In the two related bodies of work that form this volume’s centerpiece, New York–based photographer Zoe Leonard (born 1961) poses fundamental questions about the medium of photography and the nature of sight. In a series of large-scale installations, the artist employed the principle of the camera obscura, pairing it with gelatin silver photographs of the sun. The image in Leonard’s room-size camera obscuras is immersive and continuous, shifting constantly in response to the fleeting light of the outside world and unraveling in the surrounding space to come into its full vibrancy.
Leonard’s camera obscuras have been sited in cities in Europe . . . .go to book page >>

This first comprehensive monograph on the work of China-born, Netherlands-based artist Evelyn Taocheng Wang (born 1981) unfolds along the path of her biography—beginning with her early studies in Chengdu, China, her arrival in 2008 in Berlin and Bleckede, Germany, from China, followed by a move to Frankfurt am Main to attend the Städel Academy as a guest student; time in Amsterdam at De Ateliers, Rotterdam; and, most recently, stays in Germany.
Wang’s multimedia art—from painting to video—synthesizes themes of class, gender, fashion, cultural identity, art history and popular culture. The publication traces how the artist’s personal life experiences and encounters during . . . .go to book page >>

Edited by artist, curator, writer and editor Julie Ault, Hidden in Plain Sight brings together essential writings by the trailblazing art historian and curator Karin Higa (1966–2013). The selected essays, written between 1992 and 2011, focus on the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans in Western US states to specially constructed concentration camps, the artistic production and communities that took root within them and the individual and collective narratives of Asian American artists amid discriminatory policies, restricted political agency and racism. While exploring issues of identity and immigration, Higa recuperates significant artists and oeuvres from historical neglect and engages contemporary artists . . . .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 >>

In early March 2020, on the cusp of the COVID-19 shutdown, an audience gathered to witness a reinvention of Allan Kaprow’s happening, Chicken, by Philadelphia-based artist Alex Da Corte (born 1980). Performed at the site of Kaprow’s original—the Gershman Y at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia—Da Corte’s first live performance reimagined Kaprow’s chaotic event, which had been orchestrated in 1962 under the auspices of the first Pop art exhibition on the East Coast. While the focus of activity for the performers of Kaprow’s Chicken involved the hawking of live and boiled chickens and their eggs, Da Corte’s performers . . . .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 >>