Books published by Distributed Art Publishers

Artists defy Western conceptions of the "human" The term "no humans involved" emerged shortly after the 1991 beating of Rodney King, when it was discovered that the Los Angeles Police Department was using the term as a shorthand for casework that involved Black and Latino men and sex workers. In 1994, Jamaican scholar and theorist Sylvia Wynter challenged her academic colleagues to consider how they themselves might be contributing to the cultural mindset that gave rise to this exclusionary definition of human. In particular, Wynter highlighted the strong influence the notion of race has on the definition of the human and the social hierarchies and injustices that result from this link.No Humans Involved collects works by contemporary artists that serve as a response to Wynter's prompt. Among the artists featured are Eddie Aparicio, who uses large-scale, rubber casts of trees to document social and economic relationships between Latin America and the United States; Tau Lewis, a multidisciplinary artist who creates portraits out of culturally relevant found objects and recycled materials; and Wilmer Wilson IV, who investigates the marginalization of Black bodies in social relations through performance, sculpture, photography and other mediums. This collection of artworks from a diverse group of artists provides a contemporary response to Wynter's call to action, addressing the social divisions present today and exploring opportunities for social unity.Artists include: Eddie Aparicio, Tau Lewis, Las Nietas De Nonó, Sondra Perry, Sangree, Wangshui and Wilmer Wilson IV.

Sixteen international artists at the forefront of feminismThis book focuses on a selection of midcareer international artists whose oeuvres are informed by the legacies of feminist thought. Each artist adds to the feminist discourse, whether by reclaiming women's marginalized creative histories, using gender discrimination as a method of institutional critique or creating alternate research methodologies that confront patriarchal norms.The book includes sculpture, painting, video, installation and performance art, and features lesser-known projects or entirely new commissions that recast sociopolitical realities throughout the world. In addition to extensive illustrations, the book includes essays by Anne Ellegood and Connie Butler, curators and art historians whose practices have also been dedicated to a discussion of women's rights.Artists include: Leonor Antunes, Yael Bartana, Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Candice Breitz, Shu Lea Cheang, Minerva Cuevas, Vaginal Davis, Every Ocean Hughes, Bouchra Khalili, Laura Lima, Teresa Margolles, Otobong Nkanga, Okwui Okpokwasili, Lara Schnitger and Beverly Semmes.

Art in the space between magic and activism: an introduction to the participatory, multimedia creations of Glenn KainoPublished for the Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist Glenn Kaino's (born 1972) largest exhibition to date, In the Light of a Shadow, this book showcases his work and how art can chronicle parallel trajectories of disparate political and geographical contexts, utilizing history to speak about our present, and art to facilitate political action and hope. Kaino has built his career in the space between these two; creating projects that are based on the magic of trust, fair promises and righting the lapses in memory and omissions of history, all while creating beautifully hopeful and immersive installations.This Book Is a Promise is organized in a galaxy-like structure, with different aspects of Kaino's production over the years represented as intertwined constellations. Additionally, the book reads in two directions, Memory and Promise, each with their own cover. The Memory side presents a retrospective survey, while the Promise surveys the MASS MoCA exhibition. Themes explored include equity, visibility, belief, regeneration and space-making. This publication gives context to Kaino's diverse practice, provides promises for people to follow to live in a better, more humane world and serves as a field guide to being human.

The ongoing legacy of the East Asian ink tradition in contemporary artIncluding the work of more than 50 contemporary artists--from Xu Bing and Lin Tianmiao to Lee Ufan and Hiroshi Sugimoto--and featuring artists from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore to South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Europe and the United States, this book offers a reevaluation of what defines ink art, arguing that it is not the conceptual threads of its history that define what contemporary ink art can be. The gatekeepers who have tied ink art to the continent of Asia and prescribed a strict set of tools for its execution--ink, brush, paper, silk--are nowhere in sight here. Instead, this collection recognizes a spirit of ink painting that transcends medium or place of origin. Ink Dreams seeks to delineate that spirit in the context of a contemporary, globalizing art world, by recognizing three major facets of ink art history that go beyond the tradition's concrete attributes. Exquisitely designed and illustrated, this publication features one of the most important collections of contemporary ink art in the world, from Dora and Gérard Cognié. While there are books on traditional Chinese ink painting, this unique book examines how contemporary art extends an expanded practice into the present day.Artists include: Bingyi, gu wenda, Li Huasheng, Li Huayi, Chen Haiyan, Lin Tianmiao, Liu Dan, Liu Guosong, Lui Shou-kwan, Qiu Shihua, Idris Khan, Wang Tiande, Wucius Wong, Xu Bing, Yang Jiechang, Zhang Yu, Zheng Chongbin, Park Seo-bo, Lee Ufan, Kitamura Junko, Kim Ho-deuk, Shirazeh Houshiary, Jorma Puranen, Matti Kujasalo, Ophélie Asch, Irma Blank, Michael Cherney, Shi Guorui, Hai Bo, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Min Byung Hun.

