British artist Hurvin Anderson (born 1965), is best known for evocative paintings that engage with charged social histories and shifting notions of cultural identity. His depictions of lush Caribbean landscapes and urban barbershops explore themes of memory and place, and the indelible connection between the two. Anderson applies paint with deceptive ease, as if eager to capture the scene before it drifts away; figure and ground blend to create compositional spaces where subjects fluidly project forward and recede back into permeable picture planes. The most comprehensive survey of Anderson’s work to date, Backdrop examines the artist’s practice in depth, presenting new and recent paintings alongside previously unseen sculpture and photography.

Hurvin Anderson: Backdrop

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

A Fiction of Authenticity presents seminal moments for challenging prevailing notions about interculturalism and postcolonial subjects. This full-color catalogue features specially commissioned work by 11 contemporary artists of African descent--each of whom lives and works in either the United States or Europe and examines the invented idea of an “authentic” Africa. Each of these artists has positioned themselves outside the frame of Africa, but each remains connected, and by doing so has created a shift in the way the world considers postmodern and postcolonial art production. The participating artists are Siemon Allen, Fatma Charfi, Godfried Donkor, Mary Evans, Meschac Gaba, Kendell Geers, Moshekwa Langa, Ingrid Mwangi, Odili Donald Odita, Owusu-Ankomah and Zineb Sedira. Also included are seven new essays by some of the most exciting and critical voices working internationally today. A Fiction of Authenticity considers the diasporic positioning of these artists, as well as paradigms of discourse concerned with aesthetics, nationhood, citizenship, community, locality and sense of place.

A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad

Tawadros, Gilane

Ha, Paul

Cámara, Ery

Britto Jinorio, Orlando

History & Criticism

From a distance, Yun-Fei Ji's traditional brush paintings hark back to the atmospheric landscapes of the Sung Dynasty painters. Step closer though, and Ji's mists are revealed to be toxic clouds, and his craggy mountains are shown to be piles of overflowing garbage and abandoned vehicles. His misty imagery also includes stylized abstractions that may or may not refer to intestines, explosions or bubbling slime. Using traditional materials (inks, Chinese brushes and handmade mulberry paper) Ji employs age-old methods to illuminate historic and contemporary concerns. This full-color monograph/catalogue includes a new thematic group of six large-scale works made especially for the exhibition. Multi-page gatefolds of these paintings are included.

Yun-Fei Ji: The Empty City

Lin, Tan

Volk, Gregory

Chiu, Melissa

Michael Lin wouldn't mind if someone stepped on his art: he creates all-encompassing visual floral cornucopias--often on the floor. Long interested in Asian textiles and influenced by Chinese, Japanese and American culture, many of the fabrics appropriated by the artist are designs culled from Taiwanese wedding fabrics. Included here is “The Architect &amp; The Housewife”--Frances Stark's rare essay on public and private space; extensive installation documentation; an illustrated exhibition history; and a complete artist biography.

Michael Lin

Known for her cartoon-like characters engaged in ambiguous activities, Laylah Ali's paintings and drawings imply narratives that address a wide variety of political, cultural, and social concerns. Her carefully-created images are deceptive with their buoyant color, yet at the same time delve into some of the more disturbing impulses revealed in the workings of individuals and groups. Often creating characters that represent the many facets of social and racial identity, this special artist book, Types, includes new drawings that are representative of the different “types” of characters Ali creates. Keeping with the intimate scale of her works, this 36-page book includes 14 new black and white color drawings. Each image is juxtaposed next to a solid block of color in order to heighten the intricate details of these new depictions.

