A revelatory new volume on the American modernist's lesser-known works on paper, reuniting many serial works for the first time

Recalling a charcoal she made in 1916, Georgia O'Keeffe later wrote, I have made this drawing several times--never remembering that I had made it before--and not knowing where the idea came from. These drawings, and the majority of O'Keeffe's works in charcoal, watercolor, pastel and graphite, belong to series in which she develops and transforms motifs that lie between observation and abstraction. In the formative years of 1915 to 1918, she made as many works on paper as she would in the next 40 years, producing sequences in watercolor of abstract lines, organic landscapes and nudes, along with charcoal drawings she would group according to the designation specials. While her practice turned increasingly toward canvas in subsequent decades, important series on paper reappeared--including charcoal flowers of the 1930s, portraits of the 1940s and aerial views of the 1950s.
Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, this richly illustrated volume highlights the drawings of an artist better known as a painter, and reunites individual sheets with their contextual series to illuminate O'Keeffe's persistently sequential practice.
Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) first received critical attention when her breakthrough charcoal drawings were exhibited in New York in 1916. Two years later, she moved to the city to work full time on her art. Beginning in 1929, O'Keeffe spent summers in New Mexico, where she would relocate in 1949. The most famous female artist of her age, she thought of herself not as the best woman painter but as one of the best painters.

Profiles of fourteen women who transformed the country's foremost modern art museum in its fledgling years

Founded in 1929, the Museum of Modern Art owes much of its early success to a number of remarkable women who shaped the future of the institution in its first decades. As founders, patrons, curators and directors of various departments, these figures boldly defied societal norms to launch this radical venture during the depths of the Great Depression. They were fortunate in the freedoms afforded by uncharted territory; because the notion of a museum of modern art was new, there was a conspicuous absence of the professional prerequisites, official structures and respectable salaries that would have limited the jobs to men. This left the door open for a host of women to define their own roles and invent new fields. This book profiles 14 pioneering figures who made an indelible mark not only on MoMA, but on the culture of their time. Inventing the Modern transports the reader to the grit and glamour of midtown Manhattan in the 1930s and '40s. It deepens our understanding of MoMA's history and contributes to a broader understanding of women's achievement in the 20th century.
Subjects include: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan, Margaret Scolari Barr, Ernestine Fantl, Iris Barry, Elodie Courter, Sarah Newmeyer, Dorothy Miller, Dorothy Dudley, Nancy Newhall, Elizabeth Mock, Olga Guggenheim, Jean Volkmer.

An in-depth exploration of the last six decades of work from the iconic photographer and filmmaker, with a special focus on his ceaseless experimentation and artistic collaborations

This volume, published in conjunction with the artist's first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, provides new insights into the interdisciplinary and lesser-known aspects of Robert Frank's expansive career. The exhibition explores the six decades that followed his landmark photobook The Americans, a period in which Frank maintained an extraordinarily multifaceted practice characterized by perpetual experimentation across mediums and artistic and personal dialogues with other artists and with his communities. Coinciding with the centennial of his birth, this catalog takes its name from the artist's poignant 1980 film, Life Dances On, in which Frank reflects on the individuals who have shaped his outlook.
The lushly illustrated publication features photographs, films, books and archival materials, layered with quotes from Frank on his influences and process. Three scholarly essays, excerpts from previously unpublished video footage and a rich visual chronology together explore Frank's ceaseless creative exploration and observation of life.
Robert Frank was a Swiss American photographer and filmmaker best known for his groundbreaking monograph The Americans (1958). Over his decades-long career, Frank captured the complexities of contemporary life with a distinct style and poetic insight. He lived between New York City and Nova Scotia, Canada.

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.

Growing up in the mountains of Japan, Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) dreamed of becoming an artist. One day, she had a vision in which the world and everything in it--the plants, the people, the sky--were covered in polka dots. She began to cover her paintings, drawings, sculptures, and even her body with dots. As she grew up, she traveled all around the world, from Tokyo to Seattle, New York to Venice, and brought her dots with her. Different people saw these dots in different ways--some thought they were tiny, like cells, and others imagined them enormous, like planets. Every year, Kusama sees more of the world, covering it with dots and offering people a way to experience it the way she does.

