In 1974, women in a feminist consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed a mock organization called the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Emblazoning its logo onto t-shirts, the group wryly envisioned female collective textile making as a practice that could upend conventions, threaten state structures, and wreak political havoc. Elaborating on this example as a prehistory to the more recent phenomenon of “craftivism”—the politics and social practices associated with handmaking—Fray explores textiles and their role at the forefront of debates about process, materiality, gender, and race in times of economic upheaval. Closely examining how amateurs and fine artists in the United States and Chile turned to sewing, braiding, knotting, and quilting amid the rise of global manufacturing, Julia Bryan-Wilson argues that textiles unravel the high/low divide and urges us to think flexibly about what the politics of textiles might be. Her case studies from the 1970s through the 1990s—including the improvised costumes of the theater troupe the Cockettes, the braided rag rugs of US artist Harmony Hammond, the thread-based sculptures of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, the small hand-sewn tapestries depicting Pinochet’s torture, and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt—are often taken as evidence of the inherently progressive nature of handcrafted textiles. Fray, however, shows that such methods are recruited to often ambivalent ends, leaving textiles very much “in the fray” of debates about feminized labor, protest cultures, and queer identities; the malleability of cloth and fiber means that textiles can be activated, or stretched, in many ideological directions. The first contemporary art history book to discuss both fine art and amateur registers of handmaking at such an expansive scale, Fray unveils crucial insights into how textiles inhabit the broad space between artistic and political poles—high and low, untrained and highly skilled, conformist and disobedient, craft and art.

Fray: Art and Textile Politics

Arts & Photography

Bryan-Wilson, Julia

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

A daring reassessment of Louise Nevelson, an icon of twentieth-century art whose innovative procedures relate to gendered, classed, and racialized forms of making\n“Here is a book that is not only a transformative study of a single artist but also a record of the scholar’s own labor—and her devotion.”—Artforum\nIn this radical rethinking of the art of Louise Nevelson (1899–1988), Julia Bryan-Wilson provides a long-overdue critical account of a signature figure in postwar sculpture. A Ukraine-born Jewish immigrant, Nevelson persevered in the male-dominated New York art world. Nonetheless, her careful procedures of construction—in which she assembled found pieces of wood into elaborate structures, usually painted black—have been little studied.\nOrganized around a series of key operations in Nevelson’s own process (dragging, coloring, joining, and facing), the book comprises four slipcased, individually bound volumes that can be read in any order. Both form and content thus echo Nevelson’s own modular sculptures, the gridded boxes of which the artist herself rearranged. Exploring how Nevelson’s making relates to domesticity, racialized matter, gendered labor, and the environment, Bryan-Wilson offers a sustained examination of the social and political implications of Nevelson’s art. The author also approaches Nevelson’s sculptures from her own embodied subjectivity as a queer feminist scholar. She forges an expansive art history that places Nevelson’s assemblages in dialogue with a wide array of marginalized worldmaking and underlines the artist’s proclamation of allegiance to blackness.

Louise Nevelson's Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face

Yale University Press

The first book to address the significance of the materials and methods used to make contemporary artworks Today, artists are able to create using multiple methods of production―from painting to digital technologies to crowdsourcing―some of which would have been unheard of just a few decades ago. Yet, even as our means of making art become more extraordinary and diverse, they are almost never addressed in their specificity. While critics and viewers tend to focus on the finished products we see in museums and galleries, authors Glenn Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson argue that the materials and processes behind the scenes used to make artworks are also vital to current considerations of authorship and to understanding the economic and social contexts from which art emerges. This wide-ranging exploration of different methods and media in art since the 1950s includes nine chapters that focus on individual processes of making: Painting, Woodworking, Building, Performing, Tooling Up, Cashing In, Fabricating, Digitizing, and Crowdsourcing. Detailed examples are interwoven with the discussion, including visuals that reveal the intricacies of techniques and materials. Artists featured include Ai Weiwei, Alice Aycock, Isa Genzken, Los Carpinteros, Paul Pfeiffer, Doris Salcedo, Santiago Sierra, and Rachel Whiteread. 219 color illustrations

Art in the Making: Artists and their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing

Adamson, Glenn

Thames&Hudson

Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, in response to the political turbulence generated by the Vietnam War, an important group of American artists and critics sought to expand the definition of creative labor by identifying themselves as art workers.” In the first book to examine this movement, Julia Bryan-Wilson shows how a polemical redefinition of artistic labor played a central role in minimalism, process art, feminist criticism, and conceptualism. In her close examination of four seminal figures of the periodAmerican artists Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and Hans Haacke, and art critic Lucy LippardBryan-Wilson frames an engrossing new argument around the double entendre that art works.” She traces the divergent ways in which these four artists and writers rallied around the art worker” identity, including participating in the Art Workers' Coalitiona short-lived organization founded in 1969 to protest the war and agitate for artists' rightsand the New York Art Strike. By connecting social art history and theories of labor, this book illuminates the artworks and protest actions that were central to this pivotal era in both American art and politics. A Best Book of 2009, Artforum Magazine

