Books by Pablo Helguera

In this charming English/Spanish story, a toddler encounters the fall leaves for the first time, and starts giving them away to people, helping adults rediscover the beauty of autumn.

In 2017, the New Britain Museum of American Art invited artist Pablo Helguera to exhibit as part of its NEW/NOW series. Inspired by New Britain's rich industrial history and the museum's extensive holdings of American art and illustration,Helguera wrote and illustrated three short stories, now presented in this small book. The stories draw upon the legacy of the Shakers in Connecticut, the manufacturing legacy of New Britain (once known as "the Hardware Capitol of the World"), and the biography of one of New Britain's most illustrious residents, American artist Sol LeWitt. These stories, which interweave humor, the supernatural, and heartfelt reflections about education and the power of art making, serve as a small tribute to the history of this New England town and Museum.About the AuthorIn a methodical way and recurring to strategies connected to the baroque fugue and ars combinatoria (combinatory art), Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) often draws improbable relationships between human histories, biographies, anecdotes and historical events, always bringing them all together in a cohesive whole and making all serve as a reflection on our current relationship with art as a society. Helguera often focuses on history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics and anthropology in formats such as lectures, museum displays, performance and written fiction. His project The School of Panamerican Unrest (2003-2011), an early example of pedagogically-fo- cused socially engaged art, consisted in a nomadic think-tank, physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage to Tierra del Fuego. He has exhibited and performed widely (MoMA, Havana Biennial, Performa, Reina Sofia, amongst many others) and has been recipient of the Guggenheim, Franklin Furnace and Blade of Grass Fellowships and the Creative Capital and Art Matters grants. He was the first recipient of the International Award of Participatory Art of the Emilia Romagna Region in Italy. His book Education for Socially Engaged Art, (2011), a primer for social practice has quickly become adopted as a main textbook for art schools and university programs internationally. He is also author of several other books including The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style, Theatrum Anatomicum (and other performance lectures), What in the World, and Art Scenes: The Social Scripts of the Art World, a book on the sociology of contemporary art. In 2013 he launched the project Libreri¿a Donceles, consisting in creating the only Spanish used book- store in New York, a non-profit project intended to draw attention to the perceptions of Latin American culture in the U.S. Since 2007, he is Director of Adult and Academic Programs in the Education Department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Currently, the Jumex Museum in Mexico City is presenting a multi-year mid-career retrospective of his work under the title Dramatis Personae.

Drawing on the rich literary tradition of the aphorism, Pablo Helguera uses an anthropologist's lens to comment on contemporary art its practice. While this is a book directed to visual artists, the reflections of An Atlas of Commonplaces provide a window to current issue around art making for art professionals and the general public alike. Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a visual artist living in New York. He is the author of many books including The Parable Conference, (2014), Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011) and Art Scenes: The Social Scripts of the Art World (2012).

In this provocative new book, Helguera argues that contemporary art makes viewers perform self-conscious or instinctive interpretive acts; and that the construction of value in art is determined less by the objects themselves than by the nature of interpretive performances, having a trickle-down effect on practically every aspect of art in society.

In 1660, a mysterious sect of Dutch mystics arrived to an island in the New World with the objective to create a new society. Their governing principle revolved around the uninterrupted performance of a single dramatic work in seven tableaux vivants. Invoking alchemical imagery and hermetic thought, their goal was to arrive to a higher state of being by collectively embodying the symbolic representation of all of human and divine knowledge. Their experiment, which would last a century, would test the human boundaries of time, physical endurance, and the collective commitment toward an idea. "Like a 'lamb in wolf's clothing, ' Pablo Helguera uses the exoteric mechanisms of historical erudition to lure us to his magical island of the Ourobourians. But right about the time we lose our footing on the land's slippery shores-when we begin to wonder if the artist has gleaned an esoteric tradition for more than just source material for his island's symbols and nomenclature, when we start to navigate his land with the non-verbal hunches of the alchemists' score, and call into question the artifices we employ to gather the world around us-we realize Helguera has really taken us on a journey to another land altogether, the most forbidden of places: the self." -Lise Patt, founder and director of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Los Angeles "Pablo Helguera is a splendid liar, a first-class storyteller, a curious mind constantly in search of stories, a creator of parallel universes and impossible characters living in credible situations, which invariably probe our certainties, intuition and knowledge." - Naief Yehya, writer and critic

¿Eine Übung im hochgradig provokatorischen, originellen Denken. Pablo Helgueras Parabelkonferenz stellt eine Unmenge unkonventioneller Fragen über die Kunst, nur um sie durch eine Reihe unterhaltsamer erfundener Geschichten zu beantworten. >Gibt es zu viel Kunst auf der Welt?Wie sollte man Kunst unterrichten?Warum wollen wir Andy Warhol wieder erleben?