Women's History Month Books

Lauded internationally for her narrative quilts and her colorful paintings of African American life, New York artist Faith Ringgold has explored and sabotaged perceptions of identity and gender inequality through her experiences in the feminist and civil rights movements.
This catalog is published for her international traveling exhibition organized by the Serpentine, London, which traveled to Bildmuseet, Sweden, in 2020 and opens at Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland, in 2021. Focusing on several series of paintings, story quilts and political posters from the 1960s to today, the book includes two texts by Michele Wallace that interweave Ringgold’s biography with the chronology of works in the exhibition. In an extensive interview, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ringgold discuss her life in Harlem, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, her inspirations and her passion for storytelling and exercising her freedom of speech. The book also documents the expanded scope of the exhibition at the Glenstone Museum, which includes key examples of Ringgold’s soft sculpture and rare experiments with pure abstraction.
Faith Ringgold (born 1930) is a painter, mixed-media sculptor, performance artist, teacher and writer best known for her narrative quilts. As an avid civil rights and gender equality activist, Ringgold’s work is highly political; in 2020, the New York Timesdescribed her as an artist “who has confronted race relations in this country from every angle, led protests to diversify museums decades ago, and even went to jail for an exhibition she organized.” She has had solo shows at Spectrum Gallery (1967), Studio Museum in Harlem (1984) and, most recently, a five-decade retrospective at the Serpentine (2019). Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art, among others.

The first and only monograph to give a comprehensive examination of acclaimed American artist Sarah Sze's painting practice

Since the late 1990s, Sarah Sze has developed a signature visual language that challenges the static nature of art with a dynamic body of work spanning sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, video and installation.

In recent years, Sze has returned to painting, the medium in which she was first trained. Comprising constellations of painted and collaged elements, her expansive abstract landscapes explore a visual world that is constantly evolving, degrading, and generating new ways of seeing. Her paintings are highly sought-after and are held in the permanent collections of prominent institutions and museums worldwide.

The book includes two essays by Mark Godfrey and Tina Pang that explore Sze's influences and her working process, plus an interview between the artist and Madeleine Grynsztejn, that expands on the theoretical underpinnings of her painting practice.

With each copy numbered and hand signed by the artist, this exquisitely illustrated luxury volume, packaged in a cloth-wrapped slipcase, was created in close collaboration with Sze, and is the first monograph devoted to her painting practice.

Specifications:

• Format: Hardback
• Size: 308 × 292 mm (12 1/8 × 11 1/2 in)
• Pages: 396 pp
• Illustrations: 300 illustrations
• ISBN: 9781838665623

The second installment in an epic and authoritative seven-volume Hilma af Klint catalogue raisonné the pioneering abstractionist's beloved The Paintings for the Templeseries

 Between 1906 and 1915, Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) created 193 paintings that she would title The Paintings for the Temple. Colorful, mostly abstract, with biomorphic imagery, these works expressed af Klint's mediumistic vision of spiritual reality, which she hoped would ultimately be installed in a round temple for true spiritual comprehension and enlightenment. Since the internationally acclaimed Guggenheim exhibition of 2018-19, these works have come to number among her most popular, defining and beloved.

 This handsomely produced clothbound volume collects these paintings in the second of a projected and collectible seven-volume catalogue raisonné that will present the entirety of af Klint's work in its dazzling totality for the first time. Produced in cooperation with the Axel and Margaret Ax: son Johnson Foundation, it features introductions by Daniel Birnbaum, former head of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, and architect of the grand af Klint exhibitions between 2013 and 2019, and Kurt Almqvist, President of the Axel and Margaret Ax: son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit.

American visual artist Marilyn Minter (born 1948) has long cultivated a space between the classical and the commercial for her photorealistic paintings and visceral photographs. Minter’s art is characterized by an emphasis on natural textures in all of their extremes—whether that of the turquoise eyeshadow on a young woman’s face or the glittery grit on the underside of a high-heeled shoe. This monograph dedicated to her recent works presents her 2009 film Green Pink Caviar and a dozen monumental paintings as well as the processes behind such works.
In her most recent painting series, Minter is inspired by classical representations of the female bather as an artistic subject from ancient Greece to early Impressionism. She offers a contemporary version of this figure: her female subjects relax and wash themselves in modern showers, their faces and bodies partially obscured by a film of condensation on the glass separating them from the viewer. In some images the women appear as a mere blur behind the glass; in others, the rivulets of water that course down the glass plane reveal enough to identify a face or body part. The effect is a sensuousness that defies the male voyeuristic gaze seen throughout art history.

Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, a series of 69 black-and-white photographs created between 1977 and 1980, is widely seen as one of the most original and influential achievements in recent art. Witty, provocative and searching, this lively catalogue of female roles inspired by the movies crystallizes widespread concerns in our culture, examining the ways we shape our personal identities and the role of the mass media in our lives. Sherman began making these pictures in 1977 when she was 23 years old. The first six were an experiment: fan-magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blond actress, played by Sherman herself. The photographs look like movie stills--or perhaps publicity pix--purporting to catch the blond bombshell in unguarded moments at home. The protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen and lounging in the bedroom. Onto something big, Sherman tried other characters in other roles: the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway, the luscious librarian, the domesticated sex kitten, the hot-blooded woman of the people, the ice-cold sophisticate and a can-can line of other stereotypes. She eventually completed the series in 1980. She stopped, she has explained, when she ran out of clichés.

Other artists had drawn upon popular culture but Sherman's strategy was new. For her the pop-culture image was not a subject (as it had been for Walker Evans) or raw material (as it had been for Andy Warhol) but a whole artistic vocabulary, ready-made. Her film stills look and function just like the real ones--those 8 x 10 glossies designed to lure us into a drama we find all the more compelling because we know it isn't real. In the Untitled Film Stillsthere are no Cleopatras, no ladies on trains, no women of a certain age. There are, of course, no men. The 69 solitary heroines map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that took hold in postwar America--the period of Sherman's youth and the starting point for our contemporary mythology. In finding a form for her own sensibility, Sherman touched a sensitive nerve in the culture at large. Although most of the characters are invented, we sense right away that we already know them. That twinge of instant recognition is what makes the series tick and it arises from Cindy Sherman's uncanny poise. There is no wink at the viewer, no open irony, no camp.

In 1995, The Museum of Modern Art purchased the series from the artist, preserving the work in its entirety. This book marks the first time that the complete series will be published as a unified work, with Sherman herself arranging the pictures in sequence.

Cindy Sherman is a ground-breaking American photographer, born in 1954. She began her "Film Stills" series at the age of 23, gaining early recognition, and has followed it with remarkable experiments in color photography. Her art has won her wide recognition and praise, and been collected and exhibited by major museums throughout the world since 1980. A major retrospective exhibition of her work was shown at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Dallas Museum of Art. Sherman is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. She is represented by Metro Pictures gallery in New York.

A vase is never merely a container. As Georges Braque once said, "the vase gives form to emptiness": ever since the earliest human civilizations, this object has had a purpose that is greater than its function and it perennially invites experimentation in shape and expression.
The 1,000 vases presented in this book offer an eloquent demonstration of this fact. They come from 35 different countries and more than 80% of them have been made by women or independent designers and artists born between 1988 and 1993—each of whom was invited to create a free interpretation of the same archetype, resulting in a spectrum of the infinite creativity inspired by the many possible versions of a single item. Made from an enormous range of materials (ceramic, terracotta, porcelain, metal, wood and glass, as well as natural fibers, industrial waste and recycled plastic), using techniques both ancient and ultramodern (3D printing) and belonging to different categories (from amphora to jar, jug to carafe), almost all sit on the borderline that simultaneously unites and separates art, design and craftsmanship.
Designers include: Yuta Segawa, Zhu Ohmu, Yonobi Studio, Angelika Kogevina, Anbar El Mokri, Andrea Maestri, Angelina Guez, Anna Jukova, Ariaana de Luca, Carey Lowell, Coco Brun, E Jockel, Gabriela Flores and many more.

Niki de Saint Phalle’s sensual Nanas—colorful, buxom female figures—laid the foundation for her international success beyond the art world. But the self-taught artist’s creative spectrum is much broader, and her unconventional oeuvre—ranging from painting and drawing to assemblages, performances, theater, film and architecture—is more subversive and critical of society than is widely assumed. Based in part on her efforts to process her own experiences, Saint Phalle addressed social and political issues, critically questioning institutions and role models in ways that are as relevant today as they have ever been. This publication sheds new light on the artist’s exceptional personality and uncovers an oeuvre that is always surprising and eccentric, emotional, dark and brutal, humorous and cheerful.

Hilma af Klint: Artist, Researcher, Medium investigates, from a variety of perspectives, the question of how this trailblazing abstract artist linked her painting to a higher consciousness. Essays by art historians, a quantum physicist, a spiritual teacher and an historian of theosophy and esotericism, among others, provide insights into a world beyond the visible which fascinates us now even more than ever.

