Natalie Bell – författare

The first comprehensive monograph in over a decade celebrating the work of pioneering video artist Steina, who is known for pushing perspective beyond the human-centered realm. Accompanying the related exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts Center and Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Steina: Playback brings renewed recognition to Steina (b. 1940, Iceland), tracing her oeuvre from early collaborative works with her partner Woody Vasulka to her independent explorations of optics and a liberated, non-anthropocentric subjectivity. It follows her practice from downtown New York to Buffalo to the vast landscapes of New Mexico and Iceland, which appear in her immersive video environments of the 1990s and 2000s. Venturing into nature and combining imaging technologies with reflective orbs, Steina reorientated the human body s relationship to nature and expanded how we access the natural world through media. Scholars including Gloria Sutton, Joey Heinen, and Ina Blom consider how Steina s generative sense of play gave way to methods of processing and computation; contextualize Steina alongside a group of her peers who shared an obsession with the electronic signal; and argue for her interest in video as a proto-virtual space. Steina has never felt more relevant. Steina, born Steinunn Briem Bjarnadottir, studied violin and music theory in Reykjavik before attending the State Music Conservatory in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In 1965, she emigrated to New York City. By the late 1960s, she began to focus entirely on video work, and in 1971, cofounded The Electronic Kitchen (later The Kitchen), an experimental electronic media space. Her work has been shown at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and many other places. A copublication with the MIT List Visual Arts Center and Buffalo AKG Art Museum.

In the segregated Deep South when lynching and Klansmen and Jim Crow laws ruled, there stood a line of foot soldiers ready to sacrifice their lives for the right to vote, to enter rooms marked "White Only," and to live with simple dignity. They were called Freedom Riders and Thomas M. Armstrong was one of them. This is his story as well as a look ahead at the work still to be done. June, 1961. Thomas M. Armstrong, determined to challenge segregated interstate bus travel in Mississippi, courageously walks into a Trailways bus station waiting room in Jackson.  He is promptly arrested for his part in a strategic plan to gain national attention.  The crime?  Daring to share breathing space marked "Whites Only."  Being of African-American descent in the Mississippi Deep South was literally a crime if you overstepped legal or even unspoken cultural bounds in 1961.  The consequences of defying entrenched societal codes could result in brutal beatings, displacement, even murder with no recourse for justice in a corrupt political machine, thick with the grease of racial bias.  The Freedom Rides were carefully orchestrated and included both black-and-white patriots devoted to the cause of de-segregation. Autobiography of a Freedom Rider details the strategies employed behind the scenes that resulted in a national spectacle of violence so stunning in Alabama and Mississippi that Robert Kennedy called in Federal marshals. Armstrong''s burning need to create social change for his fellow black citizens provides the backdrop of this richly woven memoir that traces back to his great-grandparents as freed slaves, examines the history of the Civil Rights Movement, the devastating personal repercussions Armstrong endured for being a champion of those rights, the sweet taste of progressive advancement in the past 50 years, and a look ahead at the work still to be done. Hundreds were arrested for their part in the Freedom Rides, Thomas M. Armstrong amongst them. But it is the authors'' quest to give homage to "the true heroes of the civil rights movement . . . the everyday black Southerners who confronted the laws of segregation under which they lived . . . the tens of thousands of us who took a chance with our lives when we decided that no longer would we accept the legacy of exclusion that had robbed our ancestors of hope and faith in a just society."

This first major monograph on Guatemalan multimedia artist Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa (born 1978) contextualizes his works in performance, sculpture, drawing and printmaking of the past ten years. Ramírez-Figueroa's installations often combine sculpture and aspects of avant-garde theater to allude to traumatic events that have shaped the political climate of present-day Guatemala. Ramírez-Figueroa expands on references to literature, folklore, magic and childhood memories. For this catalog, Catherine Wood, Senior Curator of Performance at Tate Modern, considers the artist's work through the lens of performance art, while Guatemalan Garifuna poet Wingston Gonzalez takes up its connections to the legacy of experimental theater in Latin America. Natalie Bell, Associate Curator at the New Museum, contributes an essay surveying selected bodies of work, and Kunsthalle Lissabon directors João Mourão and Luís Silva contribute an interview with the artist.

Accompanying her forthcoming New Museum solo exhibition, this book surveys the recent work of Turkish artist Asli Cavusoglu (born 1982), who works in media, including artists books, videos, photography and installations pursuing a commitment to exposing the untold histories and politics contained in objects, images and materials. Writer and curator Amy Zion contributes a monographic essay examining the prevailing concerns of Cavusoglu's practice, and artist Mariana Castillo-Deball reflects on shared interests in the social and political histories of pigment and the fields of archeology and science. Natalie Bell, Associate Curator at the New Museum, contributes an interview with the artist that explores her background and probes the philosophical and conceptual threads that run through her works.