While Carol Rama (1918–2015) has been largely overlooked in contemporary art discourses, her work has proven prescient and influential for many artists working today, attaining cult status and attracting renewed interest.
Rama’s exhibition at the New Museum brings together over 150 of her paintings, objects and works on paper, highlighting her consistent fascination with the representation of the body. This book celebrates the independence and eccentricity of this legendary artist whose work spanned half a century of contemporary art history and anticipated debates on sexuality, gender and representation. Encompassing her entire career, it traces the development from her early erotic, harrowing depictions of “bodies without organs” through later works that invoke innards, fluids and limbs. This catalog accompanying her New Museum exhibition features an interview with the artist by Lea Vergine, a new text by writer Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, and a contribution by artist Danh Võ.

Carol Rama: Antibodies (NEW MUSEUM)

Arts & Photography

Lehrer-Graiwer, Sarah

Individual Artists

New Museum

Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece (One Work)

The artist Lee Lozano (1930--1999) began her career as a painter; her work rapidly evolved from figuration to abstraction. In the late 1960s, she created a major series of eleven monochromatic Wave paintings, her last in the medium. Despite her achievements as a painter, Lozano is best known for two acts of refusal, both of which she undertook as artworks: Untitled (General Strike Piece), begun in 1969, in which she cut herself off from the commercial art world for a time; and the so-called Boycott Piece, which began in 1971 as a month-long experiment intended to improve communication but became a permanent hiatus from speaking to or directly interacting with women. In this book, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer examines Lozano's Dropout Piece, the culmination of her practice, her greatest experiment in art and endurance, encompassing all her withdrawals, and ending only with her burial in an unmarked grave. 
And yet, although Dropout Piece is among Lozano's most important works, it might not exist at all. There is no conventional artwork to be exhibited, no performance event to be documented. Lehrer-Graiwer views Dropout Piece as leveraging the artist's entire practice and embodying her creative intelligence, her radicality, and her intensity. Combining art history, analytical inquiry, and journalistic investigation, Lehrer-Graiwer examines not only Lozano's act of dropping out but also the evolution over time of Dropout Piece in the context of the artist's practice in New York and her subsequent life in Dallas.

History & Criticism

Afterall Books

The artist Lee Lozano (1930--1999) began her career as a painter; her work rapidly evolved from figuration to abstraction. In the late 1960s, she created a major series of eleven monochromatic Wave paintings, her last in the medium. Despite her achievements as a painter, Lozano is best known for two acts of refusal, both of which she undertook as artworks: Untitled (General Strike Piece), begun in 1969, in which she cut herself off from the commercial art world for a time; and the so-called Boycott Piece, which began in 1971 as a month-long experiment intended to improve communication but became a permanent hiatus from speaking to or directly interacting with women. In this book, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer examines Lozano's Dropout Piece, the culmination of her practice, her greatest experiment in art and endurance, encompassing all her withdrawals, and ending only with her burial in an unmarked grave. And yet, although Dropout Piece is among Lozano's most important works, it might not exist at all. There is no conventional artwork to be exhibited, no performance event to be documented. Lehrer-Graiwer views Dropout Piece as leveraging the artist's entire practice and embodying her creative intelligence, her radicality, and her intensity. Combining art history, analytical inquiry, and journalistic investigation, Lehrer-Graiwer examines not only Lozano's act of dropping out but also the evolution over time of  Dropout Piece in the context of the artist's practice in New York and her subsequent life in Dallas.

Mungo Thomson's wide-ranging, multi-media work approaches mass culture and everyday perceptual experience through a lens of deep time and cosmic scale, implicating the spaces of production and exhibition in ever-widening extrapolations.He has convened an orchestral ensemble to perform a score transcribed from the chirping of crickets, persuaded museums to let their incoming mail pile up unopened in the galleries for the run of an exhibition, and replaced the coat-hangers in the Whitney Museum's coat check with custom-made hangers modeled on orchestral triangles, transforming it into an enormous musical instrument.Spanning his entire oeuvre, this first comprehensive monograph focuses in particular on the artist's three main series that embody his exploration of popular culture and everyday objects to question what we most take for granted, or fail to notice.In the 'TIME' series, person-sized silkscreened mirrors bearing the red border and logo of the 100-year-old international weekly newsmagazine, pair a precise historical moment with the viewer's own reflection in the present. As a series, these works form their own archive, reflecting each other, and picturing the viewer within an infinity room of culture and politics and media and design.The 'Wall Calendar' series displays commercial calendar images as if held up to the sun, allowing the reverse side of the page to show through. Printed on both sides of fabric and stretched over a lightbox, recto and verso are collaged together with light--the calendar grid of a single month is superimposed onto a photograph of a 40-million-year-old mountain, and the everyday minutiae of living is put into scale with geological time.These works consider geochronology from a precarious contemporary vantage, contrasting evocations of elevated consciousness with contemplations of extinction. Thomson's 'Snowman' is a series of trompe-l'oeil stacks of Amazon boxes and other online retail shipping cartons cast in sturdy patinated bronze. Both a droll contribution to the field of outdoor sculpture and a mineralogical transformation of the temporary and ephemeral into the permanent and geological, in 2020 the Snowman also became public art for a depopulated world.Includes a conversation with Laura Owens.

Mungo Thomson

Griffin, Tim

Grau, Donatien

Jrp Ringier Kunstverlag Ag

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

Books by Lehrer-Graiwer, Sarah

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

Carol Rama: Antibodies (NEW MUSEUM)

Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece (One Work)

Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece (One Work)

Mungo Thomson