A copiously illustrated, sweeping overview of the beloved polymath's life and career

Harry Smith (1923-91) was a painter, filmmaker, folklorist, musicologist and collector as well as a radical nonconformist whose work defies categorization. This volume accompanies the major exhibition on the art and life of Harry Smith co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Carpenter Center at Harvard University. It is the first publication featuring extensive color illustrations of Smith's visual art, films and collections. It contains biographical information alongside examinations of his work across mediums.
The publication follows Smith from an isolated Depression-era childhood in the Pacific Northwest through his counterculture youth in postwar Berkeley, California. From there, it traces his path through bebop and experimental cinema in San Francisco, to his profoundly influential decades spent in New York City, where he was an essential part of the city's avant-garde. This volume is a critical read for fans of Harry Smith, as well as those interested in any of the many countercultures and art movements that he shaped.

This book was published in conjunction with Whitney Museum of American Art

This guidebook provides excellent examples of deep questioning, critical engagement and the embracing of Judaism as an ongoing call for social justice. -Angela Y. Davis

Edited by comedic performance artist and activist Morgan Bassichis with artist and educator Jay Saper and writer Rachel Valinsky, Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah invites 36 writers, artists, scholars and activists to offer accessible reflections on 36 questions to help young Jews--and anyone else who picks up this book--feel grounded in the Jewish radical tradition, unlearn Zionism and deepen their solidarity with Palestinians. With a foreword by seminal scholar-activist Angela Y. Davis and illustrations by artist Nicole Eisenman, this essential volume offers an accessible and challenging set of personal and collective responses to critical questions for our time. Questions included range from What even is a Bat Mitzvah? and I'm queer/nonbinary/secular/old/not even Jewish--are Bat Mitzvahs for me? to What do Palestinian kids do when they turn thirteen?
Contributors include: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Imani Altemus-Williams, Sumaya Awad, Shirly Bahar, Kholoud Balata, Morgan Bassichis, Bazeed, Gregg Bordowitz, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Ilise Benshushan Cohen, Jonah Aline Daniel, Maya Edery, Esther Farmer, Dan Fishback, Aitan Groener, Rabbi Miriam Grossman, Noah Habeeb, Olivia Katbi, Aurora Levins Morales, Brooke Lober, Tariq Luthun, Collier Meyerson, Dori Midnight, Izzy Mustafa, Aidan Orly and Jonathan Brenneman, Una Aya Osato, Khury Petersen-Smith, Rabbi Brant Rosen, Dylan Saba, Mahdi Sabbagh, Jay Saper, Ita Segev, Dean Spade, Elena Stein, Sandra Tamari, Kendra Watkins and Satya Zamudio.

A sculptural and photographic dialogue with embodiedness and Le Corbusier's Carpenter Center

This first monograph on the Chicago-based multimedia artist B. Ingrid Olson (born 1987) accompanies two simultaneous exhibitions: History Mother and Little Sister, each on a separate floor of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Informed by notions of doubling and mirroring, unexpected uses of footnotes and architectural fixtures as well as the work of figures such as Madeline Gins and Eileen Gray, the exhibitions insinuate her own objects and images into a sometimes tense, playfully knowing relationship with Le Corbusier's famous building, probing the normative, gendered and material experiments of the structure's modular elements of concrete, glass, plywood and primary colors. The book's innovative design brings together documentation of the site-specific installation, sketches and reproductions of other works made over the last decade, putting them into conversation with a selection of poetry and criticism that informs Olson's practice.

Legacies of modernism reappraised and reconstructed in an epic project by Ren e Green

American artist Ren e Green (born 1959) spent two years engaged with the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, during which she presented a series of interlinked public programs and exhibitions, culminated with her major exhibition Within Living Memory (2018). Green's Carpenter project, Pacing, is a meditation spurred by inhabiting an architectural icon--Le Corbusier's Carpenter Center--while exploring the historical and institutional legacies of modernism's other forms, including cinema, visual art, poetry, music and literature.

This handsome publication illuminates Green's unfolding process, with a sequence of exhibitions that took place from 2015 and culminating in Pacing: Facing in Toronto; Tracing in Como, Italy; Placing in Berlin; Spacing in Lisbon; and Begin Again, Begin Again in Los Angeles. The result is a meditation on creative processes across histories and media, partially inspired by two architectural icons: Rudolf M. Schindler and Le Corbusier. Despite grand ambitions, Le Corbusier was only able to realize two buildings in the Americas, the Carpenter Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Casa Curuchet, in La Plata, Argentina. In Pacing, dreams, projections and geographically distant buildings are put into dialogue through time, weaving a layered constellation of unexpected relations.

Lavishly illustrated, Ren e Green: Pacing features new texts by Gloria Sutton and Fred Moten, and brings together a series of previously unpublished conversations between the artist and Yvonne Rainer, Nora M. Alter and Mason Leaver-Yap. Additional contributions are provided by Nicholas Korody, William S. Smith and Carpenter Center director Dan Byers.

Collected Zoom transcripts from critical talks held by artists and thinkers during lockdown

Compiling deep-dive conversations originally broadcast live on Zoom during the height of the pandemic, this vital collection emerges now as a time capsule of sorts, charting the practices of artists and their interlocutors as they grappled with profound social rupture.

Lin's richly tactile installation meditates on the upheavals of 2020, drawing on complex material histories and speculative multispecies narratives

This book chronicles the creation of a newly commissioned body of work by Los Angeles-based artist Candice Lin (born 1979) during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Lin often investigates the legacies of colonialism by tracing the material histories of goods that circulated within global trade routes. For her Walker Art Center and Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts project, the artist brings together hand-dyed indigo textiles, plaster sculptures to be touched by visitors, large-scale ceramics partially inspired by Chinese tomb guardians and a hallucinogenic video featuring dancing cats and spam texts. Taken together, this multipart installation addresses the anxiety, isolation, fear and anger of this tragic year of pandemic and social upheaval, emphasizing touch, intimacy and a collective questioning of our precarious present and future.
Texts explore Lin's innovative use of materials and mediums and the theoretical frameworks that animate her art. A fully illustrated plates section documents the artist's process of research, making and installation, and an annotated selection of Lin's major past exhibitions provides important context for works made over the last decade.

When Gregg Bonn lost his wife Heidi to cancer, he posted on Facebook to let friends know of her passing. As he continued to post daily, his life unexpectedly transformed. His grief began to heal--and he became an author.

Through frank explorations of pain and bewilderment and humor-tinged recollections of life before, author Gregg Bonn shares in this memoir-cum-grief-manual how he navigated his new role as a widowed single father of three while reckoning with the hard realities of becoming a minus one.

As Bonn shared his pain and musings about death and loss online, he received comfort-and, to his surprise, gratitude. The posts were helping not only him, but also his readers, who shared that his courage in showing up authentically and vulnerably had led them to tap into hidden capacities for compassion, strength, and purpose. In Gregg's words, people connected to the stuff that everybody feels, but nobody talks about. With their encouragement, he began to compile the posts into a memoir.

Bonn soon realized he was creating a roadmap that could help others to make their way through the anguish of grieving a lost spouse or to understand the struggle of a widowed loved one. He tells his story in a down-to-earth, conversational style, treating the reader like a friend who has come to sit shiva--pay a condolence call--in his living room. Following the telling of his story, in a section called Takeaways, the author shares hard-won advice organized for easy reference.

Whether you're grieving or know someone who is, Minus One offers helpful tools for moving forward and will make you cry, laugh, and ultimately cheer when Gregg Bonn discovers that, even after wrenching loss, life does go on, and love can happen twice in a lifetime.