American artist Vija Celmins (b. 1938) is widely admired and respected for her sublime images of night skies and ocean waves. Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964-1966 looks closely at Celmins's early work, which is deeply engaged with the Pop Art scene of 1960s Los Angeles. The authors argue convincingly for a better understanding of this body of work, which is not well known by contemporary audiences, both within Celmins's overall career, and as part of the complicated historical context in which she was working. 
The book illustrates Celmins's work from the mid-1960s. These paintings and sculptures of war planes, smoking guns, and other representations of death and disaster were informed by images found in books and magazines. Also reflecting the moment when print began to give way to television, as well as the impact of the first televised war, they are creative interpretations of a world destabilized by the turmoil of war and domestic political conflicts.

Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964-1966

Arts & Photography

Sirmans, Franklin

White, Michelle

History & Criticism

The Menil Collection

The first survey of more than fifty years of drawing by a legendary sculptor and draftswoman Lee Bontecou (b. 1931) established a significant reputation in the 1960s with pioneering sculptures and reliefs made of raw and expressionistic materials. Her art is simultaneously organic and mechanical, and infused with biological, geological, and technological motifs. These same qualities also animate a less-known but compelling body of work: her drawings. Ranging from her early soot on paper works created using powder from a welding torch to recent drawings in pencil and colored pencil that evoke cosmoses and microcosmic worlds, this stunning book is the first retrospective survey of Bontecou’s consistently innovative drawings. More than sixty full-color plates, populated by imagery ranging from black voids to mechanomorphs to hybrid descendants of teeth, plants, and fish, are complemented by original essays from leading scholars who explore themes such as the drawings’ historical contexts, Bontecou’s use of the iconography of the void, and the eco-apocalyptic themes of an artist who came of age in the roiling political atmosphere of the 1960s.

Lee Bontecou: Drawn Worlds

An enlightening study of Barnett Newman’s last works, based on a decade of exhaustive research The work of Barnett Newman (1905–1970) has come to define the spiritual aspirations and material innovations of American painting in the mid-20th century. Best known for his zip paintings—in which thin vertical lines rise through large, bold planes of color—Newman’s work was an abrupt departure from his contemporaries’ gestural abstraction, yet anticipated Color Field painting. During the last five years of his life, Newman worked primarily in acrylic rather than oil paint, used increasingly vibrant colors, and experimented with shaped canvases. When he died at the age of 65, he left a group of works hanging in his studio, some deemed unfinished. Centered on three of these works, this book builds upon ten years of exhaustive technical research to provide a rare glimpse of Newman’s relatively mysterious artistic process. The first scholarly publication devoted to the last years of Newman’s oeuvre, it features more than 20 paintings from this period and earlier. The authors present eye-opening analysis of these unfinished works as well as rich insight into Newman’s full body of work. This striking volume also includes photographic close-ups and scientific imaging that reveal previously unknown aspects of Newman’s mediums and techniques.

Barnett Newman: The Late Work, 1965–1970

Epley, Bradford A.

This stunning book examines the collection of works by self-taught artists assembled by Stephanie and John Smither over the last thirty-odd years. A team of prominent curators, writers, critics, and art historians focuses on key works by twelve artists, including the boisterous assemblages of Thornton Dial; brightly colored visual interpretations of the Bible by Sister Gertrude Morgan; Oscar Hadwiger’s detailed wood models of fantastical architecture; and Carlo Zinelli’s narrative tableaus of stylized figures and animals. Also featured are works by the ceramicist Georgia Blizzard; drawings by Hiroyuki Doi, Solange Knopf, Martín Ramírez, and Dominico Zindato; paintings by Jon Serl and Johnnie Swearingen; and carved wood sculptures by Charlie Willeto.  

As Essential as Dreams: Self-Taught Art from the Collection of Stephanie and John Smither

A fresh and engaging look at the groundbreaking work of contemporary artist Mona Hatoum The work of London-based artist Mona Hatoum (b. 1952) addresses the growing unease of an ever-expanding world that is as technologically networked as it is fractured by war and exile. Best known for sculptures that transform domestic objects such as kitchen utensils or cribs into things strange and threatening, Hatoum conducts multilayered investigations of the body, politics, and gender that express a powerful and pervasive sense of precariousness. Her works are never simple and often elicit conflicting emotions, such as fascination and fear, desire and revulsion. This copiously illustrated presentation of Hatoum’s oeuvre offers critical and art historical essays by Michelle White and Anna C. Chave and imaginative texts by Rebecca Solnit and Adania Shibli, which contextualize the artist’s work and its relationship to Surrealism, Minimalism, feminism, and politics. With extensive discussions on a selection of significant sculptures and installations, some of which are previously unpublished, Mona Hatoum: Terra Infirma provides an insightful look at one of the most exciting and influential artists working today.

