Katy Siegel – författare

A new, fully transcribed edition of the celebrated collection of Jack Whitten’s wide-ranging, perceptive writings When it was originally published in 2018, Notes from the Woodshed marked the first time that a book had been devoted to the writings of pioneering American artist Jack Whitten. Edited by art historian Katy Siegel, this new edition of the celebrated publication now presents a fully transcribed collection of Whitten’s insightful, searching writings, alongside a new afterword in the form of a conversation between curators Matilde Guidelli-Guidi and Zoé Whitley and artist Glenn Ligon. Widely renowned for his experimental approach to painting, Whitten often turned to writing as away to investigate, understand, and grapple with his practice and his milieu. Taking its title from the heading that Whitten scrawled across many of his texts—a term borrowed from the world of jazz that means “to practice in private”—Notes from the Woodshed is a fascinating, intimate insight into an artist at work.

The image of a tortured genius working in near isolation has long dominated our conceptions of the artist's studio. Examples are abound: think Jackson Pollock dripping resin on a cicada carcass in his shed in the Hamptons. But times have changed; ever since Andy Warhol declared his art space a 'factory', artists have begun to envision themselves as the leaders of production teams, and their sense of what it means to be in the studio has altered just as dramatically as their practices. "The Studio Reader" pulls back the curtain from the art world to reveal the real activities behind artistic production. What does it mean to be in the studio? What is the space of the studio in the artist's practice? How do studios help artists envision their agency and, beyond that, their own lives? This forward-thinking anthology features an all-star array of contributors, ranging from Svetlana Alpers, Bruce Nauman, and Robert Storr to Daniel Buren, Carolee Schneemann, and Buzz Spector, each of whom locates the studio both spatially and conceptually - at the center of an art world that careens across institutions, markets, and disciplines.A companion for anyone engaged with the spectacular sites of art at its making, "The Studio Reader" reconsiders this crucial space as an actual way of being that illuminates our understanding of both artists and the world they inhabit.

A sweeping retrospective exploring the oeuvre of an incandescent artist, revealing the ways that Mitchell expanded painting beyond Abstract Expressionism as well as the transatlantic contexts that shaped herJoan Mitchell (1925–1992) was fearless in her experimentation, creating works of unparalleled beauty, strength, and emotional intensity. This gorgeous book unfolds the story of an artistic master of the highest order, revealing the ways she expanded abstract painting and illuminating the transatlantic contexts that shaped her. Lavish illustrations cover the full arc of her artistic practice, from her exceptional New York paintings of the early 1950s to the majestic multipanel compositions she made in France later in her career. Signature works are represented here along with rarely seen paintings, works on paper, artist’s sketchbooks, and photographs of Mitchell’s life, social circle, and surroundings.  Featuring scholarly texts, in-depth essays, and artistic and literary responses, this book is organized in ten chronological chapters. Each chapter centers on a closely related suite of paintings, illuminating a shifting inner landscape colored by experience, sensation, memory, and a deep sense of place. Presenting groundbreaking research and a variety of perspectives on her art, life, and connections to poetry and music, this unprecedented volume is an essential reference for Mitchell’s admirers and those just discovering her work.Published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern ArtExhibition Schedule:San Francisco Museum of Modern Art(September 4, 2021–January 17, 2022)  Baltimore Museum of Art(March 6–August 14, 2022)  Fondation Louis Vuitton (October 5, 2022–February 27, 2023)

A fascinating account of the art of the US Bicentennial, offering wide-ranging perspectives on debates about national identity and history that remain pressing todayIn 1976 the United States celebrated its two hundredth year with festivals, exhibitions, works of art, and historical initiatives. Over a decade, planning for the Bicentennial spanned postwar prosperity, political activism, and, toward the end, fear of national decline. The social alchemy of these conditions produced a national investment in shared cultural experience never matched before or since.Across wildly disparate venues, demographics, interests, presidencies, and geographies, Bicentennial cultural production contended with community, the environment, immigration, heritage, technology, and what it meant to be American. This outpouring of projects both reflected and drove national debates, eliciting mass participation in negotiating US history and imagining the nation’s future.What Was America? offers a prismatic view of American art and culture in the years leading up to 1976. Ten fascinating case studies examine the individual efforts of artists such as Benny Andrews; blockbuster exhibitions, including A Nation of Nations at the Smithsonian; and popular community projects such as protest quilts and time capsules. The authors consider issues that remain highly relevant today and offer new perspectives on the possibilities for art’s social role, exploring its use in defining the nation’s past and future, its purpose and its people.

A companion to the upcoming exhibition of Reed s 1974 75 brushstroke paintings, this book features colour plates of works originally exhibited in 1975 at Susan Caldwell Gallery. Along with installation images and plates from that seminal exhibition, related paintings, performances, and film images appear throughout the book in the form of a visual essay. New texts by Richard Hell and Reed appear alongside reprints from the time, including the original exhibition text by Paul Auster. A conversation between Katy Siegel and artist Christopher Wool unfolds the significance and legacy of Reed s early work.