The illustrations evoke Kusama's style remarkably well, and the book is enhanced by high-quality photographs of a variety of her pieces . . . Works for young readers on contemporary non-Western artists are rare, and this visually striking and clearly written, if limited, contribution makes a complex artist's work accessible and appealing. --Kirkus Reviews

A single potato chip on a matchbox, larger-than-life figurative sculptures polished to a gleam: Thomas Schütte's category-defying oeuvre gives form to the incongruences of the world we inhabit

The Düsseldorf-based sculptor, draftsman, model maker and sometime architect Thomas Schütte works in scales ranging from small to monumental. Rooted in minimal and conceptual art, his work addresses history, art history, modes of meaning and how art can function in the world.
Published in conjunction with the first museum retrospective of Schütte's work in the United States in over 20 years, this eponymous monograph presents a holistic overview of his career from 1975 to the present. Taking aesthetics, form and history as its focus, the publication features over 100 sculptures, drawings, prints and experiments in architecture, alongside revelatory archival materials. Curator Paulina Pobocha has worked in close collaboration with Schütte since 2015, and has had complete access to his archives, as well as the myriad drawings and notebooks still in his possession. Excerpts from these papers are published for the first time in this catalog. Additionally, essays by Pobocha, Jennifer Allen and André Rottmann provide historical and theoretical pathways into the complexity of Schütte's oeuvre, and contributions by artists Marlene Dumas and Charles Ray reflect on Schütte's significance through close readings of his work.
Thomas Schütte (born 1954) studied under Gerhard Richter and Fritz Schwegler at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He has participated in Documenta, Skulptur Projekte Münster and the Venice Biennale, where he was awarded the Golden Lion in 2005. His work can be found in the collections of major institutions across Europe and North America.

An extraordinary gathering of rare drawings, prints and sculptures focusing on themes of motherhood, grief and resistance

In the early 20th century, when many artists were experimenting with abstraction by way of colorful painting, Käthe Kollwitz remained committed to an art of social purpose through figurative, black-and-white printmaking and drawing. Through her work, she brought visibility to the hardships of the working class and asserted the female point of view as a necessary and powerful agent for change.
Published in conjunction with the largest exhibition of her work in the United States in more than 30 years, and the first major retrospective devoted to Kollwitz at a New York museum, this book surveys the artist's career from the 1890s through the early 1940s. It features approximately 120 drawings, prints and sculptures drawn from public and private collections in Europe and North America. Examples of the artist's most iconic projects showcase her political engagement, while rarely seen studies and working proofs highlight her intensive, ever-searching creative process. Essays explore crucial aspects of Kollwitz's art, career and legacy, including her professional life and connections in Berlin, her groundbreaking approach to the subject of women's grief and her work's reception among artists in the US.
Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) was born in the Prussian city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). One of history's most outstanding graphic artists, she was widely recognized for her art of social advocacy and compassion and was one of the few women artists of the early 20th century to achieve international renown in her own lifetime.

The first full retrospective of Whitten's dazzling and trenchant abstraction from the 1960s-2010s, which transformed the relationship between art, race and society

Jack Whitten offered the world a new way to see. Over nearly six decades, he dared to invent new forms of abstraction, constantly transforming both perception and our understanding of art in society. This gorgeously illustrated volume, with pathbreaking new perspectives and revelatory technical analyses of his innovative materials and processes, explores Whitten's wide-ranging and game-changing practice.
Raised in the segregated Jim Crow South in the 1940s, Whitten undertook an extraordinary journey in becoming an artist, convinced that by changing form, he could help change the world. Despite pressure from peers to create figurative art, he was a key proponent of creating abstract art that responded to social turmoil; to his own identity as a Black artist; and to sea changes in technology. He created new ways of painting through a series of artistic inventions and strategies. He defied traditional boundaries between abstraction and representation, pictures and things, culture and technology, individual identity and global history.
Published to accompany the first comprehensive retrospective of Whitten's art, this sumptuous catalog presents the full range of his career across painting, sculpture and works on paper, produced in New York and Greece, with texts by leading art historians and artists, and new technical analyses by conservators. Previously unpublished writings by the artist and an expansive chronology of Whitten's life, featuring newly discovered photographs and archival materials, bring into focus an artist who was as committed to human perception as to human rights, becoming one of the most important artists of our time.
Jack Whitten (1939-2018) was born in Bessemer, Alabama, and began his studies in medicine at the Tuskegee Institute. After moving to New York in 1960 to attend the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, he became a leading artist in the wake of Abstract Expressionism, and of a generation of Black artists committed to abstraction. Whitten lived in New York until his death.

