Published with Forge Project, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Mackenzie Art Gallery, and SITE Santa Fe.

Native artists are at the vanguard of performance art practices and discourse, using humor as a strategy for cultural critique and reflection, parsing the relationships between objecthood and agency. This reader centers performance and theater as origin points for the development of contemporary art by Native American, First Nations, Métis, Inuit and Alaska Native artists. Song, dance and music are also posited as a basis for collectivity and resistance and a means to speak to a time when Native traditional ceremony and public gatherings . . . .go to book page >>

Published with Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.

Since the 1980s, Canadian artist Stan Douglas (born 1960) has created films, installations, photographs and other multidisciplinary projects that address moments of rupture where history could go one way or the other. Across formats, his images recall things that haunt: unresolved moments, political tumult and violent turning points; plots that retain a hold, however imperceptible, on the present. His work operates within the genres of cinema, photography and theater to present a point of view that is always staged. Douglas' rigorous explorations of these charged histories show us how to think historically in the present and frame contemporary . . . .go to book page >>

Published with Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought.

From the 1970s until her death, Louisiana-born artist Tina Girouard (1946–2020) was a dedicated experimental artist, collaborator and art worker. Alongside her individual creative endeavors, she nurtured and was a part of numerous influential artist communities and organizations in New York, Louisiana and Haiti, including the Anarchitecture Group, the interdisciplinary cohort of 112 Greene Street, the restaurant Food, the Kitchen, P.S. 1 and the Festival International de la Louisiane. Her acts of upkeep, including domestic labor traditionally associated with women's work, blurred the boundaries between artmaking and what she called life-making. Sign-In is . . . .go to book page >>

The acclaimed American visual artist and writer Carmen Winant (born 1983) is best known for her multimedia works that center found imagery to explore representations of women. Her newest book, How We Practice, is part critical writing and part experimental essay, while also a self-portrait of Winant’s life in long-distance competitive running.
The book asks a single, knotty question: What is practice ? Winant attempts to answer this by posing others, such as: What is the difference between going to a practice and having one? Are practice and theory dialectical? Does practice ever end?
This project works to define the often contradictory . . . .go to book page >>

In 2012, Leslie Hewitt (born 1977) and Bradford Young (born 1977) produced Untitled (Structures), a series of silent, nonlinear film vignettes that grew out of an invitation from the Menil Collection, Houston, to consider the museum’s civil rights–era photograph collection. The invitation, which inspired years of research into the aftereffects of the Great Migration, the civil rights movement and the ongoing struggle for human rights, prompted Hewitt and Young to shoot new work in Chicago, Memphis and Arkansas in an array of important sites, found and not found in the museum’s photographs. Exposing the tensions between still photography and moving . . . .go to book page >>

Pioneering AIDS activist, art critic, educator and curator Douglas Crimp is known for the fluidity and acuity of his writing on an array of passions. His book AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (1987) deconstructed the art world’s complicated and mostly disheartening responses to the AIDS crisis; On the Museum’s Ruins (1993) explored postmodernist art practices in relation to the politics of institutions; and Before Pictures (2016), a brilliant combination of memoir and criticism, chronicled Crimp’s first decade in 1970s New York.

This new book collects the critic’s incisive pieces on dance (a lifelong interest) and dance on film, which, according to Artforum, . . . .go to book page >>