Nora Burnett Abrams – författare

Tara Donovan's sculptures and installations are mind-bending experiences: she transforms common everyday materials like straws and index cards turning them into elaborate, room-size sculptures that are as surreal as they are beautifulMacArthur "genius" grant recipient Tara Donovan's otherworldly sculptures have transfixed audiences for over a decade. Taking mundane materials and through clever craftsmanship, ingenuity, and repeated manipulation, the artist builds large-scale works made of rubber bands, plastic tubing, and paper plates into objects that evoke the natural world or other organic material. This volume--which accompanies a major exhibition at MCA Denver--features an expansive selection of her most significant works to date, including sculpture, drawings, works on paper, and site-responsive installations. This exhibition will be the first time that Donovan's wall-based and freestanding objects will be installed together, in order to understand fully how the artist conceptualizes her complex work. Curator Nora Burnett Abrams, along with two other leading scholars of contemporary art Jenni Sorkin and Guiliana Bruno, consider critical issues around her work: ideas related to labor, scale, process and formalism, among other key themes. The book looks at several major bodies of work realized in different formats and different settings, affording the reader a glimpse into the important themes and visual languages the artist continuously explores.

The Cowboy, Reconsidered: the enduring myth of the cowboy is a richer, more diverse story than most understand. In this survey, some of the most important artists working today take up the cowboy through the lens of queer, Black, Asian, and Latinx perspectives.Perhaps no other figure in the American popular imagination conjures the respect, mystery, and adoration than that of the cowboy. And it’s long been a favorite subject of artists from the early twentieth century to today. In this unique exhibition and accompanying catalogue, the cowboy is explored in depth from diverse perspectives and lived experience, ushering in a new vision for this long-standing pop icon.Director and co-curator Nora Burnett Abrams considers the cowboy through historical perspectives, breaking down the myth and mystique. In an extended interview, co-curator Miranda Lash talks with queer Latinx artist rafa esparza who considers the vaquero (the Spanish term for cowboy) and the influence of norteño culture in his work. Jongwoo Jeremy Kim provides an in-depth analysis of artist Kenneth Tam’s practice and deeper discussion of Asian American masculinity, sexuality, and how they are represented. Myeshia Babers shares the history of the Black rodeo cowboy, and how this figure performs and functions today, and artist R. Alan Brooks conjures the history of Dearfield, Colorado, one of the earliest Black homesteading communities in the state, through a dream-like short graphic novel. Artist List: John Baldessari, R. Alan Brooks, Mel Chin, Gregg Deal, Angela Ellsworth, rafa esparza, Fabian Guerrero, Juan Fuentes, Karl Haendel, Luis Jiménez, Kahlil Joseph, Grace Kennison, Deana Lawson, Matthew J. Mahoney, Laurel Nakadate, Richard Prince, Otis Kwame Quaicoe, Akasha Rabut, Lucy Raven, Ken Taylor Reynaga, Yumi Roth in collaboration with Emmanuel David, Ana Segovia, Amy Sherald, Stephanie Syjuco, Kenneth Tam, Andy Warhol, and Nathan Young

A comprehensive look at the celebrated work of contemporary artist Horn, whose innovative exploration of water as a medium and metaphor has established her as a vital voice in the discourse on identity, perception, and the environment.This book is a captivating exploration of Horn’s decades-long fascination with water, both as a material and a metaphor. Known for her provocative approach to perception, identity, and the mutability of form, Horn uses water to mirror human experience and emotion. Born in 1955 in New York, Horn has spent decades pushing the boundaries of art to explore the complexities of identity, perception, and nature.  Horn’s body of work spans photography, cast glass, and installation, consistently returning to the theme of fluidity. Her iconic series You Are the Weather—100 photographs of Icelandic artist Margrét Haraldsdóttir Blöndal submerged in water—reveals how water can both obscure and define identity. Similarly, her “liquid” glass sculptures play with the tension between solidity and fluidity, their colors ranging from turquoise to black. In an era marked by climate change and water scarcity, Horn’s works pose urgent questions about water as a shared resource and a symbol of impermanence and survival.  This volume not only offers a retrospective of her water-centered works but also connects them to broader global challenges with critical and poetic texts by Nora Burnett Abrams, Jarrett Earnest, Anne Carson, and the artist herself.

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, exploded into the art space last year, no doubt because Beeple (a digital artist) sold his NFT at Christie’s auction house for a staggering $69 million. Yet the story of NFTs is much more interesting, significant, and subtle than that sale. This book explains NFTs in the art world—and the ways they might not only democratize the arts but enliven our larger democracy.Since the NFT phenomenon took over the art world, useful information that isn’t too reductive is in short supply. Artists, collectors, arts professionals, art lovers, and museumgoers are still trying to understand what NFTs are, how to benefit from or engage with them, and what they mean for the art world in the future. This book is precisely for this audience.The authors take the reader through the basic concepts of NFTs and the underlying technology of blockchain, including their origins, their surprising connections to the history of artmaking and art collecting, and their potential to radically reshape the art world. The book invites the reader to engage with this new technology, to understand its connections to the longer arc of art history, and to help shape its future.The volume is structured around four key chapters: Origin Stories (where NFTs come from), Artists + Making (how artists are currently engaging with the technology and minting NFTs logistically and conceptually), Collectors + Buying (what does it mean to collect an NFT and other advice for current and soon-to-be collectors), and Future States (how NFTs will upend and democratize the arts). In addition to the authors’ extensive knowledge, the book draws on a wide range of interviews with leading contributors to the NFT story.The Story of NFTs is an inventive, elegant, and not insufferable book on a topic that matters more than most people think, in ways that are surprising and at odds with the one-dimensional cryptocurrency story. The many intersecting stories of NFTs in this book—knowledge stories, artist stories, democracy stories—center how we know what is true in an age of digital records and how we build collaborative and equitable structures for the future.