A groundbreaking exploration of how women artists of the 1970s combined art and protest to make sexual violence visible, creating a new kind of art in the process.
The 1970s was a time of deep division and newfound freedoms. Galvanized by The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique, the civil rights movement and the March on Washington, a new generation put their bodies on the line to protest injustice. Still, even in the heart of certain resistance movements, sexual violence against women had reached epidemic levels. Initially, it went largely unacknowledged. But some bold women artists and activists, including Yoko Ono, Ana Mendieta, Marina Abramovic´, Adrian Piper, Suzanne Lacy, Nancy Spero, and Jenny Holzer, fired up by women’s experiences and the climate of revolution, started a conversation about sexual violence that continues today. Some worked unannounced and unheralded, using the street as their theater. Others managed to draw support from the highest levels of municipal power. Along the way, they changed the course of art, pioneering a form that came to be called simply, performance.
Award-winning author Nancy Princenthal takes on these enduring issues and weaves together a new history of performance, challenging us to reexamine the relationship between art and activism, and how we can apply the lessons of that turbulent era to today. 21 color illustrations

Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s

Arts & Photography

Princenthal, Nancy

History & Criticism

Thames&Hudson

The first biography of visionary artist Agnes Martin, one of the most original and influential painters of the postwar period Over the course of a career that spanned fifty years, Agnes Martin’s austere, serene work anticipated and helped to define Minimalism, even as she battled psychological crises and carved out a solitary existence in the American Southwest. Martin identified with the Abstract Expressionists but her commitment to linear geometry caused her to be associated in turn with Minimalist, feminist, and even outsider artists. She moved through some of the liveliest art communities of her time while maintaining a legendary reserve. “I paint with my back to the world,” she says both at the beginning and at the conclusion of a documentary filmed when she was in her late eighties. When she died at ninety-two, in Taos, New Mexico, it is said she had not read a newspaper in half a century. No substantial critical monograph exists on this acclaimed artist―the recipient of two career retrospectives as well as the National Medal of the Arts―who was championed by critics as diverse in their approaches as Lucy Lippard, Lawrence Alloway, and Rosalind Krauss. Furthermore, no attempt has been made to describe her extraordinary life. The whole engrossing story, told here for the first time, Agnes Martin is essential reading for anyone interested in abstract art or the history of women artists in America. 38 illustrations, 33 in color

Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art

For the first time in paperback, the PEN award-winning biography of visionary artist Agnes Martin, one of the most original and influential painters of the postwar period. 
Over the course of a career that spanned fifty years, Agnes Martin’s austere, serene work anticipated and helped to define Minimalism, even as she battled psychological crises and carved out a solitary existence in the American Southwest. Martin identified with the Abstract Expressionists but her commitment to linear geometry caused her to be associated in turn with Minimalist, feminist, and even outsider artists. She moved through some of the liveliest art communities of her time while maintaining a legendary reserve. “I paint with my back to the world,” she says both at the beginning and at the conclusion of a documentary filmed when she was in her late eighties. When she died at ninety-two, in Taos, New Mexico, it is said she had not read a newspaper in half a century.
Agnes Martin, the recipient of two career retrospectives as well as the National Medal of the Arts, was championed by critics as diverse in their approaches as Lucy Lippard, Lawrence Alloway, and Rosalind Krauss. The whole engrossing story, now available in paperback, Agnes Martin is essential reading for anyone interested in abstract art or the history of women artists in America. 38 illustrations, 33 in color

One of the Best Art Books of 2019 ― The New York Times 
A groundbreaking exploration of how women artists of the 1970s combined art and protest to make sexual violence visible, creating a new kind of art in the process, now in paperback. 
The 1970s was a time of deep division and newfound freedoms. Galvanized by The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique, the civil rights movement and the March on Washington, a new generation put their bodies on the line to protest injustice. Still, even in the heart of certain resistance movements, sexual violence against women had reached epidemic levels. Initially, it went largely unacknowledged. But some bold women artists and activists, including Yoko Ono, Ana Mendieta, Marina Abramovic, Adrian Piper, Suzanne Lacy, Nancy Spero, and Jenny Holzer, fired up by women’s experiences and the climate of revolution, started a conversation about sexual violence that continues today. Some worked unannounced and unheralded, using the street as their theater. Others managed to draw support from the highest levels of municipal power. Along the way, they changed the course of art, pioneering a form that came to be called, simply, performance. 
Award-winning author Nancy Princenthal takes on these enduring issues and weaves together a new history of performance, challenging us to reexamine the relationship between art and activism, and how we can apply the lessons of that turbulent era to today. 21 color illustrations

