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The Smith & Wisznia collection’s singular focus: artists living, working and exhibiting in Louisiana post Hurricane Katrina. Louisiana during this period of renewal, rebirth, and rebuilding experienced an art renaissance. The Smith & Wisznia Collection features artists of color, women, LGBTQ and artists of diverse religious backgrounds. The Art World's current trend has shifted to visual artists who have been marginalized and or discriminated against who are now being exhibited in galleries and museums Worldwide to a welcoming and exuberant audience. The Smith & Wisznia Collection is a window into a collector's and curator's vision, focus and commitment and their collective's contributions to the landscape of Contemporary Art and Society. 

Published on the occasion of a major retrospective exhibition at MCA Denver, Clark Richert in Hyperspace celebrates the singular work of Denver-based abstract painter Clark Richert (born 1941). The book, like the exhibition, chronicles the distinct phases of Richert’s nearly 50-year career, tracing out the metaphysical thread that connects them and continues to drive Richert’s practice. That thread—the exploration and visualization of n-dimensionality, or hyperspace—not only elucidates Richert’s often enigmatic paintings but also links his oeuvre to the work of early 20th-century avant-gardists whose engagement with hyperspace philosophy was a pivotal modernist project (Braque, Duchamp, Ernst, Malevich, Mondrian, Van Doesburg and, later, Buckminster Fuller). For Richert the visual manifestation of dimensions beyond the three with which we are familiar is not solely a geometrical or philosophical problem, but the pursuit of an idealistic, even utopic, reality. For Richert, art is the tool by which this project can be realized.

A two-volume publication on the mysterious object that inspired poetry, art and unlikely artistic collaborations

For nearly five decades a peculiar wooden object called the “Slant Step” was exchanged between artists from coast to coast, developing a cultlike following and inspiring poetry, art and unlikely collaborations. Artist William T. Wiley first came upon the original object at a salvage store in Northern California in 1965. Covered in worn green linoleum, it looked like a footstool; however, its sharp slanted riser mystified Wiley and Bruce Nauman, his student at the University of California, Davis. Wiley purchased the found object and gifted it to Nauman, who maintained possession over it until Richard Serra absconded with it from San Francisco to New York. In 1969, Sacramento artist Phil Weidman surveyed the first years of the “Slant Step” in an artist’s book that featured contributions by Nauman, Wiley, William Allan, Richard C., Jack Edwards, Jack Fulton, Ray Johnson, Steve Jongeward, Stephen Kaltenbach, Robert Leach, Jack Ogden, Frank Owen, Ron Peetz, Lawrence Dean Phillips, Peter Saul, Dorothy Wiley and William Witherup.On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, Weidman’s influential Slant Step Book is again available in a two-volume set. This long-overdue republication features a facsimile of the 1969 artist’s book and a companion catalog with new essays and visual responses by contemporary writers and artists such as Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Dan Nadel, Jacob Stewart-Halevy, Terry Berlier, Gordon Hall, Corin Hewitt, Aay Preston-Myint, Jessi Reaves, Mungo Thomson and Angela Willetts.

Gorgeous abstractions on roasting pans and takeout containers from a beloved figure of the New York art world

For nearly five decades New York-based artist B. Wurtz (born 1948) has transformed humble materials and discarded objects into humorous and wryly beautiful works of art. This full-color, Swiss-bound monograph focuses on the artist’s iconic series of “pan paintings” made on disposable aluminum roasting pans and to-go containers. In 1990, Wurtz discovered patterns stamped in the bottom of these mass-produced products and grasped their potential as “readymade abstract paintings.” In the three decades since, he has worked across a wide variety of pan shapes and sizes, applying dazzling combinations of color using the patterns as predetermined compositions. Pan Paintings provides the first overview of the various permutations in color and shape that comprise this long-term series. The book includes an essay by art historian and curator Erica Cooke which considers this critically acclaimed body of work and its deep entanglement with the craft-oriented ethos and amateur culture of postwar America.

The first comprehensive monograph on a lost veteran of American conceptualism

A pioneering figure in the history of conceptual art, Sacramento-based artist and author Stephen Kaltenbach (born 1940) is long overdue for scholarly treatment; in the past decade and a half there has been a resurgence of interest in his work, but this is the first major publication dedicated to him and his unique contribution to art post-1960.Alongside reproductions of works, essays by the principle authors, exhibition co-curators Constance Lewallen and Ted Mann, explore, respectively, Kaltenbach’s dialectic of concealment and exposure, and his enduring interest in the nature of artistic influence and authorship. Contributing essays by Gwen Allen, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer and Lawrence Rinder focus on more specific works or bodies of work: Kaltenbach’s seminal Artforum Ads of 1968-69; his series of Life-Dramas; and his monumental painting Portrait of My Father (1972-79). The book also includes an exhibition history and bibliography.

The idea of America, and the American identity, has been central to this country’s cultural conversation and debate since its inception. America — past, present, and future — is an ongoing experiment in free will and liberty for all who reach its welcoming shores, plow its fertile soil, and raise their children to achieve that great promise of the American Dream. In The American Experiment, photographer Brandon Ralph presents an exploration of the patriotic symbols, the vast and varied landscape, and the tapestry of humanity that poses the question anew: What makes an American?

The result is a finely wrought collection of moments and Americans captured in time, separated by decades and by state lines, by events of national significance and by the invisible routines of day-to-day life. In Ralph’s starkly beautiful and unwaveringly sensitive images, there is a sense of timelessness that speaks to our collective nostalgia, our unflagging optimism, and our unending pursuit of freedom for all people.

No issue in America in the 1960s was more vital than civil rights, and no two public figures were more crucial in the drama of race relations in this era than Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

Fifty years after they were both murdered, noted journalist David Margolick explores the untold story of the complex and ever-evolving relationship between these two American icons. Assassinated only sixty-two days apart in 1968, King and Kennedy changed the United States forever, and their deaths profoundly altered the country’s trajectory.

In The Promise and the Dream, Margolick examines their unique bond and the complicated mix of mutual assistance, impatience, wariness, awkwardness, antagonism, and admiration that existed between the two, documented with original interviews, oral histories, FBI files, and previously untapped contemporaneous accounts.

At a turning point in social history, MLK and RFK embarked on distinct but converging paths toward lasting change. Even when they weren’t interacting directly, they monitored and learned from, one another. Their joint story, a story each man took some pains to hide and which began to come into focus only with their murders, is not just gripping history but a window into contemporary America and the challenges we continue to face.

Complemented by award-winning historian Douglas Brinkley’s foreword and more than eighty revealing photos by the foremost photojournalists of the period, The Promise and the Dream offers a compelling look at one of the most consequential but misunderstood relationships in our nation’s history.