Claudia Schmuckli – författare

One of the founding forces behind the 1970s feminist art movement, Judy Chicago became widely known for The Dinner Party, a massive installation turning women’s traditional household-bound role on its head by setting a feast for thirty-nine remarkable women – from Hildegarde of Bingen to Emily Dickinson – to shine a spotlight on women’s contributions to history. Concluded in 1979, it was presented in San Francisco to popular success and proceeded to be shown internationally to an audience of over one million viewers through an unprecedented grassroots effort. Art critics, however, responded differently, annihilating it for its celebration of vaginal imagery and embrace of 'feminine' craft. For decades Chicago operated on the margins of the art world, her work shunned by most critics and institutions and her evolution as an artist eclipsed by the notoriety of The Dinner Party. Judy Chicago: In the Making accompanies the first exhibition to offer a thorough overview of Chicago's career. It traces the artist’s practice back to its roots, revealing her unique working process and the origins of the formal and conceptual strategies she has applied throughout her oeuvre. Bringing together a selection drawn from every major series of her work, it also reproduces sketchbooks, journals and preparatory drawings that document her extensive process of research and development.With 225 illustrations in colour

Catalogues the recent critically acclaimed exhibition of Isaac Julien’s work at the de Young Museum, San Francisco. Sir Isaac Julien (b 1960), one of the UK’s leading artists working in film and video, is celebrated for his poetic yet astutely political films and video installations that reflect on the intersection of power, politics and personal experience through the lens of identity, race and sexuality. Distinguished by their fusion of fact and fiction, social critique and aesthetic immersion, his video installations offer poetic meditations on catalytic political and cultural events that have shaped the lives of individuals and societies around the world. His work breaks down the barriers between different artistic disciplines, melding references to cinema, art, poetry, performance and music into spellbinding political allegories that challenge our understanding of histories, both past and present. Isaac Julien: I Dream a World accompanies the first comprehensive retrospective of this renowned artist and filmmaker in the United States. Centering ten of the artist’s key works shot across the Americas, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Europe, this volume situates his work within a global context. Provocative essays by a roster of contemporary writers and lavish galleries that feature multiple views of Julien’s work further mark this as an indispensable book on the artist and the subject of art history today.

“That is the archaeology I am unearthing: the specter of police violence and state control over the bodies of young Black and brown people all over the world.” –Kehinde WileyPublished with Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence features a new body of paintings and sculptures by American artist Kehinde Wiley confronting the legacies of colonialism through the visual language of the fallen figure. It expands on a subject the artist first explored in his 2008 series Down—a group of large-scale portraits of young Black men inspired by Wiley’s encounter with Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521–22) at the Kunstmuseum Basel. Holbein’s painting triggered an ongoing investigation into the iconography of death and sacrifice in Western art that Wiley traced across religious, mythological and historical subjects. An Archaeology of Silence extends these considerations to include men and women around the world whose senseless deaths, often unacknowledged or silenced, are transformed into a powerful elegy of global resistance against state-sanctioned violence. The resulting paintings of Black bodies struck down, wounded or dead, all referencing iconic historical paintings of slain heroes, martyrs or saints, offer a haunting meditation on the violence against Black and brown bodies through the lens of European art history.Kehinde Wiley (born 1977) is a world-renowned visual artist. Working in the mediums of painting, sculpture and video, Wiley is best known for his vibrant portrayals of contemporary African American and African-diasporic individuals that subvert the hierarchies and conventions of European and American portraiture. Wiley became the first African American artist to paint an official US Presidential portrait for former US President Barack Obama. Wiley has held solo exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally, and his works are included in the collections of over 40 public institutions worldwide. He lives and works in Beijing, Dakar and New York.