An internationally acclaimed artist whose work has been honored with inclusion in both the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial, James Drake has explored political, social, and universal themes through the media of sculpture, video, installation, photography, and drawing. James Drake, the first monograph devoted to the artist, surveys thirty-five years of Drake's work up to 2007. Many of the works reproduced in James Drake reflect the artist's preoccupation with borders. Some have to do with the political border between the United States and Mexico and the inherent social and psychological tensions of people living in its extreme and unique environment. Other works explore the internal boundaries that people experience as a result of attitudes, prejudices, power, control, and arrogance. Jimmy Santiago Baca's narrative poem Huitzilopochtli, a personal response to Drake's work, provides a verbal counterpart to the artist's theme of border-crossing. Another prominent subject in Drake's work is the relationship of people and animals—in particular, the animality that always lurks in human behavior. In his essay "Between Animality and Man," critic Steven Henry Madoff traces this subject through Drake's work and shows how Drake uses it to contrast the forces of intellect and instinct, light and darkness. Interspersed among the color plates are quotations from writers as varied as Cormac McCarthy and Dante. Also accompanying the plates and essays is an introduction by Bruce W. Ferguson, a nationally known art curator, educator, and critic, that places Drake's work in an art historical context. Lists of James Drake's works, exhibitions, public collections, and awards, as well as a bibliography of works about Drake, complete this first retrospective of the oeuvre of this major, socially concerned artist, who always "tries to make work as exciting, powerful, and thought-provoking as possible."

James Drake (M. Georgia Hegarty Dunkerley Contemporary Art Series)

Arts & Photography

BACA, JIMMY SANTIAGO

Madoff, Steven Henry

MCCARTHY, CORMAC

Drake, James

History & Criticism

University of Texas Press

Christopher Wilmarth delighted the world with light-filled sculptures of glass and steel that were deeply poetic in their moods and extraordinarily rich in their modernist heritage. But in 1987, at the peak of his career, a long struggle with depression ended tragically for Wilmarth. The internationally acclaimed artist committed suicide at age 44, and his work largely fell from the public view.
 Now, Wilmarth's legacy is recaptured in this beautifully written, richly illustrated book by art critic, historian, and poet Steven Henry Madoff. The first in-depth look at Wilmarth's extraordinary life as an artist, the book explores both the light and the darkness that underlie his work. Madoff offers a critical overview of the artist's career, examining the sculptor's response not only to historical masters such as Cézanne, Brancusi, Matisse, and Giacometti, but also to the art world of his times--particularly the dominant influence of Minimalism. Using the newly created Wilmarth archive at Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum, Madoff anchors this moving interpretation with the sculptor's own writings unearthed from journals, student notebooks, artist sketchbooks, and letters.
 Madoff draws as well from interviews, articles, and poems that Wilmarth published in his lifetime, along with the body of criticism covering Wilmarth's development over the years. Acclaimed biographer Nancy Milford contributes a poignant memoir of her years of friendship with the artist, and Fogg associate curator Edward Saywell offers a powerful selection of Wilmarth's writings. The sculptor's romantic outlook, his gorgeously light-infused art, and his dramatic decline into work of harrowing darkness are sensitively examined in a book that reintroduces Christopher Wilmarth's sculptures and graphics to the contemporary art audience.

Christopher Wilmarth: Light and Gravity

Princeton University Press

The still-life painting tradition has been constant one in our society. The representation of an assemblage of objects from the everyday world has captivated artists and their audiences throughout history. Whether considering Dutch 17th-century paintings or cubist compositions, the interest remains constant. Donald Sultan's works fit perfectly in this tradition, while at the same time offering a springboard into the next century.
While Sultan's subjects may appear ordinary, they become extraordinary by their representation. Fabulous oranges, lemons, and flowers dominate the surface with their brilliant colors and bold forms. They demand our attention by virtue of their medium, size, color, and composition. Sultan's paintings, with their weight and scale, with their sculptural mass, and their references to the past, draw the viewer in by their boldness, confrontational directness, and surreal quality.

Donald Sultan: In the Still-Life Tradition

Sultan, Donald

Memphis Brooks Museum Of Art

MAMET, DAVID

Univ of Washington Pr

The symposium “Revisiting Black Mountain College: Cross-Disciplinary Experiments and Their Potential for Democratization (in Times of Post-Democracy)” asked these questions in relation to anti-democratic tendencies in many countries worldwide. How can education still hold up democratic values, while at the same time presumably measuring its success by careers in the market? The symposium—from 25–27 May 2018—was organized by Prof Dr Dorothee Richter in conjunction with the exhibition and event programme “Revisiting Black Mountain” (documented under https://blog.zhdk.ch/revisit) initiated by the Zurich University of the Arts (especially through the now retired Head of the Department of Performing Arts and Film, Hartmut Wickert and the Head of the Department of Cultural Analysis, Christoph Weckerle) under the direction of the “Kollegium Kuration” (Bitten Stetter, Brandon Farnsworth, Dorothee Richter, Jochen Kiefer, Martin Jaeggi, Paolo Bianchi), with the aim of opening up projects from different disciplines, of artistic and research-based practices in equal measure, and the idea that it should be open to the participation of all groups at the university—students, researchers, and lecturers.This issue brings together contributions from participants of the conference Susanne Kennedy, Steven Henry Madoff, Raqs Media Collective, and Jeanne van Heeswijk with lecturers of the ZHdK Brandon Farnsworth, Annemarie Bucher, Daniel Späti, and Cornelia Sollfrank and adds further contributions by Andres Janser, Jochen Kiefer, Olga von Schubert, Caroline Adler, Boris Buden, Lucy Bayley, Sascia Bailer, Simon Fleury, Gilly Karjevsky, Asli Uludag, and Mieke Matzke.The interview by Ronald Kolb with Bitten Stetter, Brandon Farnsworth, Dorothee Richter, Jochen Kiefer, Martin Jaeggi, and Paolo Bianchi—all professors or lecturers at the Zurich University of the Arts—provides an internal perspective of today’s curriculum-based universities in relation to an education model like Black Mountain College—which can be seen as the opposite.

OnCurating Issue 43: Revisiting Black Mountain: Cross-Disciplinary Experiments and Their Potential for Democratization

Richter, Dorothee

Matzke, Mieke (Annemarie)

Collective, Raqs Media

von Schubert, Olga

van Heeswijk, Jeanne

Sollfrank, Cornelia

Kennedy, Susanne

Kiefer, Jochen

Independently published

Websights has articles written by professionals who write about the future of business and design on the internet. Websights is the first book on digital design to combine the vital imagery of the Web with intelligent commentary on the industry and future trends.

Websights: The Future of Business and Design on the Internet

DiNucci, Darcy

Steadman, Carl

HALL, Peter

Bruton, Clive

Janensch, Laurel

Mmaeda, John

Moed, Andrea

Rubinstein, Rhonda

Bodow, Steve

North Light Books

While We're Here signals the debut of a poetry that is startling and simple by turns, taking in the classical world and the contempprary with the rigor and inventiveness of its forms. This book is a narrative that moves edgily from the natural world to the social, from the social to the historical. Elegant, sometimes brutal, Madoff's poems echo each other, back and forth, weaving a whole that records the miraculous wealth of the natural world and our own miracles and mayhem within it.

While We're Here

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Hard Pr Inc

Exhibition catalogue to accompany the show "Y.Z. KAMI" at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills from January 8 to February 14, 2008. This catalogue includes an essay by Steven Henry Madoff.

Y. Z. Kami

GAGOSIAN GALLERY

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Books by Madoff, Steven Henry