A multidisciplinary look at the foremost archive of Black American visual culture, as recast by Theaster GatesThis book features essays and other reflections commissioned in response to the Facsimile Cabinet of Women Origin Stories, a monumental participatory work by Theaster Gates (born 1973). The Cabinet includes nearly 3,000 framed images of women from the Johnson Publishing Company archive, and highlights from the collection appear in this edited volume.Founded in 1942, Chicago-based Johnson Publishing chronicled the lives of Black Americans for more than seven decades through the magazines Ebony and Jet. Composed from arguably the most important archive of American Black visual culture in the 20th century, Gates' work centers the essential and too often unsung role of women in this history.When the Cabinet was exhibited at the Colby College Museum of Art, 12 women from a wide range of disciplines (including archivists, legal scholars, anthropologists and librarians, as well as curators, visual artists, filmmakers, writers and art historians) were invited to reflect on a work that brings a sisterhood of images to light.

"This substantial new monograph on the work of Edgar Degas (1834-1917), one of the most significant artists of the 19th and 20th centuries, is a decisive contribution to the literature on the French Impressionist artist. An innovative and groundbreaking book, with underlying discussions related to 'dance, politics and society,' it pays special attention to issues of gender, identity, labor, race and the representation of women. Degas worked in various mediums, and, at the end of his life, left around 6,000 works, including 2,000 related to the world of dance and ballet. The contradictions and ambiguities of his art, especially the way he straddles both tradition and modernity, reaffirm both his uniqueness and significance in the history of Western art. Degas: Dance, Politics and Society includes ten essays, never before published, by experts around the world, and also features a visual essay of black-and-white photographs of the bronze sculptures, including Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, by the Brazilian artist Sofia Borges. Through her camera, Borges reinterprets and conceives new images of Degas' most cherished and classic sculptures"

"This is the most comprehensive book to date on Beatriz Milhazes, featuring many previously unpublished paintings and prints. Milhazes, a pivotal figure in contemporary art and the history of abstraction, works with a complex repertoire of images associated with different motifs, origins and sources. She works mainly in painting, printmaking and collage, but also in drawing, sculpture, artist's books and textiles, among other mediums. Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, geometry and free form, her compositions are intricate, dense, multicolored and literally full of layers--of colors, paints, papers and meanings. Milhazes' sources are diverse and varied: from modernism to the Baroque, from folk art or "arte popular" to pop culture, from fashion to jewelry, from architecture to abstraction, from the history of art to nature. Her work encompasses multiple references, including the artists Hilma af Klint, Sonia Delaunay, Bridget Riley, Henri Matisse, Tarsila do Amaral and Piet Mondrian."

An intimate look at one of the most radical and groundbreaking printmakers of all time, the American Impressionist Mary CassattThis book examines the radical experimentation and innovation of one of the finest and most creative printmakers of the 19th century. A collaborator with the Impressionists Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) made some of her greatest artistic achievements as a printmaker. Her prints reveal the personal and introspective side of an American artist who was at the center of the French art world.Addressing themes of creativity, domesticity, motherhood, fashion, intimacy and privacy, Inside Out: The Prints of Mary Cassatt brings readers into close contact with an artist who used printmaking to consider issues of identity and selfhood in a changing modern world. This publication, which investigates the artist's exploration of the medium over a period of two decades, also features an original pattern design by contemporary designer Frances MacLeod.

The shipwreck narrative is used to explore globalization, colonization and climate change in the masterful works of contemporary American painter Alexis RockmanIn Shipwrecks, Alexis Rockman (born 1962) looks at the world's waterways as a network by which all of history has traveled. The transport of language, culture, art, architecture, cuisine, religion, disease and warfare can all be traced along the routes of seafaring vessels dating back to and in some cases predating the earliest recorded civilizations. Through depictions of historic and obscure shipwrecks and their lost cargoes, Rockman addresses the impact--both factual and extrapolated--the migration of goods, people, plants and animals has on the planet. This timely publication, which includes essays from leading scholars, is propelled by impending climate disaster and the current largest human migration in history, taking place in part by waterway.

