Jill Medvedow

Scintillating and significant, Atlas’ genre-defying, collaborative video art is on full display in this extensive survey American artist Charles Atlas (born 1949) is a leading figure in film and video art known for his pioneering work at the intersections of moving image, dance and performance. Alongside the artist’s first retrospective, About Time surveys 50 years of groundbreaking work through immersive multichannel video installations Atlas describes as “walk-through experiences.” These monumental installations reimagine his collaborations with artists such as Marina Abramovic, Michael Clark, Merce Cunningham and Yvonne Rainer in dynamic new spatial configurations. Taking in themes of performance and portraiture, gender and sexuality, and collaboration and friendship, About Time presents significant new scholarship on the artist’s work and legacy from some of today’s leading voices, foregrounding a diverse group of artists reflecting on Atlas’ influence.

The first monograph on Lewis' sculptural practice inspired by the material inventiveness of Afro-Atlantic diasporic traditions This is the first monograph dedicated to the sculptural practice of the Canadian artist Tau Lewis (born 1993). Lewis transforms found materials into intricate soft sculptures, quilts, masks and other assemblages through intensive processes such as hand sewing and carving. A self-taught artist, Lewis’ practice is directed at healing personal, collective and historical traumas through the repetitive forms of creative labor she employs. She forages for materials charged with meaning—old clothing and photographs, as well as driftwood and seashells—which she often collects from her surroundings in Toronto, New York or outside her family’s home in Negril, Jamaica. Lewis’ upcycling relates to forms of material inventiveness practiced by diasporic communities, wherein working with objects close at hand is a reparative act to reclaim agency. Throughout, Lewis’ interest lies in honoring and advancing these diasporic traditions and exploring, as she has said, “the transference of energy and emotion that occurs when an object is made by hand.”

“Her language for exploring [history] is at once serious and exuberant.” –Siddhartha Mitter, New York Times Over the last 15 years, Firelei Báez has created artwork that delves into the historical narratives of the Atlantic Basin. She draws on the disciplines of anthropology, geography, folklore, fantasy, science fiction and social history to unsettle categories of race, gender and nationality in her paintings, drawings and installations. Her exuberant paintings feature finely wrought, complex and layered uses of pattern, motifs and saturated hues. Primarily centering women of color, her works incorporate regal fashion styles and decorative elements as well as defiant gazes in order to assert their authority. In advance of her North American traveling solo exhibition, this lushly illustrated book offers audiences an opportunity to gain a holistic understanding of Báez’s complex body of work, cementing her as one of today's most important artists. Partly inspired by artists’ sketchbooks, the monograph includes full-spread reproductions of the artist’s preparatory sketches alongside annotations, source images and close-up details of her artworks. Numerous scholars contribute thoughtful, reverent texts, weighing in on Báez’s indelible mark on the contemporary art landscape. The Dominican Republic–born artist Firelei Báez (born 1981) reworks visual references drawn from diasporic histories in order to imagine new possibilities for the future, overlaying figuration, symbolic imagery and abstract gesture onto large-scale reproductions of found maps and documents. She then populates these representations with hybrid forms composed of folkloric and literary references, textile patterns and plant life.

The first major monograph on Simone Leigh's multimedia explorations of community, Black feminism and the traditions and material cultures of the African diaspora A New York Times Book Review 2023 holiday gift guide pick Over the past two decades, Simone Leigh has created artwork that situates questions of Black femme-identified subjectivity at the center of contemporary art discourse. Her sculpture, video, installation and social practice explore ideas of race, beauty and community in visual and material culture. Leigh's art addresses a wide swath of historical periods, geographies and traditions, with specific references to materials across the African diaspora, as well as forms traditionally associated with African art and architecture.This publication includes substantial new scholarship addressing Leigh's work across mediums and topics. The volume, timed with the artist's first museum survey and national tour, includes contributions by her longtime collaborators, new scholars who add diverse insights and perspectives, and a conversation highlighting Leigh's voice. Additionally, generous and lushly illustrated plates feature her critically acclaimed work for the 59th Venice Biennale and works made throughout her 20-year career. A special section featuring Leigh's research images gives access to Leigh's research methodologies and encourages readers to fully engage with all aspects of Leigh's work. This monograph provides a timely opportunity to gain a holistic understanding of the complex and profoundly moving work of this groundbreaking artist. Born in Chicago in 1967, Simone Leigh received a BA in fine art with a minor in philosophy from Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, in 1990. In 2022, Leigh represented the United States at the 59th Venice Biennale with her critically acclaimed exhibition Sovereignty. She has had solo presentations at the Kitchen, New York (2012); Creative Time, New York (2014); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2016); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); and the High Line, New York (2019); among other venues. Leigh lives and works in Brooklyn.

How artists from Paul Klee and Mierle Laderman Ukeles to Faith Ringgold and Deborah Roberts have explored childhood themes of innocence, spontaneity and storytelling Artists have long been inspired by children—by their imagination, creativity and unique ways of seeing and being in the world—and have made work that depicts and involves children as collaborators, that represents or mimics their ways of drawing or telling stories, that highlights their unique cultures, and that addresses ideas of innocence and spontaneity closely associated with children. To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood surveys how artists have reflected on and contributed to notions of childhood from the early 20th century to the present. The works in To Begin Again offer distinctive viewpoints and experiences, revealing how time and place, economics and race, and representation and aesthetics fundamentally shape how we experience and understand early development. The catalog underscores that while there is no single, uniform idea of childhood, it is nevertheless the ground upon which so much of society is built, negotiated and imagined. Artists include: Ann Agee, John Ahearn, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Francis Alÿs, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Brian Belott, Jordan Casteel, Lenka Clayton, Allan Rohan Crite, Henry Darger, Karon Davis, Robert Gober, Jay Lynn Gomez, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Duane Hanson, Mona Hatoum, Sharon Hayes, Ekua Holmes, Mary Kelly, Paul Klee, Justine Kurland, Helen Levitt, Tau Lewis, Glenn Ligon, Oscar Murillo, Rivane Neuenschwander, Berenice Olmedo, Charles Ray, Faith Ringgold, Deborah Roberts, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Rachel Rose, Heji Shin, Sable Elyse Smith, Becky Suss, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Cathy Wilkes and Carmen Winant.

The first major American publication on this important contemporary sculptor.Anish Kapoor is one of a highly inventive generation of sculptors who emerged in London in the early 1980s. Since then he has created a remarkable body of work that blends a modernist sense of pure materiality with a fascination for the manipulation of form and the perception of space. This book-the first major American publication on Kapoor's work-surveys his work since 1979, with a focus on sculptures and installations made since the early 1990s. With more than ninety color images of these ambitious and complex works, three original essays, an extended interview with Kapoor, and selections from his sketchbooks, this book confirms Anish Kapoor's place as one of the most remarkable sculptors working today. Kapoor's work has evolved into an abstract and perceptually complex elaboration of the sculptural object as at once monumental and evanescent, physical and ethereal-as in his famous Cloud Gate (2004) in Chicago's Millennium Park. The works in Anish Kapoor include such striking works as Past, Present, Future (2006), 1000 Names (1979-1980) and When I Am Pregnant (1992). This book, which accompanies an exhibition at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, offers American readers a long-overdue opportunity to consider the extraordinary clarity, subtlety, and power of Kapoor's art.