This volume, the third in the artist’s first seven-part catalogue raisonné, contains the sketches and preparatory work af Klint made in anticipation of The Paintings for the Temple. af Klint traveled with these sketchbooks so as to be able to show her friends her work in a more accessible format.

Sonia Delaunay was a true pioneer of modernist abstraction; breaking with the figurative vocabulary that subordinated color to subject matter, she placed dynamic color interaction at the core of her vision, whether expressed through painting, book illustration or costume and textile design. Drawing inspiration from both traditional Russian crafts and the modern frenetic metropolis, Delaunay’s work reflects the drastic changes ushered in by industrialization. Through her polyvalent practice, Delaunay helped construct the new modern woman that she herself embodied: equal parts avant-gardist, creative entrepreneur and businesswoman.
This richly illustrated catalog showcases the range of Delaunay’s work as it unfolded over 60 years, from abstract paintings and works on paper to textile design, garments, fashion photography, books and carpets—even a brightly colored sports car.

New research and cultural context on the life and art of Hilma af Klint

 Hilma af Klint: Visionary explores the social and spiritual movements that appeared at the turn of the 20th century, inspiring the pioneers of modernism and abstract art: Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich and af Klint. What was the zeitgeist that inspired such an eruption in abstract art? What were the conditions that created Hilma af Klint? Academics and experts Julia Voss, Tracey Bashkoff, Isaac Lubelsky, Linda Dalrymple Henderson and Marco Pasi each take a different approach. Voss analyzes af Klint's biography, pinpointing five important events in her life; Bashkoff presents her connection to Hilla Rebay and her plans for the building of a temple; Lubelsky traces the origins of theosophy in New York; Henderson examines the occult and science; and Pasi considers esotericism's changing role in culture.

The long-awaited English translation of a pioneering account of af Klint's oeuvre

 For the first time since its original publication in 1989, Åke Fant's pioneering account of Hilma af Klint's life and career is available to read in English. Following her training at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and 20 subsequent years of painting, Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) began working with an abstract visual language in 1906. She then dedicated the rest of her life to her magnum opus, a series of large-scale abstract paintings intended to be exhibited as part of an immense spiritual temple. Af Klint drew upon contemporaneous occult sources to develop her work, such as Spiritualism and the writings of Theosophical writers Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, as well as Rudolf Steiner, who claimed to be clairvoyant. This edition supplements Åke Fant's original text and curator Lars Nittve's foreword with a new preface by Kurt Almqvist (President, Axel and Margaret Ax: son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit). An updated timeline, full-color reproductions of af Klint's art and a beautiful cloth binding further emphasize the momentousness of Fant's work, which remains vital even in the light of subsequent research, at a time when interest in Hilma af Klint and her work has never been greater.

Ringgold's most formative and influential political works are gathered in this beautifully designed clothbound volume

Alongside reproductions of key works made between 1967 and 1981, Faith Ringgold: Politics / Power provides an overview of Ringgold's seminal artistic and activist work, and its historical context during these years, including accounts by the artist herself.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Ringgold, a dedicated and impassioned civil rights advocate, established her voice as a feminist and within the Black Arts Movement. Her influential work expressed her in-depth knowledge of art history and contemporary art, as well as her activism. Spanning mediums such as painting, cut paper works, posters, collage and textile art, the works presented in this publication foreground the artist's explicitly political pieces, for which she deployed new material and formal processes, and developed a radical aesthetics and vocabulary.
Organized chronologically, the book allows readers to retrace the artist's foundational creative approaches to contemporaneous social, political and artistic questions. It includes illustrations of individual artworks together with previously unpublished work and archival materials.

Australian-born, California-based sister artists Margaret and Christine Wertheim draw on a unique fusion of mathematics, marine biology, traditional handicraft methods and collective art practice to create large-scale coralline landscapes both beautiful and blighted. Responding to anthropogenic crisis, their soft sculptures and wall-mounted reliefs simulate living reefs using crochet techniques to mimic in yarn the curling, crenelated forms of actual marine organisms. Initiated in 2005, the Crochet Coral Reefproject has been exhibited at the 58th Venice Biennale, Helsinki Biennial, Andy Warhol Museum, The Smithsonian Institution and other international venues. In addition to their own reefs, the Wertheims have collaborated with communities in 50 cities and countries to create local Satellite Reefs, to which more than 20,000 people have contributed, constituting one of the largest, longest running participatory art happenings on the planet.