University of California Press

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, in response to the political turbulence generated by the Vietnam War, an important group of American artists and critics sought to expand the definition of creative labor by identifying themselves as “art workers.” In the first book to examine this movement, Julia Bryan-Wilson shows how a polemical redefinition of artistic labor played a central role in minimalism, process art, feminist criticism, and conceptualism. In her close examination of four seminal figures of the period―American artists Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and Hans Haacke, and art critic Lucy Lippard―Bryan-Wilson frames an engrossing new argument around the double entendre that “art works.” She traces the divergent ways in which these four artists and writers rallied around the “art worker” identity, including participating in the Art Workers' Coalition―a short-lived organization founded in 1969 to protest the war and agitate for artists' rights―and the New York Art Strike. By connecting social art history and theories of labor, this book illuminates the artworks and protest actions that were central to this pivotal era in both American art and politics. A Best Book of 2009, Artforum Magazine

The first complete monograph on an artist whose work investigates surveillance and government secrecy in the digital age
Trevor Paglen's art gives visual geography to hidden forces, relentlessly pursuing what he calls the 'unseeable and undocumentable' in contemporary society. Blending photography, installation, investigative journalism, and science, Paglen explores the clandestine activity of government and intelligence agencies, using high-grade equipment to document their movements and reveal their hidden inner workings. This book presents over three decades of Paglen's groundbreaking work, making visible the structures and technologies that impact our lives.

Trevor Paglen (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Cornell, Lauren

Kholeif, Omar

Phaidon Press

The first comprehensive publication to capture Hayes's unique blend of performance and social engagement which has been at the forefront of questions of feminist history, queer time, and protest culture for over a decade
American artist Sharon Hayes uses photography, film, video, sound, performance, and text to interrogate the intersections between the personal and collective sphere. Her deeply affective and queer approach to history and politics draws particular attention to the language of twentieth-century activism as well as drama, anthropology, and journalism.
This book is the first to feature all of Hayes's most significant projects, from the ten-hour performance My Fellow American 1981-1988 to her Monument Lab addressing the absence of monuments to women in Philadelphia.
A professor of fine art at the University of Pennsylvania, Hayes's work has been shown at the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Documenta 12 in Kassel, and the 55th Venice Biennale, as well as in the most prestigious museums around the world. Her re-examination of protest, speech, and history is one of the most powerful reflections of the complexity and the urgency of our times.
Sharon Hayes is the latest addition to the acclaimed Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series.

Sharon Hayes (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Tang, Jeannine

Tattersall, Lanka

Humor & Entertainment

The most comprehensive book on the work of Liza Lou, whose popular and critically acclaimed installations made entirely of beads consider the important themes of women, community, and the valorization of labor.\nLiza Lou first gained attention in 1996 when her room-sized sculpture Kitchen was shown at the New Museum in New York. Representing five years of individual labor, this groundbreaking work subverted standards of art by introducing glass beads as a fine art material. The project blurred the rigid boundary between fine art and craft, and established Lou's long-standing exploration of materiality, process, and beauty. Working within a craft métier has led the artist to work in a variety of socially engaged settings, from community groups in Los Angeles, to a collective she founded in Durban, South Africa. Over the past fifteen years, Lou has focused on a poetic approach to abstraction as a way to highlight the process underlying her work.\nIn this comprehensive volume that considers the entirety of Lou’s singular vision, curators, art historians, and artists offer important perspectives on the breadth of the work.

Liza Lou

Sherman, Elisabeth

Chaffee, Cathleen

Individual Artists

Rizzoli Electa

"Trigger is a vital reminder that identity politics, far from being a failure, as the right and left alike are quick to tell us, is alive, well, and getting on with changing the world."―Aruna D’Souza
The accompanying catalog for the New Museum’s exhibition Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon investigates gender’s place in contemporary art and culture at a moment of political upheaval and renewed culture wars. The exhibition features over 40 artists working across a variety of mediums and genres, including film, video, performance, painting and sculpture. Many embrace explicit pleasure and visual lushness as political strategies, and some deliberately reject or complicate overt representation, turning to poetic language, docufiction and abstraction to affirm ambiguities and reflect shifting physical embodiment. Among the artists included are Morgan Bassichis, Nayland Blake, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Vaginal Davis, ektor garcia, House of Ladosha, Candice Lin, Christina Quarles, Tschabalala Self, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Sable Elyse Smith and Wu Tsang.

Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon (NEW MUSEUM)

Burton, Johanna

Chen, Mel Y.

Bradley, Rizvana

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

New Museum

Easypieces is published for the first New York museum solo presentation of work by Argentine artist Mika Rottenberg (born 1976). Employing absurdist satire to address the critical issues of our time, Rottenberg creates videos and installations that offer subversive allegories for contemporary life. Contributors include Samantha Frost, Associate Professor of Political Science and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Diana Coole, Professor of Political and Social Theory at the School of Politics of Sociology, Birkbeck, University of London; and Julia Bryan-Wilson, Professor of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, in an interview with Rottenberg. The catalog also features an overview by New Museum Curator Margot Norton. Easypieces is part of an ongoing series of solo exhibitions that provide a focused exploration of artists’ practices and continues the New Museum’s history of giving contemporary artists their first museum presentations in New York.

Mika Rottenberg: Easypieces

Phillips, LIsa

Frost, Samantha

Coole, Diana

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bryan-Wilson, Julia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bryan-Wilson, Julia

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bryan-Wilson, Julia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Fray: Art and Textile Politics

Louise Nevelson's Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face

Art in the Making: Artists and their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing

Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era

Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era

Trevor Paglen (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Sharon Hayes (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Liza Lou

Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon (NEW MUSEUM)

Mika Rottenberg: Easypieces