Inspired by American pop art of the 1960s, sots art emerged in the Soviet Union during the 1970s. Both movements used irony, parody, and mockery to expose the core elements of their societies -- in the United States, consumerism, and in the USSR, communist ideology. It's the Real Thing is the catalog of a landmark exhibition in which the work of pre- and post-perestroika sots artists was exhibited together for the first time in the United States at the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis.
Sots art was originally produced in Moscow by nonofficial Soviet artists who grew up in the 1960s. Strongly influenced by propaganda art, they still remembered the aura of sanctity that had surrounded Stalin. Pop art provided them with tools to confront the objects of their consumerism -- political slogans and official images. Instead of enjoying the adulation and mainstream success many pop artists experienced, sots artists were harassed and misunderstood, and their art remained underground and marginal. Not until some of these artists emigrated to New York City in the mid-1970s was sots art hailed in the United States as the first avant-garde movement to come out of the Soviet Union since the 1910s.
It's the Real Thing features work by all the major figures of sots art, including Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who founded the movement. By liberating culture from generations of accumulated fear and by embracing political changes and alternatives, sots artists created a movement that continues to influence contemporary art in Russia just as pop artists changed the American art world forever. It's the Real Thing illuminates art and artists of this important and fascinating movement.

It’s the Real Thing: Soviet and Post-Soviet Sots Art and American Pop Art

Arts & Photography

Khidekel, Regina

History & Criticism

Weisman Art Museum

While many modern artists have been fascinated by the formal richness, the conceptual foundations, and the social significance of maps, cartographers have long used the techniques of artists to create maps that express much more than how to get from one place to another. World Views is the companion volume to an exhibition at the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum that is the first to combine maps, contemporary art that uses map forms and strategies, and commissioned works of art based on the idea of map making.
Densely illustrated with full-color reproductions, World Views shows how maps are a vehicle for examining cultural issues ranging from personal identity to international politics. Maps from around the world and throughout history along with works by artists such as Jasper Johns and Nancy Graves are joined by art created especially for the exhibition.
Although maps are supposedly objective, they incorporate cultural values and political beliefs. Essays by Robert Silberman and eminent geographer Yi-Fu Tuan explore further the complex relationship between the changing world, map making, and art.

World Views: Maps and Art

SIlberman, Robert

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Alfred Henry Maurer (1868-1932) was prolific artist who worked in many of the styles of the early twentieth century: impressionism, postimpressionism, fauvism, and expressionism. This richly illustrated book draws from the single largest public collection of his work and presents the impressive range of his paintings and works on paper throughout his career.

Alfred Maurer: The First American Modern

Deeds, Daphne Anderson

Individual Artists

Charles Biederman

Charles Biederman (b. 1906) has been active in the avant-garde for three-quarters of a century. From his early experiments with cubism and surrealism to the brightly colored aluminum sculptures he constructed through the 1990s, he has pioneered art forms, styles, and theories. This book presents a comprehensive, up-to-date overview of the career of this influential artist, and features full-color illustrations of dozens of Biederman's paintings, drawings, and signature three-dimensional aluminum constructions.

Larsen, Susan C.

The Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota stands like a beacon on the banks of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. The first art museum designed by Frank Gehry, the Weisman introduces the structural and sculptural qualities that would become the hallmarks of his later works, including the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Experience Music Project in Seattle, and the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. With an exterior that has been described as a shiny ice castle and an exploding tin can, and an interior that was declared by Herbert Muschamp of the New York Times to be "five of the most gorgeous galleries on earth," the Weisman boldly proclaims its creativity and artistic vision inside and out.An insightful essay by longtime museum director Lyndel King complements eighty photographs of the building, shot from every angle, to give an impressionistic and comprehensive view of this foundational Gehry project. Now celebrating its tenth anniversary, the Weisman is fully established as an art venue in the vibrant cultural community of the Twin Cities and as a milestone in the development of Gehry's revolutionary architectural style.Distributed for the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum

Weisman Art Museum: Frank Gehry Designs the Building (Volume 1)

Architecture

In 1976, the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota opened a gallery in downtown Minneapolis—and introduced the Twin Cities to a feminist approach to art. WARM was a significant presence both nationally and locally, offering educational workshops, a mentoring program, and an alternative exhibit space for Minnesota women artists. Its longevity and success rivaled those of feminist art collectives in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and renowned artists and critics such as Miriam Schapiro, Judy Chicago, Harmony Hammond, and Lucy Lippard participated in WARM’s programs and exhibits. 
WARM, the first history of this important group, includes an essay that places WARM within the national feminist art movement. Twelve Minnesota artists are featured, representative of the more than one hundred women who belonged to the organization and worked in a variety of art media, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, textiles, graphic design, and installation art.
Joanna Inglot is associate professor of art history at Macalester College.
Distributed for the Weisman Art Museum

WARM: A Feminist Art Collective in Minnesota

Inglot, Joanna

A retrospective and creatively collaborative review of this international feminist conceptual artist &nbsp; Young women victims of a garment factory fire in New York in 1911. An autobiographical progression through stages of womanhood. American veterans killed in Iraq. A giant trough filled with books and surrounded by an urban cornfield. The subjects of Harriet Bart's art are as varied as the media and genres in which she works--sculpture, installation, textiles, painting, drawing, artist's books. Harriet Bart: Abracadabra and Other Forms of Protection is a comprehensive look at the prolific and dynamic career of this international feminist conceptual artist. A founder of the Women's Art Registry of Minnesota (WARM, a nationally recognized feminist art collective in the Twin Cities) and of the Traffic Zone Center for Visual Art in Minneapolis, Bart has sought deep and evocative expressions of memory through several decades of innovative artistic creation and collaboration. This book, which accompanies the first retrospective exhibition of her work at the Weisman Art Museum in 2020, features poetry and prose contributions by significant writers, artists, and curators who have been influenced by her art.&nbsp; Contributors: Betty Bright; Stephen Brown, Jewish Museum; Robert Cozzolino, Minneapolis Institute of Art; Elizabeth Erickson; Heather Everhart; Nor Hall; Matthea Harvey, Sarah Lawrence College; Joanna Inglot, Macalester College; Lyndel King, Weisman Art Museum; Eric Lorberer, Rain Taxi; Jim Moore, Hamline U; Diane Mullin, Weisman Art Museum; Samantha Rippner; Joan Rothfuss; John Schott; Sun Yung Shin; Susan Stewart, Princeton U.

Harriet Bart: Abracadabra and Other Forms of Protection

The first comprehensive study of this innovative and interactive multimedia artist The artistic practice of Piotr Szyhalski encompasses an impressive array of media and genres: from poster design to experimental music, from interactive web-based art to large-scale conceptual installations, from public performance to innovative pedagogy. His commitment to viewer engagement with art and meaning making characterizes all of his work, which constantly strives to advance the multiplicities and complexities of our understandings. "We Are Working All the Time!" he proclaims, both in his graphic design and in his thematic approach to interactive art. Born and trained in Poland, Szyhalski is a vital presence in the Twin Cities. A professor of design and new media art at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and a codirector of Art(ists) On the Verge, his art and performance push boundaries, embrace contradictions, and welcome participation. This midcareer survey of the work of this iconoclastic visual artist accompanies an exhibition of his art at the Weisman Art Museum in 2020. Contributors: Karine Léonard Brouillet, Montreal Museum of Fine Art; Emily Ruth Capper, U of Minnesota; Steve Dietz, Northern Lights.mn; Theresa Downing, U of Minnesota; Michael Gallope, U of Minnesota.

Piotr Szyhalski: We Are Working All the Time!

This "painter's painter" constantly explored the variety of American modernist art, inspired by many locations and artistic styles &nbsp; B. J. O. Nordfeldt was described by a Minneapolis art critic in 1935 as a "painter's painter," and his prolific career evinced constant experimentation with subjects, genres, and media of modernist art. The Swedish emigrant lived throughout the world--from his early training and teaching in Chicago to the dynamic art scenes of Paris and New York to popular American art colonies in Provincetown, Santa Fe, and Lambertville, New Jersey. These various locales encouraged him to engage with new styles and techniques in oil paintings, watercolors, prints, woodcuts, and etchings. His landscapes, portraits, and still lifes showed similarities with the work of Matisse and Cézanne, as well as elements of cubism, and his wood carvings and prints revealed influences from Paul Gauguin and Japanese traditions. In the 1930s Nordfeldt taught at the Minneapolis School of Art (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design). In 2021 the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota will host a major exhibition of Nordfeldt's diverse art. A comprehensive review of this "independent regionalist" and intensely innovative artist, B. J. O. Nordfeldt: American Internationalist also presents the impressive breadth and creative exploration of twentieth-century American modernist art. Contributors: Annika Johnson, Paul Kruty, and Janet Whitmore.

B. J. O. Nordfeldt: American Internationalist

Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), one of the most important artists from the American early modern period, was part of the heady group surrounding Alfred Stieglitz and his galleries in the early decades of the twentieth century. While New York and Stieglitz acted as a base of support and friendship for Hartley, he constantly shifted from place to place, living abroad and in varying locales across the country. Marsden Hartley: An American Modern traces the artists’s movements and the evolution in his thinking and art. For the first 40 years of his life, Hartley pursued the ideals and philosophical principles of American transcendentalism. He shifted radically from his approach after the First World War. Instead of embracing subjectivity, he honored rational intellect and objectivity. Toward the end of his life, he returned to a passionate belief in the subjective self. Patricia McDonnell analyzes Hartley’s beliefs and artistic practice in the context of the cultural and political realities that deeply affected the man and his times This completely redesigned version of the catalogue published by the Weisman Art Museum in 1997 features an expanded section of color plates.

Marsden Hartley: American Modern

McDonnell, Patricia

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