Highlighting a new generation of black artists, 'Young, Gifted and Black' surveys works drawn from the collection of Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi, longtime champions of emerging artists of African descent. Edited by Antwaun Sargent, the book features over 100 artworks -- including painting, photography, sculpture, and performance -- that explore collective memory, struggle, and self-representation. With texts by curators and artists offering diverse perspectives, [this book] speaks broadly to notions of community and identity that, while rooted in the specific experience of blackness, capture how these artists are shaping the ways we think about representation, race, and the history of art.

Explore the treasures of The Frick Collection through the eyes of a diverse group of contemporary writers, artists and other cultural figures, from George Condo, Lydia Davis and Julie Mehretu to Abbi Jacobson and Edmund WhiteA cultural haven for museumgoers in New York and beyond, The Frick Collection holds masterpieces by some of the most celebrated artists in the Western tradition--among them Bellini, Gainsborough, Goya, Rembrandt, Vermeer and Whistler--installed in a Gilded Age mansion on Fifth Avenue. This book includes 61 reflections on the Frick's preeminent collection, with the contributors writing about an artwork that has personal significance, sharing how it has moved, challenged, puzzled or inspired them. Each text is accompanied by an illustration of the artwork. For example, writer Jonathan Lethem tells how he started going to the Frick as a teenager, to gaze at Hans Holbein's portraits of Thomas Cromwell and Sir Thomas More. Historian Simon Schama revels in Turner's Mortlake Terrace: Early Summer Morning, which reminds him of his own childhood growing up next to the River Thames. This engaging anthology attests to the inspirational power of art and reminds us that there is no one way to look. Authors include: André Aciman, Ida Applebroog, Firelei Báez, Victoria Beckham, Tom Bianchi, Carter Brey, Rosanne Cash, Jerome Charyn, Roz Chast, George Condo, Gregory Crewdson, Joan K. Davidson, Lydia Davis, Edmund de Waal, Rineke Dijkstra, Mark Doty, Lena Dunham, Stephen Ellcock, Donald Fagen, Rachel Feinstein and John Currin, Teresita Fernández, Bryan Ferry, Michael Frank, Moeko Fujii, Adam Gopnik, Vivian Gornick, Agnes Gund, Carolina Herrera, Alexandra Horowitz, Abbi Jacobson, Bill T. Jones, Maira Kalman, Nina Katchadourian, Susanna Kaysen, Jonathan Lethem, Kate D. Levin, David Masello, Julie Mehretu, Daniel Mendelsohn, Rick Meyerowitz, Duane Michals, Susan Minot, Mark Morris, Nico Muhly, Vik Muniz, Wangechi Mutu, Catherine Opie, Jed Perl, Taylor M. Polites, Diana Rigg, Jenny Saville, Simon Schama, Lloyd Schwartz, Annabelle Selldorf, Arlene Shechet, Judith Thurman, Colm Tóibín, Chris Ware, Darren Waterston, Edmund White and Robert Wilson.

Philippe Thomas' entrepreneurial experiment questions the distinction between authorship and ownershipFrench artist Philippe Thomas (1951-95) never intended to make a name for himself; rather, he was much more invested in the artist's ability to disappear behind his work. In 1987 he created readymades belong to everyone(R), a communication and events agency that mainly provided posters and signboards for different advertising campaigns. Though he was the sole creator of these artifacts, Thomas declined to sign his name on any of them so that the provenance of such pieces took priority over their initial origin--the collector or institution who commissioned or purchased the works would sign their names instead. The entrepreneurial project became a years-long experiment in testing the limitations of authorship and artistry in a post-Duchamp world. This volume provides documentation of the project, along with a final previously unpublished interview by Thomas that enables readers to understand the coherence of his entire work.

Catalog of a traveling exhibition held at the Albuquerque Museum, June 26-Sept. 26, 2021; Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oct. 17, 2021-Feb. 20, 2022; Artis - Naples, the Baker Museum, Mar. 26-July 24, 2022; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, Aug. 28-Nov. 20, 2022; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Dec. 18, 2022-April 16, 2023.

