Over the past two decades, Ellen Gallagher (born 1965) has created a body of work exploring notions of materiality, history and language. In her early paintings, Gallagher dispersed fields of repeated bulging lips and eyes--borrowed from the imagery of minstrel performances--on gridlike backgrounds of penmanship paper. She continued to incorporate historical material in subsequent works, most famously using midcentury advertisements for African-American beauty products from Ebony magazine and other publications of the period, abstracting portraits of models with yellow Plasticine, oil paint, pencil marks and incisions. For the first major New York museum exhibition of her work at New Museum, Gallagher produced a series of new paintings that both extend her formal and thematic interests and mark a radical new development. Each of the pieces consists of tendril-like formations incised into layers of paint. This complex series is featured in this catalogue along with a booklet of her work from 1993–2009.

Ellen Gallagher: Don't Axe Me (NEW MUSEUM)

Arts & Photography

Carrion-Murayari, Gary

Individual Artists

New Museum

This catalogue coincides with her exhibition at the New Museum which provides a survey of her recent work. Camille Henrot's practice combines anthropological research with a staggering range of cultural fragments reflective of the current digital age. The title, "The Restless Earth," is borrowed from a poem by the Martinican writer Edouard Glissant, known for his novels, peoms and writings on colonialism and diversity. The exhibition will feature four of Henrot's recent videos including Grosse Fatigue, a standout of the recent Venice Biennale, garnering her the Silver Lion as most promising young artist. The work extends on earlier videos like Coupé/Décalé (2010) and Million Dollar Point (2011), which capture rituals and landscapes that move across history and bridge disparate cultures and geographies. "The Restless Earth" also includes several series of works on paper and a new installation of "Is it possible to be a revolutionary and like flowers?" (2012-14). In this series, Henrot translates books from her library into ikebana arrangements, connecting the languages of literature, anthropology, and philosophy with the equally complex language of flowers. Through translation as well as archival research and the creation of hybrid objects-apparent throughout the artist's videos, sculptures, and works on paper-Henrot demonstrates how the classification of artifacts and the production of images structure the way we understand the world.

Camille Henrot: The Restless Earth

This catalogue, accompanying the New Museum exhibition Here and Elsewhere, presents the work of over 45 artists who share roots in the Arab world and a critical sensibility with regard to images and image-making. The title of the exhibition is borrowed from a 1976 film-essay by Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin and Anne-Marie Miéville. Their film, Ici et ailleurs, was conceived as a pro-Palestinian documentary, but evolved into a complex reflection on the ethics of representation. Taking inspiration from this film―which has had a strong impact on Arab artists--Here and Elsewhere examines the role of the artist in the face of historical events. An anthology of critical texts edited by Bidoun magazine highlights the critical discussions that have animated contemporary art in the Arab world. Among the artists included are Fouad Elkoury, Hrair Sarkissian, Hassan Sharif, Anna Boghiguian, Simone Fattal, Ziad Antar and Etel Adnan.

Here and Elsewhere

History & Criticism

Over the course of a 40-year career, Conceptual artist and photographer Sarah Charlesworth deconstructed the conventions of photography and gave emphasis to the medium's importance in mediating our perception of the world. Part of a group of artists working in New York in the 1980s that included Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons, Charlesworth straddled 1970s Conceptual art and the Pictures Generation, creating work that probed the visual language of mass media and illuminated the impact of ubiquitous imagery on our everyday lives. This fully illustrated catalogue accompanying Charlesworth's first major survey in New York features series such as Stills (1980), a group of 14 large-scale works rephotographed from press images that depict people falling or jumping off buildings; Modern History (1977-79), which pioneered photographic appropriation; the alluring Objects of Desire (1983-88) and Renaissance Paintings (1991), which continued Charlesworth's trenchant approach to mining the language of photography; Doubleworld (1995), which probes the fetishism of vision in pre-modernist art and marks Charlesworth's transition to a more active role behind the camera; and her final series, Available Light (2012). Sarah Charlesworth was born in 1947 in East Orange, New Jersey, and received a BA from Barnard College in 1969. She was the subject of a 1997 retrospective organized by SITE Santa Fe. Charlesworth taught photography for many years at the School of the Visual Arts, New York; the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; and Princeton University, New Jersey. She died in 2013 in Falls Village, Connecticut.

Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld

Photography & Video

The Keeper accompanies an exhibition dedicated to the act of preserving objects, artworks and images. Through a variety of imaginary museums, personal collections and unusual assemblages, it offers a reflection on the impulse to save both the most precious and the apparently valueless, and reveals the devotion with which artists, collectors, scholars and hoarders have created sanctuaries for endangered images and artifacts. Through works spanning the 20th century, The Keeper tells the stories of various individuals through the objects they chose to safeguard. Some, such as Roger Caillois’ collection of rare stones and Harry Smith’s string figures, pursue a universal syntax. Other collections were not so much kept as withheld, such as Hilma af Klint’s suite of abstract paintings from 1906–15, which she kept hidden for decades after her death, venturing that her work would be better appreciated beyond her own time. Shinro Ohtake’s feverishly collaged scrapbooks burst with found materials as free associations of images and everyday ephemera. In a ceremonious personal custom, Ye Jinglu had a studio portrait of himself taken every year for decades. These photos, preserved by Tong Bingxue, represent collecting as a mode of auto-ethnography that inadvertently also traces social and political changes over time. The centerpiece of the book is a vast display conceived by Ydessa Hendeles, composed of over 3,000 family-album photographs of people posing with teddy bears, and vitrines containing antique teddy bears.

The Keeper (NEW MUSEUM)

YOURCENAR, MARGUERITE

Gioni, Massimiliano

Hendeles, Ydessa

Bentley, Wilson

Boyle, Robert

Pettway, Loretta

Rydet, Zofia

PAMUK, ORHAN

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Encompassing drawing, painting, sculpture and video, Kaari Upson’s (born 1972) works track open-ended, circuitous narratives that weave elements of fantasy, physical and psychological trauma, and the often-fraught pursuit of an American ideal.
For The Larry Project (2005–ongoing), she unearthed a well of projected histories, images and artifacts inspired by forgotten fragments from the abandoned personal archive of a man whom she had never met. Upson has continued this forensic approach in subsequent projects. This catalog accompanying her New Museum exhibition features an interview with the artist by Paul McCarthy, a new essay by curator Margot Norton and a text by artist Jim Shaw. It also debuts her newest series, centering around a family living in a Las Vegas tract house.

Kaari Upson: Good Thing You Are Not Alone (NEW MUSEUM)

Norton, Margot

Shaw, Jim

McCarthy, Paul

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)

Lehrer-Graiwer, Sarah

"Trigger is a vital reminder that identity politics, far from being a failure, as the right and left alike are quick to tell us, is alive, well, and getting on with changing the world."―Aruna D’Souza
The accompanying catalog for the New Museum’s exhibition Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon investigates gender’s place in contemporary art and culture at a moment of political upheaval and renewed culture wars. The exhibition features over 40 artists working across a variety of mediums and genres, including film, video, performance, painting and sculpture. Many embrace explicit pleasure and visual lushness as political strategies, and some deliberately reject or complicate overt representation, turning to poetic language, docufiction and abstraction to affirm ambiguities and reflect shifting physical embodiment. Among the artists included are Morgan Bassichis, Nayland Blake, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Vaginal Davis, ektor garcia, House of Ladosha, Candice Lin, Christina Quarles, Tschabalala Self, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Sable Elyse Smith and Wu Tsang.

Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon (NEW MUSEUM)

Bryan-Wilson, Julia

Burton, Johanna

Chen, Mel Y.

Tang, Jeannine

Bradley, Rizvana

This catalog is the first monographic publication to survey the work of London-based artist John Akomfrah (born 1957) and accompanies his upcoming New Museum exhibition. Since the early 1980s, Akomfrah's moving image works have offered some of the most rigorous and expansive reflections on the culture of the black diaspora. Zoe Whitley and Aram Moshayedi survey Akomfrah's early work as part of Black Audio Film Collective. Tina Campt explores the sonic resonances of Akomfrah's installation The Unfinished Conversation (2012), which focuses on the life of cultural theorist Stuart Hall. Diana Nawi examines the recent work Transfigured Night (2013/2018), considering how Akomfrah continues to find new languages for film, representation and narrative. T.J. Demos and Okwui Enwezor look at Vertigo Sea (2015), Akomfrah's monumental work exploring the concept of the black Atlantic, using the work to articulate the visual and philosophical underpinnings of Akomfrah's work across his career.

John Akomfrah

ENWEZOR, Okwui

Nawi, Diana

Whitley, Zoé

Moshayedi, Aram

Akomfrah, John

Campt, Tina

Demos, T.J.

Mopadevi, Srivinas Aditya

Easypieces is published for the first New York museum solo presentation of work by Argentine artist Mika Rottenberg (born 1976). Employing absurdist satire to address the critical issues of our time, Rottenberg creates videos and installations that offer subversive allegories for contemporary life. Contributors include Samantha Frost, Associate Professor of Political Science and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Diana Coole, Professor of Political and Social Theory at the School of Politics of Sociology, Birkbeck, University of London; and Julia Bryan-Wilson, Professor of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, in an interview with Rottenberg. The catalog also features an overview by New Museum Curator Margot Norton. Easypieces is part of an ongoing series of solo exhibitions that provide a focused exploration of artists’ practices and continues the New Museum’s history of giving contemporary artists their first museum presentations in New York.

Mika Rottenberg: Easypieces

Phillips, LIsa

Frost, Samantha

Coole, Diana

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