Phenomenal

by Robin Lee Clark, Michael Auping, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego

2011 · Univ of California Press

“The Light and Space movement—of great importance to my development as a young artist—is far more than a valid art historical reference. It translates matters of psychology, phenomenology, criticality, emotional investment, and now-ness into an immaterial language that is both subversive and compelling. Light and Space is as contemporary as ever.” —Olafur Eliasson

Amalia Mesa-Bains

by Laura E. Pérez, Maria Esther Fernández

2023 · Univ of California Press

"Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory is the first retrospective exhibition of the work of longtime Bay Area artist Mesa-Bains. Presenting work from the entirety of her career for the first time, this exhibition, which features nearly 60 works in a range of media, including fourteen major installations, celebrates Mesa-Bains's important contributions to the field of contemporary art locally and globally. For over forty-five years, Mesa-Bains has worked to bring Chicana art into the broader American field of contemporary art through innovations of sacred forms such as altares (home altars), ofrendas (offerings to the dead), descansos (roadside resting places), and capillas (home yard shrines). She expanded her installations from domestic spaces to include laboratories, library forms, gardens, and landscapes, focusing attention on the politics of space to highlight colonial erasure of the preexisting and still-surviving cultural differences in colonized Indigenous and Mexican American communities. Many of these works offer a feminist perspective on the domestic life of immigrant and Mexican American women across different historical periods--most notably the four-part installation series Venus Envy, which was created over multiple decades and will be displayed in its entirety for the first time at BAMPFA. Standing at the juncture of cultural diversity, environmentally centered spirituality culled from ancestral non-Western worldviews, and intersectional feminism, Mesa-Bains has been heralded as one of the most prominent voices in feminist Chicanx art of her generation."--

Robert Smithson

by Robert Smithson, Eugenie Tsai, Cornelia H. Butler, Thomas E. Crow, Alexander Alberro, Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, Calif.), Moira Roth, Whitney Museum of American Art

2004 · Univ of California Press

This catalogue is "the" major study of Smithson (1938-1973), who is most renowned as an early earthworks artist and creator of Spiral Jetty, a 1,500-foot rock coil dramatically situated in the Great Salt Lake.

Judy Pfaff

by Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art

2007 · SUNY Press

Explores the recent print work of Judy Pfaff, one of America’s leading sculptors, printmakers, installation artists, and set designers.

Artists Respond

by Melissa Ho, Thomas Crow, Erica Levin, Mignon Nixon, Martha Rosler, Smithsonian American Art Museum

2019 · Princeton University Press

"Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, March 15, 2019 to August 18, 2019."

Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer

by Makeda Best, Stephanie Sparling Williams

2023 · Princeton University Press

« Betye Saar (b. 1926) is an artist whose assemblages tell visual stories and convey political messages. A figure of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, she works with found objects, many of which she gathers on her travels to explore themes like symbolic mysticism, feminism, racism, and Eurocentric chauvinism. Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer examines Saar's creative process, her trips around the world, and the ways in which her artworks engage with global histories of travel and forced migration. This illustrated book draws on interviews with Saar and the companions who accompanied her in her travels across four continents over several decades. Essays contextualize Saar's journeys within her broader life and career, as well as how her practice fits into broader traditions, such as scrapbooking, in African American visual culture. In addition to providing this context, this book explores how Saar's assemblage practice both echoes and provides a counterpoint to the collecting practices of Gilded Age American art collectors like Isabella Stewart Gardner. Featuring previously unpublished material, including almost thirty travel sketchbooks and two dozen finished assemblages, Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer offers a timely social history of the impact of travel on the African American experience. »--Quatrième de couverture