Distributed Art Publishers Livres

Five decades of iconic and incisive art from Barbara Kruger Since the mid-1970s, Barbara Kruger (born 1945) has been interrogating the hierarchies of power and control in works that often combine visual and written language. In her singular graphic style, Kruger probes aspects of identity, desire and consumerism that are embedded in our everyday lives. This volume traces her continuously evolving practice to reveal how she adapts her work in accordance with the moment, site and context. The book features a range of striking images―from her analogue paste-ups of the 1980s to digital productions of the last two decades, including new works produced on the occasion of the exhibition. Also featured are singular works in vinyl, her large-scale room wraps, multichannel videos, site-specific installations and commissioned works.The book also showcases how Kruger’s site-specific works have been reconceived for each venue, and includes a section of reprinted texts selected by the artist. Renowned for her use of direct address and her engagement with contemporary culture, Kruger is one of the most incisive and courageous artists working today. This volume explores how her pictures and words remain urgently resonant in a rapidly changing world.

This is the first overview of the work of Jimmy DeSana, a pioneering yet underrecognized figure in New York's downtown art, music and film scenes during the 1970s and 1980s. The book situates DeSana's work and life within the countercultural and queer contexts in the American South as well as New York, through his involvement in mail art, punk and No Wave music and film, and artist collectives and publications.DeSana's first major project was 101 Nudes, made in Atlanta during the city's gay liberation movement. After moving to New York in 1973, DeSana became immersed in queer networks, collaborating with General Idea and Ray Johnson on zines and mail art, and documenting the genderqueer street performances of Stephen Varble. By the mid-1970s, DeSana was a fixture in New York's No Wave music and film scenes, serving as portraitist for much of the period's central figures and producing album covers for Talking Heads, James Chance and others. His book Submission, made with William S. Burroughs, humorously staged scenes out of a S&M manual that explored the body as object and the performance of desire. DeSana was also an early adopter of color photography, creating his best-known series, Suburban, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This body of work explores relationships between gender, sexuality and consumer capitalism in often humorous, surreal ways. After DeSana became sick as a result of contracting HIV, he turned to abstraction, using experimental photographic techniques to continue to push against photographic norms

This volume will be the first monograph on the work of Chicago-based artist William J. O'Brien (born 1975), produced to accompany his first large-scale, solo exhibition opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in January 2014. The show demonstrates the broad range of O'Brien's work--from sculpture and ceramics to drawing, textiles and painting--and his guiding interest in physicality and the handmade. The catalogue expands the dominant narratives around his practice, which generally focus on his ceramics, to more accurately reflect his diverse, prolific practice as a whole. Exhibition curator Naomi Beckwith and contributing author and curator Trevor Smith contextualize the artist's work in light of recent modes in contemporary art history--l'informe, the handmade and semiotic play. Critic Jason Foumberg contributes a creative text inspired by the artist's working process. Together, the contributing essays make a strong contextual case for O'Brien's work that counters canonical themes of media-specificity and traditional art materials, producing a catalogue as expansive as the breadth of O'Brien's practice itself.

Artworks from the early 1990s through the present examine the many ways that love is understood, expressed or left unspoken This volume features more than 35 diverse and multigenerational artists, exploring themes that grapple with some of the most firmly rooted concepts of love, including the union of two people and their co-belonging in a shared destiny, the ties that bind family and friends, and loving practice that comes from action, intention and commitment to promote the worth and well-being of community. Artists include: Ghada Amer, Rina Banerjee, Thomas Barger, Patty Chang, Susanna Coffey, James Drake, Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett, Alanna Fields, Dara Friedman, Andrea Galvani, General Idea, Jeffrey Gibson, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Kahlil Robert Irving, Tomashi Jackson, María de los Angeles Rodríguez Jiménez, Rashid Johnson, Gerald Lovell, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Kerry James Marshall, Felicita Felli Maynard, Wangechi Mutu, Ebony G. Patterson, Paul Pfeiffer, Magnus Plessen, Gabriel Rico, Dario Robleto, RongRong&inri, Michelle Stuart, Vivian Suter, Jana Vander-Lee, Carrie Mae Weems and Akram Zaatari.

For nearly four decades, Spike Lee has made movies that demand our attention. His extensive filmography reflects an unflinching critique of race relations in the United States, from the Student Academy Awarda?winning short Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads and the ever-relevant Do the Right Thing to the more recent Oscara-winning BlacKkKlansman and Da 5 Bloods. A lifelong cinephile and film scholar, Lee draws inspiration from other artists working across a range of eras, genres and global cinemas. He has also devoted much of his career to teaching the next generation of filmmakers. Spike Lee: Director's Inspiration presents Lee's personal collection of original film posters and objects, photographs, artworks and more - many of these inscribed to Lee personally by filmmakers, stars, athletes, activists, musicians and others who have inspired his work in specific ways. Straight from the walls of Lee's 40 Acres and a Mule production studio in Brooklyn, his faculty office at NYU and his Martha's Vineyard home, these objects offer a glimpse into what shapes Lee's signature filmmaking approach. Spike Lee: Director's Inspiration also includes a conversation between Lee and Shaka King (Judas and the Black Messiah), Lee's list of 95 essential films and brief texts by some of the many artists Lee himself has inspired.

"Trouvé's evident investment in tricks of the eye--and of the mind--paint her ... as a 21st-century surrealist" -Artforum MAMCO's collections include the complete set of Italian artist Tatiana Trouvé's (born 1968) archive of drawings, as well as a room, Prepared Space, painted blindingly white and transected by tiny thread-width gashes seemingly held open by pieces of bronze and wood wedged into the cuts, somewhat resembling the lines on an ancient map. The goal of this volume, which is based around these two bodies of work, is to highlight the importance of drawing in the artist's work--the way in which it structures both her vision and her sculpture. Each corpus is described in detail, but is also situated within Trouvé's oeuvre in a comprehensive way, thus opening up various possible readings of her work. This affordable introduction to Trouvé's oeuvre contains 30 color images of her work and commentary by MAMCO's curators.

On a sculptural recreation of a room from an ancient Iraqi palace, in the wake of lootings by Western archaeologists and ISIS Using Arab-language newspapers and wrappers from food products imported from the Middle East, Iraqi American artist Michael Rakowitz (born 1973) has recreated to scale Room H from the Northwest Palace of the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud (Kalhu). Part of a reception suite, Room H was originally lined with seven-foot-tall carved stone reliefs, including an inscription detailing Ashurnasirpal II's achievements and winged male figures, many of which have been removed by Western archaeologists over the last 150 years. Here, Rakowitz has "reappeared" only those panels that were in situ in Room H when the remains of the palace were destroyed by the jihadist group the Islamic State (ISIS) in 2015. Areas from which the reliefs had already been removed by 19th-century archaeologists are left blank, resulting in what Rakowitz calls "a palimpsest of different moments of removal."

The shipwreck narrative is used to explore globalization, colonization and climate change in the masterful works of contemporary American painter Alexis Rockman In Shipwrecks , Alexis Rockman (born 1962) looks at the world’s waterways as a network by which all of history has traveled. The transport of language, culture, art, architecture, cuisine, religion, disease and warfare can all be traced along the routes of seafaring vessels dating back to and in some cases predating the earliest recorded civilizations.Through depictions of historic and obscure shipwrecks and their lost cargoes, Rockman addresses the impact―both factual and extrapolated―the migration of goods, people, plants and animals has on the planet.This timely publication, which includes essays from leading scholars, is propelled by impending climate disaster and the current largest human migration in history, taking place in part by waterway.