We Wanted a Revolution by
A landmark exhibition on display at the Brooklyn Museum from April 21 through September 17, 2017, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 examines the political, social, cultural, and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second-wave feminism. It showcases the work of black women artists such as Emma Amos, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O'Grady, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, and Betye Saar, making it one of the first major exhibitions to highlight the voices and experiences of women of color. In so doing, it reorients conversations around race, feminism, political action, art production, and art history in this significant historical period. The accompanying Sourcebook republishes an array of rare and little-known documents from the period by artists, writers, cultural critics, and art historians such as Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, bell hooks, Lucy R. Lippard, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Lowery Stokes Sims, Alice Walker, and Michelle Wallace. These documents include articles, manifestos, and letters from significant publications as well as interviews, some of which are reproduced in facsimile form. The Sourcebook also includes archival materials, rare ephemera, and an art-historical overview essay. Helping readers to move beyond standard narratives of art history and feminism, this volume will ignite further scholarship while showing the true breadth and diversity of black women's engagement with art, the art world, and politics from the 1960s to the 1980s. We Wanted a Revolution will also be on display at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles from October 13, 2017 through January 14, 2018; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York from February 17, 2018 through May 27, 2018; and at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston from June 26, 2018 through September 30, 2018. Published by the Brooklyn Museum and distributed by Duke University Press
Seven Days in the Art World by
The art market has been booming. Museum attendance is surging. More people than ever call themselves artists. Contemporary art has become a mass entertainment, a luxury good, a job description, and, for some, a kind of alternative religion.In a series of beautifully paced narratives, Sarah Thornton investigates the drama of a Christie's auction, the workings in Takashi Murakami's studios, the elite at the Basel Art Fair, the eccentricities of Artforum magazine, the competition behind an important art prize, life in a notorious art-school seminar, and the wonderland of the Venice Biennale. She reveals the new dynamics of creativity, taste, status, money, and the search for meaning in life. A judicious and juicy account of the institutions that have the power to shape art history, based on hundreds of interviews with high-profile players, Thornton's entertaining ethnography will change the way you look at contemporary culture.
The Heart of the Question: The Writings and Paintings of Howardena Pindell by 
Howardena Pindell: What Remains to be Seen by
This retrospective volume celebrates five decades of Howardena Pindell's art, including works on paper, collage, photography, film, and video. Born in middle-class Philadelphia in the 1940s, Howardena Pindell came of age during the Civil Rights movement. As an African-American woman artist, making her way in the world provided Pindell with source material to inspire her work. This book examines every facet of Pindell's impressive career to date. Since the 1960s, she has used materials such as glitter, talcum powder, and perfume to stretch the boundaries of traditional canvas painting. She has also infused her work with traces of her labor, such as obsessively affixing dots of pigment and circles made with an ordinary hole punch tool. After a car crash in 1979 left her with short-term amnesia, Pindell's work looked beyond the painting studio to explore a wide range of subjects, including the personal and diaristic as well as the social and political. This monograph also highlights Pindell's work with photography, film, and performance. Excerpts from the artist's writing, in particular her critique of the art world and her responses to feminism and racial politics, provide prescient commentary in light of conversations around equality and inclusion today. Published in association with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era by
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, in response to the political turbulence generated by the Vietnam War, an important group of American artists and critics sought to expand the definition of creative labor by identifying themselves as "art workers." In the first book to examine this movement, Julia Bryan-Wilson shows how a polemical redefinition of artistic labor played a central role in minimalism, process art, feminist criticism, and conceptualism. In her close examination of four seminal figures of the period--American artists Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and Hans Haacke, and art critic Lucy Lippard--Bryan-Wilson frames an engrossing new argument around the double entendre that "art works." She traces the divergent ways in which these four artists and writers rallied around the "art worker" identity, including participating in the Art Workers' Coalition--a short-lived organization founded in 1969 to protest the war and agitate for artists' rights--and the New York Art Strike. By connecting social art history and theories of labor, this book illuminates the artworks and protest actions that were central to this pivotal era in both American art and politics. A Best Book of 2009, Artforum Magazine
Curatorial Activism by
Only 16% of the most recent Venice Biennale artists were female. A mere 14% of MoMA's 2016 display is by non-white artists. Only one third of artists represented by US galleries are female, but over two-thirds of the enrolment in art and art-history programmes is young women... The fight for gender and race equality in the art world is far from over. Indeed, the more closely one examines the numbers, the more glaring it becomes that white, Euro-American, heterosexual, privileged and, above all, male artists continue to dominate the art world. Arranged in thematic sections focusing on feminism, race and sexuality, this book examines and illustrates pioneering examples of exhibitions that have broken down boundaries and demonstrated that new approaches are possible, from Nochlin's 'Women Artists' at the LACMA in the mid-1970s to Martin's 'Carambolages' in 2016 at the Grand Palais in Paris. By exposing both the disparities and inclusive solutions, the author addresses the urgent need in the contemporary art world for curatorial strategies that provide alternatives to exclusionary models of collecting and display. In so doing, she provides an invaluable source of information for current thinkers and, in a world dominated by visual culture, a vital source of inspiration for today's ever-expanding new generation of curators.
