Search results for ""author julia bryan-wilson""

In 1974, women in a feminist consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed a mock organization called the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Emblazoning its logo onto t-shirts, the group wryly envisioned female collective textile making as a practice that could upend conventions, threaten state structures, and wreak political havoc. Elaborating on this example as a prehistory to the more recent phenomenon of "craftivism" the politics and social practices associated with handmaking Fray explores textiles and their role at the forefront of debates about process, materiality, gender, and race in times of economic upheaval. Closely examining how amateurs and fine artists in the United States and Chile turned to sewing, braiding, knotting, and quilting amid the rise of global manufacturing, Julia Bryan-Wilson argues that textiles unravel the high/low divide and urges us to think flexibly about what the politics of textiles might be. Her case studies from the 1970s through the 1990s including the improvised costumes of the theater troupe the Cockettes, the braided rag rugs of US artist Harmony Hammond, the thread-based sculptures of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuna, the small hand-sewn tapestries depicting Pinochet's torture, and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt are often taken as evidence of the inherently progressive nature of handcrafted textiles. Fray, however, shows that such methods are recruited to often ambivalent ends, leaving textiles very much "in the fray" of debates about feminized labor, protest cultures, and queer identities; the malleability of cloth and fiber means that textiles can be activated, or stretched, in many ideological directions. The first contemporary art history book to discuss both fine art and amateur registers of handmaking at such an expansive scale, Fray unveils crucial insights into how textiles inhabit the broad space between artistic and political poles high and low, untrained and highly skilled, conformist and disobedient, craft and art.

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During the late 1960s and early 1970s, in response to the political turbulence generated by the Vietnam War, an important group of American artists and critics sought to expand the definition of creative labor by identifying themselves as 'art workers'. In the first book to examine this movement, Julia Bryan-Wilson shows how a polemical redefinition of artistic labor played a central role in minimalism, process art, feminist criticism, and conceptualism. In her close examination of four seminal figures of the period - American artists Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and Hans Haacke, and art critic Lucy Lippard - Bryan-Wilson frames an engrossing new argument around the double entendre that 'art works'. She traces the divergent ways in which these four artists and writers rallied around the 'art worker' identity, including participating in the Art Workers' Coalition - a short-lived organization founded in 1969 to protest the war and agitate for artists' rights - and the New York Art Strike. By connecting social art history and theories of labor, this book illuminates the artworks and protest actions that were central to this pivotal era in both American art and politics. This is a Best Book of 2009, "Artforum Magazine".

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A daring reassessment of Louise Nevelson, an icon of twentieth-century art whose innovative procedures relate to gendered, classed, and racialized forms of making “Here is a book that is not only a transformative study of a single artist but also a record of the scholar’s own labor—and her devotion.”—Artforum In this radical rethinking of the art of Louise Nevelson (1899–1988), Julia Bryan-Wilson provides a long-overdue critical account of a signature figure in postwar sculpture. A Ukraine-born Jewish immigrant, Nevelson persevered in the male-dominated New York art world. Nonetheless, her careful procedures of construction—in which she assembled found pieces of wood into elaborate structures, usually painted black—have been little studied. Organized around a series of key operations in Nevelson’s own process (dragging, coloring, joining, and facing), the book comprises four slipcased, individually bound volumes that can be read in any order. Both form and content thus echo Nevelson’s own modular sculptures, the gridded boxes of which the artist herself rearranged. Exploring how Nevelson’s making relates to domesticity, racialized matter, gendered labor, and the environment, Bryan-Wilson offers a sustained examination of the social and political implications of Nevelson’s art. The author also approaches Nevelson’s sculptures from her own embodied subjectivity as a queer feminist scholar. She forges an expansive art history that places Nevelson’s assemblages in dialogue with a wide array of marginalized worldmaking and underlines the artist’s proclamation of allegiance to blackness.

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Liza Lou first gained attention in 1996 when her room-sized sculpture Kitchen was shown at the New Museum in New York. Representing five years of individual labour, this groundbreaking work subverted standards of art by introducing glass beads as a fine art material. The project blurred the rigid boundary between fine art and craft, and established Lou s long-standing exploration of materiality, process, and beauty. Working within a craft metier has led the artist to work in a variety of socially engaged settings, from community groups in Los Angeles, to a collective she founded in Durban, South Africa in 2005, to a women s prison in Belm, Brazil, and a bead embroidery collective in Mumbai, India. Over the past 15 years, Lou has focused on a poetic approach to abstraction as a way to highlight the process under-lying her work. In this comprehensive volume that considers the entirety of her singular vision, curators, art historians, and artists offer important perspectives on the breadth of her work.

