On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century explores the radical evolution of drawing that took place during the last century and through to the present day, as numerous artists subjected the traditional concepts of the medium to a critical examination. In a revolutionary departure from the institutional definition of drawing, and from reliance on paper as the fundamental support material, artists instead pushed the line across the plane and into real space, expanding the medium in relation to gesture and form and connecting it with painting, sculpture, photography, film and dance. Published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, On Line presents a discursive history of mark-making through nearly 250 works by 100 artists, including Aleksandr Rodchenko, Alexander Calder, Karel Malich, Eva Hesse, Anna Maria Maiolino, Richard Tuttle, Mona Hatoum and Monika Grzymala among many others. Essays by the curators illuminate individual practices and offer focused examinations of broader themes, such as the exploration of line by the avant-garde, and the relationship between drawing and dance.

On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century

Arts & Photography

Butler, Connie

Buchloh, Benjamin

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

One of Canada's most humorous conceptual artists--as witty as he is smart--Rodney Graham gets his first North American museum retrospective and accompanying catalogue. Rodney Graham: A Little Thought tracks the career of a brilliant, idiosyncratic artist whose work spans a range of media including photography, film, book works, installation and pop music. In this volume, amply illustrated with many never-before-seen images from early in his career as well as new photography of his most recent works, scholarly essays provide a broad context for viewing: Cornelia Butler looks at Graham's relationship to landscape and Canadian identity, Lynne Cooke examines the construction of the artist's persona in works such as City Self/ Country Self (2001), and Shep Steiner discusses the joke as a conceptual strategy for Graham. Diedrich Diederichsen considers the artist's oeuvre within the context of musical structure, and Sara Krajewski describes how Graham's video works unfold. Finally, Grant Arnold offers an in-depth illustrated chronology, tracing the range of activities that have occupied Graham since his early days on the Vancouver scene.

Rodney Graham: A Little Thought

Diederichsen, Diedrich

Cooke, Lynne

Arnold, Grant

Bradley, Jessica

Steiner, Shepherd

Krajewski, Sara

Individual Artists

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

One of the leading artists of her generation, Lorna Simpson (born 1960) came to prominence in the mid-1980s through her photographic and textual works that challenged conventional attitudes toward race, gender and cultural memory with a potent mixture of formal elegance and conceptual rigor. Published on the occasion of her 2013 exhibition at Aspen Art Museum, Lorna Simpson: Works on Paper highlights four recent bodies of work on paper that explore the complex relationship between the photographic archive and processes of self-fashioning, including a new group of works being developed during her time as the AAM’s 2013 Jane and Marc Nathanson Distinguished Artist in Residence. As in Simpson’s earlier works, these new drawings and collages take the African-American woman as a point of departure, continuing her longstanding examination of the ways that gender and culture shape the experience of life in our contemporary multiracial society. This beautifully illustrated catalogue features new scholarship by New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als, MoMA Chief Curator of Drawings, Connie Butler, LACMA Chief Curator of Contemporary Art, Franklin Sirmans, and the AAM’s Nancy and Bob Magoon CEO and Director, Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson.

Lorna Simpson: Works on Paper (ASPEN ART PRESS)

Sirmans, Franklin

ALS, Hilton

Zuckerman Jacobson, Heidi

Smith, Anna Deveare

History & Criticism

Aspen Art Press

The third iteration of the quintennial exhibition organized by P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and The Museum of Modern Art, Greater New York 2010 showcases emerging artists who are living and working in the metropolitan New York area. Covering a full range of practices and media, and eagerly anticipated throughout the art community, the 2010 exhibition and catalogue present new works by more than 70 artists of diverse backgrounds, allowing each of them a significant area of space in P.S.1's expansive galleries in which to show new work or work that has been made in the past five years. This year, Greater New York is organized by Klaus Biesenbach, P.S.1 Director and MoMA Chief Curator at Large; Connie Butler, MoMA Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawing; and Neville Wakefield, P.S.1 Senior Curatorial Advisor.

Greater New York 2010

BIESENBACH, KLAUS

Wakefield, Neville

MoMA PS1

Next Level Now: Living Your Next Level Now!

Butler, Dwight

Religion & Spirituality

Wilbert Butler

This wide-ranging and generously illustrated book focuses on new and cutting-edge artwork created in Southern California. Celebrating the Hammer Museum’s biennial, this volume brings together the work of thirty-five emerging and under-recognized artists from Los Angeles. It features new installations, videos, films, sculptures, performances, and paintings, much of it commissioned especially for the biennial, and offers a snapshot of the L.A. scene. Each artist is featured in multiple pages, along with six fold-out inserts specifically designed for the book by some of the artists featured in the exhibition. Essays by the exhibition’s curators and many of its artists round out this volume that showcases one of America’s most fertile and exciting artistic environments.

