Lauren Cornell – författare

The first comprehensive book on the expansive, kaleidoscopic work of Somali American artist UmanUman’s work across painting, drawing, textile, sculpture, and murals fuses abstraction, figuration, and meditative patterning. Known for her vivid color palettes, rich vocabulary of signs, and fluid, improvisational gestures, Uman incorporates various influences into her art, including East African textiles, portraiture, and a profound engagement with the natural world. This book, which accompanies the artist’s major survey exhibition at the Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, includes more than 200 works made over the last twenty years, along with four insightful essays that introduce new lenses through which to view Uman’s remarkable practice.

Fifty years of media critique from the leading exponent of feminist video artThroughout her five-decade career, New York–based artist Dara Birnbaum (born 1946) has relentlessly dissected the process of watching and has argued against the passive absorption of mass media, information and ideology, through various techniques—many of which can be described as subversive reactions or reversals. As media itself has evolved over the years, from the monolithic nature of TV broadcast networks to the Internet’s decentralization of information, Birnbaum’s work has remained consistently prescient and vital, incorporating new technologies and providing a touchstone for generations of younger artists.Including original scholarship by leading critics and curators of moving image and media art, this book examines Birnbaum's key works and concepts to illustrate how much her practice has to teach in a technology and media laden culture that demands constant participation and response.

Leaving fingerprints and tool marks behind, a São Paulo artist evokes the cycles of the cosmosThis volume takes an expansive view of the bold and influential practice of Brazilian artist Erika Verzutti (born 1971), surveying more than 60 pieces made over the past 15 years. In Verzutti’s art, moons recur as symbols of renewal and the multiple phases that a person or entity can pass through. Her work presents novel modes of perception by orbiting outside set systems of being—zooming out, in a telescopic sense, to the point where the relations we take so seriously here on Earth can be rethought. Vibrant illustrations of individual works and installation views of New Moons, the artist’s first US museum survey, highlight how her approaches to display and presentation reveal such relationships. Presenting original scholarship on the art historical and theoretical aspects of Verzutti’s practice as well as the artist’s own writing, this book offers insights on the inspiration and multifaceted ideas at play across her work.

Douglas' first US survey charts his global influence and innovation across 40 works and reimagines D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915)Published with Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.Since the 1980s, Canadian artist Stan Douglas (born 1960) has created films, installations, photographs and other multidisciplinary projects that address moments of rupture where "history could go one way or the other." Across formats, his images recall things that haunt: unresolved moments, political tumult and violent turning points; plots that retain a hold, however imperceptible, on the present. His work operates within the genres of cinema, photography and theater to present a point of view that is always staged. Douglas' rigorous explorations of these charged histories show us how to "think historically in the present" and frame contemporary crises in a longer timeline.

Multimedia artist with a unique voice Over the past two decades, Lisa Oppenheim has developed a critically acclaimed practice that is deeply rooted in the field of photography while also constantly exploring its margins. She often focuses on the unexplored potential of the medium's artistic, technological, and sociopolitical histories. Combining material experimentation with archival research, Oppenheim transforms— or, in her words, “reprocesses”—images and ideas both recent and historical by employing creative mechanisms ranging from a host of photographic processes to other media such as textiles, film and video, and, most recently, sculpture. Published in conjunction with her exhibition Monsieur Steichen at MUDAM Luxembourg, this richly illustrated catalogue surveys Oppenheim's works from the past dozen years, and includes new texts by Darsie Alexander, Christophe Gallois, Jacob Proctor, and Bettina Steinbrügge, as well as a conversation between Lisa Oppenheim and artist Liz Deschenes.