A stunning mid-career retrospective Mark Bradford is best known for dazzling, large-scale abstract paintings that examine the class-, race-, and gender-based economies that structure urban society in the United States. Gathering carefully chosen found and salvaged materials from the area surrounding his studio in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, Bradford engages in an intricate artistic process that involves both creation and destruction. His complex, fractured works address pressing political issues and the media’s influence on contemporary society while cataloguing cultural change and the artist’s personal responses to societal condition.
The first major book on this leading American artist, Mark Bradford features essays by distinguished authors who investigate how Bradford straddles the line between social critique and formal innovation, playing the two against one another to produce works of seduction and analysis. Topics include Bradford’s debt to abstract expressionism, his relationship to the largely unknown history of twentieth-century abstraction by African American artists, his work as a public artist, and his interest in midcentury European collage and décollage practices.

Mark Bradford

Arts & Photography

Bedford, Christopher

Walker, Hamza

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

<div>Austrian Heimo Zobernig's work intervenes, rearranges, recontextualizes, and down-right makes fun of the architecture of museum/gallery spaces so as to demystify its illusory potential and reinscribe it with self-referentiality. Zobernig is among several significant contemporary artists such as Michael Asher, General Idea, and Daniel Buren who have made it their mission to critique sites of modern art. In Zobernig's 1996 installation, the gallery walls from the Society's preceding exhibition were laid flat on the floor-a neat-handed figure/ground reversal turning support into sculpture. In another provocative turn, Zobernig brought the outside in to this altered gallery space via video - he had himself filmed cavorting arond the Renaissance Society hallway naked in front of walls that were painted video back-drop blue; this image was then super-imposed on footage shot while driving around Chicago. This informative and engaging book, designed by Zobernig, serves as a valuable pictorial document, and an insightful critical analysis of this important work. Walker's essay speaks to the challenge Zobernig's art poses for art history and the implications of that challenge for the future of art. In addition, the catalog features a transcript of the panel discussion: Planned Obsolescence, in which a group of critics, curators and architectural historians gathered to discuss how Zobernig's practice differs from, or further informs, practices that have made an art out of calling for an end of art.</div>

Heimo Zobernig

Renaissance Society

"Many things have happened to me, around me, and away from me. I do not remember them sequentially. I remember some of them. I am supposed to have a memory. I recollect certain things. But I have no memory, at least not in the conventional sense." Moshekwa LangaThis publication documents Langa's 1999 installations at The Renaissance Society and Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva. Langa, a native of South Africa currently residing in Amsterdam, works in no single medium; video, photography, drawing, painting and found-object installations are employed without hierarchy, his medium choices being more a matter of whatever is immediately at hand. His exhibitions evidence not only this freewheeling versatility, but also the artist's prolifigacy; he fills every available inch in the gallery spaces. This book's innovative design echoes the artist's collage aesthetic and spirit of generous excess. Like Langa's exhibitions, it is a visual candy store, so full of pleasures that it is hard to decide where to look first. In his catalogue essay, Walker interprets Langa's promiscuous mixing of media and his strategies of appropriation and fragmentation as a response to the conditions of belonging to a diaspora, reflecting the instability that comes from a radical change of place. Janus discusses Langa's efforts to come to terms with the established art world's expectation that an African artist deal with such political issues as post-colonialism, displacement and racism, and his resistance to that through the intensely personal and intimate character of his work. Published in conjunction with Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva.

Moshekwa Langa

Janus, Elizabeth

Since 1975, photographer Dawoud Bey has developed a body of work distinguished for its commitment to portraiture as a means for reflecting social circumstances. Ranging from street encounters to studio portraits, Bey has investigated numerous photographic methods to find increased engagement with his subjects. The Renaissance Society exhibition this catalogue accompanies (May 13 – July 13, 2012) included selections from Bey's work spanning the thirty years from 1982 to the present. The exhibition offered a comprehensive look at Bey's oeuvre, and provided an opportunity to explore related subjects in art history and social discourse, such as the presentation of self, race, site, and the relationship between artist and subject. Includes essays by Arthur Danto and Julie Bernson as well as an interview between Bey and the Renaissance Society's Associate Curator and Director of Education, Hamza Walker.

Dawoud Bey: Picturing People

DANTO, Arthur C.

Bey, Dawoud

Bernson, Julie

Taking its title from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, exhibition Black Is, Black Ain't (April 20 – June 8, 2008) explored a shift in the rhetoric of race from an earlier emphasis on inclusion to a present moment where racial identity is being simultaneously rejected and retained. Curated by the Renaissance Society's Associate Curator and Education Director Hamza Walker, the exhibition brought together works by twenty-seven black and non-black artists whose work collectively examines a moment where the cultural production of so-called "blackness" is concurrent with efforts to make race socially and politically irrelevant. The publication features essays by Huey Copeland, Darby English, Greg Foster-Rice, Amy M. Mooney, Kymberly N. Pinder, Krista Thompson, Hamza Walker, and Kenneth Warrren.

