video art This volume marks the 50th anniversary of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), one of the first nonprofit organizations dedicated to the advocacy and development of video art.

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Documenting Michelle Lopez’s major site-specific installation and critical dialogues across sculpture, race, politics and power In Ballast & Barricades sculptor Michelle Lopez (born 1970) critiques symbols of nationalism, power and consumption, creating a precarious urban landscape from the material remains of crisis. This monograph brings together a decade of work on this topic.

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From the discarded to the mass-produced: Vaughn’s installations explore complex histories of production and race This volume presents recent works by artist Jessica Vaughn (born 1983) that address modular architecture’s promise of malleability and universality—at the expense of visibility for Black workers and workers of color.

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Focusing on Los Angeles and Philadelphia, First Among Equals considers the various modes that contemporary artists have developed to work with each other and reach across generations through negotiation and dialogue. Among the artists included are Kathryn Andrews, Bodega, Alex Da Corte, Extra Extra, Machete Group, Marginal Utility, P&Co., Mateo Tannatt and Wu Tsang.

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Architect Peter Eisenman and landscape architect Laurie Olin have been collaborating since 1980 on projects both built and unbuilt. Their key works include the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. This first book on their important and unusually egalitarian working relationship offers a revealing look at the development of a 25-year collaboration, beginning with the title work, a recent site-specific environmental installation, and continuing through a survey of their portfolio. Each of the two also maintains an individual practice and teaches: Olin is the Practice Professor of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Across the Open Field, Essays Drawn on the English Landscape, and co-author of Vizcaya, An American Villa and its Makers. Peter Eisenman was the first Irwin S. Chanin Distinguished Professor of Architecture at The Cooper Union and is currently the Louis I. Kahn Professor of Architecture at Yale. His books include Diagram Diaries and Chora L Works, co-authored with Jacques Derrida. Fertilizers includes essays by each of them, an interview and many seldom-seen images.

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Documenting this American artist's first solo museum exhibition, Charles LeDray will focus on his obsessively crafted miniature sculptures in a variety of media, including textiles, ceramics, seashells, and bone, that reflect on childhood, gender, sexuality, and autobiography.

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On the politics of land, the body and space in multimedia and multidisciplinary works Jamaican artist Deborah Anzinger (born 1978) works at the intersection of Black feminist thought, geography and space to create sculptures, videos, paintings and installations combining synthetic and living materials. An Unlikely Birth compiles her material and conceptual experiments.

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Conceptions of “nothing” are one of the driving themes of twentieth-century art. One thinks of Piet Mondrian's reductivist approach to abstraction, Marcel Duchamp's contention that art resides in ideas, not objects, Mark Rothko's painterly reach for the sublime, Andy Warhol's affirmations of the vacuity of Pop culture. The Big Nothing will focus on themes of nothing, nothingness and negation in contemporary art and culture, surveying the legacy of these and other manifestations of absence made manifest in contemporary art. Artist include Gareth James, Jutta Koether, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, Yves Klein, Bernadette Corporation, John Miller and James Welling, among others. Given its broad connotations, “nothing” provides general audiences with immediate access to looking at and thinking about the art of today. Part of a pan-Philadelphia cultural event initiated by the ICA, in which the city gives itself over to the art of nothing.

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Multimedia reveries on the power and rhetoric of public monuments and the persistence of the political past This publication documents the first solo museum exhibition of Philadelphia-based sculptor Karyn Olivier (born 1968), focusing on recent trajectories of her investigation into scale and public memory, particularly as activated for monuments and memorials. After several years developing a number of public commissions, and a year's study in Rome, Olivier revisited a handful of recent works alongside her first forays into video and sound, to consider the conflicted histories and unresolved spaces monuments too often shadow. Organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, the exhibition traveled to the University at Buffalo Art Galleries. Exhibition images from the venues are accompanied by the full narrative text for Oliver's first video; an overview essay from ICA Daniel and Brett Sundheim Chief Curator Anthony Elms; UB Art Galleries curator Liz Park's in-depth consideration of Moving the Obelisk; and a critical assessment by art historian Andrianna Campbell-LaFleur.

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This first book on the Philadelphia-based artist features work from his 2009 ICA exhibition--an installation composed of a six-minute, animated, high-definition projected video and five bronze sculptures. Dread was premiered at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2008, where it received critical acclaim.

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Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere (both born 1970) have been working collaboratively for more than 14 years, 7 of them under the collective name neuroTransmitter. Often incorporating popular music and visual forms, their projects traverse the cultural contradictions at play in public spaces. This catalogue accompanies their first US survey.

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Philadelphia is home to two major art institutions, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art. Philadelphia artist Virgil Marti (born 1962) recently curated a show for the ICA of objects chosen from the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection; Set Pieces brings these objects together, shedding light both on the Museum’s outstanding collection of objects and on the roots of Marti’s own opulent, design-based aesthetic. Texts by I.C.A. Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner, Philadelphia Museum curator Joseph Risehl, gallerist Lia Gangitano (Participant Inc.) and Philadelphia-based poet Thomas Devaney round out the volume.

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An artist’s attempts at achieving personal happiness, from meditation to pharmaceuticals Austrian-born, New York-based graphic designer, typographer and artist Stefan Sagmeister (born 1962) often tests and transgresses the boundary between art and design, through his imaginative implementation of typography. The Happy Film Pitch Book both documents Sagmeister’s touring exhibition, The Happy Show, and anticipates his ongoing feature length film, The Happy Film. In both projects, Sagmeister undergoes a series of self-experiments (each experiment lasting three months)--with meditation, cognitive therapy, and mood-altering pharmaceuticals--attempting to improve his personal happiness. I am usually rather bored with definitions,” Sagmeister says. “Happiness, however, is just such a big subject that it might be worth a try to pin it down.” The Happy Show, Sagmeister’s first museum show in the United States, documents his adventures in video, print, infographics, sculpture and interactive installations, most of which were custom-made for this exhibition. Here, Sagmeister offers his own witty and poignant thoughts and reasons for his ten-year exploration of happiness. Throughout the book, Sagmeister’s trademark maxims serve as access points to a larger exploration of happiness, its cultural significance, our constant pursuit of it and its notoriously ephemeral nature.

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A convergence of histories and aesthetic paradigms for disentangling the body from space and place The artists in this volume interrogate the geographic implications of particular histories on specific spaces. From the intimate cartographies of a body to the imagined and constructed contours of the Black Atlantic; from the ecology of the North York Moors to the ruins of slave auction blocks, plantation fields, lynching trees and Underground Railroad routes in North America, to a magical realist vision of a river-bound voyage in Guyana.

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At first glance, The Puppet Show seems a flip title. Organized by Philadelphia ICA Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner and Carin Kuoni, this exhibition catalogue focuses--with both humor and gravity--on the surprisingly prodigious amount of puppet imagery in contemporary art. It takes as its historic point of departure one of the first episodes of avant-garde art history: Alfred Jarry's 1896 puppet play Ubu Roi, which the South African artist William Kentridge, in collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company, has adapted into an allegory of apartheid. Other puppets are featured in works from more than 30 well-established, international artists, including Anne Chu, Terence Gower, Pierre Huyghe, Christian Jankowski, Laurie Simmons, Kiki Smith and Kara Walker. This volume also looks at puppets in Modern art and popular culture--from Sophie Tauber Arp’s Dada marionettes to the Internet phenomenon of the “sockpuppet”--a well-known person’s fake online persona, created in order to boost public opinion.

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