Gilbert Vicario – författare

The spiritually inspired pictures of Agnes Pelton (1881–1961) have their roots in the desert of California, a place where the artist settled in 1932 and where she lived until her death. She wrote of her highly symbolic paintings that her pictures were “like little windows”, which opened up a view into the interior, her “message of light to the world”.In the 1920s Agnes Pelton started to explore abstract painting, because this offered her the possibility of translating esoteric topics into pictures as well as interpreting earth and light in a spiritual way. Like her fellow-artist Georgia O’Keeffe, Pelton deliberately turned her back on the art scene of the East Coast. She was celebrated for her abstract compositions: “… it is simply an oasis of beauty for the eye”, was how American Art News eulogised her work. After her death Pelton’s work disappeared from the public focus for a long time; today her important artistic contribution to American modernism is acknowledged once more.

Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist will be the first survey of this under recognized American painter in over 22 years. Her distinctive paintings could be described as metaphysical landscapes rooted in the California desert near Cathedral City. Pelton chiefly drew on her own inspirations, superstitions, and beliefs to exemplify emotional states.The publication seeks to clarify the artist’s significance and role within the cannon of American Modernism but also against the legacy of European abstraction. It contextualizes her work against her contemporaries, Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe, and their distinct versions of American spiritual modernism. Pelton’s highly symbolic paintings were inspired by religious sources ranging from Theosophy and Agni Yoga to the spiritual teachings of Dane Rudhyar and Will Levington Comfort. Over three decades she devoted herself to painting spiritual abstractions, which conveyed her “light message to the world.”

Compelling survey of Xicanx art that has shaped visual culture over the last 50 years. Xican-a.o.x. Body centres the political and creative resistance of Xicanx artists from 1968 to the present. The publication presents new histories of Xicanx art, illustrating how artists foreground the Brown body to explore, expand, and complicate conceptions linked to Chicanx, Latinx and Xicanx experiences. The publication offers new insights into more than 50 years of Xicanx art, examining influential works by some 70 artists who highlight the Brown body as a site of resistance and who have created artistic communities that push against systemic racism and the exclusionary practices of mainstream art institutions. Thematic essays by renowned scholars address the ways in which Xicanx art lies at the intersection of the politics of identity, race and class, and interrogate questions of “high” and “low” culture.

Since the 1960s, British sculptor Phyllida Barlow (born 1944) has pursued a unique investigation into materiality, form and process in the wake of the minimalist and postminimalist movements of the 1960s and 70s. Barlow's 2013 exhibition Scree, at the Des Moines Art Center, was designed specifically for the museum, responding to and residing within the architecture of its I.M. Pei wing. Built in 1968, this classically Brutalist architecture with its poured concrete structure and expansive windows forms the perfect backdrop to the artist's ongoing development of the minimalist legacy. Scree also includes 55 works on paper from the late 1960s to the present, which are juxtaposed with works she has selected from the Des Moines Art Center's Permanent Collections. These include works by artists who have been central to her artistic development such as Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Magdalena Abakanowicz, John Chamberlain and Eva Hesse.