The colossal two-part catalog accompanying the 2022 biennial's ambitious exploration of metamorphosis, as imagined by 213 artists from across the world

Named after a children's book by Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, the 59th Venice Biennale takes Carrington's fey creatures, along with other figures of transformation, as companions on an imaginary journey through the metamorphoses of bodies and slippery definitions of humanity. Volume I of this two-part publication addresses the conceptual basis of The Milk of Dreams, as developed by curator Cecilia Alemani, and further elaborates upon its thematic threads. Each artist from the 2022 Biennale is introduced by way of a critical text and an iconographic apparatus. The volume includes Alemani's original exhibition texts and a plethora of original essays by some of today's most cutting-edge thinkers and writers, with conversations and reprinted texts concerning the exhibition: the representation of bodies and their metamorphoses, the relationship between individuals and technologies, and the connection between bodies and the earth.
Volume II of the catalog presents the participating countries and the collateral events of the biennale; its lavishly illustrated texts explore the various projects on display in Venice.
Artists include: Sophia Al-Maria, Josephine Baker, Djuna Barnes, Jadé Fadojutimi, Nan Goldin, Robert Grosvenor, Tishan Hsu, Jacqueline Humphries, Allison Katz, Kapwani Kiwanga, Barbara Kruger, Hannah Levy, Liliane Lijn, Candice Lin, Precious Okoyomon, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Elle Pérez, Aki Sasamoto, Sable Elyse Smith, Kaari Upson, Andra Ursuta, Cecilia Vicuña, Marianne Vitale, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller and Laura Wheeler Waring.

The first publication of its kind, connecting a constellation of artists working at the forefront of abstraction in the early 20th century

Orphism emerged among a cosmopolitan group of artists active in Paris in the early 1910s, as the innovations of modern life radically altered conceptions of time and space. Engaged with ideas of simultaneity in kaleidoscopic compositions, these artists investigated the transformative possibilities of color, form and motion. Often featuring disks of brilliant color, their work evoked multisensory experiences. When pushed to its limits, Orphism signaled total abstraction. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire, a contemporary, coined the term Orphism to describe this move away from Cubism, toward a physically and spiritually transcendent art. His concept referred back to the Greek mythological poet and lyre player Orpheus, whose music thwarted death.
The first in-depth examination of the Orphist avant-garde, this revelatory exhibition catalog contextualizes Orphism, tracing its roots, exploring its cross-disciplinary reach and considering its transnational reverberations across 16 illustrated texts by a multigenerational group of authors from different fields. Incisive essays offer new perspectives, delineating Orphism's connection to music, dance and poetry, and investigating the historical and cultural circumstances that shaped its ethos. More than 90 artworks in multiple mediums are punctuated by micro-narratives that view select artists through the Orphist lens, presenting original scholarship on well-known figures such as Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Frantisek Kupka and Francis Picabia while also illuminating lesser-known ones such as Mainie Jellett, Morgan Russell and Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso.

- The official catalog of the Centre Pompidou's Surrealism: First and Foremost! exhibition which begins in Paris, 4 September 2024 to 13 January 2025, and moves on to Spain, Germany and the USA

- Featuring pages from André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto

- Illustrated with 250 Surrealist masterpieces, including works by some of the world's most famous artists

- Reversible layout

The defining book for the centenary of Surrealism. From September 2024 to January 2025, the Centre Pompidou will celebrate the 100th anniversary of André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto. For the next two years, their unprecedented Surrealist exhibition will tour the art galleries of the world, accompanied by this special catalog. Perhaps more than any other artistic movement, Surrealism had a cataclysmic effect on the modern mind, changing forever the way we think about experiencing the world. By rejecting the gross linearity that typified several centuries of preceding artworks, the legendary Surrealists - Magritte, Ernst, Carrington, Dalí, Tanning and so many others - reached beyond the façade of that which is patently visible and found something more. Like the great works that fill its pages, Surrealism: First and Foremost! offers a departure from singletrack thinking, with a multi-directional layout and an uninhibited design. Featuring original essays from leading academics and excerpts from the Surrealist Manifesto itself, this stands among the most essential Surrealist catalogs ever published.