Laylah Ali: Types

Self-taught, Chicago-based artist Dzine (born Carlos Rolon in 1970) has gone from graffiti on the streets to showing in the galleries of Tokyo, Paris, Madrid and New York. His vibrant canvases--some in neon colors with biomorphic forms, some in softer palettes with patterned lines and curves--pulse with the energy of the city, but have ventured from the look of the street into accomplished abstracts, most recently encrusted with shimmering glass beads. The creative force behind an experimental record label that works with world-renowned DJs and producers such as DJ CAM, Gotan Project and Guidance Recordings, Dzine combines music with his art in this catalogue from his solo show at the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis: Punk Funk includes a CD by DJ CAM, featuring a soundtrack made especially for the exhibition.

Dzine: Punk Funk

When curators at Saint Louis's Contemporary Art Museum asked Cindy Sherman whether there was a moment in her career whose resonance might be underappreciated, one around which she might like to develop an exhibit and a book, she selected her earliest adult creative years, beginning while she was still a student at Buffalo State College in the mid-1970s. Working Girl is full of rarely seen pieces, and it features, for the first time, documentation of and stills from Sherman's 1975 animated short Doll Clothes, which is among the pieces that bring Sherman's early exploration of gender and identity into focus. The mostly small-scale work, including many early black-and-white, hand-colored, and sepia-toned photographs, is culled primarily from the artist's family members' collections and her own, and includes the pieces that laid the groundwork for her first major success, the acclaimed Film Stills series. Working Girl is a unique glimpse into the early development of Sherman's artistic practice, and into the genesis of her inimitable substance and style. It illuminates her conceptual approach to photography and foretells the career that would be launched in the late 1970s, positioning her as one of the most significant artists of our time.

Cindy Sherman: Working Girl (Decade Series 2005)

This first comprehensive publication on the New York performance artist Larry Krone is also an artist's edition, a box whose contents include a CD sound track to his latest show and a pattern for making your own stage costume, the eponymous Underpants of Many Colors. The suitcase-style packaging bears Krone's unique graphic look, and, inside, additional components including a pocket for reproductions of performance programs, copies suitable for framing and a 56-page booklet. Artist/Entertainer surveys 10 years of handmade art objects alongside Krone's keenly crafted performance pieces, where improvisation, country music, poetry, costume and family meet amid lowbrow stage sets. Underpants of Many Colors, documented here in music, costume and description, is a lively exploration into themes of love and loss, kitsch and domesticity, and finally, obsession. Krone's work has been seen at the Whitney museum of American Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Larry Krone: Artist/Entertainer

In a curious botanical milieu peopled with costumed creatures born from myths and folktales, Janaina Tschape makes photographs and video. Melantropics, her first American monograph, documents recent works staged in the 79-acre Saint Louis Botanical Garden, a National Historic Landmark and one of the country's oldest botanical institutions, and in Rio de Janeiro's John Tyndale-designed Parque Lage. The linked projects incorporate the same costumes and props, leaving viewers to decipher their artificially luxuriant locales. Photographed and filmed during the spring, their subjects serve as transitory blooms and foliage, surrogates for those that have withered and those yet to blossom. Tsachape, born in Germany and living in Brooklyn, has shown her work at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the National Museum of Women in the Arts and on the flashing screens of Times Square, through Creative Times's 59th Minute program.

Janaina Tschape: Melantropics

I Remember Heaven explores shared affinities in the work of the Pop art superstar Andy Warhol, and contemporary artist Jim Hodges. This cross-generational study looks at both artists' work within a continuum of art production that finds history in everyday artifacts and uses aesthetic representation as a means to understand visibility and invisibility, sexuality, selfhood, love and death. Essayist Jose Esteban Muñoz discusses the artists' work in relation to queer aesthetics before and after Stonewall. Susan E. Cahan examines the personal and social aspects of collective grief, a subject which preoccupied both artists. I Remember Heaven captures a sense of the America of the 60s as not so different from today: Once again, the American public is fiercely divided over social issues; once again, an unpopular war enters American homes via television; and once again, American culture is experiencing an explosion of information--this time spawned by the Internet.

I Remember Heaven: Jim Hodges and Andy Warhol

José Muñoz

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

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Books by Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis