Braiding Sweetgrass by
As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, the author has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders, family, and history that the Potawatomi, as well as a majority of other cultures indigenous to this land, consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowing together to reveal what it means to see humans as 'the younger brothers of creation.' As she explores these themes she circles toward a central argument: the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgement and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the world. Once we begin to listen for the languages of other beings, we can begin to understand the innumerable life-giving gifts the world provides us and learn to offer our thanks, our care, and our own gifts in return.
Agnes Martin by
The critically acclaimed, indispensible illustrated monograph on Agnes Martin, published to accompany the major retrospective exhibition organized by the Tate and on view in 2016 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Guggenheim 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. Edited by the exhibitions's co-curators Frances Morris and Tiffany Bell, and with essays by leading scholars that give a context for Martin's work--her life, relationship with other artists, the influence of South-Asian philosophy--alongside focused shorter pieces on particular paintings, this beautifully designed volume is the definitive publication on her oeuvre. Frances Morris places Martin's work in the art historical context of the time; art historian Richard Tobin analyzes Martin's painting "The Islands"; conservator Rachel Barker offers the reader a close viewing of "Morning"; curator Lena Fritsch provides a visual biography by comparing photographic portraits of Martin from different periods; and art historian Jacquelynn Baas delves into the spiritual and philosophical beliefs so present in Martin's art, including Platonism, Christian mysticism, Zen Buddhism and Taoism. Agnes Martin was born in Maklin, Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1912, and moved to the US in 1932, studying at universities in Oregon, California, New Mexico and New York. She painted still lifes and portraits until the early 1950s, when she developed an abstract biomorphic style influenced by Abstract Expressionism. Her first one-woman exhibition was held at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, in 1958. Partly through close friendships with artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Ad Reinhardt, Martin began to experiment with symmetrical compositions of rectangles or circles within a square, then from around 1960-61 to work with grids of delicate horizontal and vertical lines. She left New York in 1967, shortly after the death of Reinhardt, and moved to New Mexico, where she lived until her death in 2004.
Hilma Af Klint: Paintings for the Future by
A groundbreaking study of visionary artist Hilma af Klint. When Swedish artist Hilma af Klint died in 1944 at the age of 81, she left behind more than a thousand paintings and works on paper that she kept largely private during her lifetime. Believing the world was not yet ready for her art, she stipulated that it should remain unseen for another 20 years. But only in recent decades has the public had a chance to reckon with af Klint's radically abstract painting practice - one which predates the work of Vasily Kandinsky and other artists widely considered trailblazers of modernist abstraction. Accompanying the first major survey exhibition of the artist's work in the United States, Hilma af Klint represents her groundbreaking painting series while expanding recent scholarship to present the fullest picture yet of the artist's life and work. Essays explore the social, intellectual, and artistic milieu of af Klint's 1906 break with figuration and her subsequent development, placing her in the context of Swedish modernism and folk art traditions, contemporary scientific discoveries, and spiritualist and occult movements. A roundtable discussion among contemporary artists, scholars, and curators considers af Klint's sources and relevance to art in the 21st century. The volume also delves into her unrealized plans for a spiral-shaped temple in which to display her art - a wish that finds a fortuitous answer in the Guggenheim Museum's rotunda, the site of the forthcoming exhibition.
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Cecilia Vicuña: about to Happen by
Vicu a makes art of gathered materials from the ocean, the river and the street Beginning and ending at the edge of the ocean, Chilean-born artist and poet Cecilia Vicu a's (born 1948) artist's book serves as both a lament and love letter to the sea. Vicu a collects the detritus that washes up on shore and assembles out of the refuse tiny precarios and basuritas--little sculptures held together with nothing more than string and wire. About to Happen, which accompanies an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans....Watch a virtual tour of the exhibition About To Happen (Museum of Modern Art North Miami)
Baroness Elsa by
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927) is considered by many to be the first American dadaist as well as the mother of dada. An innovator in poetic form and an early creator of junk sculpture, the Baroness was best known for her sexually charged, often controversial performances. Some thought her merely crazed, others thought her a genius. The editor Margaret Anderson called her perhaps the only figure of our generation who deserves the epithet extraordinary. Yet despite her great notoriety and influence, until recently her story and work have been little known outside the circle of modernist scholars.
See an exhibition based on her work Baroness Elsa Project (Cartlton University Art Gallery)
Anne Truitt: Paintings by
This is the first book on the paintings of Anne Truitt (1921-2004). Best known for her sculptures--wood columns painted in multiple layers of vibrant acrylic--Truitt also spent more than two decades producing innovative large-format paintings on canvas. Featured here are 16 abstract works made between 1972 and 1993, all generously illustrated, including numerous full-page detail photographs. In an essay Michael Schreyach provides an incisive formal analysis of the works' compositional elements, particularly the tension between two- and three-dimensionality that characterizes not only Truitt's paintings but also her sculptures. It was through these pictorial and material qualities that she manifested the metaphysical meaning of her art--or, as she described it, "the sharp delight of watching what has been inside one's own most intimate self materialize into visibility."
Tantra Song: Tantric Painting From Rajasthan by
This collection of rare, abstract Tantra drawings was conceived when the French poet Franck Andr Jamme stumbled on a small catalogue of Tantric art at a Paris bookseller's stall. The volume included writings by Octavio Paz and Henri Michaux, and Jamme became fascinated by the images' affinity with modern art and poetry. He read voraciously and even journeyed to India, searching in vain for Tantric practitioners, until a bus accident on the road to Jaipur sent him home to France with serious injuries. When he returned a few years later, he met a soothsayer who proclaimed that Jamme had now paid sufficient tribute to the goddess Shakti and required him to take a vow: he must visit the tantrikas alone or only in the company of a loved one. Since then, Jamme has gained extraordinary access to very private communities of adepts and their intensely beautiful works. These contemporary, anonymous drawings from Rajasthan are unlike the more familiar strands of Tantric art--the geometric yantras, or erotic illustrations of the Kama Sutra. The progeny of seventeenth-century illustrated religious treatises, these drawings have evolved into a distinct visual lexicon designed to awaken heightened states of consciousness and are imbued with specific spiritual meanings (e.g. spirals and arrows for energy, an inverted triangle for Shakti). A revelatory volume on this occluded genre of Indian art, Tantra Song is a convergence of east and west, the spiritual and the aesthetic, the ancient and the modern. Franck Andr Jamme is the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry. His translated workds (by John Ashbery, Charles Borkuis, David Kelley and others) include New Exercises, Another Silent Attack, The Recitation of Forgetting and Extracts of the Life of a Beetle. He has collaborated on books with a number of artists including Philippe Favier, Suzan Frecon, Acharya Vyakul and Hanns Schimansk. A specialist in Art Brut, Tantric and tribal art of India, he has participated in exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Beaux-Art de Paris and The Drawing Center, among others.