This publication accompanies a museum-wide retrospective at Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, Germany, which gathers the Wertheims' work over the past 17 years alongside a new Baden-Baden Satellite Reef, the largest to date, encompassing over 40,000 individual coral pieces. With commissioned essays about the scientific, social, environmental, mathematical and communal dimensions of the project, the book provides a critical in-depth look at a stunning example of the power of art and community in the face of climate change. Collaborative, figurative, material, conceptual, artistic, feminist and playful, the Wertheims' Crochet Coral Reef alerts us to the reality that life on Earth is nothing if not entangled.

A Great Turn in the Possible follows Weems’s muses, as they perform and re-enact life itself, as they occupy public space, as they challenge history and its scenarios, as they embrace the future and its conditions of possibility, as the artist seeks to generate a space for a new socio-political and cultural conversation, praising the efforts of the precursors, widening the path for the successors, and most of all, aspiring to a communal reimagination of a shared future.

This volume features new watercolor works on paper and assemblages by Betye Saar (born 1926) that incorporate the artist’s personal collection of Black dolls. These watercolors showcase the artist’s experimentation with vivid color and layered techniques, and her new interest in flat shapes. While Saar has previously used painting in her mixed-media collages, this is the first publication to focus on her watercolor works on paper.

Since the mid-1970s, Barbara Kruger (born 1945) has been interrogating the hierarchies of power and control in works that often combine visual and written language. In her singular graphic style, Kruger probes aspects of identity, desire and consumerism that are embedded in our everyday lives. This volume traces her continuously evolving practice to reveal how she adapts her work in accordance with the moment, site and context. The book features a range of striking images—from her analogue paste-ups of the 1980s to digital productions of the last two decades, including new works produced on the occasion of the exhibition. Also featured are singular works in vinyl, her large-scale room wraps, multichannel videos, site-specific installations and commissioned works.

This is a reenvisioned, fresh look at Agnes Martin, the enigmatic, influential, highly independent painter whose life and work have proved inspirational to audiences across many fields and disciplines. Accompanied by color reproductions of works by Martin, Agnes Martin: Independence of Mind presents a series of essays by living artists and writers commissioned especially for this volume. Contributors include artists Martha Tuttle, Jennie C. Jones and James Sterling Pitt, as well as authors Teju Cole, Bethany Hindmarsh, Darcey Steinke and Jenn Shapland. These contributors write about Martin’s influence on their creative lives and work, and offer new interpretations that defy stereotyped notions about Martin's life. Longer essays are mixed with shorter, more anecdotal texts by a wider selection of artists.

This groundbreaking survey provides an in-depth account of Martin's artistic career, from lesser-known early experimental works through her striped and gridded grey paintings and use of color in various formats, to a group of her final pieces that reintroduce bold forms. A selection of drawings and watercolors and Martin's own writing are also included.

Following her best-selling TASCHEN monograph, Linda McCartney’s Polaroid Diaries brings together highlights from her vast archive. Taken from the early 1970s until the mid-1990s, the portraits, still lifes, landscapes and interior compositions affirm her bold eye for pattern, color, or simply an elegant fall of light. Through these candid instant pictures, we discover an intimate testimony to McCartney as an experimental artist and photographer.

Accompanying the first retrospective of Taeuber-Arp’s work in the United States in 40 years, Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction is a comprehensive survey of this multifaceted abstract artist’s innovative and wide-ranging body of work. Her background in the applied arts and dance, her involvement in the Zurich Dada movement and her projects for architectural spaces were essential to her development of a uniquely versatile and vibrant abstract vocabulary. Through her artistic output and various professional alliances, Taeuber-Arp consistently challenged the historically constructed boundaries separating fine art from craft and design.

Annie Leibovitz began working as a photographer in the early 1970s, which was a volatile and frenetic time in America. The lines had yet to be drawn between journalists and the people they covered, so she had access that would now be considered unusual. This unique collection provides a vivid account both of Leibovitz’s development as an artist and of a pivotal era.

Hardcover, 8.5” x 10.6”, 182 pages

Agnes Martin The Distillation of Color

A Chicago Tribune 2020 holiday gift guide pick

In Tar Beach, photographer and Little Italy resident Susan Meiselas (born 1948) brings together found pictures that were made, kept and gathered by various families who handed them down from 1940 to the early 1970s. Reflections from the community offer perspectives of multiple generations, as local author Angel Marinaccio says: “If you had an accomplishment—communion, confirmation, wedding, graduation or birthday, you‘d dress up in your best outfit and go to the rooftop to take pictures and celebrate with your family.”