Made in L.A. 2014

Holte, Michael Ned

Prestel USA

This generously illustrated volume features Mark Bradford’s newest work which deals with the body and the performance of identity. Mark Bradford’s layered, multi-textured paintings have earned him wide critical acclaim. His latest body of work comprises a new group of paintings and a video, each of which cycles around the idea of the body in crisis. Bradford witnessed the LA riots (1992) from his studio and has translated the fury, fear, outrage, pandemonium, and lasting wounds into artworks. This volume reproduces in full new paintings in which Bradford carved into the layered surface of the work creating depressions and arteries that structure these otherwise abstract compositions. Bradford’s new video references the history of black standup comedy taking on Eddie Murphy’s controversial concert film “Delirious” (1983). In the video Bradford takes on Murphy’s searing comments on sexuality, reinterpreting this important cultural moment while considering the modalities of gender and its performance. Accompanying texts include Bradford's trenchant performance script and a scholarly text by Butler explores Bradford’s critique of pervasive cultural racism and homophobia in society as a whole.

Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth

Prestel

Bringing together five decades of painting, sculpture, and installations from the celebrated Italian artist Marisa Merz, this monograph accompanies a major US retrospective of her work. This generously illustrated book offers readers the chance to appreciate the full range of works by Marisa Merz, winner of the 2013 Golden Lion lifetime achievement award at the Venice Biennale. This volume traces Merz’s artistic evolution from early experiments with non-traditional materials and processes, to intricately constructed installations of the 1970s and the enigmatic ceramic heads of the 1980s and ’90s. Authoritative essays explore the rise of international women’s art in the 1960s and ’70s and Merz’s own place in Italy’s postwar art history. As the sole female protagonist of Arte Povera she is one of the few Italian women to exhibit in major venues internationally. Merz’s challenging and evocative body of work is deeply personal and resistant to the categories of art history, including Arte Povera and international feminist art, with which she was associated. Previously unpublished texts and poetry by the artist, and an illustrated chronology, complement this comprehensive look at an enormously influential artist.

Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space

The incredible detail and scale of Lari Pittman’s mesmerizing paintings are gloriously recreated in this lushly-illustrated retrospective book. One of the most prolific and exuberant painters of the past three decades, Lari Pittman creates works that mirror the social fabric of his time. This volume follows Pittman's trajectory as his visual language evolved and his technical mastery grew ever more sophisticated. From his early works—defiant affirmations of identity in the increasingly conservative 1980s—to his more recent subjects that feature emblems of cultural regression and commercialism, Pittman's paintings are uniquely operatic and ambitious. This book features over sixty paintings and thirty drawings, including Pittman's mural-scale series Flying Carpets. Alongside these illustrations are essays that place Pittman's imagery within both Modernism and recent histories of Los Angeles, and examine the work's political commentary as well as its many literary references. Serving as a cipher for the political tensions around the body and transcultural identity, Lari Pittman emerges as an artist who speaks truth to power through a visual language that reflects the contemporary world. Published with the Hammer Museum

Lari Pittman: Declaration of Independence

Between 1969 and 1974, Lucy Lippard curated four exhibitions of contemporary art, which have become renowned as her “numbers shows.” Each took the population of the city in which it was shown as its title: 557,087 in Seattle, 955,000 in Vancouver, 2,972,453 in Buenos Aires and c. 7,500, which opened in Valencia, California, before touring the U.S. and then traveling to London. From Conceptualism to Feminism follows Lippard’s curatorial trajectory, analyzing her transition from a writer about art to a maker of exhibitions, and tracing her growing political engagement and involvement with feminism. Extensive photographic material is complemented by a major new essay by Cornelia Butler and interviews with Lucy Lippard, Seth Siegelaub and with artists in c. 7,500. The volume also includes an analysis of artists’ initiatives in Argentina, which give a context for Lippard’s emerging political consciousness. From Conceptualism to Feminism is the third publication in Afterall’s Exhibition Histories series, which investigates exhibitions that have shaped the way contemporary art is experienced, made and discussed.

From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969-74

Lippard, Lucy R.

POLLOCK, GRISELDA

Plagens, Peter

Day, Pip

Afterall Books

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Books by Butler, Connie