Last year Yale University Press was pleased to publish two illuminating studies of 1930s public murals: Swing Landscape: Stuart Davis and the Modernist Mural (selected as Outstanding Exhibition Catalogue of 2020 by the Midwest Art History Society) and Modernism for the Masses: Painters, Politics, and Public Murals in 1930s New York.
David S. Areford— Sol LeWitt. For the dedicated or even occasional museum visitor, the artist’s name conjures up expansive and colorful murals (his “wall drawings”) and equally commanding, large-scale cubic sculptures (his “structures”). Often installed in grand public interior or exterior settings, these artworks collaborate with the architectural and spatial
Interview with the artist by David Ebony Sanford Biggers is a multifaceted, multi-talented artist with a singular, global vision. A major touring museum solo of works by the Los Angeles-born (1970), New York-based artist, Codeswitch features some sixty large-scale “quilt paintings,” as well as a number of relief constructions, and videos. Scheduled to
In my work, I strive to understand how diverse populations of people used and experienced architecture in the medieval Islamic world. The texts I have chosen for my personal canon explore these cultural interactions, bringing the complexity of medieval humanity to life. The Cairo Geniza The Cairo Geniza, which is
Transmissions is an installation, a collage of several art forms, a revisionist investigation of New York modernism and sexual expression, and an essay in queer theory…. The juxtapositions show that Transmissions is a work of creative imagination as much as revelation. You go to sample it as history, you absorb
Jonathan Faiers— Fur Thinking In 1963, as part of a publicity stunt, World Heavyweight Boxing Champion Sonny Liston had a pair of boxing gloves made from mink. The gloves were used during press interviews between Liston and newcomer Muhammad Ali (then still known as Cassius Clay), the joke being that
By Sarah Roberts and Katy Siegel Yale University Press and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art are very pleased to publish a sweeping and beautifully produced retrospective of the artist Joan Mitchell. The book, which accompanies an exhibition that will open in September at the San Francisco Museum of
Natalya Semenova– Why do people even begin collecting? This has been bothering me for a long time. After all, I collect the stories of my protagonists in the same way they collected paintings and sculptures. Collecting is undoubtedly one of the most ancient viruses, even though collectors as we know
The five titles I have chosen are a mixed bag, but then so are the more than twenty books I have written over the last four decades, covering architecture, furniture, tools, urbanism, real estate, history, and biography. Yet when I look at my library, much reduced since our last downsizing
Jesse Locker — 2020 was, without a doubt, a terrible year for most of us; however, it was a very good year for the seventeenth-century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi. The exhibition “Artemisia” at the National Gallery, London, despite being delayed for months and then interrupted by lockdowns, nevertheless sparked a