Frazier's personalized arrangements of her compelling photographs recognize the myriad social and political struggles of Black working-class communities

For more than two decades, artist-activist LaToya Ruby Frazier has used photography, text, moving images and performance to revive and preserve forgotten narratives of labor, gender and race in the postindustrial era. Frazier has cultivated a practice that builds on the legacy of the social documentary tradition of the 1930s, the photo-conceptual forays of the 1960s and 1970s, and the work of socially conscious writers such as Upton Sinclair, James Baldwin and bell hooks. Monuments of Solidarity celebrates the creativity and collaboration that persist in the face of industrialization and deindustrialization, racial and environmental injustice, gender disparities, unequal access to health care and clean water, and the denial of fundamental human rights. A form of Black feminist world-building, Frazier's nontraditional monuments for workers' thoughts demand recognition of the crucial role that women and people of color have played, and continue to play, in histories of labor and the working class.
Published in conjunction with the first comprehensive museum survey dedicated to the artist, Monuments of Solidarity presents the full range of her practice and includes both rarely seen and brand-new bodies of work. An illuminating overview essay by the exhibition's curator, Roxana Marcoci, is accompanied by a manifesto by the artist and a suite of focused essays by other curators and scholars.
LaToya Ruby Frazier was born in 1982 in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Her artistic practice spans a range of mediums, including photography, video, performance, installation art and books, and centers on the nexus of social justice, cultural change and commentary on the American experience. Frazier is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2015 MacArthur Fellowship.

A comprehensive retrospective of work from one of the foremost performance artists to emerge from the 1970s

Since her earliest performances in the late 1960s, Joan Jonas has concerned herself with animation and moving images, asking what it means to move images, or to be moved by them. The artist constantly returns to her ever-expanding archive of images, sounds, gestures, ideas and places, reworking materials into new forms across the decades. Published in conjunction with the artist's most comprehensive retrospective in the United States, presented by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Good Night Good Morning spans more than 50 years of her remarkable career and features works in all mediums--including videos, drawings, notebooks, photographs and major installations and performances.
The abundantly illustrated publication features essays by curators and scholars that delve into the political, social and historical impact of Jonas' working method, a suite of oral histories gathered specifically for this project and a new photographic portfolio by the artist Zoe Leonard. Featuring extensive archival materials, many previously unpublished, this monograph sheds new light on Jonas' unique role as a trailblazing figure of video and performance, and highlights her enduring multimedia legacy for generations of younger artists.
Born in New York City in 1936, Joan Jonas is a pathmaking figure in video and performance art, and one of the most important artists to emerge from the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 2015 she was the sixth woman artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. She lives and works in New York and Nova Scotia, Canada.

Drawing on over 15 years of research and hands-on experience engaging families in multi-sensory programs at MoMA, this colorful activity book provides opportunities for creative exploration and art making at home, in a group or alone, while providing real examples of the tools, techniques, and ideas used by contemporary and modern artists whose works can be found in MoMA's collection.

Each project is inspired by a particular artist, movement, or design concept and features full-color reproductions of artwork from the likes of Diego Rivera, Vasily Kandinsky, Berenice Abbott, and Charles and Ray Eames. Step-by-step instructions, handy tips and open-ended questions encourage kids to think like artists and develop their own techniques and ideas for art making.

The first retrospective in 30 years on American maverick Donald Judd's minimalist sculpture, architecture and furniture

Published to accompany the first US retrospective exhibition of Donald Judd's sculpture in more than 30 years, Judd explores the work of a landmark artist who, over the course of his career, developed a material and formal vocabulary that transformed the field of modern sculpture.

Donald Judd was among a generation of artists in the 1960s who sought to entirely do away with illusion, narrative and metaphorical content. He turned to three dimensions as well as industrial working methods and materials in order to investigate real space, by his definition. Judd surveys the evolution of the artist's work, beginning with his paintings, reliefs and handmade objects from the early 1960s; through the years in which he built an iconic vocabulary of works in three dimensions, including hollow boxes, stacks and progressions made with metals and plastics by commercial fabricators; and continuing through his extensive engagement with color during the last decade of his life.

This richly illustrated catalog takes a close look at Judd's achievements, and, using newly available archival materials at the Judd Foundation and elsewhere, expands scholarly perspectives on his work. The essays address subjects such as his early beginnings in painting, the fabrication of his sculptures, his site-specific pieces and his work in design and architecture.

Donald Judd (1928-94) began his professional career working as a painter while studying art history and writing art criticism. One of the foremost sculptors of our time, Judd refused this designation and other attempts to label his art: his revolutionary approach to form, materials, working methods and display went beyond the set of existing terms in midcentury New York. His work, in turn, changed the language of modern sculpture.