Black figuration and portraiture as realized in the works of Amy Sherald, Jordan Casteel and other contemporary artists

There is never a time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now, wrote James Baldwin. Published in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, The Time is Always Now is edited by curator Ekow Eshun, former director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The book brings together 22 contemporary African diasporic artists working primarily in the United Kingdom and the United States, whose practices--whether through painting, drawing or sculpture--foreground the Black figure. Acknowledging the paradox of race as both a socially constructed fiction and a lived reality, as Eshun writes, The Time is Always Now celebrates these Black figurative artworks against a background of heightened cultural visibility. Through a three-part structure, this book examines Black figuration as a means to address the absence and distortion of Black presence within Western art history. Each artist receives a detailed biographical profile alongside reproductions of their included works. The catalog is also supplemented by three original essays from Dorothy Price, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art; Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other; and Esi Edugyan, two-time Giller Prize winner for her novels Half-Blood Blues and Washington Black.
Artists include: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Hurvin Anderson, Michael Armitage, Jordan Casteel, Noah Davis, Godfried Donkor, Kimathi Donkor, Denzil Forrester, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Titus Kaphar, Kerry James Marshall, Wangechi Mutu, Chris Ofili, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Jennifer Packer, Thomas J. Price, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Lorna Simpson, Amy Sherald, Henry Taylor, Barbara Walker.

Examining aesthetic connections between the works of more than 50 Black artists from throughout the global diaspora

This book was born out of frustration with art histories that emphasize Black artists' resilience over the aesthetic impact of their work. The experiences of oppression Black people endure are inconceivable, yet this focus on resilience often overwhelms critical attention to Black artists' ideas, innovations or use of materials. Imagining Black Diasporas defines diaspora'' more broadly, understanding it as a dynamic term that evolves with Black experience. Through four themes, the book illuminates aesthetic connections among established and emerging US-based artists in dialogue with artists working in Africa, the Caribbean, South America and Europe.
Artists include: Mark Bradford, Lorna Simpson, Calida Rawles, El Anatsui, Josué Azor, Isaac Julien, Frida Orupabo, Theaster Gates, Yinka Shonibare, Wangechi Mutu.

How modern and contemporary artists across the African and Caribbean diasporas transformed European Surrealism into a tool for Black expression

On the centennial anniversary of André Breton's first Surrealist Manifesto, Surrealism and Us shines new light on how Surrealism was consumed and transformed in the Caribbean and the United States. It brings together more than 50 works from the 1940s to the present that convey how Caribbean and African diasporic artists reclaimed a European avant-garde for their own purposes.
Since its inception, the Surrealist movement--and many other European art movements of the early 20th century--embraced and transformed African art, poetry and music traditions. Concurrently, artists in the Americas proposed subsets of Surrealism more closely tied to African diasporic culture. In Martinique, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire proposed a Caribbean Surrealism that challenged principles of order and reason and embraced African spiritualities. Meanwhile, artists in the United States such as Romare Bearden and Ted Joans engaged deeply with Surrealist ideas. These trends lasted far beyond those of their European counterparts. Indeed, the term Afro-surrealism was created by poet Amiri Baraka in 1974; today the movement still flourishes in tandem with Afrofuturism. The Surrealism and Us catalog is divided into three themes: To Dare, Invisibility and Super/Reality. These sections, galvanized by scholarly essays, create transnational and multi-generational connections between Black life and artistic practice over the past 100 years.
Artists include: Firelei Báez, Agustin Cárdenas, Myrlande Constant, Rafael Ferrer, Ja'Tovia Gary, Hector Hyppolite, Ted Joans, Wifredo Lam, Simone Leigh, Kerry James Marshall.

