Julie Ault – författare

A multifaceted history of New York’s influential alternative art scene during a time of rapid social change.By the mid-1960s, New York’s art establishment-its major museums and galleries-had ceased to reflect the city’s diversity and had largely ignored the decade’s social, political, and cultural ferment. In response, marginalized artists created an oppositional network of organizations, exhibit spaces, and cooperative galleries that both paralleled and challenged the status quo. This alternative art movement flourished for more than two decades, repositioning New York at the center of international contemporary art. Alternative Art New York brings together a diverse group of artists and critics to explore the origins and evolution of this diffuse and vibrant cultural scene from a variety of perspectives: political, philosophical, organizational, economic, and aesthetic. Locating the movement within both the art world and its larger social and political context, these authors decipher the shifting configurations of cultural power in this period and the complex relationship between the mainstream and the marginal. With a unique, annotated chronology of the alternative art scene from 1965 to 1985, and illustrated with 150 images of key works, installations, and exhibits; reproductions of posters, communiquÉs, and other ephemera; and photographs of protests and meetings, this volume is an important work of contemporary art history and a valuable sourcebook that suggests the basis for the return of an artist-driven cultural economy.Contributors: Martin Beck; Juli Carson, UCLA; Jim Cornwell; David Deitcher, Cooper Union; Arlene Goldbard; Miwon Kwon, UCLA; Lucy R. Lippard; Alan Moore; Brian Wallis, International Center of Photography.Published in collaboration with The Drawing Center, New York.

Corita Kent’s photographs of vernacular inspiration—from street signs and folk art to kites, parades and fairsCorita Kent, formerly Sister Mary Corita, is known for her exuberant, colorful serigraphs and her teaching, as evidenced in her lively art classes. As a Catholic nun from 1936 until 1968, Corita lived and worked in the Immaculate Heart of Mary community in Los Angeles. She taught lettering and layout, image finding, and art structure for 20 years in Immaculate Heart College’s art department. There, she screened multiple films simultaneously, hosted guest thinkers including Saul Bass, Buckminster Fuller and John Cage, and guided the making of large-scale collaborative projects with students.Corita regularly took her students out for looking sessions at a used car lot or an art exhibition. While constantly looking and discovering visually, Corita shot thousands of 35 mm slides documenting references, the IHC milieu and the art department processes. For Corita, the vernacular environs of advertising, supermarkets and the city’s media landscape were a source of inspiration and raw material. Her slide collection encompasses a wide range of subjects: cookies, coke bottles, toys, presents, experiments, projects, Mary’s Day celebrations stemming from Corita’s classroom, flowers, magazines, seeds, puppets, visits with Charles and Ray Eames, street signs, trade fairs, folk art, boxes, billboards and kites. Drawing from the Corita Art Center’s vast slide collection, Ordinary Things Will Be Signs for Us embodies Corita’s philosophy of looking.Corita Kent (1918–86) was known for her iconic art, innovative teaching methods and messages of social justice. Born Frances Elizabeth Kent in Fort Dodge, Iowa, she entered the order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Hollywood at age 18. As a professor and later chair of the art department, she helped establish its reputation as a hub of creativity and liberal thinking. By 1968, her art was enormously popular, showing in more than 230 exhibitions and held in public and private collections around the world. She remained active in social causes until her death in 1986.

The first in-depth survey of the life and work of Jim Hodges, one of America's most celebrated contemporary artistsJim Hodges is an artist who addresses issues such as memory, love, and existential struggles through a multifaceted practice that includes photography, screen printing, and sculpture. His use of found materials like rocks and denim, coupled with the adoption of transitory shapes like spiderwebs, speaks of a personal experience that resonates on a collective level filtered through elements available in nature. Mysterious, beautiful, poetic, and conceptually deep, Hodges's work has the rare quality of being simultaneously thought-provoking and visually beautiful.

The first comprehensive monograph on visual artist and filmmaker Rosa Barba, one of the most critically acclaimed artists working todayRosa Barba is a Berlin-based artist whose work offers a crucial deconstruction of film and sculpture and how the two relate to each other. While her installations and site-specific interventions challenge and reconstitute the viewer’s notions of cinema and its staging vis-à-vis gesture, genre, documents, and information, her films settle at an ambiguous point between experimental documentary and fictional narrative, thriving in a contemporary moment while hinging on fleeting memory and encroaching uncertainty.Predicated by extensive study in a variety of places, and occasionally enhanced by live performances conceived to activate her pieces, Barba’s art provides an experience that brings back the audience to the bewildered, complex reality that surrounds us every day.Extensively illustrated with more than 150 photographs, this first monograph on the groundbreaking artist includes essays and texts from art-world luminaries, an illuminating new interview with Barba, studio photography, and more.

Higa’s critical work on Asian American art history and the art of Japanese Americans imprisoned in World War II US internment camps provides a compelling view into the historical realities of racially marked identity and art-makingEdited by artist, curator, writer and editor Julie Ault, Hidden in Plain Sight brings together essential writings by the trailblazing art historian and curator Karin Higa (1966–2013). The selected essays, written between 1992 and 2011, focus on the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans in Western US states to specially constructed concentration camps, the artistic production and communities that took root within them and the individual and collective narratives of Asian American artists amid discriminatory policies, restricted political agency and racism. While exploring issues of identity and immigration, Higa recuperates significant artists and oeuvres from historical neglect and engages contemporary artists to examine how art acts as a source for and transmitter of cultural identity.This book reveals how Higa’s conviction that art and lived experience are indissolubly linked was at the root of her methodological modeling of an Asian American art history. Moving between portrayals of artists’ networks in the camps and Little Tokyo communities and case studies of oeuvres and biographies, Higa recovers vital art practices and hidden histories of creative struggle and efflorescence. In the process, she maps—across ethnic, geographic, and stylistic boundaries—the fertile creative milieux of individual practices and communities. Higa shows how artists of Asian descent have negotiated the divide between the United States and their ancestral homes by using their freedom as artists to define their culture more broadly.