The introduction to Tar Beach is written by renowned filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who grew up on the streets portrayed in this collection. He writes: “The roof was our escape hatch and it was our sanctuary. The endless crowds, the filth and the grime, the constant noise, the chaos, the claustrophobia, the non-stop motion of everything … you would walk up that flight of stairs, open the door, and you were above it all. You could breathe. You could dream. You could be.”

Meiselas, along with two of her neighbors, Angel Marinaccio and Virginia Bynum, collected and curated these vernacular photographs and memories to convey the feeling of this special place and time in the daily lives of Italian immigrants as they made their way to becoming part of American culture.

A Wall Street Journal 2021 holiday gift guide pick

American photographer Ruth Orkin earned acclaim for her work as she combined her love for travel and her experience growing up in Hollywood into a practice that captured the cinematic elements of everyday life and revealed the humanity of the upper crust.
The atmospheric photographs taken by Orkin in cities such as Florence, New York and London still shape the image of these metropolises today: her street scenes consistently offer penetrating insights into the personality of her human subjects as well as their environments. This unique quality also manifests in her celebrity portraits of figures such as Albert Einstein, Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams and Lauren Bacall: though clearly posed, these photographs offer a certain level of candor that allows the viewer to connect with the sitters on a human level. She also pursued filmmaking with two successful features, Little Fugitive (1953) and Lovers and Lollipops (1955)—and she did all of this as one of the few female practitioners in the field.
Published on the occasion of what would have been the photographer’s 100th birthday, this illustrated volume celebrates Orkin’s life and career with an equally extensive and fascinating overview of this exceptional artist's oeuvre.
Ruth Orkin (1921–85) studied at Los Angeles City College. Working as a freelance photographer, she published in magazines such as Life, Look and Ladies' Home Journal. She was awarded an Oscar for the film Little Fugitive, which she made with her husband in 1953. A World Through My Window(1978) is her best-known book of photographs.

A New York Times critics' pick | Best Art Books 2021

During the last 15 years of her life, Nellie Mae Rowe lived on Paces Ferry Road, a major thoroughfare in Vinings, Georgia, and welcomed visitors to her “Playhouse,” which she decorated with found-object installations, handmade dolls, chewing-gum sculptures and hundreds of drawings. Rowe created her first works as a child in rural Fayetteville, Georgia, but only found the time and space to reclaim her artistic practice in the late 1960s, following the deaths of her second husband and her longtime employer.

This book offers an unprecedented view of how Rowe cultivated her drawing practice late in life, starting with colorful and at times simple sketches on found materials and moving toward her most celebrated, highly complex compositions on paper. Through photographs and reconstructions of her Playhouse created for an experimental documentary on her life, this publication is also the first to juxtapose her drawings with her art environment.

Nellie Mae Rowe (1900–82) grew up in rural Fayetteville, Georgia. When her Playhouse became an Atlanta attraction, she began to exhibit her art outside of her home, beginning with Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art, 1770–1976, a traveling exhibition that brought attention to several Southern self-taught artists, including Rowe and Howard Finster. In 1982, the year she died, Rowe’s work received a new level of acclaim, as she was honored in a solo exhibition at Spelman College and included as one of three women artists in the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s landmark exhibition .

Proceeds from sale of this book have been donated to 826NYC  who offer highly individualized creative writing instruction for over 4,000 young New Yorkers every year. Free programs throughout NYC empower young authors and develop crucial skills they need to thrive in the classroom and beyond.

Rerun Era is a captivating, propulsive memoir about growing up in the environmentally and economically devastated rural flatlands of Oklahoma, the entwinement of personal memory and the memory of popular culture, and a family thrown into trial by lost love and illness that found common ground in the television.

Told from the magnetic perspective of Joanna Howard’s past selves from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Rerun Era circles the fascinating psyches of her part-Cherokee teamster truck-driving father, her women’s libber mother, and her skateboarder, rodeo bull-riding teenage brother. Illuminating to our rural American present, and the way popular culture portrays the rural American past, Rerun Era perfectly captures the irony of growing up in rural America in the midst of nationalistic fantasies of small town local sheriffs and saloon girls, which manifested the urban cowboy, wild west theme-parks, and The Beverly Hillbillies.

Written in stunning, lyric prose, Rerun Era gives humanity, perspective, humor, and depth to an often invisible part of this country, and firmly establishes Howard as an urgent and necessary voice in American letters.

Praise for Rerun Era