The subversive, often jarringly direct sculptures of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960) are acclaimed for their seemingly absurd juxtapositions and uncanny photorealism. Reflecting deep suspicions of religious and political authorities, these constructions serve as sardonic critiques of existing power structures, forcing the viewer to challenge his or her understanding of symbols, both iconic and commonplace. This publication features new works by Cattelan, as well as several of his large-scale pieces dating from 2003 to 2007, all of which are considered in the context of the Menil’s remarkable holdings, with a focus on contemporary art. To this end, we see how works by artists such as Lucio Fontana, Robert Morris, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol “converse” with Cattelan’s art. With commentary from Franklin Sirmans, this book presents the rare opportunity to appreciate Cattelan’s works amid the backdrop of the 20th century.

Maurizio Cattelan: Is There Life Before Death?

Arts & Photography

Sirmans, Franklin

History & Criticism

The Menil Collection

Working in the tradition of trompe l'oeil, Steve Wolfe (b. 1955) creates careful replicas of classic books, worn album covers, and vinyl records, crafted from modeling paste, screenprints, drawings, and many other media. Wolfe’s reproductions embrace the tattered jackets, aged paper, and worn corners that come with the consumption of the culture within. These marks become records of time and memory representing the intersection of abstract thought and physical substance. With painstakingly composed illusion, these objects fall within the tradition of trompe l'oeil and blur the line between everyday object and art.
This book focuses on Wolfe’s works on paper, including drawings and pieces that combine drawing with painting, collage, and printmaking. Although his work is included in numerous museum collections and has appeared in several group shows, this is the first major publication on this important emerging artist.

Steve Wolfe on Paper

Foster, Carter E.

Whitney Museum of American Art

American artist Vija Celmins (b. 1938) is widely admired and respected for her sublime images of night skies and ocean waves. Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964-1966 looks closely at Celmins's early work, which is deeply engaged with the Pop Art scene of 1960s Los Angeles. The authors argue convincingly for a better understanding of this body of work, which is not well known by contemporary audiences, both within Celmins's overall career, and as part of the complicated historical context in which she was working. 
The book illustrates Celmins's work from the mid-1960s. These paintings and sculptures of war planes, smoking guns, and other representations of death and disaster were informed by images found in books and magazines. Also reflecting the moment when print began to give way to television, as well as the impact of the first televised war, they are creative interpretations of a world destabilized by the turmoil of war and domestic political conflicts.

Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964-1966

White, Michelle

A comprehensive study of one of the most versatile artists and acute observers of our time, who fuses art and fashion
American artist Sterling Ruby works in a large variety of media, including sculpture, ceramics, painting, and video art. Ruby is influenced by a wide range of sources, including marginalized societies, maximum-security prisons, modernist architecture, artefacts and antiquities, graffiti, waste and consumption, and urban gangs. Through these, he examines the psychological space where individual expression confronts social constraint.

Sterling Ruby (Phaidon Contemporary Artist Series)

Morgan, Jessica

Fowle, Kate

Humor & Entertainment

Phaidon Press

"Everyone who is fortunate enough to live a long time will become an elder, and this includes visual artists. The title of this book, suggested by sculptor Melvin Edwards, conveys the certain destiny human beings can anticipate by simply lasting."—from the Introduction 
Something to Look Forward To pays homage to the exceptional talent, unique vision, and courageous persistence of mature artists who have created dynamic abstract images and objects during extended and successful careers. The 22 artists included here— Betty Blayton, Frank Bowling, Yvonne Pickering Carter, Edward Clark, Melvin Edwards, Sam Gilliam, David Hammons, Gerald Jackson, Lawrence Compton Kolawole, Alvin Loving, Richard Mayhew, Sam Middleton, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Joe Overstreet, Howardena Pindell, Helen Evans Ramsaran, John T. Scott, Sylvia Snowden, Mildred Thompson, Jack Whitten, William T. Williams, and Frank Wimberley—are all over 60 (seven are over 70), and they’re all African American. 
The principal essay by April Kingsley offers brief overviews highlighting little-known but significant details about the artists and their work. Franklin Sirmans’ essay comments on the complex layers of style and meaning that compel the audacity of the art and artists. Reflections on abstract art by Geoffrey Jacques illuminate essential questions about the history and status of the artists represented.

Something To Look Forward To: An Exhibition Featuring Abstract Art By 22 Distinguished Americans Of African Descent: Franklin And Marshall College Lancaster, Pennsylvania, March 26-June 27, 2004

Kingsley, April

Jacques, Geoffrey

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Phillips Mus of Art

From his child-sized Klan robes and rows of empty gilded sneakers to his recent photographs of uninhabited pedagogical spaces, Gary Simmons's work contains and invokes an absence as palpable and fraught with meaning as any presence. His best known work, expansive erasure drawings containing imagery addressing issues pertaining to race, pedagogy and culture, are sketched on blackboards and walls and then rubbed and smudged by the artist's own hands. A widely acclaimed young artist who came to prominence in the late 80s, Simmons's work in drawing and sculpture deals extensively with black identity and with imagery inspired by American popular culture, from cartoons to vernacular architecture. This catalogue, the artist's first, focuses on work produced since the mid-1990s.

Gary Simmons

Simmons, Gary

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and The Studio Museum, Harlem

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)

ALS, Hilton

Butler, Connie

Zuckerman Jacobson, Heidi

Smith, Anna Deveare

Aspen Art Press

Since 2006, Tavares Strachan has been working on a body of work investigating orthostatic tolerance--our capacity to withstand deep-sea and outer-space pressure. Strachan's films, examined here, show the artist in training for his experiments with gravitational stress. The book also is a record of Strachan's artists' residence at MIT.

Tavares Strachan: Orthostatic Tolerance: It Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea if I Never Went Home

Heller, Maxwell

Individual Artists

MIT List Visual Arts Center

Cross a Saturday-night special with the Saturday-morning cartoons and you get a sense of the shady-sweet flavor of this Atlanta-based artist's paintings. Crayola-colored refugees from the toy chest--Teddy bears, elephants, and rag dolls--don human garb and star in ambiguous narratives laced with menace. A green horse holds a gun to the head of an orange bear while a blasa yellow doll checks his watch; a red elephant offers candy to a reticent purple bear cub in knee socks. Over all, Griffin gives us a sense of compassion, which is not to say hope, for his hapless menagerie. --The New Yorker This is the first catalog devoted to the work of Kojo Griffin, an up-and-coming artist whose work was featured in Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.

Kojo Griffin: New Work

Griffin, Kojo

Mitchell-Innes & Nash

From its inception in the 1960s, the Rubell Collection has been able to boast a particularly fine range of African-American art. Recent New York exhibitions (such as the Harlem Studio Museum's Freestyle and Frequency, or the Renaissance Society's Black Is, Black Ain't) inspired the Rubell family to mount an exhibition of their holdings in this area, reproduced here in 30 Americans. With a late addition to this exhibition, there are in fact 31 artists: Nina Chanel Abney, John Bankston, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mark Bradford, Iona Rozeal Brown, Nick Cave, Robert Colescott, Noah Davis, Leonard Drew, Renée Green, David Hammons, Barkley L. Hendricks, Rashid Johnson, Glenn Ligon, Kalup Linzy, Kerry James Marshall, Rodney McMillian, Wangechi Mutu, William Pope L., Gary Simmons, Xaviera Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Shinque Smith, Jeff Sonhouse, Henry Taylor, Hank Willis Thomas, Mickalene Thomas, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Kehinde Wiley and Purvis Young.

30 Americans

Wallace, Michele

Hobbs, Robert

Ligon, Glenn

Rubell Family Collection

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