Doris Salcedo, a sculptor who lives and works in Bogota, Colombia, is a rising international star. This is a comprehensive monograph of her work and its humanitarian and political content. Her haunting sculptures and installations are painstakingly made from found objects left in the abandoned homes of missing people in Colombia - personal effects such as furniture or shoes which become symbols of a vanished existence, suggesting the desperation and silent violence of ongoing acts of inhumanity.

Doris Salcedo (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Huyssen, Andreas

Basualdo, Carlos

Phaidon Press

Robert Mangold

Robert Mangold is a pre-eminent figure in post-war painting. His large, gently curving paintings are among the most majestically beautiful abstract works of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In contrast to the sober austerity of his Minimalist peers, with whom he is often associated, Mangold uses unusual, subtle colours and soft, hand-drawn geometries, endowing his large-scale paintings with a unique sensibility and presence. This is the first major monograph on one of most significant contemporary painters working today and is a timely retrospective on his work, made in close association with the artist himself. Mangold’s work is celebrated in this important book by some of contemporary art’s most prestigious writers.

DANTO, Arthur C.

Plimack Mangold, Sylvia

Individual Artists

Two insiders provide powerful insight into this often controversial government program, revealing how artists are selected for awards and discussing the numerous success stories of artists whose careers were enhanced by its support.

A Creative Legacy: A History of the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists' Fellowship Program

Ivey, Bill

Dowley, Jennifer

Harry N. Abrams

The first major survey of artist Katherine Bradford, renowned for her wholly personal paintings of swimmers, bathers, and superheroes. Known for her vibrant palette and eccentric compositions, Katherine Bradford came to prominence late in life, when her unique style of painting finally garnered critical acclaim in the art world. The artist's paintings are populated by a wide-ranging cast of characters--from swimmers to superheroes to, most recently, mothers--who anchor and connect her work across time and media. Her figures, who often defy society's expectations of women (and other gender norms), thus serve as surrogates for a mother, painter, and lesbian coming of age at the turn of the twenty-first century. Featuring more than twenty years of her work, Flying Woman: The Paintings of Katherine Bradford considers the artist's many themes, her ongoing exploration of different painterly modes, and her lifelong fascination with color.

Flying Woman: The Paintings of Katherine Bradford

DeSimone, Jaime

Rizzoli Electa

Album: Thirty years at the Lower East Side printshop, 1968-1998

Lower East Side Printshop, Inc

Offering a radical rewriting of the history of contemporary art from a feminist perspective, four distinguished authors explore the lineages of performance, abstraction, craft and ecofeminism in ways that reveal the debt these important genres owe to the work of pioneering women artists. The painters, sculptors and performance artists featured here have shaped ideas now dominating the art world: the vulnerability of the environment, the rise of activist art, the challenge to the reign of high technology (including digital culture), and the development of a new language of abstraction. Having demolished the linear narrative of modernism, the privileging of a white male ethnocentric vision, the division of high and low art and the separation of art from larger social issues, feminist artists laid the groundwork for the globalised, multi-media, postmodern art world of today.Illustrated with a spread of work from the last sixty years (and including contextual discussion of earlier practitioners), this book makes a compelling case for placing feminist art and artists at the heart of contemporary art.

Mothers of Invention: The Feminist Roots of Contemporary Art

Scott, Sue

Heartney, Eleanor

POSNER, Helaine

Lund Humphries

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

Books by Princenthal, Nancy

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

Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s

Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art

Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art

Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s

Doris Salcedo (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Robert Mangold

A Creative Legacy: A History of the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists' Fellowship Program

Flying Woman: The Paintings of Katherine Bradford

Album: Thirty years at the Lower East Side printshop, 1968-1998

Mothers of Invention: The Feminist Roots of Contemporary Art