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Today’s artists have an unprecedented level of choice with regard to materials and methods available to them, yet the processes involved in making artworks are rarely addressed in books or exhibitions on art. Here, Glenn Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson argue that the materials and methods used to make artworks hold the key to artists’ motivations, their attitudes to authorship, uniqueness and the value of objects, the economic and social contexts from which they emerge, and their approach to the perceived opposition between materiality and conceptualism in art. The book’s introduction sets out a history of trends in artistic production and the possible catalysts for the proliferation of production strategies since the mid-twentieth century, followed by nine chapters that explore different methods and media. Detailed examples are interwoven with the discussion, including visuals that reveal the intricacies of each technique or material and its overall effect when presented as an artwork. Artists featured include Ai Weiwei, Ron Arad, Chris Burden, Katharina Fritsch, Isa Genzken, Jeff Koons, Los Carpinteros, Haroon Mirza, Takashi Murakami, Gerhard Richter, Doris Salcedo and Santiago Sierra

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From her early rarely seen Riot Grrrl-influenced fanzines and performances to a career that has produced seminal films, fiction, sculptures, public art, and even a smartphone app, Miranda July has proven adept at articulating the poignancy and humour of the human plight while also achieving enormous acclaim along the way. This chronological retrospective includes July’s performance and video projects, award- winning films, digital multimedia, and written pieces which make clear the multidimensionality of her work. The book includes photography, stills, and archival ephemera and is narrated by friends, collaborators, curators, assistants, and audience members including David Byrne, Spike Jonze, Lena Dunham, Carrie Brownstein, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, as well as July herself. This behind-the-scenes commentary reveals an intimate perspective on the process, struggles, and grit involved in forging one’s own path. What emerges is just how singular her voice is—from a movie narrated by an injured cat to a performance that builds an intentional community; from sculpture that engages the public to an interfaith charity shop in a London department store. July may be impossible to categorise, but the importance of her work and her status as an essential cultural icon with wide-ranging appeal is irrefutable.

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A deep dive into the life and work of sculptor Louise Nevelson recontextualizes her art in light of social movements, travel, and her experiences in dance and theater Known for her monumental wooden wall pieces and outdoor sculptures, Louise Nevelson (1899–1988) was a towering figure in twentieth-century American art. A more nuanced picture of Nevelson emerges in The World Outside: Louise Nevelson at Midcentury. Discussions about Nevelson’s early involvement with modern dance and subsequent immersion in avant-garde theater bring new understandings of her drawings and sculptures. A reframing of her travels to Mexico and Guatemala in the early 1950s demonstrates, for the first time, how colonial archaeology haunted her visual language for decades. Other little-known facets of Nevelson’s life—her interest in folk art, architecture, and period furniture—open up a conversation about the artist’s approach to America’s past material culture. A pioneering examination of Nevelson’s printmaking experiences at Tamarind Lithography Workshop reveals how the artist created alternative modes of viewing through unconventional methods and materials. The book also reconsiders Nevelson’s work in the context of the environmental movement. Additionally, three contemporary artists relate Nevelson’s role in their careers and lives, a local expert describes her roots and relationship to Maine, and the artist’s granddaughter shares thoughts on Nevelson’s spirituality. Distributed for the Amon Carter Museum of American ArtExhibition ScheduleAmon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX (August 27, 2023–January 7, 2024)Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME (February 6–June 9, 2024)

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The first monograph on the influential contemporary Cuban–American interdisciplinary artist and writer Coco Fusco. Tomorrow, I will become an island is the first in-depth study of the performances, videos and social practice of the influential Cuban–American artist Coco Fusco. Featuring contributions by renowned scholars of art history, performance art and Cuban cultural politics as well as an essay by the artist herself, the book offers a comprehensive review of Fusco’s interdisciplinary art practice and her transnational perspective on race, gender and power. For more than three decades, Fusco has been a leader in conversations around the intersection of identity, feminism, culture, and politics in the Americas and beyond. Emerging during the 1980s as a pioneering advocate of multiculturalism in the arts, Fusco utilizes performance, video, exhibition making, archival research and writing to reflect upon the ways that intercultural relations and colonial histories shape the construction of the self and perceptions of cultural difference. Her work has critically examined society from a postcolonial perspective, engaging with debates about cultural politics throughout the Americas, Europe and elsewhere. This expansive approach is highlighted through a broad range of works that address themes including post-revolutionary Cuba, racial stereotypes, feminist politics, animal psychology, ethnographic displays, suppressed colonial records, military interrogation and sex tourism. The book will accompany an international touring retrospective of the artist’s work starting in 2023.

