CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/14/2023

Highly anticipated 'Cynthia Carlson: Sixty Years' is NEW from D.A.P. Publishing

Featured spreads are from new release Cynthia Carlson: Sixty Years, the first comprehensive overview on the fearlessly experimental (and openly humorous) artist most associated with the 1970s Pattern & Decoration movement, but whose work goes way beyond. From braided and woven early paintings to paintings and “wallpaper installations” made with cake-making tools, to a life-sized gingerbread house sculpture, she has refused to be labeled or held to any one style or idea. For example, essayist Anna Katz writes, “By her own admission, Carlson had not set out to make politically feminist work, or even political work. Carlson has averred that ‘issues’ such as ‘feminism and a return to craft’ were misapplied to her work. She’s insisted that her overarching focus was to ‘mess up’ and ‘deliberately confuse’ previously separated categories of decoration and art, yet also did not deny that extruding flowers and curlicues, repetitively, from no more feminized a tool than a cake pastry piping bag to simulate nothing other than wallpaper invariably invites interpretation along feminist lines.”