A history of Kippenberger's museum on a Greek island--both a parody and a site of creative camaraderieNot quite a "real" museum and not quite an installation piece of its own, the Museum of Modern Art Syros (MOMAS) was created in 1993 by German artist Martin Kippenberger (1953-97) as a private artists' space that poked fun at the institutional value of museums. Kippenberger claimed the cement ruins of an abandoned building on the Greek island of Syros as the perfect site for his museum--the fact that there were no walls on which to hang any art did not matter to him, because no art was ever actually displayed. For seven years, Kippenberger assumed the role of museum director and annually invited a small group of friends to work on and exhibit their art in MOMAS. This publication provides the first comprehensive study of the project with Kippenberger's original plans and interviews with the artists who attended MOMAS.

Discover how the renowned Korean-born artist Do Ho Suh translates his architectural works into sublime two-dimensional compositionsA sculptor and installation artist, Korean-born Do Ho Suh (born 1962) is best known for his full-scale fabric works in which he meticulously reimagines the architectural space of his past homes and studios. Since collaborating with Singapore's STPI - Creative Workshop & Gallery in 2009, Suh has turned to print and paper as a new medium to channel and recreate these forms. The resulting Thread Drawings, developed using an innovative technique that employs thread as a sculptural material on handmade paper, represent an important breakthrough in Suh's repertoire. The artist's Gelatine Drawings extend from this technical approach to capture a range of dimensional domestic structures, objects and in-between spaces flattened on a single plane, rendered spectral, foldable and mobile. This book also documents Suh's pastel rubbings of interior spaces and everyday objects that disclose and memorialize details of his surroundings, as well as etchings, lithographic prints and cyanotypes.

Between art and activism, from climate change to immigration: the multimedia work of Andrea BowersBased in Los Angeles, Andrea Bowers (born 1965) constructs her practice around the notions of collaboration, representation and engagement. Through her dedication to social and environmental justice, as well as her partnerships with activist organizations and various protest movements, Bowers has renegotiated her role as artist in society. Running throughout her drawings, paintings, videos and installations is a rigorous reevaluation of the concepts, structures and images that have guided our relentless search for meaning and justice. With work that is at once hyper-conceptual and socially engaged, Bowers creates spaces within which to share and evaluate the potential of art as a tool for social progress--while serving as witness and documentarian to the work of activists worldwide. This book is a comprehensive and definitive survey of Bowers' work to date and investigates some of the key, longstanding interests that have guided her practice. Critical pieces from writers of various backgrounds and fields position Bowers' practice in the context of the movements, histories and struggles that make up these broader concerns. Accompanying these illuminating texts are full-color illustrations of works, including a selection of Bowers' well-known neon sculptures and large-scale installations, as well as numerous other drawings, paintings, photographs and video works.

"This book focuses on the works that comprise McArthur Binion's DNA series, produced between 2013 and 2020 and united by their underlying imagery and the language of the grid. Binion has indicated that the series, more than 250 paintings and prints, is now, as of summer 2020, complete. While narratives surrounding aspects of the artist's practice and life have become well-trod in the existing bibliography regarding his work, this volume seeks to dig more deeply, more precisely, into a single body of production as a means to both hone and open the ways we might understand and see Binion's work. Taken as a whole, this publication reveals the visual complexity of the series and the boarder field of meaning it suggests"--Page 7.

Surveys Mies van der Rohe's Lafayette Park in Detroit, Michigan, showing how its residents live with and experience the architecture

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Barbara Kruger: thinking of you, I mean me, I mean you at the Art Institute of Chicago (April 25-August 23, 2021) and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California (October 3, 2021-May 22, 2022), and at The Museum of Modern Art (July 2, 2022-January 2, 2023)"-- Provided by publisher.

Published in advance of the exhibition of the same name at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, February 14-May 31, 2021, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, July 12-November 7, 2021.

Themes of social and environmental justice in the multimedia artworks of renowned Colombian artist Carolina CaycedoCarolina Caycedo's (born 1978) immense geographic photographs, lively artist's books, colorful hanging sculptures and other works are not merely art objects, but gateways into larger discussions about how we treat each other and the world around us. She confronts topics such as the privatization of rivers and other bodies of water, territorial rights of Indigenous groups, the use of violence by police and the environmental, economic and social impacts of dams on local communities. This book showcases Caycedo's process with lavish illustrations of her work, including stills from her video Apariciones / Apparitions (2018), selections from her book Serpent River Book (2017) and images of her celebrated Cosmotarrayas series.