Carrie Moyer’s first major monograph expansively represents the influential abstract painter’s work and queer agitprop. Carrie Moyer consciously centers her painting as a practice about painting, with history as a subtext. Known for her incursions into Color Field painting, Moyer also traces her influences to iconic female artists of the twentieth century, such as Georgia O’Keeffe, and surrounding questions of taste, once quipping of her paintings that “[Helen] Frankenthaler and [Fernand] Léger met in a dark corner and had Elizabeth Murray.” Moyer’s complex work merges abstract aesthetics and legible imagery: vividly colored and textured forms are embedded with a range of historical, stylistic, and physical references to Surrealism, Modernism, 1960s and ’70s counterculture graphics, and ’70s feminist art. Moyer often works on the floor, pouring, rolling, stippling, mopping the paint, and embellishing with glitter. An exploration of acrylic’s unique properties is a driving force in her work. Beginning as an intern at HERESIES, the pioneering feminist art magazine, Moyer has also engaged in critical practices beyond the studio. This monograph enriches a deep dive into Moyer’s painting practice, in particular her work of the past decade, with a portfolio of the artist’s agitprop from the 1990s, including Dyke Action Machine! (DAM!), one of the first lesbian public art projects.

Art histories of the recent past usually depict art after World War II as wrested from a ravaged Europe by a triumphant United States, or in formal terms, floating free of social meaning. These histories fail to describe how the particularities of American culture shaped contemporary art. Without the European triumvirate of academy, aristocracy, and avant-garde, American artists instead responded to social issues native to the country: race, mass culture, individual success, suburbia, and the atomic bomb, which revived the Puritanical tradition of the apocalyptic imaginary. Katy Siegel examines how these issues came to find their place in art ranging from the works of Norman Lewis, Joan Mitchell, and Robert Rauschenberg to Kerry James Marshall and Mike Kelley, situating them amidst an American literary and political discourse that includes Herman Melville, Ralph Ellison, and Frederick Exley. Since ’45 explores how U.S. culture not only shaped American art, but, given the political and economic dominance of the U.S., has continued to affect contemporary art worldwide, even as the American century fades.

Painter, novelist and wrestler, Drexler is the great polymath of PopRosalyn Drexler has always moved between worlds. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, she showed sculpture at New York’s Reuben Gallery, a gathering place for artists like Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg who combined installation and performance with traditional media. Drexler took part in Happenings at Reuben Gallery and at Judson Church (years after her own quasi-performance as a female wrestler, memorialized by Andy Warhol in the 1962 series Album of a Mat Queen). Drexler’s collages and large-format paintings of the 1960s open the category of Pop art to technology and politics in a way that feels contemporary today, crossing hard-edge painting with depictions of sex, violence, race and gender role-playing in film and media.Her writing also crosses high and low genres, comprising novels both experimental and popular, avant-garde theater and writing for television (including an Emmy-winning Lily Tomlin special). In addition to a comprehensive selection of Drexler’s major paintings, Who Does She Think She Is? also recovers the artist’s early sculptures, recently rediscovered and not exhibited since 1960. Documentation of Drexler’s performances and theatrical work, photographs evoking her role in the downtown New York scene and a selection of her books and other archival materials present her work across multiple mediums, offering a comprehensive look at Drexler’s varied career.Rosalyn Drexler was born in 1926 in the Bronx, New York. In 1951 Drexler pursued a brief career as a professional wrestler under the name "Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire." In January 1964 her work was included in the First International Girlie Exhibit at Pace Gallery, New York. In 1968, Drexler signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

A celebration of groundbreaking works by generations of women artists from Joan Mitchell to Julie Mehretu and beyondThis book explores the bold vision and vast range of achievements of women artists working predominantly across North America from the late 1960s into the present moment. The paintings, sculpture and mixed-media works featured are drawn from the Shah Garg Collection, which is dedicated to illuminating the critical role that women have played in shaping the development of abstraction and the narratives of art more broadly. Making Their Mark includes two sweeping essays by editors Mark Godfrey and Katy Siegel, writings by six scholars on topics relevant to the depth of the collection, such as the importance of craft traditions, artistic experimentation with new technologies and the impact of personal and communal identity on artmaking, as well as lively texts by 15 artists about the artists who inspire them. Richly illustrated with works by 136 artists, this volume offers new insights that make it a resource for students of art and general readers alike.Artists include: Pacita Abad, Candida Alvarez, Olga de Amaral, Emma Amos, Firelei Báez, Jennifer Bartlett, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Trude Guermonprez, Jacqueline Humphries, Suzanne Jackson, Maria Lassnig, Simone Leigh, Julie Mehretu, Joan Mitchell, Senga Nengudi, Toyin Ojih Odutula, Calida Rawles, Ilana Savdie, Tschabalala Self, Lorna Simpson, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Pat Steir, Lenore Tawney, Toshiko Takaezu, Charline von Heyl, Kay WalkingStick and Mary Weatherford.