Af Klint's exquisitely rendered botanical portfolio reveals a deep spiritual engagement with the flora of her native Sweden

Across the spring and summer seasons of 1919 and 1920, Swedish artist Hilma af Klint engaged in a period of intense observation of nature, venturing into forests and fields and drawing the flowers she found there. The resulting 46 sheets comprise her Nature Studies portfolio, recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In pencil and jewel-toned watercolor, af Klint juxtaposed exquisitely rendered blossoms with enigmatic diagrams: a blooming sunflower is echoed by nested circles; lily of the valley is joined by a colorful checkerboard; catsfoot is set against a pair of mirrored spirals. Together, these two modes--representational and abstract--demonstrate the artist's belief that close observation of nature reveals what stands behind the flowers ineffable aspects of the human character.
Published in conjunction with the first public exhibition of this rare portfolio, Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers presents the drawings alongside contextualizing artworks and translations of the artist's previously unpublished writings. An overview essay by curator Jodi Hauptman explores af Klint's portfolio and the circumstances of its creation; texts by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Laura Neufeld and Lena Struwe unpack the imagery, materiality and botanical knowledge behind these works.
Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) trained at Stockholm's Royal Academy of Fine Arts and established herself as a professional artist. In the first decade of the 20th century, she developed a unique abstract vocabulary, some years earlier than her peers. Whether on canvas or on paper, her singular work is informed by her spiritual investigations and, as this project demonstrates, an interest in and attunement to the natural world.

A singular study on Porset's Butaque chair recently acquired by MoMA

There is design in everything we perceive, proposed Clara Porset (1895-1981), one of the most innovative Latin American designers of the 20th century. Although born in Matanzas, Cuba, Porset spent most of her life in Mexico and throughout her long career as a designer, writer, activist and teacher, she challenged social conventions, persevering in an era that offered few opportunities for the professional development of women. In this latest volume of MoMA's One on One series, scholar and curator Ana Elena Mallet explores Porset's interpretation of the butaque, the traditional low-slung chair found throughout Latin America. Porset's butaque--distinctively modern yet rooted in ancient cultures--demonstrates how a single item of design can convey multitudes about culture, regional identity and intersecting histories.

On the unique synthesis of word and image in Dorothea Lange's boldly political photography, which defined the iconography of WPA and Depression-era America

Toward the end of her life, Dorothea Lange reflected, All photographs--not only those that are so-called 'documentary'... can be fortified by words. Though Lange's career is widely heralded, this connection between words and pictures has received scant attention. A committed social observer, Lange paid sharp attention to the human condition, conveying stories of everyday life through her photographs and the voices they drew in. Published in conjunction with the first major MoMA exhibition of Lange's in 50 years, Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures brings fresh attention to iconic works from the collection together with lesser-known photographs--from early street photography to projects on the criminal justice system. The work's complex relationships to words show Lange's interest in art's power to deliver public awareness and to connect to intimate narratives in the world.

Presenting Lange's work in its diverse contexts--photobooks, Depression-era government reports, newspapers, magazines, poems--along with the voices of contemporary artists, writers and thinkers, the book offers a nuanced understanding of Lange's career, and new means for considering words and pictures today. An introductory essay by curator Sarah Hermanson Meister is followed by sections organized according to words from a range of historical contexts: Lange's landmark photobook An American Exodus, Life and Aperture magazines, an illustrated guide to minimize racism in jury trials, and many more. These contexts are punctuated with original contributions from a distinguished group of contemporary writers, artists and critical thinkers, including Julie Ault, Kimberly Juanita Brown, River Encalada Bullock, Sam Contis, Jennifer Greenhill, Lauren Kroiz, Sally Mann, Sandra Phillips, Wendy Red Star, Christina Sharpe, Rebecca Solnit, Robert Slifkin and Tess Taylor.

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) operated a successful San Francisco portrait studio in the 1920s before going on to work with the Resettlement Administration (and later the Farm Security Administration) documenting the hardships of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl migration. During World War II, Lange worked for the US government photographing the Japanese American internment camps, and California's wartime economy. Lange's photographs were published widely during her lifetime. Lange worked closely with curator John Szarkowski on a retrospective that opened posthumously in 1966 at the Museum of Modern Art.

O'Keeffe's 1927 painting expresses her defiant commitment to abstraction and the influences of Kandinsky, Dove and others

During the 1920s, Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) became widely known for her paintings of enlarged flowers. But she regularly returned to abstraction, and indeed found it surprising how many people separate the objective from the abstract. Executed in 1927, Abstraction Blue illustrates that belief, retaining the glowing color, careful modulation and zoomed-in view of the artist's contemporaneous blooms, while forgoing any obligation toward representation. In this latest volume of the MoMA One on One series, curator Samantha Friedman considers how these and other factors converged in the creation of this composition.

