Lauren O'Neill-Butler – författare

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.

A gorgeously produced monograph on Aram’s exquisite conflations of abstraction and decorationThis volume brings together a group of new paintings, collages and sculptural works by Iranian-born, Brooklyn-based artist Kamrooz Aram (born 1978) that continue his exploration of the relationship between painting and ornament and his renegotiation of hierarchies that place the so-called decorative arts beneath the fine arts. Working primarily as a painter, over the past decade Aram has expanded his practice to include sculpture and collage, and he has employed wall painting as a form of exhibition design to unify these mediums in his exhibitions.Aram moved with his family to the US seven years after the Iranian Revolution and entered graduate school in 2001, where mentors such as Coco Fusco and Charline von Heyl imparted to Aram a politically minded and resilient work ethic. He has never lost touch with those paradigms, and his art engages critically with terms such as Western and non-Western.

Artists in America have long battled against injustices, believing that art can in fact "do more." The War of Art tells this history of artist-led activism and the global political and aesthetic debates of the 1960s to the present. In contrast to the financialized art market and celebrity artists, the book explores the power of collective effort - from protesting to philanthropy, and from wheat pasting to planting a field of wheat. Lauren O'Neill-Butler charts the post-war development of artists' protest and connects these struggles to a long tradition of feminism and civil rights activism. The book offers portraits of the key individuals and groups of artists who have campaigned for solidarity, housing, LGBTQ+, HIV/AIDS awareness, and against Indigenous injustice and the exclusion of women in the art world. This includes: the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), David Wojnarowicz's work with ACT UP, Top Value Television (TVTV), Agnes Denes, Edgar Heap of Birds, Dyke Action Machine! (DAM!), fierce pussy, Project Row Houses, and Nan Goldin's Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (PAIN). Based upon in-depth oral histories with the key figures in these movements, and illustrated throughout, The War of Art is an essential corrective to the idea that art history excludes politics.

Artists in America have long battled against injustices, believing that art can in fact "do more." The War of Art tells this history of artist-led activism and the global political and aesthetic debates of the 1960s to the present. In contrast to the financialized art market and celebrity artists, the book explores the power of collective effort - from protesting to philanthropy, and from wheat pasting to planting a field of wheat. Lauren O''Neill-Butler charts the post-war development of artists'' protest and connects these struggles to a long tradition of feminism and civil rights activism. The book offers portraits of the key individuals and groups of artists who have campaigned for solidarity, housing, LGBTQ+, HIV/AIDS awareness, and against Indigenous injustice and the exclusion of women in the art world. This includes: the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), David Wojnarowicz''s work with ACT UP, Top Value Television (TVTV), Agnes Denes, Edgar Heap of Birds, Dyke Action Machine! (DAM!), fierce pussy, Project Row Houses, and Nan Goldin''s Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (PAIN). Based upon in-depth oral histories with the key figures in these movements, and illustrated throughout, The War of Art is an essential corrective to the idea that art history excludes politics.