An impressive and wide-ranging showcase of mostly women and gender-expansive artists whose work intertwines fluid ideas of embodiment with capacious models of abstraction

This stunningly illustrated exhibition catalog looks closely at how abstraction in art is often intimately tied with shifting ideas of the bodily. Bringing together seemingly unalike categories such as figurative/abstract, self/other and exotic/banal into newly fused configurations, the publication shows how artists have often conceived of these categories as inextricably intertwined. The catalog is divided into three thematic sections. Mirror explores the ways artists have honed in on the forms of the face and head as a distorted mirror. Matter looks at how artists draw on the metaphorical resonances of the body in ways that suggest mutable morphologies, especially in relation to socially constructed definitions of gender, race and sexuality. Metamorphosis examines how artists have used abstraction as a means to transform the human body into different modes of being: new identities, other animals and spiritual or cosmological entities. An introductory essay by Lanka Tattersall, Laurenz Foundation curator, maps the historical precedents from a feminist, queer and Afro-diasporic art historical perspectives, while a prologue by poet and artist Precious Okoyomon and a reflection by Lambda Literary Award finalist Cyrus Dunham open up new forms of language for questions around gender and abstraction.
Artists include: Kathy Acker, Jo Baer, Forrest Bess, Louise Bourgeois, Claude Cahun, Blondell Cummings, Minnie Evans, Barbara Hammer, Margo Humphrey, Suzanne Jackson, Ted Joans, Frida Kahlo, Bhupen Khakhar, Greer Lankton, Maria Lassnig, Ana Mendieta, Senga Nengudi, Carol Rama, Lorna Simpson, Thelma Johnson Streat, Jackie Winsor and more.

An essential primer on the history of Photoshop and other tools of digital image manipulation, from the 1970s through to the current day

This timely volume, Digital Witness, examines the impact of Photoshop and other tools of digital manipulation, tracing simultaneous developments in photography, graphic design and visual effects over roughly five decades.
Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, advances in computer science and engineering made it possible to design, build and run raster graphics programs, while developments in graphical user interfaces allowed artists and designers to directly create and edit images. At the same time, these nascent technologies led to concerns about authorship, automation and the viability of the businesses that supported various creative industries. During the 1990s, following the release of Photoshop, image-editing software rose to widespread use in multiple fields. As digitally altered imagery has permeated popular culture, aesthetic and ethical debates have played out in mass media, politics, advertising and even the judicial system.
Examining the relationship between software development and artistic practice, Digital Witness explores how artists and engineers responded to each others' innovations. Each new version of Photoshop allowed for increasingly sophisticated edits, from tracing intricate paths to layers to editable type. Some artists found creative potential in these advances, taking analog art forms such as collage to digitally enabled extremes. Others resisted the growing dependence on mainstream commercial software, developing open-source alternatives.
Published in conjunction with the landmark PST ART exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, this substantial, image-packed volume includes Q&As with noted visual artists, filmmakers and designers such as Copper Frances Giloth, Raqi Syed and April Greiman.

Updated documentation of The Theater of Refusal on the exhibition's 30th anniversary

In 1993, at the University of California, Irvine, Charles Gaines and Catherine Lord mounted a category-breaking exhibition of Black artists from different generations, working across Fluxus, Conceptualism, assemblage, photography and installation. Challenging the racializing of Black artists' work, the exhibition confronted the discourse around race difference in the United States by including excerpts of writing by art critics who had discussed the featured artists. On the 30th anniversary of this event, this publication reprints the eponymous 1993 volume documenting the show, which contained essays by Gaines, Lord and Berger, and the transcript of a roundtable of artists and writers. Reproducing images of the exhibition in color for the first time, this new edition augments the original publication with an essay by poet and scholar Fred Moten; recent conversations between Lord and Gaines; an interview with Gaines by Moten; and a new roundtable discussion moderated and edited by curator Jamillah James and Thomas (T.) Jean Lax.
Artists include: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Renée Green, David Hammons, Ben Patterson, Sandra Rowe, Gary Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems.

