Kirjahaku

Sadie Benning is not only among the country's most respected and influential video artists, she also broke cultural ground as a founding member of the multimedia feminist band Le Tigre. Suspended Animation, the first monograph on the artist and the catalogue of her first U.S. museum exhibition, introduces Benning's paintings and Play Pause, an ambitious new two-channel video installation. Benning's videos, which she began to make in the late 1980s with a Fisher-Price Pixelvision 2000 "toy camera," are known for their explorations of loneliness, alienation, gender ambiguity and her own developing lesbian identity. Benning's recent paintings--flat, illustrative, exuberant--are playful, imaginary portraits that address similar themes. Play Pause, created entirely from hundreds of Benning's drawings, offers a rhythmic and affectionate view of contemporary life in a city's streets, parks and gay bars. Includes written contributions by Eileen Myles and Aleksandar Hemon, and a conversation with the New York painter Amy Sillman.

Robert Beck (b. 1959) makes drawings, photographs, sculptures, videos and installations investigating sexuality, masculinity and violence; his work has been collected by the Getty, the Whitney and MoMA, among others. Dust documents the eponymous recent installations in materials including graphite, Polaroids, drywall and shower curtains.

The work of Paul Sietsema (born 1968) might be described as a sequence of multimedia suites, each of which begins with a phase of intensive research into historical–political themes, and which results in a body of interrelated sculptures, photographs, drawings, collages and films that propose an “exploded” model of historical progress. In general, these suites, such as Empire (2003) and Figure 3 (2008), have been discussed and exhibited individually. This publication, by contrast, brings together major elements from projects of the past decade, along with new works, which are being facilitated by the support of a Wexner Center Artist Residency Award in visual arts. The publication, like the exhibition it accompanies, is the most comprehensive survey of Sietsema’s work to date. It includes his most recent sequence, Chinese Box, done through the support of the Wexner Artist Residency Award.

Cruzamentos features 35 artists, working across all genres, who reflect the vibrant artistic scene currently flourishing throughout Brazil. Many of the artists are emerging or mid-career and, with very few exceptions, have not been widely (or ever) exhibited in the US. “Cruzamentos” translates literally as “crossings” or ‘“intersections,” but in Brazil it also refers to the mixing of cultures that renders the country so distinctive. Cruzamentos extends that metaphor to contemporary art, focusing on artists whose practices are as varied as the country itself. Although a handful of postwar Brazilian visual artists have received recognition in North America, the astonishingly high level of artistic production throughout Brazil over recent decades remains significantly overlooked beyond its borders. Among the artists included are Márcio Almeida, Jonathas de Andrade, Laura Belém, Tatiana Blass, José Damasceno, Cia de Foto, Dias & Riedweg, Marcius Galan, Fernanda Gomes, Jac Leirner, Cristiano Lenhardt, Cinthia Marcelle, Beatriz Milhazes, Regina Silveira, Adriana Varejão and Marcia Xavier.

In celebration of its 25th anniversary in fall 2014, the Wexner Center for the Arts presented an unprecedented exhibition of the personal collection of Leslie and Abigail Wexner. Transfigurations: Modern Masters from the Wexner Family Collection features an in-depth selection of masterworks by Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti and Jean Dubuffet. With its concentrated focus on these three twentieth-century virtuosos, along with additional works by Edgar Degas, Willem de Kooning and Susan Rothenberg, the Wexner Family Collection is truly incomparable to any other private collection formed over the last 50 years. Guest curated by Robert Storr, professor and dean of the Yale University School of Art, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue bring fresh perspective to these artists and examine the figurative impulses that connect them. The comprehensive catalogue features essays by such leading art historians and curators as James Demetrion, Valerie Fletcher, Lisa Florman, Marilyn McCully, Diana Widmaier Picasso, Robert Storr and the late Kirk Varnedoe, as well as entries on the 60 objects in the exhibition. Apart from the singular significance of each individual work, both the catalogue and exhibition demonstrate the persistence of the human figure in art throughout the twentieth century and into our own.

Deconstructing the charged connections between sitter, artist and viewer Presenting paintings of some of the artist's key models and muses, I Can't See You Without Me illuminates the work of Brooklyn painter Mickalene Thomas (born 1971). Culling from art history and popular culture, Thomas creates scintillating portraits that deconstruct the highly charged connections between sitter, artist and viewer. Whether depicted as classically composed 19th-century odalisques, Afro-adorned vixens of blaxploitation films or as a powerful maternal figure yearning for social mobility, the recurring models in Thomas' compositions (almost exclusively women of color) convey a spirit of strength and self-confidence. Across this archetypal array, it is both their contradictions and kinships that make the black female body such fertile terrain for the artist's ongoing investigations. By casting herself, her late mother and other formidable women in her life as models, muses and collaborators, Thomas particularizes her distinctive oeuvre of portraiture. Focused yet expansive, the catalog both reasserts and further contextualizes issues of identity, sexuality and agency in Thomas' work that have only become more nuanced and palpable over time.