Culture Jamming by
A collaboration of political activism and participatory culture seeking to upend consumer capitalism, including interviews with The Yes Men, The Guerrilla Girls, among others. Coined in the 1980s, "culture jamming" refers to an array of tactics deployed by activists to critique, subvert, and otherwise "jam" the workings of consumer culture. Ranging from media hoaxes and advertising parodies to flash mobs and street art, these actions seek to interrupt the flow of dominant, capitalistic messages that permeate our daily lives. Employed by Occupy Wall Street protesters and the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot alike, culture jamming scrambles the signal, injects the unexpected, and spurs audiences to think critically and challenge the status quo. The essays, interviews, and creative work assembled in this unique volume explore the shifting contours of culture jamming by plumbing its history, mapping its transformations, testing its force, and assessing its efficacy. Revealing how culture jamming is at once playful and politically transgressive, this accessible collection explores the degree to which culture jamming has fulfilled its revolutionary aims. Featuring original essays from prominent media scholars discussing Banksy and Shepard Fairey, foundational texts such as Mark Dery's culture jamming manifesto, and artwork by and interviews with noteworthy culture jammers including the Guerrilla Girls, The Yes Men, and Reverend Billy, Culture Jamming makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of creative resistance and participatory culture.
The Magazine by
The artist's magazine as a place where new ideas and forms can be imagined and created, from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first.The multiple platforms of the digital era have not diminished the role of the magazine for artists as an alternative medium and experimental space. Whether printed on paper or electronically generated, the artist's magazine continues to be a place where new ideas and forms can be imagined as well as a significant site of artistic production. Intrinsically collaborative, including readers' active engagement, the magazine is an inherently open form that generates constantly evolving relationships. It was integral to the emergence of art criticism in the Enlightenment period and to the development of artistic dialogues around notions of culture, politics, and the public from the modern era avant-gardes to the present. This collection contextualizes the current condition and potential of the artist's magazine, surveying the art worlds it has created and then superseded; the commercial media forms it has critically appropriated, intervened in, or subverted; the alternative DIY cultures it has brought into being; and the expanded fields of cultural production, exchange, and distribution it continues to engender. In addition to surveying case studies of transformational magazines from the early 1960s onwards, The Magazine includes a wide-ranging archive of key editorial statements, from eighteenth-century Weimar to twenty-first century Bangkok, Cape Town, and Delhi. Artists surveyed include Can Altay, Ei Arakawa, Julieta Aranda, Tania Bruguera, Maurizio Cattelan, Eduardo Costa, Dexter Sinister, Rimma Gerlovina, Valeriy Gerlovin, Robert Heinecken, John Holmstrom, John Knight, Silvia Kolbowski, Lee Lozano, Josephine Meckseper, Clemente Padin, Raymond Pettibon, Adrian Piper, Seth Price, Raqs Media Collective, Riot Grrrl, Martha Rosler, Sanaa Seif, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Scott Treleaven, Triple Canopy, Anton Vidokle Writers include Saul Anton, Stewart Brand, Jack Burnham, Johanna Burton, Thomas Crow, Edit DeAk, Kenneth Goldsmith, J rgen Habermas, Martina K ppel-Yang, Antje Krause-Wahl, Lucy Lippard, Caolan Madden, Valentina Parisi, Howardena Pindell, Georg Sch llhammer, Nancy Spector, Sally Stein, Reiko Tomii, Jud Yalkut, Vivian Ziherl
Fabian Bocart et al., “Glass Ceilings in the Art Market,” SSRN, August 27, 2018.
CONCEPTUALIZING AFRICAN-AMERICAN ART: THE MARKET, ACADEMIC DISCOURSE AND PUBLIC RECEPTION
Daisy Murray Voigt, "Marketing Afro American Artists" Art Papers, July/August 1988
