About the Author\nMichael Brenson was for two decades a member of the sculpture faculty at Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and he is the author of Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of the Visual Artist in America. A former art critic for The New York Times and an eloquent voice on modern and contemporary sculpture, Brenson has been a Getty Scholar, a Bogliasco Fellow, a Clark Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow, and he was awarded a Creative Nonfiction Grant from the Whiting Foundation. He has curated exhibitions at MoMA PS1 and the Sculpture Center, and has organized and moderated conferences or panels at the National Gallery of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Rockefeller Foundation, and New York’s Jewish Museum. He lives in Accord, New York.\nThe landmark biography of the inscrutable and brilliant David Smith, the greatest American sculptor of the twentieth century.\nThe artist David Smith once wrote, “'Humanism' is a useless word in my time.” A member of the abstract expressionist generation, he would do more than any sculptor of his era to bring the plastic arts to the forefront of the American scene. Central to this project was his desire to explode the logic that equated representation and harmony with humanistic values in the postwar era―instead, Smith sought out the unbalanced and unexpected, creating works of art that seem to undergo radical shifts as the spectator moves from one point of view to another. So groundbreaking and prolific were his contributions to American art that by the time Smith was just forty years old, Clement Greenberg was already calling him “the greatest sculptor this country has produced.”\nMichael Brenson’s David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor is the first major biography of this epochal figure. It follows Smith from his upbringing in the Midwest, to his heady early years in Manhattan, to his decision to establish a permanent studio in Bolton Landing in upstate New York, where he would create many of his most significant works―among them the Cubis, Tanktomems, and Zigs. It explores his at times tempestuous personal life, marked by marriages, divorces, and fallings-out, as well as by deep friendships with the likes of Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell. His wife Jean Freas described him as “Salty and bombastic, jumbo and featherlight, thin-skinned and Mack Truck. And many more things”―and this was true of his work as well. He was a bricoleur, a skilled welder, a painter, and a writer, and he entranced critics and attracted admirers wherever he showed his work.\nWith this book, richly illustrated with more than one hundred photographs, Brenson has contextualized Smith for a new generation of fans and confirmed his singular place in the history of American art.

David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor

Arts & Photography

Brenson, Michael

History & Criticism

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Rebecca Smith: Blue Cage Sculptures

SMITH, Rebecca

Jeannie Freilich Fine Art

Acts of Engagement brings together writings spanning the extraordinarily eventful ten-year after the author left The New York Times, where he had been an art critic from 1982 to 1991. The writings fall into three broad areas: art, art criticism, and arts and cultural institutions. In each area, Brenson finds it imperative to consider issues such as responsibility, creativity, process, and voice―issues that have taken on increasing urgency as corporate culture has overcome almost every aspect of American life. If we are to understand and come to terms with the violent shift from multiculturalism to privatization and the difficult if not precarious situation American art and culture are now in, we must engage the key words that define the book's four sections: language, identity, audience, and power. In Brenson's catalogue and book essays, and in his short addresses and comprehensive lectures lie a wealth of historical knowledge, connoisseurship, political and social commentary, philosophical speculation, and an impassioned dedication to the value of artists and the visual arts. The book ranges from a detailed examination of a single popular masterpiece, to an appreciation of the potential everyday impact of artists as people, to analyses of the art world system and of sweeping social and institutional changes.Acts of Engagement addresses the fundamental humanity and necessity of the visual arts: what they are about, why they matter, and the challenges and dangers they face.

Acts of Engagement: Writings on Art, Criticism, and Institutions, 1993-2002 (Culture and Politics Series)

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Acts of Engagement brings together writings spanning the extraordinarily eventful ten-year after the author left The New York Times, where he had been an art critic from 1982 to 1991. The writings fall into three broad areas: art, art criticism, and arts and cultural institutions. In each area, Brenson finds it imperative to consider issues such as responsibility, creativity, process, and voice―issues that have taken on increasing urgency as corporate culture has overcome almost every aspect of American life. If we are to understand and come to terms with the violent shift from multiculturalism to privatization and the difficult if not precarious situation American art and culture are now in, we must engage the key words that define the book's four sections: language, identity, audience, and power. In Brenson's catalogue and book essays, and in his short addresses and comprehensive lectures lie a wealth of historical knowledge, connoisseurship, political and social commentary, philosophical speculation, and an impassioned dedication to the value of artists and the visual arts. The book ranges from a detailed examination of a single popular masterpiece, to an appreciation of the potential everyday impact of artists as people, to analyses of the art world system and of sweeping social and institutional changes. Acts of Engagement addresses the fundamental humanity and necessity of the visual arts: what they are about, why they matter, and the challenges and dangers they face.

