Stephanie Seidel – författare

The first monograph on the powerful painting of Janiva Ellis, exploring abstraction, figuration, race and social accelerationPublished with Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.This volume introduces the work of American painter Janiva Ellis, who participated in the New Museum Triennial 2018 and the Whitney Biennial 2019. Featuring a suite of new paintings created over the past year, Rats is published on the occasion of the first solo museum exhibition for Ellis, whose paintings use formal themes of speed and transformation to explore fractured states of personal and cultural perception. Her works produce abundant imagery, invented as well as appropriated. She draws from a broad array of material, including art history and pop culture, to comment on the insidious nature of white supremacist mythology and its denial of itself as a brutal social and structural force. The humor in her work aims to create space for release as well as renewal. Ellis uses figuration to paint Blackness expansively, communicating the complexity of navigating such a lopsided and violent landscape.

Rarely seen installation works that exemplify this pioneering artist’s critical focus on Black identity and Black feminismPublished with Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.Showcasing a lesser-known aspect of Saar’s art, Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight provides new insights into her explorations of ritual, spirituality and cosmologies, as well as themes of the African diaspora. Featured here are significant installations created by Saar from 1980 to 1998, including Oasis (1984), a work that will be reconfigured at ICA Miami’s Saar exhibition for the first time in more than 30 years.With compelling scholarship and rich illustration—combining new installation photography and archival material—the monograph provides a fresh look at this significant artist’s critical and influential practice. Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight reinforces and celebrates Saar’s standing as a visionary artist, storyteller and mythmaker, and the ongoing significance and relevance of her work to the most pressing issues in America today.Betye Saar (born 1926) is renowned for pioneering Black feminism and West Coast assemblage in her visionary artistic practice, through dense, complexly referential objects. For over six decades, Saar’s work has led dialogues on race and gender, reflecting changing cultural and political contexts. Most recently, solo presentations have been hosted by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Saar’s work was prominently featured in We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, and in Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern, London, which traveled to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Brooklyn Museum; The Broad, Los Angeles; and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

A thematic introduction to the thriving Miami museum’s permanent collectionPublished with Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.Since its founding in 2014, ICA Miami has established itself as a singular voice in artistic stewardship with a collection that champions leading emerging and established artists. Fire Figure Fantasy revolves around important focal points of ICA Miami’s collection. Artists working in a wide range of mediums, including McArthur Binion, Lauren Halsey, Rashid Johnson and Martine Syms, draw on conceptualist strategies to critically explore structures that perpetuate injustice. In works by Andra Ursuta, Louise Bonnet, Christina Quarles and Avery Singer, themes of identity, community, and technology are drawn out through explorations of the body, materiality and form. Works by Vivian Caccuri, Tau Lewis, Vaughn Spann and Henry Taylor contend with some of the most pressing issues of our time, while works by Hernan Bas, Tomm El-Saieh and Jared McGriff, among others, reflect the artistic production of Miami artists that the museum has long championed.

A new narrative series of digital paintings set against the backdrop of New York City in 2001Published with Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.Reflecting the innovative tools employed in their production, the iconic paintings of New York–based Avery Singer (born 1987) are complex interpretations of contemporary social realities and technologies. The large-scale paintings portray worlds that emerge from digital renderings and take shape through manual and digital airbrush techniques, liquid and solid masking, and complex layering processes.Unity Bachelor presents a striking series of narrative paintings featuring a trio of digital characters. Singer sets the story of the main characters Unity Bachelor and Priya Prasad in New York in 2001, a coming-of-age period and place for the artist. Their fictionalized love story is marked by the collective trauma of September 11, 2001, when Priya goes missing, while a third figure, an inebriated art student, who has doubled as a self-portrait of sorts throughout Singer’s career, roams Lower Manhattan.

Early works, regional projects and acclaimed series from Allan McCollum, whose work often blurs boundaries between unique artifacts and mass productionPublished with Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.Since the late 1960s, the American artist Allan McCollum (born 1944) has created works that examine the art object’s relationship to uniqueness, context and value, as well as to the museum that collects, values and preserves it. Allan McCollum: Works since 1969, which accompanies a major survey of the artist's work, brings together new scholarship, documentary material and in-depth information on McCollum’s decades-long career, adding to the broader historical and theoretical interpretation of the artist’s important practice.McCollum’s celebrated works can be interpreted in infinite ways and have significant impact on the understanding of the role of art and material culture in society. Throughout his career the artist has explored various economies and contexts that structure collections and presentations of objects. Interested in how material artifacts become charged with meaning, McCollum understands these objects as vehicles of self-assurance and self-representation within communities.This book traces the artist’s career through numerous illustrations, supplementary material and texts, focusing on three key components—early work, “regional projects” and the artist’s most iconic series.