Since the last century, the relationship between vanguard and self-taught artists has been defined by contradiction. The established art world has been quick to make clear distinctions between trained and untrained artists, yet at the same time it has been fascinated by outliers whom it draws selectively and intermittently into its orbits. For a new exhibition launching at the National Gallery of Art, curator Lynne Cooke explores shifting conceptualizations of the American outlier across the twentieth century, drawing on the inherent sociality of the exhibition in her installation of these works. This companion catalog, Outliers and American Vanguard Art, offers a fantastic opportunity to consider works by schooled and self-taught creators in relation to each other and defined by historical circumstance. The art works in Outliers and American Vanguard Art come from three distinct periods when the intersections between mainstream and outlier artists were most dynamic and productive, ushering in exhibitions of art based on various degrees of co-existence, inclusion, and assimilation. Works by such diverse artists as Charles Sheeler, Christina Ramberg, and Matt Mullican are set in conversation with a range of works by such self-taught artists as Horace Pippin, Janet Sobel, and Henry Darger. Cooke also examines a recent increase of radically expressive work that challenges what it means to be an outlier today. She reveals how these distinctions have been freighted with a particularly American point of view as she investigates our assumptions about creativity, artistic practice, and the role of the artist in contemporary culture. Outliers and American Vanguard Art is the most comprehensive show ever to examine outliers in dialogue with their established peers. It is sure to inspire vigorous conversation about how artists and the work they make are represented.

Outliers and American Vanguard Art

Arts & Photography

Cooke, Lynne

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Mexico Citybased artist Francis Alÿs (b. 1959) has assembled a group of paintings depicting Saint Fabiola, a 4th-century saint who gave up all earthly possessions and devoted herself to the practice of Christian asceticism. All of the pictures in the collection are based on an original worknow lostby the 19th-century French artist Jean-Jacques Henner. Alÿs's collection of Fabiola portraits, numbering in the hundreds and painted by amateurs and professionals alike, is the focus of this intriguing book. Not only does it examine the artist’s exploration of collecting practices, but the publication also offers an unusual window into aesthetic, sociological, and anthropological values of the past century.
In addition to cataloguing each of the Fabiola works, the book includes Saint Jerome’s eulogy for Fabiola (the primary source for Fabiola’s biography), followed by an interpretive text on evolving hagiographies and saints’ vitae, an analysis of the role of iconographic imagery in the practice of Catholicism, and art historical essays that focus on Alÿs’s practice.

Francis Alÿs: Fabiola: An Investigation

MORGAN, David

Bann, Stephen

Buskirk, Martha

Laningham, Susan

Dia Art Foundation

Internationally acclaimed as one of the most resourceful and engaging younger artists in Britain, Julian Opie has been exhibiting his diverse work since the early 1980s, and has steadily gained a reputation stretching from Europe to Japan and the United States. He first established himself with painted steel sculptures of ordinary objects - typewriters, books, food, luggage - and of Old Master canvases. Since then, he has worked in a proliferation of styles: colourful abstract sculptures; mysteriously pseudo-functional objects resembling air vents, light boxes and lavatory cubicles; space-filling wood constructions with cryptic titles. His latest pieces feature subjects from austere acrylic paintings and concrete models of motorways to miniature houses, castles and fortifications. Published on the occasion of a major exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, this comprehensive publication on Opie illustrates each phase of his career, with large-scale colour reproductions of many works, together with preparatory sketches and models and comparative illustrations. Five commentators on modern art examine all aspects of his work and provide a complete aesthetic context for this eclectic, original artist.

Julian Opie

Herzogenrath, Wulf

Biographies & Memoirs

Thames&Hudson

Spanning her entire career, this book explores the celebrated British artist’s drawings and is created under the aegis of the Bridget Riley Art Foundation. 
Bridget Riley’s paintings are developed carefully over time, the result of methodically working through pictorial variables such as color, tone, scale, and rhythm. Studies are central to this process, allowing Riley to concentrate on the analysis and synthesis that lie at the heart of her working practice. This volume richly illustrates the thinking that goes into Riley’s work through a selection of over 150 drawings, color analyses, notations, scale studies, and cartoons. The selection spans most of Riley’s working life, tracing the origins and evolving nature of her remarkable body of work. Riley’s beginnings are also documented through selected childhood drawings, work made during and immediately following her studies at Goldsmiths’ College and the Royal College of Art, and her early explorations into abstraction. 
The artist’s working method is brought into high relief in a newly commissioned conversation with Riley and Sir John Leighton, Director of the National Galleries of Scotland. The text explores the cardinal moments in the artist’s practice and the impulses that bring her work into existence. The volume also includes four texts dedicated to Riley’s studies and practice written by the artist, art historians, curators, and museum directors, which shed further light on the enduring role of drawing and the process of exploration central to her work. 200+ color illustrations