Acts of Engagement: Writings on Art, Criticism, and Institutions, 1993–2002 (Culture and Politics Series)

Magdalena Abakanowicz: Recent Sculpture

Museum of Art

This catalogue examines a major though little-known body of David Smith's work. Enraged by the rise of fascism that he witnessed while visiting Europe in the 1930s, Smith began to work on the “Medals for Dishonor.” Approaching the tradition of commemorative medallions ironically, Smith denounces historical players who willingly contributed to the horrors of war.

David Smith: Medals For Dishonor

Ashton, Dore

Marks, Matthew

Independent Curators International (ICI)

Describes and illustrates the innovative process of public dialogue and involvement that underlay eight works of public art in Chicago, in a project organized by Mary Jane Jacob. Among the works are a multi-neighborhood parade, a community storefront hydroponic garden for HIV/AIDS patients, a new line of candy produced with members of a candy-making union, and a video installation by teenagers from the tough West Town neighborhood. No index or bibliography. Published by Bay West, 115 West Denny Way, Seattle, WA 98119-4205. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Culture in Action: A Public Art Program of Sculpture Chicago

Jacob, Mary Jane

Olson, Eva M.

Sculpture Chicago (Organization)

Sculpture

Bay Pr

This catalogue was publishd on the occasion of the exhibition, Ursula von Rydingsvard, by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, and by Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield West Yorkshire. Many beautiful photographs of the works on display and the artist at work. An interview with Ursula von Rydingsvard and Deborah Emont Scott. A short biography and her vitae are also included.

Ursula Von Rydingsvard

Nelson-Atkins Museum Of Art

Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Von Rydingsvard, Ursula

Emont-Scott, Deborah

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

This expanded edition was published on the inauguration of the Nasher Sculpture Center in 2003. Essays by Carmen Gimenez, Michael Brenson, and Steven A. Nash. Artists include Degas, Brancusi, Noguchi, Serra, Segal, di Suvero, Stella, Puryear, Long, and others. 152 works by 62 artists are illustrated. Measures 10x11.75 inches.

A Century of Sculpture: The Nasher Collection

Nash, Steven A.

Giménez, Carmen

Nasher, Raymond

Nasher Foundation

Disputes over free expression in the arts have always loomed as struggles between creativity and repression, transgression and outrage, candor and hypocrisy. But while high-profile shootouts at art museums and less visible skirmishes at schools, libraries, and theaters persist, overt censorship is no longer the only, or the most dire, threat to free expression. On the one hand, society has become more accepting of provocative imagery, with media conglomerates often leading the way in the depreciation of taboos. On the other hand, artists, while enjoying some unprecedented liberties, are hemmed in by new constraints that often fall beyond the range of First Amendment protection. The current terrain bears little resemblance to the culture wars of a decade ago, much less to what the First Amendment's Framers could have imagined. And since Sept. 11, 2001, the frontlines of the free-expression debate have been shifting once again. Based on a Columbia University conference organized by the National Arts Journalism Program, The New Gatekeepers explores the reconfigured ranks of those who decide what the public gets to see, hear and read, from struggles over intellectual property and copyright, to continuing debates about acceptable and offensive content in the cultural marketplace, to the less visible biases of the arts funding system. This heavily illustrated book also includes a historical overview of censorship and contributions by 40 scholars, artists, experts and journalists from around the United States. Discussed and participating artists include Edouard Manet, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Serra, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Andres Serrano, Carolee Schneemann, Dread Scott, Gran Fury, Joel-Peter Witkin, Kara Walker, Jock Sturges, Chris Ofili, and Tom Sachs.

The New Gatekeepers: Emerging Challenges to Free Expression in the Arts

Menand, Louis

Manet, Édouard

Walker, Kara

Schneemann, Carolee

Mann, Charles

HIRST, Damien

Newman, Roger

SERRA, Richard

Chapman, Jake

Koons, Jeff

Becker, Carol

Sunstein, Cass

Ofili, Chris

RODIN, Auguste

Sachs, Tom

Adler, Amy

Cahill, Timothy

Gurstein, Rochelle

Tepper, Steven

Godfrey, Marian

Chapman, Dinos

Ferguson, Laura

Scott, Dread

Serrano, Andres

National Arts Journalism Program

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