Kelly Baum – författare

This generously illustrated volume surveys a new chapter in the history of environmental art, one in which space, geopolitics, human relations, urbanism, and utopian dreamwork play as important a role as, if not more than, raw earth. Discussed are case studies by seven artists and two artist teams—Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Francis Alÿs, Yael Bartana, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Emre Hüner, Andrea Geyer, Matthew Day Jackson, Lucy Raven, and Santiago Sierra. While some of these artists explore historical and symbolic configurations of space, others parse the social, legal, and economic conditions of specific land-sites, including the Navajo Nation, the island of Vieques, the border town of Juarez, and the cities of Tongling, Jerusalem, and Beirut. Not confined to the displacement of matter, these artists employ a wide range of media, such as performance, animation, assemblage, and photography.Distributed for the Princeton University Art MuseumExhibition Schedule:Princeton University Art Museum 10/23/10 – 02/20/11

“Best in Show” — 2014 AAM Museum Publications Design CompetitionBetween 1950 and 1975, some of the postwar era’s most innovative artists flocked to a very unexpected place: New Jersey. Appreciating what others tended to ignore or mock, they gravitated to the state’s most desolate peripheries: its industrial wastescapes, crumbling cities, crowded highways, and banal suburbs. There they produced some of the most important work of their careers. The breakthroughs in land, conceptual, performance, and site-specific art that New Jersey helped catalyze are the subject of New Jersey as Non-Site, whose title evokes the mixed-media sculptures that Robert Smithson began to create in 1968 while driving the state’s highways with Nancy Holt.This catalogue examines more than 100 works by sixteen artists, including Amiri Baraka, George Brecht, Dan Graham, Allan Kaprow, Gordon Matta-Clark, and George Segal. Organized around three themes—ruin, cooperation, and displacement—Kelly Baum’s essay considers their work in relationship to seismic shifts in the world of art and equally dramatic changes to New Jersey’s economy, infrastructure, landscape, demography, and social stability.Distributed for the Princeton University Art MuseumExhibition Schedule:Princeton University Art Museum(10/05/13–01/04/14)

Positioning Alice Neel as a champion of civil rights, this book explores how her paintings convey her humanist politics and capture the humanity, strength, and vulnerability of her subjects  “One of the most ambitious and thorough collections of Neel’s work to date.”—Allison Schaller, Vanity Fair  “For me, people come first,” Alice Neel (1900–1984) declared in 1950. “I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being.” This ambitious publication surveys Neel’s nearly 70-year career through the lens of her radical humanism. Remarkable portraits of victims of the Great Depression, fellow residents of Spanish Harlem, leaders of political organizations, queer artists, visibly pregnant women, and members of New York’s global diaspora reveal that Neel viewed humanism as both a political and philosophical ideal. In addition to these paintings of famous and unknown sitters, the more than 100 works highlighted include Neel’s emotionally charged cityscapes and still lifes as well as the artist’s erotic pastels and watercolors. Essays tackle Neel’s portrayal of LGBTQ subjects; her unique aesthetic language, which merged abstraction and figuration; and her commitment to progressive politics, civil rights, feminism, and racial diversity. The authors also explore Neel’s highly personal preoccupations with death, illness, and motherhood while reasserting her place in the broader cultural history of the 20th century.Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University PressExhibition Schedule:The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York(March 22–August 1, 2021)  Guggenheim, Bilbao(September 17, 2021–January 30, 2022)  de Young Museum, San Francisco(March 12–July 10, 2022)

This career-spanning publication features conceptual, political, formal, and technical perspectives on the work of contemporary sculptor Charles RayFor Charles Ray (born 1953), sculpture is a way of thinking that informs his work across a wide range of media—from gelatin silver prints to porcelain, fiberglass, wood, and steel. Charles Ray: Figure Ground spans the whole of the artist’s fifty-year career, from his early photographs and performances through his intriguing, often unsettling sculptures, some of which are published here for the first time.  The essays foreground Ray’s engagement with preexisting traditions, as well as charged issues around race, gender, and sexuality (notably expressed through his explorations of Mark Twain’s 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) and investigate the modalities of touch that run through his work. In addition, a reflection by Ray himself and a conversation between the artist and Hal Foster offer further insights into his multifaceted practice.  Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press    Exhibition Schedule:  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York(January 31–June 5, 2022)