Bridget Riley: Working Drawings

HARRISON, Michael

Askew, Lucy

Baro, Gene

De Sausmarez, Maurice

Leighton Sir, John

Licht, Jennifer

Individual Artists

American artist Roni Horn is admired internationally for the quiet seriousness of her exquisitely conceived artworks. Horn has concentrated on a small, highly personal selection of subjects in her work: the tradition of Minimal sculpture, and our response to it; Iceland, a place she has visited regularly for many years; and the poetry of Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson. Groupings of sculptures and photographs are often presented together in large installations which invite the viewer's full, prolonged attention in the observation of precise, subtle shifts of detail or mood, offering a heightened sense of environment and presence in the world.
Independent curator and editor Louise Neri (co-curator of the Whitney Biennial, 1996) examines recurring themes and formal structures in Horn's work. Lynne Cooke, curator at New York's Dia Center, discusses with the artist her shift from three-dimensional (sculpture) to two-dimensional forms (photography); theorist Thierry de Duve concentrates on Horn's series of photographs You Are the Weather, featured at the 1997 Venice Biennale. The Artist's Choice is from a short story by Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector. This volume contains the largest collection available of the artist's eloquent writings. Their cool, simple style -- describing Iceland, or commenting on poetry and literature -- reflects the intense, pared-down ambience of her art.

Roni Horn (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Duve, Thierry

Neri, Louise

Phaidon Press

The definitive book on a creative force who continues to influence sculpture and installation art
Jessica Stockholder has long broken down the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture to explore the body in social and cultural space - using found objects intertwined with profusions of vivid colours. This revised, updated edition spotlights the extraordinary evolution of her career, and examines the pivotal role she has played in shaping some of the most fundamental ideas around which contemporary sculpture and painting revolve today.

Jessica Stockholder: Contemporary Artists series (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

TILLMAN, Lynne

Schwabsky, Barry

Celant, Germano

The art of Richard Serra is internationally admired for its powerful material qualities and its searching exploration of the relationship between the work, the viewer and the site. Indeed, since his emergence in the mid-1960s, Serra is widely understood to have radicalized and extended the very definition of sculpture. Quite simply the most complete view to date of the work of one of the most important artists of the last half-century, Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years offers a detailed visual presentation and documentation of Serra's entire career, from his early experiments with materials like rubber, neon and lead to the environmentally scaled steel works of recent years--including three monumental new sculptures created for The Museum of Modern Art's 2007 retrospective, for which this volume was produced. The book contains major scholarly essays on the artist's work by Benjamin Buchloh, Lynne Cooke and John Rajchman, as well as an interview with the artist by Kynaston McShine, the Museum's Chief Curator at Large.

Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years

McShine, Kynaston

Rajchman, John

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

Butler, Connie

Diederichsen, Diedrich

Arnold, Grant

Bradley, Jessica

Steiner, Shepherd

Krajewski, Sara

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

A "highly recommended" (Library Journal) examination of how cultural differences are implicit within visual forms. Discussions in Contemporary Culture is an award-winning series copublished with the Dia Center for the Arts in New York City. These volumes offer rich and timely discourses on a broad range of cultural issues and critical theory. The collection covers topics from urban planning to popular culture and literature, and continually attracts a wide and dedicated readership.

Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances (DISCUSSIONS IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE)

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Bay Pr

For Tropos, Ann Hamilton spread a sea of horsehair across the 5000 square feet of a factory building. Varying in color and sewn together in bundles, this hair was navigated by visitors, while in the middle of the room sat a lone figure at a desk, whose task was to read and burn each line of a text in a book; from somewhere outside the building came the strangulated garble of a man attempting speech. This surreal environment, with its attendant sense of dream landscape and half-formed associations, is classic Hamilton, at once seductive and disorienting. This book records the project.

Ann Hamilton: Tropos (DIA ART FOUNDAT)

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