This book was published in conjunction with Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart and The Brick

An interdisciplinary guide to the 20th-century Southern California-based artists who investigated phenomena from the realms of optical science, astronomy, aerospace engineering and math

The synergy between art and science is an age-old tale; artists throughout time, from Leonardo da Vinci to Beeple, have incorporated newly discovered scientific theories and techniques into their practices. The PST ART project Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science explores a particularly fecund yet underexplored period in the history of art and science's cross-fertilization. The development of postwar industry and research in Southern California inspired a host of artistic innovations; for decades, abstract artists from the region experimented with color, form and mediums, variously employing ideas or procedures gleaned from the latest developments in physics, astronomy and mathematics.
Particles and Waves unites several generations of artists working in diverse materials and styles to visualize light, energy, motion and time. Boasting a gorgeous cover, the volume features a wide array of artists and topics, from Man Ray's paintings of mathematical models to Lee Mullican's computer-inspired abstractions, and from to the West Coast Minimalists and Light and Space artists' (including Mary Corse, Fred Eversley and James Turrell) rigorous studies of light to Bettina Brendel and Helen Lundeberg's investigations of scale through their paintings of subatomic and astronomical subjects.

A powerhouse survey of work from today's most celebrated Black women artists

Black women artists have historically faced marginalization and underrepresentation within the art world. Despite these obstacles, they have persevered and crafted an artistry that encompasses a diverse range of themes, mediums and styles. At times, their creative endeavors confront the intersectionality of race, gender and identity, reflecting personal experiences, heritage and the realities of being a Black woman.
To celebrate the Harvey B. Gantt Center's 50th anniversary, A Superlative Palette brings together the work of more than a dozen generation-defining contemporary Black women artists from around the world. Their powerful and thought-provoking work has not only redefined artistic expression but has also played a significant role in advocating for social justice, equality and empowerment.
Artists include: Nina Chanel Abney, ruby onyinyechi amanze, Lauren Halsey, Rachel Jones, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Jennifer Packer, Calida Rawles, Deborah Roberts, Tschabalala Self, Amy Sherald, Mickalene Thomas, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

This fresh look at photorealism argues for its continued relevance today

This volume, Ordinary People, recovers the social art history of the long-dismissed genre of photorealism and demonstrates the continued relevance of photorealist strategies for artists working today. Spanning the 1960s to the present, this large-scale reexamination of the postwar art movement features the work of more than 40 artists, including paintings, drawings, sculptures and murals. It recasts the work of canonical and underrecognized photorealists of the 1960s and '70s in new frameworks and identifies younger artists who have deployed photorealism as a vehicle for social/political critique. Unlike the typical photorealism survey, Ordinary People includes a diverse, multigenerational group of artists, with a focused look at the major contributions of women and BIPOC artists to the genre. It explores the representational politics of photorealist painting in the context of the recent rise of figurative portraiture and covers the myriad ways that artists, through this seemingly nonconfrontational aesthetic, have enticed viewers to confront painful historical events and social experiences.
Artists: John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, Michael Alvarez, John Baeder, Judie Bamber, Gina Beavers, Robert Bechtle, Dike Blair, Andrea Bowers, Vija Celmins, Lenore Chinn, Chuck Close, Cynthia Daignault, Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, Ralph Goings, Sayre Gomez, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Duane Hanson, Barkley L. Hendricks, Nur Koçak, Jennifer J. Lee, Marilyn Levine, Sam Lipp, Hung Liu, Richard McLean, Marilyn Minter, Catherine Murphy, Calida Rawles, Ben Sakoguchi, Shizu Saldamando, Joan Semmel, Amy Sherald, Mamie Tinkler, Betty Tompkins, Jesse Treviño, Brittany Tucker, John Valadez, Vincent Valdez, Christine Tien Wang, Idelle Weber, Kehinde Wiley, Martin Wong, Takako Yamaguchi.

Contemporary artists address connections between climate activism and social justice in their work

The lungs of our planet are under threat, invaded by carbon emissions, plastics and man-made pollutants. As part of the Getty Center's PST ART initiative, Breath(e) considers the connections between climate change, environmental justice and social justice through the lens of contemporary art. This book features approximately 45 works focused on climate change by a group of intergenerational contemporary artists, scientists and activists, addressing deforestation, ocean acidification, coral reef bleaching, water pollution, extraction and atmospheric politics. It features six major new commissions, including a living bee sculpture by Garnett Puett and a garden created by Ron Finley, that extend beyond the art world to make tangible contributions to the protection of our climate.
Artists include: Mel Chin, Ryoji Ikeda, Mika Tajima, Cannupa Hasker Luger, Yoshitomo Nara, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Otobong Nkanga, Clarissa Tossin, Zheng Mahler.

