Ian Berry – författare

The most comprehensive publication to date on Sarah Cain’s exuberant paintings and installationsPublished with Tang Museum.Los Angeles-based painter Sarah Cain (born 1979) works on canvases of all sizes, often modifying them by cutting and braiding, painting on all sides and installing the canvas with the back of the painting facing the viewer. She also paints on other surfaces, including interior and exterior walls, floors, furniture and dollar bills.Cain's process often involves altering and disfiguring a composition until the original image is no longer recognizable. Her process of creation and destruction frequently includes found objects and is steeped in the history of painting and feminist art practices. Cain's work is a challenge to the patriarchal hierarchies of painting. "Almost everything about Cain's paintings—their speed, their brashness, their noodling compositions, their splashes and spray-painted scribbles, their tacky accouterments, their sense of absurdity—seems to undermine the gravitas that large-scale painting traditionally projects," wrote Jonathan Griffin, in the New York Times.Sarah Cain: Enter the Center features new writings and previously unpublished photographs and documentation of dozens of artworks with a focus on the last decade of Cain's exuberant and unique paintings and installations.

Eccentric and entertaining, the bold and cartoonish three-dimensional objects of the Chicago Imagists receive an enthusiastic survey in this playful volumePublished with Tang Museum.Contemporaneous with the Pop art movement, Chicago Imagism can be characterized as warm and wacky—a stark contrast to the cooler, more aloof styles in New York and London. The Imagist movement (a term coined by art historian Franz Schulze in 1972) was propelled by a core group of artists—all graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—that exhibited their work together as The Hairy Who between 1966 and 1968 at the Hyde Park Art Center on Chicago’s South Side. Though each artist had their own fiercely unique style, they shared a similar interest in popular culture, comics and material objects. Suellen Rocca and Roger Brown manipulated and augmented mass-produced household items. Art Green and Eleanor Dube painted on shaped canvases. Other artists, such as Karl Wirsum, Christina Ramberg and Philip Hanson, used materials associated with craft.3-D Doings explores the sculptural work and dimensional paintings of the Chicago Imagists. With a replica of Karl Wirsum’s Armpits on the cover—fake hair and all—the volume is a zany celebration of Imagist objects and their artists, featuring conversations with Suellen Rocca, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson and Philip Hanson, biographies of each artist and a dedicated ephemera section.Artists include: Don Baum, Roger Brown, Ed Flood, Art Green, Red Grooms, Ted Halkin, Philip Hanson, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Christina Ramberg, Suellen Rocca, Barbara Rossi, Evelyn Statsinger, H.C. Westermann, Karl Wirsum, Ray Yoshida.

Four decades of impassioned art-activism from the beloved radical Catholic nun, educator and graphic artist—her definitive monograph available once morePublished with Tang Museum at Skidmore College.For Corita Kent, printmaking was a populist medium to communicate with the world around her. This activist spirit came most alive in the 1960s, when her posters and murals addressed subjects such as racism and poverty, US military brutalities in Vietnam and conflicts between radical and conservative positions in the Catholic Church. Her posters, murals and signature serigraphs combined messages of love and faith with images from popular culture and inventive use of type and color.Originally published in 2013 and long out of print, the most comprehensive monograph on Kent's work finally returns in a brilliant showcase of prints and ephemera from all phases of her life, revealing her importance as an activist printmaker and a stylistic innovator in graphic design. It includes not just the 1960s serigraphs for which she is best known, but also early abstractions and text pieces as well as lyrical works made in the 1970s and 1980s. Full of the lively, colorful work that is so iconically hers, this volume presents four decades of a life dedicated to serving others through and with the language of art. Someday is Now is punctuated by scholarship, selected writings by Kent herself, interviews with former students and collaborators, and responses to her work from a wide variety of artists, curators and designers.Artist, activist, teacher and devout Catholic Corita Kent (1918–86) eloquently combined her passions for faith and politics during her rich and varied career. As a teacher at Los Angeles' Immaculate Heart College, she fostered a creative and collaborative arts community and developed an interest in printmaking. By 1968, her art was enormously popular. She remained active in social causes until her death in 1986.

A showcase of more than 200 of Butterly's evocative small-scale porcelain and earthenware pieces from the past three decadesPublished with Tang Museum at Skidmore College.Clever, mischievous, seductive, defiant—for over three decades, American sculptor Kathy Butterly (born 1963) has captivated viewers with her experimental and expressive ceramic works. Her signature small-scale porcelain and earthenware pieces evoke a range of moods, incorporating surprising color and textures in her masterful deployment of ceramic techniques. In a gesture that veers toward iconoclasm, Butterly contorts traditional vessel forms, producing biomorphic, individualistic creations that seem to bend and fold. Every detail of a Butterly sculpture—from pools of orange glaze to pearlescent beads of clay—is an essential part of its composition. Published concurrently with Butterly's expansive exhibition at the Tang Museum, Assume Yes is a major monographic survey of her sculptural and ceramic work. It spans over 30 years and features color plates of more than 200 artworks from 1994 to a selection of brand-new pieces.

The photographs in the book illustrate the dichotomy of our relationship with water—the role it has in ancient religious rituals and in building communities, to its exploitation and the devastating result of too little or too much water. They depict Hindus bathing in the Ganges, shellfish-gatherers in coastal Spain; polluted sea surrounding oil infrastructure in Baku, Azerbaijan; fishermen in Greenland navigating melting ice in the ocean; landscapes transformed to dustbowls by drought in South Africa and to villages made into islands by flooding in Bangladesh. It is was not Berry’s intention to make a political book, nor an authoritative catalogue of mans’ interactions with water, but instead to share the most memorable stories from his assignments that illustrate how water shapes our lives and what the future may hold.

This career-spanning volume documents the first museum retrospective devoted to the work of Mary Weatherford, a daring practitioner of American abstraction and a leading painter of her generation.  This career-spanning volume documents the first museum retrospective devoted to the work of Mary Weatherford, a daring practitioner of American abstraction and a leading painter of her generation.Over the last three decades, Mary Weatherford has developed a rich and diverse painting practice, from her early 1990s target paintings based on operatic heroines, to the expansive, gestural canvases overlaid with neon glass-tubing that brought attention to her practice in the 2010s. Mary Weatherford: Canyon—Daisy—Eden presents a survey of Weatherford’s career, drawing from several distinct bodies of work made between 1989 and 2017. As constant experiments with color, scale, and materials, these works as a whole reveal the continuity of Weatherford’s interest in human experience, both personal and historical.Featuring 120 full-color plates and expansive installation views, this volume—published by Gagosian in association with the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College—documents an exhibition presented at the Tang and at SITE Santa Fe.