Ralph Gibson's diptych portrayal of Israel, a land at once deeply modern and incredibly ancient The American photographer Ralph Gibson traveled throughout Israel and the surrounding region to create a portrait of a land where the past is vividly part of the present. He contrasts these in two-page spreads in which color and black-and-white images face one another: ancient language in a visual dialogue with contemporary human experience. As architect Moshe Safdie writes in his accompanying text: "This is the promise and paradox of Israel, a new country in an ancient land, modernity next to regression, with abundant and creative energy and cultural output. The high-tech world of invention next to Torah studies. It is still a young country, not even yet past its Centennial. With an optimistic eye, one sees the promise yet to be." For this project, Gibson visited many of the well-known sites of the Holy Land, including the ancient city of Petra in Jordan as well as Masada and the Sea of Galilee flowing into the River Jordan. Sacred Land is a sumptuous study in the aesthetics of time. Ralph Gibson was born in Los Angeles in 1939. In 1956 he enlisted in the navy, where he began studying photography. Since he published his first photobook The Somnambulist in 1970, his work has been the subject of over 40 monographs. His work is widely exhibited and held in public collections around the world, such as the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He lives and works in New York.

"Artist David Humphrey (b. 1955) has been exhibiting internationally since the 1980s when he burst upon the New York art scene. His dynamic paintings defy easy categorization, seamlessly blending representational and abstract passages from a range of sources to create hybrid images that borrow from a wide variety of visual languages and idioms. His work may at any given time integrate gestural abstraction and a cartoonish figuration, with aspects of expressionism, pop art and surrealism to create complex narratives that often touch on the dynamics of human relationships, gender, the environment, and race, but resist any one interpretation. David Humphrey is the first comprehensive, career-spanning monograph surveying the artist's forty-year career. Edited by Davy Lauterbach in close collaboration with the artist, the book includes over 200 generously scaled, full color reproductions of Humphrey's painting and sculptural work from the early 1980s to today. In addition the plates are complimented by a selection of archival and detail photographs, which provide further context for the reader. The book includes three essays by Lauterbach, Wayne Koestenbaum and Lytle Shaw, and a lively and far reaching conversation between Humphrey and an artistic collaborator, the painter Jennifer Coates"--

Marclay fuses art and technology to draw on the sounds and images of life on SnapchatIn Sound Stories, American artist and composer Christian Marclay (born 1955) fuses art and technology, using Snapchat videos as raw material. Featuring texts by Max Maxwell, this book documents the collaboration between the artist and Snapchat in an innovative project mixing the sounds and images of everyday life found on the multimedia messaging app, aggregating unattributed stories. Using algorithms created by a team of engineers at Snap Inc., Marclay experiments with millions of publicly posted Snapchat videos to create five immersive audiovisual installations, two of which are interactive. The Organ, a five-octave keyboard and its bench, allows the spectators to trigger video segments and their matched sounds onto the wall. Rooted in a sampling aesthetic fundamental to Marclay's work, these installations respond to the storytelling available on Snapchat and visitors' sounds and movements in the gallery space.

Franz Erhard Walther's pioneering Werksatz series of wearable fabric sculpturesIn 1991, as MAMCO Geneva was preparing to open, founder and museum director Christian Bernard asked several artists to think about how they would like to sum up their practice for presentation in the museum. German artist Franz Erhard Walther (born 1939) proposed a "Werklager"--a storeroom containing works produced between 1961 and 1972. Walther's "Werklager" has been on display at MAMCO Geneva almost without interruption since the museum opened more than 20 years ago. At the heart of this collection is Walther's 1. Werksatz, or First Work Set, series of wearable fabric objects from 1963-69. Walther described these objects as "instruments for processes"; activated by bodies (pulled through openings, connected by straps, tied and fastened in) or while they lay dormant, they constitute a form of participatory minimal sculpture. Emphasizing process and activation, these pieces circumvent "the seemingly inviolable contract that a work is an object produced by an artist," as the artist put it. "I started conceiving my work out of an action, out of an act." Franz Erhard Walther: 1. Werksatz, copublished with the Franz Erhard Walther Foundation, focuses on this groundbreaking series.