Valerie Cassel Oliver - Böcker

Cinema Remixed and Reloaded is a daring, bold, innovative look at black women artists and video art. This historical survey examines an intriguing and unbounded scope of work, including experimental film, projections, and installations. Creative projects by established artists who became interested in time-based media several decades ago, such as Camille Billops, Barbara McCullough, Howardena Pindell, and Adrian Piper, are presented alongside such midcareer artists as Berni Searle, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems, who continually garner international acclaim. Works by emerging artists, including Elizabeth Axtman, Debra Edgerton, Lauren Kelley, Jessica Ann Peavy, Pamela Sunstrum, and Lauren Woods, are also featured. While exploring personal experiences and dissecting popular visual culture, the artists in Cinema Remixed and Reloaded provide relevant views on several important topics--memory, loss, alienation, racial politics, gender inequities, empowerment, and the pursuit of power.

In the spring of 1865, a seemingly unremarkable dishcloth played a crucial role in ending the Civil War as the South's flag of surrender at Appomattox. A Confederate horseman carried a humble white linen towel into the lines of General George Custer, near the courthouse at Appomattox. The horseman was sent on behalf of General Robert E. Lee, who was requesting a suspension of hostilities while General Ulysses S. Grant proposed terms of surrender.Focusing on this Confederate Flag of Truce, Afro-Caribbean American artist (and professor at Amherst College) Sonya Clark (born 1967) explores the legacy of symbols and challenges the power of propaganda, erasures and omissions through her works. By making the Truce Flag a cloth that brokered peace and represented the promise of reconciliation into a monumental alternative to the infamous Confederate Battle Flag and its pervasive divisiveness, Clark instigates a role reversal and aims to correct a historical imbalance.

Dawoud Bey focuses on the landscape to create a portrait of the early African American presence in the United States.Renowned for his Harlem street scenes and expressive portraits, Dawoud Bey continues his ongoing series on African American history. Elegy brings together Bey’s three landscape series to date—Night Coming Tenderly, Black  (2017); In This Here Place  (2021); and Stony the Road (2023)—elucidating the deep historical memory still embedded in the geography of the United States. Bey takes viewers to the historic Richmond Slave Trail in Virginia, where Africans were marched onto auction blocks; to the plantations of Louisiana, where they labored; and along the last stages of the Underground Railroad in Ohio, where fugitives sought self-emancipation. Essays by the exhibition’s curator, Valerie Cassel Oliver, and scholars LeRonn P. Brooks, Imani Perry, and Christina Sharpe illuminate the work. By interweaving these bodies of work into an elegy in three movements, Bey doesn’t merely evoke history, he retells it through historically grounded images that challenge viewers to go beyond seeing and imagine lived experiences. Copublished by Aperture and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond

Performing and visual artist Ben Patterson (born 1934) was a founding member of Fluxus' participatory, do-it-yourself, anticommercialist avant-garde network. While many Fluxus artists, influenced by John Cage's precedent, employed conceptual techniques borrowed from music (e.g., the event score), Patterson's fusion of art and music was informed by his background as a classically trained double-bassist. His "Variations for Double Bass" (1960), for example, was played with the titular instrument balanced upside down on its scroll. Published for a retrospective at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, this volume includes an anthology of Patterson's scores, edited by Fluxus scholar Jon Hendricks; a chronology of the artist's life and work; a CD compilation of his musical performances from 1961 to 2009, produced by Alga Marghen; and essays by a variety of scholars, assessing the career of one of Fluxus' foremost and wittiest artists.

Published on the occasion of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston’s 65th anniversary, Outside the Lines documents the conceptual framework of the institution’s ability to act and think outside the norm. This publication, originally conceived as an ongoing curatorial dialogue, features six exhibitions on abstract painting, focusing on the legacies and contemporary manifestations of the genre. With text and analysis by museum director Bill Arning, curator Dean Daderko and senior curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, Outside the Lines details, in three sections, Arning’s UIA (Unlikely Iterations of the Abstract) and Painting: A Love Story; Daderko’s Outside the Lines and Rites of Spring; as well as Cassel Oliver’s Black in the Abstract: Epistrophy and Black in the Abstract: Hard Edges/Soft Curves. Each section includes texts and images for the exhibitions featured, as well as information on over 90 artists whose works are highlighted.