Aruna D'Souza

Can empathy deliver political change? Does art that elicits emotional identification with others take us where we need to go? In Imperfect Solidarities, writer and art historian Aruna D'Souza offers observations pulled from current events as well as contemporary art that suggest that a feeling of understanding or closeness based on emotion is an imperfect ground for solidarity. Empathy--and its correlate, love--is a distraction from the hard work that needs to be done to achieve justice. Rather, D'Souza contends, we need to imagine a form of political solidarity that is not based on empathy, but on the much more difficult obligation of care. When we can respect the unknowability of the other and still care for and with them, without translating ourselves into their terms, perhaps we will fare better at building political bridges.

Edouard Manet s Le Dejeuner sur l herbe (1863) is generally cited as the first modern painting. The entry slide in art history lectures about modernism, the work remains among the 'most audacious painting[s] ever seen in France,' as Ross King described it in The Judgement of Paris (2006). As Manet did with Le Dejeuner sur l herbe, the most provocative painters today collapse the historical and the contemporary onto one plane. Jeffrey Deitch invited a group of these influential artists to create their own versions, combined here with historical responses to Manet s painting. The slim volume features these often biting and satirical works alongside essays discussing Le Dejeuner sur l herbe s enduring influence on contemporary figurative painting. ARTISTS INCLUDE: Nina Chanel Abney, Diane Arbus, Vanessa Beecroft, Cecily Brown, Caitlin Cherry, Joe Coleman, Robert Colescott, Somaya Critchlow, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Dominique Fung, Alain Jacquet, Kurt Kauper, Karen Kilimnik, Cindy Ji Hye Kim, Jeff Koons, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Liu Xiaodong, Tala Madani, Sophie Matisse, Paul McCarthy, Sam McKinniss, Jill Mulleady, Ariana Papademetropoulos, Naudline Pierre, Christina Quarles, Walter Robinson, Giangiacomo Rossetti, David Salle, Katja Seib, Tschabalala Self, Vaughn Spann, Mickalene Thomas, Salman Toor, John Wesley, Kehinde Wiley

This book celebrates the generous promised gift of over three hundred works from the collection of Rebecca and Jack Benaroya to the Tacoma Art Museum. Rebecca and Jack built their collection over the course of thirty-five years, starting in 1980 with Dale Chihuly’s blown glass Tomato Red Basket Set. The couple followed their passions and acquired seminal works from some of the Northwest artists and international artists who transformed the Pilchuck Glass School into a world-renowned center for innovation and experimentation. These artists include Olga de Amaral, Howard Ben Tré, Sonja Blomdahl, Kenneth Callahan, Joey Kirkpatrick and Flora C. Mace, Kyohei Fujita, Morris Graves, Paul Horiuchi, Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová, William Morris, Ginny Ruffner, Bertil Vallien, and more. Their works are generously reproduced in full color and accompanied by scholarly essays by Stefano Catalani, Aruna D’Souza, Rock Hushka, and Tina Oldknow. This promised gift of 353 works and funds for a new wing and endowment honors Rebecca and Jack by ensuring their collection will be enjoyed for generations to come.

"An exploratory case study in institutional racism as it has manifested in the New York City art world" --Brooklyn RailIn 2017, the Whitney Biennial included a painting by a white artist, Dana Schutz, of the lynched body of a young black child, Emmett Till. In 1979, anger brewed over a show at New York's Artists Space entitled The Nigger Drawings. In 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition Harlem on My Mind did not include a single work by a black artist. In all three cases, black artists and writers and their allies organized vigorous responses using the only forum available to them: public protest.Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts reflects on these three incidents in the long and troubled history of art and race in America. It lays bare how the art world--no less than the country at large--has persistently struggled with the politics of race, and the ways this struggle has influenced how museums, curators and artists wrestle with notions of free speech and the specter of censorship. Whitewalling takes a critical and intimate look at these three "acts" in the history of the American art scene and asks: when we speak of artistic freedom and the freedom of speech, who, exactly, is free to speak?Aruna D'Souza writes about modern and contemporary art, food and culture; intersectional feminisms and other forms of politics; how museums shape our views of each other and the world; and books. Her work appears regularly in 4Columns.org, where she is a member of the editorial advisory board, as well as in publications including the Wall Street Journal, ARTnews, Garage, Bookforum, Momus and Art Practical. D'Souza is the editor of the forthcoming Making it Modern: A Linda Nochlin Reader.

Cézanne’s Bathers: Biography and the Erotics of Paint discusses an epochal shift in the representation of sexuality in modern art with the images of nudes made by Paul Cézanne. Cézanne was the first painter of the twentieth century who, through careful study of avant-garde precedents including Manet and Courbet, would transform the material qualities of his art into an erotics of paint—that is to say, an eroticization of medium, of the liquidity of paint and the resistance of the canvas, of the trembling of the contour, of the oiliness of the pigment, and of countless other painterly effects. By dislocating the erotics of his subject from the bodies he depicted and transposing it onto these formal qualities, Cézanne set the stage for the explorations of a number of later artists, including Henri Matisse, who saw in Cézanne the possibilities of the modern painting of the nude. Cézanne’s Bathers: Biography and the Erotics of Paint proposes a new way of reading Cézanne’s biography not simply as a form of myth-making but also as a form of art criticism; at the same time, it proposes a reading of Cézanne’s images of bathers that accounts for their strangenesses and for the pleasures they produce. It is a book that is fiercely engaged with arguments about these paintings that have come before, mining the writings of figures such as Meyer Schapiro, Tamar Garb, and T. J. Clark to discover a new way of looking at these strange works.