An archival dive with fresh interpretations of the legendary New York gallery and cultural laboratory that catalyzed collaboration among Black artists and their counterparts of diverse backgrounds

Just Above Midtown, or JAM, was an art gallery and self-described laboratory for experimentation led by Linda Goode Bryant that foregrounded African American artists and artists of color. Open from 1974 to 1986, it was a place where an expansive idea of contemporary art flourished and debate was cultivated. The gallery offered early opportunities for artists recognized as pivotal figures in late-20th-century art--including David Hammons, Butch Morris, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O'Grady and Howardena Pindell--as well as a nonhierarchical approach to art that welcomed artists without stylistic proscription.
Published in conjunction with the first museum exhibition to focus on this visionary gallery and its ongoing impact, Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces showcases rarely seen material from JAM's history--artworks, ephemera and photographs--that collectively document the gallery's communal and programmatic activities. This richly illustrated, jacketed paperback catalog includes essays that contextualize JAM and consider its legacy, a conversation between Goode Bryant and Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, a complete exhibition chronology written by MoMA and Studio Museum staff with nearly 50 annotated entries, and excerpts from oral histories with JAM staff and artists conducted especially for this project.
I walked in and I was like, Yes! And I remember thinking, 'I don't care if I never show there, I'm so glad to know it exists.' It was like it gave my brain another dimension. I had something to look to. -Janet Olivia Henry, JAM volunteer and artist
JAM has always been like a snowball on a hill, always gaining momentum. I'm still connected with all the things that happened there. Just Above Midtown--as much as it is a physical entity, it's also a spiritual entity. It has never not been a part of my thinking as an artist, or a part of my life as an artist, or a part of my momentum as an artist. -Randy Williams, artist and educator

The first survey on the interdisciplinary biodesign genius of Neri Oxman, pioneer of material ecology

Throughout her 20-year career, Neri Oxman has invented not only new ideas for materials, buildings and construction processes, but also new frameworks for interdisciplinary--and interspecies--collaborations. She coined the term material ecology to describe her process of producing techniques and objects informed by the structural, systemic and aesthetic wisdom of nature, from the shells of crustaceans to the flow of human breathing.

Groundbreaking for its solid technological and scientific basis, its rigorous and daring experimentation, its visionary philosophy and its unquestionable attention to formal elegance, Oxman's work operates at the intersection of biology, engineering, architecture and artistic design, material science and computer science.

This book--designed by Irma Boom and published to accompany a midcareer retrospective of Oxman's work--highlights the interdisciplinary nature of the designer's practice. It demonstrates how Oxman's contributions allow us to question and redefine the idea of modernism--a concept in constant evolution--and of organic design. Some of the projects featured in the book and exhibition include the Silk Pavilion, which harnesses silkworms' ability to generate a 3-D cocoon out of a single thread silk in order to create architectural constructions; Aguahoja, a water-based fabrication platform that prints structures made out of different biopolymers; and Glass, an additive manufacturing technology for 3-D printing optically transparent glass structures at architectural dimensions.

Israeli American architect, designer and inventor Neri Oxman (born 1976) is professor of media arts and sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, among others.

Acclaimed American poet Tess Taylor responds to Dorothea Lange's photography with a new work

In Last West, poet Tess Taylor follows Dorothea Lange's winding paths across California during the Great Depression and in its immediate aftermath. On these journeys, Lange photographed migrant laborers, Dust Bowl refugees, tent cities and Japanese American internment camps. Taylor's hybrid text collages lyric and oral histories against Lange's own journals and notebook fragments, framing the ways social and ecological injustices of the past rhyme eerily with those of the present. The result is a stunning meditation on movement, landscape and place.

Scintillatingly rendered by Taylor as conversation, meditation, road trip, and vivid documentary account, Last West tracks the not-so-distant past into the erupting present, taking on as many poetic forms as there are California topographies. -Forrest Gander, Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets and winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

How Bearden's landmark quilt exemplifies his complex art and rich legacy

Romare Bearden's (1911-88) Patchwork Quilt (1970) is a monumental collage that proves the artist's mastery of his signature medium. Acquired by the Museum of Modern Art the year it was made, the work has become a landmark in Bearden's career. But his path to creating it, to embracing collage, and to making work that addresses the specifics of Black life in America in ways that are both specific and broadly accessible, was a long one. Bearden's early career is characterized by broad experimentation with materials and visual styles, as well as major life events that led away from a visual arts practice. In this latest volume of the MoMA One on One series, curator Esther Adler explores Bearden's search for his artistic voice, illustrated by the breadth of different works in the museum's collection. A close reading of Patchwork Quilt, its sources and materiality, further emphasize the artist's unwavering commitment to both his art and community, a combination that has led to his centrality in mid-20th century art.