An unprecedented, definitive look at the school's typography and print design, from its early expressive tendencies to the functional modernism for which it is famed today

The Bauhaus looms large as one of the most influential legacies in 20th-century graphic design. Known for its bold sans-serif typefaces, crisp asymmetrical grids and clean use of negative space, the school emerged as the forebearer of a new look--one that seized the tools of mass production in the creation of a radical new art. Today, just over 100 years after the Bauhaus's opening in 1919, the school's visual hallmarks have come to define modernity as it appears on the printed page.

The official catalog for Letterform Archive's inaugural gallery exhibition, Bauhaus Typography at 100 explores the school's legacy in graphic and typographic design through artifacts of its own making--its books, magazines, course materials, product catalogs, stationery, promotional fliers and other ephemera.

From the book's beautifully designed pages, readers learn of typographic masters László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer and Joost Schmidt, who channeled Constructivism's geometric forms and optimism for industry into printed vehicles for the school's teachings. Here is where Bauhaus typography--its rejection of serifs and capitals, embrace of experimental alphabets, insistence on universal clarity, and innovation in layering and hierarchy--took its distinctive shape.

The catalog also shines light on the Bauhaus's lesser-known early forays into expressive lettering and illustration, also tracing the school's immediate impact on seminal design movements such as the New Typography and, of course, on design practitioners working today. Lavishly illustrated, carefully researched and written, and accompanied by an in-depth introduction from noted Bauhaus expert, author and curator Ellen Lupton, Bauhaus Typography at 100 is a must-have for any fan of modern design.

Replete with complexities, abjection, beauty and joy, Women Painting Women offers new ways to imagine the portrayal of women, from Alice Neel to Jordan Casteel

A thematic exploration of nearly 50 female artists who choose women as subject matter in their works, Women Painting Women includes nearly 50 portraits that span the 1960s to the present. International in scope, the book recognizes female perspectives that have been underrepresented in the history of postwar figuration. Painting is the focus, as traditionally it has been a privileged medium for portraiture, particularly for white male artists. The artists here use painting and women as subject matter and as vehicles for change. They range from early trailblazers such as Emma Amos and Alice Neel to emerging artists such as Jordan Casteel, Somaya Critchlow and Apolonia Sokol. All place women--their bodies, gestures and individuality--at the forefront.
The pivotal narrative in Women Painting Women is how the artists included use the conventional portrait of a woman as a catalyst to tell another story outside of male interpretations of the female body. They conceive new ways to activate and elaborate on the portrayal of women by exploring themes of the Body, Nature Personified, Selfhood and Color as Portrait. Replete with complexities, realness, abjection, beauty, complications, everydayness and joy, the portraits in this volume make way for women artists to share the stage with their male counterparts in defining the image of woman and how it has evolved.
Artists include: Rita Ackermann, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Emma Amos, María Berrío, Louise Bonnet, Lisa Brice, Joan Brown, Jordan Casteel, Somaya Critchlow, Kim Dingle, Marlene Dumas, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Nicole Eisenman, Tracey Emin, Natalie Frank, Hope Gangloff, Eunice Golden, Jenna Gribbon, Alex Heilbron, Ania Hobson, Luchita Hurtado, Chantal Joffe, Hayv Kahraman, Maria Lassnig, Christiane Lyons, Danielle Mckinney, Marilyn Minter, Alice Neel, Elizabeth Peyton, Paula Rego, Faith Ringgold, Deborah Roberts, Susan Rothenberg, Jenny Saville, Dana Schutz, Joan Semmel, Amy Sherald, Lorna Simpson, Arpita Singh, Sylvia Sleigh, Apolonia Sokol, May Stevens, Claire Tabouret, Mickalene Thomas, Nicola Tyson and Lisa Yuskavage.