Black is, Black Ain't

Warren, Professor Kenneth W.

English, Darby

Copeland, Huey

Mooney, Amy M.

Foster-Rice, Greg

Thompson, Krista

Pinder, Kimberly N.

Bound by an overarching sincerity and a yearning for the ideal, Tony Tasset's wry work has confronted the confluences of art, contemporary culture and the everyday since the mid-1980s. Recently, Tasset has turned his investigations inward, using his personal life as a self-effacing foil to address social stereotypes, conflicts of the ego and how we see ourselves through media-influenced perspectives.

Tony Tasset Better Me

Horodner, Stuart

TASSET, Tony

University Galleries of Illinois State University

The first comprehensive monograph on one of today’s most innovative and successful painters – made in close collaboration with the artist 
Defined by bold brushstrokes, a dynamic use of color and imaginative compositions, the paintings of Dana Schutz are panoramic expanses that offer visions of humanity in all its complex facets. Her deeply subjective approach, untethered from realism, translates into images that seem to exist in a place that transcends time while celebrating the intrinsic qualities of her medium of choice with freedom and intelligence. As the artist herself stated, ‘I’m interested in painting as an affective place where the hierarchies of the world can be rearranged within the space of a painting.’ This first comprehensive monograph on her work was created in close collaboration with the artist and features a number of never-before-seen paintings and drawings.

Dana Schutz (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

TILLMAN, Lynne

Nadel, Dan

Humor & Entertainment

Phaidon Press

This book documents Lutes' 2009 retrospective exhibition at the Renaissance Society, which included work from 1982 to 2006. While a retrospective affords a chance to construct a narrative of an artist?s development, Lutes stylistic development hardly allows for an analysis following an evolutionary model. Figuration and abstraction coexist in constantly changing degrees. As essayist John Corbett says, "It is the central point of [Lutes] work, in fact, to tease out the productive tension from those two types of painting." Lutes' work has been variously associated with Chicago imagism, Northwest Coast abstraction, so-called "bad" painting, and postmodern appropriation, to name a few. While none of these associations are wrong per se, to understand his work within the narrow context of any single movement would be a mistake. Lutes work is resolutely uncategorizable, an independent pursuit that acknowledges such art movements but never quite fits any given mold, which could arguably be considered the quintessential definition of a Midwestern artist. Hamza Walker offers an introductory overview of Lutes' career to date, while Corbett's wide-ranging essay touches on connoisseurship, coffee, and cymbals in the process of refuting the false dichotomy of abstraction and figuration.

Jim Lutes

Corbett, John

JRP|Ringier/ECART Publications

This book accompanies the third biennial focused on art from the Los Angeles area, with an emphasis on emerging and underrecognized artists. Made in L.A. has established itself as an important platform for a wildly diverse population of artists. The biennial exhibition offers a view onto the current trends and practices developed within and throughout Los Angeles, one of the most active and energetic art communities in the world. Under the direction of co-curators Aram Moshayedi and Hamza Walker, the 2016 iteration promises to offer a mix of the local and international perspectives that are an important part of the city’s identity.

Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only

Moshayedi, Aram

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Prestel

Despite an oeuvre spanning more than 20 years and a disavowal of any signature style, Mary Ellen Carroll has throughout her career been investigating a single, fundamental question: What is a work of art? The resulting multifarious, provocative and often wry outpouring in architecture, writing, performance, photography, filmmaking, printmaking, sculpture and painting has been collected into this book--the New York conceptual artist's long-awaited first monograph. Carroll's work interrogates the relationship between subjectivity, language and power; at its core is a dedication to political and social critique. The touchstones of her practice are the double, the imitation and the copy, and these motifs are applied to a range of ends--from conjuring the unheimlich to probing the means of distribution and interpretation of the work of art. A Carroll piece may involve something as seemingly effortless as trademarking an idea by another artist or as complex and bold as walking out the door penniless with only her passport and the clothes on her back to spend six weeks in a foreign country. Carroll imbues all her work with a strong performative element; even a new opus, involving the rotation of a Houston tract home on its foundation, is conceived as a way of making architecture perform.

Mary Ellen Carroll: MEC: Causes, Place, Mistakes, Boredom, Lies, Resemblance, Pleasure, Nothing, Temporality, Affect, Inscription, Envy/Imitation, Utilitarianism, Disappearance, Literalness, Thingness

Flatley, Jonathan

Individual Artists

SteidlMack

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