Asma Naeem

‘[Casteel] captures everyday encounters with people and places in works that invite recognition of our shared humanity.’ – MacArthur Foundation The first monograph on Jordan Casteel, one of the most critically acclaimed artists working today Jordan Casteel (b.1989 in Denver) is a New York-based artist known for her large-scale, figurative portraits and landscapes made with gestural brushwork and bold swaths of color. From the New York City subway and the streets of Harlem to the woodlands of Upstate New York, Casteel has established a collaborative practice where individuals she has encountered over the course of her daily life are represented in their element, generating an experience that is at once intimate and collective. Casteel's debut monograph features nearly 150 beautifully reproduced images, with sections specially conceived and designed by the artist herself.

“Toor’s evocative, tenderly executed paintings begin to pluck at your heartstrings almost as soon as you see them.” –Roberta Smith, New York Times Known for his moody figurative works that combine academic technique with a quick, sketchlike style, Salman Toor’s paintings depict intimate scenes in the imagined lives of young, queer men residing between New York City and South Asia. As Baltimore Museum of art curator Asma Naeem describes in her introduction, “his paintings resonate as journal-like entries that record moments of kinship, bonding, playfulness, lust, loneliness, rejection—pastel-inflected, gossamer-covered flights of the imagination with wispy Brown boys that mine the complexities of being an immigrant, queer and human.” This monograph, produced in conjunction with the artist’s first retrospective exhibition, collects Toor’s most essential works alongside significant new texts, by exhibition curator Naeem and painter Evan Moffitt, that examine the works for both their formal innovations and their influences. Also included is an original new short story by author Hanya Yanigahara, illustrated by Toor’s paintings. Lavishly designed by Topos Graphics, No Ordinary Love is an exquisite introduction to a powerful young talent. Salman Toor was born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1983 and currently lives and works in New York. He studied painting and drawing at Ohio Wesleyan University and received his MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. Salman Toor: How Will I Know, the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition, was recently presented at the Whitney Museum (2020–21).

This book spotlights a complex art collection established at the intersection of modern art and social justice. In 1963, as civil rights protests swirled across the fiercely segregated state, this historically Black college became an unlikely hub in Mississippi envisioned as “an interracial oasis in which the fine arts are the focus and magnet.” Since its founding in 1869 by the abolitionist-led American Missionary Association, Tougaloo College has made the fight for equality central to its mission. In 1963, Tougaloo became the nexus for modern art in Mississippi, when leaders of the New York art world began a rich program of art acquisitions. This publication features two essays and approximately thirty-five selections from this distinctive collection by diverse artists such as Francis Picabia, Jacob Lawrence, and Alma Thomas.

Whales are a diversified group of totally aquatic placental marine animals with a vast distribution. They are a loose classification within the Cetacea infraorder, which normally excludes dolphins and porpoises. The order Cetartiodactyla, which includes whales, dolphins, and porpoises, is made up of even-toed ungulates. Whales range in size from the dwarf sperm whale, which is 2.6 meters (8.5 feet) long and weighs 135 kilogrammes (298 pounds), to the blue whale, which is 29.9 meters (98 feet) long and weighs 190 metric tonnes (210 short tonnes).

Ruminants are distinguished from other mammals by their intricate digestive systems. They assimilate food, absorb nutrients, and obtain energy in a unique method compared to other herbivores. The fundamental difference between a cow's and a ruminant's digestive systems is that a cow's stomach contains four independent compartments, each with its own function, whereas most other species only have one compartment with a single function. Ruminant animals can digest grass or vegetation without chewing it completely because of the four compartments. Instead, they just partially chew the vegetation, leaving the rest to be broken down by microbes in the rumen area of the stomach. Animals having a monogastric digestive system (single stomach chambers) do not have the same potential.