Mona Hatoum: Terra Infirma

Describing drawing as her “primary activity,” for over thirty years Roni Horn (b. 1955) has created innovative and experimental works on paper marked by both conceptual and technical complexity. This carefully curated survey of the artist’s drawings from the early 1980s through 2016 explores works revolving around the mutability of identity and the fragility of place, time, and language; it also delves into Horn’s unique approach to mark-making and her process of cutting up and reassembling words and images. With sumptuous illustrations, this catalogue features an insightful look at and selected details of Horn’s large-scale—sometimes over ten feet tall—works on paper; the artist’s series of cadmium red drawings; and her cut-and-pasted word drawings that combine well-known literary texts by Gertrude Stein and William Shakespeare with colloquial expressions.

Roni Horn: When I Breathe, I Draw (Menil Drawing Institute Series)

<div>The Puerto Rico-based collaborative duo Allora & Calzadilla created Specters of Noon as a group of seven large-scale works specifically for the Menil Collection. Orchestrated around the idea of Solar Noon, a notion derived from Surrealist texts by Roger Caillois, Aimé Césaire, and others that probe the transcultural mythology of noon--the time of day when shadows disappear and delirious visions momentarily reign--the works include light projections, guano, ship engines, live vocal performance, and coal. Using the Menil's Surrealist holdings as a point of departure, Specters of Noon is infused throughout with a Caribbean perspective that addresses the instability of environmental and colonial politics; one work is a massive power transformer damaged in Hurricane Maria that is half-sheathed in copper. Filled with stunning installation photography and insightful texts both commissioned and reprinted, this volume captures the spirit of Jennifer Allora (b. 1974) and Guillermo Calzadilla's (b. 1971) deeply researched and multifaceted work. &nbsp;</div>

Allora & Calzadilla Specters of Noon

A timely reassessment of the artist's early performances and feminist sculptures, affirming their radical engagements and art historical significance This volume is a focused look at two bodies of work, the Tirs ("shooting paintings") and Nanas ("dames"), in the experimental 1960s practice of the French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002). Alongside a poetic response to the work, four essays treat Saint Phalle's oeuvre as works of radical performance and feminist art, as well as highlighting her transatlantic projects and collaborations. A chronology with photo-documentation and known participants details for the first time all Tirs shooting events in Europe and the United States, and another timeline recaps Saint Phalle's life in the 1960s.&nbsp; Tirs were made by firing a .22 caliber rifle at the surfaces of paintings. The bullets pierced bags of pigment, aerosol paint cans, or even food embedded in dense assemblages covered in painted plaster. Saint Phalle's increasingly liberated female figures with outstretched arms, curvaceous forms, and powerful poses developed into her well-known Nanas, an evolution contemporaneous with the rise of a Euro-American feminist movement.

Niki de Saint Phalle in the 1960s

Dawsey, Jill

What if all you had to do was give your worries to The Worry Jar (TM) and you could work through anything? In this book, Michelle teaches our youngest children a strategy to handle their fear, insecurity, and anxiety. The fun loving character, The Worry Jar, will encourage them while using fun, repetitive words as a reminder the worry is in the jar. When you write down your worry and put it in The Worry Jar (TM), you don't have to think about it. However, when the worry pops back into your head, say the words "Worries, worries in the jar, I can!" 
 The Worry Jar is quickly becoming a popular read with parents and teachers. Michelle has a PhD in Education and has taught for 20 years at both the elementary and college levels. She has successfully used worry jars with children and adults. The first worry jar was given to a boy named Aaron in Dr. White's class in 2000. He successfully implemented it into his routine. In 2001, Dr. White was in an accident leaving her paralyzed from the chest down. Aaron knew he could help his teacher by sending her a special worry jar to use while she started her long road to recovery.
 Other books by Michelle include New Opportunities, Scubability, and award winning, Go Away Worries! Put Then in The Worry Jar.

The Worry Jar

Children's Books

Growing Up & Facts of Life

Michelle White Enterprises

Canada's 50 Unforgettable Moments in Hockey

Bynum, Mike

November Sports

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Books by White, Michelle