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Photographs have played a crucial role in shaping perceptions of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. In Camera Atomica, art historian John O’Brian explores the intimate relationship between photography and nuclear events to uncover how the camera lens has shaped public perceptions of the atomic age and its anxieties. Bringing together both vintage and contemporary photographs that have recorded and, in certain instances, provided motivation for the production of nuclear events, O’Brian travels through history — from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi in 2011. In this vivid volume, readers will encounter more than 200 images that simultaneously document and raise questions about the contradictory roles of photography during this period. Included are Hiromitso Toyosaki and Shomei Tomatsu’s photographs of hibakusha (individuals exposed to radiation from atomic bombs), David McMillan’s photographs at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, and Sandy Skoglund’s darkly humorous Radioactive Cats, along with photographs by Nancy Burson, Edward Burtynsky, Carol Condé and Karl Beveridge, Kenji Higuchi, Richard Misrach, Weegee, and many others.

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"State of Mind", the lavishly illustrated companion book to the exhibition of the same name, investigates California's vital contributions to Conceptual art - in particular, work that emerged in the late 1960s among scattered groups of young artists. The essays reveal connections between the northern and southern California Conceptual art scenes and argue that Conceptualism's experimental practices and an array of then-new media - performance, site-specific installations, film and video, mail art, and artists' publications - continue to exert an enormous influence on the artists working today.

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A groundbreaking examination of the “double” in modern and contemporary artFrom ancient mythology to contemporary cinema, the motif of the double—which repeats, duplicates, mirrors, inverts, splits, and reenacts—has captured our imaginations, both attracting and repelling us. The Double examines this essential concept through the lens of art, from modernism to contemporary practice—from the paired paintings of Henri Matisse and Arshile Gorky, to the double line works of Piet Mondrian and Marlow Moss, to Eva Hesse’s One More Than One, Lorna Simpson’s Two Necklines, Roni Horn’s Pair Objects, and Rashid Johnson’s The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Emmett). James Meyer’s survey text explores four modes of doubling: Seeing Double through repetition; Reversal, the inversion or mirroring of an image or form; Dilemma, the staging of an absurd or impossible choice; and the Divided and Doubled Self (split and shadowed selves, personae, fraternal doubles, and pairs). Thought-provoking essays by leading scholars Julia Bryan-Wilson, Tom Gunning, W.J.T. Mitchell, Hillel Schwartz, Shawn Michelle Smith, and Andrew Solomon discuss a host of topics, including the ontology and ethics of the double, the double and psychoanalysis, double consciousness, the doppelgänger in silent cinema, and the queer double.Richly illustrated throughout, The Double is a multifaceted exploration of an enduring theme in art, from painting and sculpture to photography, film, video, and performance.Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DCExhibition ScheduleNational Gallery of Art, Washington, DCJuly 10–October 31, 2022

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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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The first comprehensive publication to capture Hayes's unique blend of performance and social engagement which has been at the forefront of questions of feminist history, queer time, and protest culture for over a decadeAmerican artist Sharon Hayes uses photography, film, video, sound, performance, and text to interrogate the intersections between the personal and collective sphere. Her deeply affective and queer approach to history and politics draws particular attention to the language of twentieth-century activism as well as drama, anthropology, and journalism.This book is the first to feature all of Hayes's most significant projects, from the ten-hour performance My Fellow American 1981-1988 to her Monument Lab addressing the absence of monuments to women in Philadelphia.A professor of fine art at the University of Pennsylvania, Hayes’s work has been shown at the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Documenta 12 in Kassel, and the 55th Venice Biennale, as well as in the most prestigious museums around the world. Her re-examination of protest, speech, and history is one of the most powerful reflections of the complexity and the urgency of our times.Sharon Hayes is the latest addition to the acclaimed Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series.

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This volume offers a comprehensive look at the career of Mika Rottenberg (born 1976). Each chapter is devoted to one of the major videos/installations for which Rottenberg has become known, with an abundance of installation views, video stills, planning diagrams and source materials. Additional illumination is provided through texts by Rottenberg herself that accompany each project. The book also includes drawing and photography, significant bodies of work by Rottenberg not previously explored in book form. Also included is a major new text by award-winning poet, novelist, humorist and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum, as well as texts on the artist by Rose Art Museum director Christopher Bedford, and author and theorist Julia Bryan-Wilson. The book also contains a thorough biography and bibliography of the artist to date, making this a comprehensive resource on Rottenberg.

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Delegation is the first comprehensive monograph by Apsáalooke/Crow artist Wendy Red Star, whose photography recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective. Red Star centers Native American life and material culture through imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations. Whether referencing nineteenth-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, she constantly questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation. Including a dynamic array of Red Star’s lens-based works from 2006 to the present, and a range of essays, stories, and poems, Delegation is a spirited testament to an influential artist’s singular vision. Copublished by Aperture and Documentary Arts

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