Abstract painting meets theosophical spirituality in 1930s New Mexico: the first book on a radical, astonishingly prescient episode in American modernism

Founded in Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, in 1938, at a time when social realism reigned in American art, the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG) sought to promote abstract art that pursued enlightenment and spiritual illumination. The nine original members of the Transcendental Painting Group were Emil Bisttram, Robert Gribbroek, Lawren Harris, Raymond Jonson, William Lumpkins, Florence Miller Pierce, Agnes Pelton, Horace Towner Pierce and Stuart Walker. They were later joined by Ed Garman. Despite the quality of their works, these Southwest artists have been neglected in most surveys of American art, their paintings rarely exhibited outside of New Mexico. Faced with the double disadvantage of being an openly spiritual movement from the wrong side of the Mississippi, the TPG has remained a secret mostly known only to cognoscenti.

Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group aims to address this slight, claiming the group's artists as crucial contributors to an alternative through-line in 20th-century abstraction, one with renewed relevance today. This volume provides a broad perspective on the group's work, positioning it within the history of modern painting and 20th-century American art. Essays examine the TPG in light of their international artistic peers; their involvement with esoteric thought and Theosophy; the group's sources in the culture and landscape of the American Southwest; and the experience of its two female members.

Archival documents and new writings on the intermedia collaborations of avant-garde jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and textile artist Moki Cherry

Don Cherry and Moki Karlsson met in Sweden in the late '60s. They married and began to perform together, dubbing their mix of communal art, social and environmental activism, children's education and pan-ethnic expression Organic Music. Their home in T garp became a locus of artistic production, attracting free-spirited musicians, poets, actors and artists with the promise of collective life. There, Keith Knox assembled T garp Publication Number One to document the collectivistic practices blooming under the Cherrys' guidance. Reproduced here, the text includes interviews with Terry Riley and Cherry, a piece on Pandit Pran Nath, a report on the Bombay Free School and a survey of the esoteric Forest University by Bengt af Kintberg. This book explores Don Cherry's work of the period through additional interviews by Knox, a piece on his Relativity Suite and an essay by Fumi Okiji. Moki's writings on her workshops are featured alongside full-color reproductions of her tapestries, used as performance environments by Don's ensembles. Cherry collaborators Bengt Berger and Christer Both n contribute travelogues from the era.

A celebratory visual chronicle of the many ways in which Black Americans have used portraiture to envision themselves

Spanning over two centuries from around 1800 to the present day, Black American Portraits chronicles the ways in which Black Americans have used portraiture to envision themselves in their own eyes. Remembering Two Centuries of Black American Art, curated by David C. Driskell at LACMA 45 years ago, this book is a companion to the exhibition of the same name that reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters and spaces. This selection of approximately 140 works from LACMA's permanent collection highlights emancipation, scenes from the Harlem Renaissance, portraits from the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, multiculturalism of the 1990s and the spirit of Black Lives Matter.
Countering a visual culture that often demonizes Blackness and fetishizes the spectacle of Black pain, these images center love, abundance, family, community and exuberance. Black American Portraits depicts Black figures in a range of mediums such as painting, drawing, prints, photography, sculpture, mixed media and time-based media. In addition to work by artists of African descent, Black American Portraits includes several works by artists of other backgrounds who have exemplified a thoughtfulness about, sensitivity toward and commitment to Black artists, communities, histories and subjects.
Artists include: Alvin Baltrop, Edward Biberman, Bisa Butler, Jordan Casteel, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Bruce Davidson, Stan Douglas, rafa esparza, Shepard Fairey, Charles Gaines, Sargent Claude Johnson, Deana Lawson, Kerry James Marshall, Alice Neel, Lorraine O'Grady, Catherine Opie, Amy Sherald, Ming Smith, Henry Taylor, Tourmaline, Mickalene Thomas, James Van Der Zee, Carrie Mae Weems, Charles White, Kehinde Wiley and Deborah Willis.