Dancing Foxes Press – förlag

Documentation and testimony from Da Corte's 2020 reinvention of a classic 1960s happeningIn early March 2020, on the cusp of the COVID-19 shutdown, an audience gathered to witness a reinvention of Allan Kaprow’s happening, Chicken, by Philadelphia-based artist Alex Da Corte (born 1980). Performed at the site of Kaprow’s original—the Gershman Y at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia—Da Corte’s first live performance reimagined Kaprow’s chaotic event, which had been orchestrated in 1962 under the auspices of the first Pop art exhibition on the East Coast. While the focus of activity for the performers of Kaprow’s Chicken involved the hawking of live and boiled chickens and their eggs, Da Corte’s performers frantically peddled exquisite yellow orbs made from a variety of materials that represented the moon.Including sketches and reproductions of the objects and costumes constructed for Da Corte’s revision, as well as performance images, scripts, essays and personal accounts reflecting on the event’s impact and significance over the ensuing year, this publication becomes a living document of a moment in time.

The most substantive monograph yet published on the work of German-born, New York based multimedia artist Andrea Geyer (born 1971), Dance in a Future with All Present focuses on her recent explorations of the marginalized yet pivotal role that women have played in the formulation of American modernism, tracing and honoring the ephemeral acts, initiatives and stories that shaped it. Featuring full-color images of Geyer's artworks and research materials, including documents, found photographs and previously unpublished photographs by the artist, Dance in a Future with All Present offers insight into Geyer's art and the multiple histories of modernism. Contributors to this volume include Thomas J. Lax, Andre Lepecki, Soyoung Yoon, Andrianna Campbell, Alhena Katsof, Matthew Jeffrey, Juli Carson, Lynne Cooke, Barbara Clausen, Dean Daderko, Saisha Grayson, Sharon Hayes, Megan Heuer, Danielle Jackson, Kristan Kennedy, Ralph Lemon, Renate Lorenz, Josiah McElheny, Fred Moten, Kristin Poor, Yvonne Rainer, Gabriela Rangel and Jeannine Tang.

Ranging from figurative representation to gestural abstraction, monumental landscape paintings to more intimate portraits, the oeuvre of American painter Leidy Churchman (born 1979) channels his artistic and literary influences, friendships, moods, surrounding landscapes and the visual iconography of divergent religions and philosophies.Crocodile highlights the artist's investigations into consciousness in his renderings of anthropomorphic animals and psychological states; his appropriation of existing artworks and aesthetics; and his recasting of various signs and symbols, from his depiction of the Buddhist symbol of the protector deity in Mahakala (2017) to the Mastercard logo in Mastercard (2013).Churchman, who divides his time between New York and Maine, emerges here as a dynamic protagonist of contemporary American painting. In addition to collecting 90 reproductions of works, the book features artwork made especially for it, plus texts by Ruba Katrib, Alex Kitnik and Arnisa Zeqo, in addition to a conversation between Churchman and Lauren Cornell.

Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist Jeanine Oleson (born 1974) created a 2017 exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, presenting her ongoing sharply absurdist response to research on the ways copper is produced and used in 21st-century capitalism.Through a video installation, objects and a performance including a copper-based instrument that reacted to human touch and a handwoven rug based on perspectives visible in three-dimensional modeling the exhibition focused on the confused entwinement of the human into contemporary material, as well as the relation with representation and art when these activities are now, more often than not, mediated through the digital for which copper is an essential material component. With humor, pathos and intellectual rigor, Oleson explores issues of labor, the environment, craft and performance.Conduct Matters features an introduction by Connie Butler, chief curator at the Hammer Museum, and texts by cultural historian Jaleh Mansoor and legal scholar K-Sue Park, along with the full script of Oleson's video.

Technological evolution and obsolescence on Earth and in outer space, in a new project by artist Julia ChristensenThis volume documents an ongoing investigation by artist Julia Christensen (born 1976) into how our relentless "upgrade culture"—the perceived notion that we need to constantly upgrade our electronics to remain relevant—fundamentally impacts our experience of time. In a personal narrative interspersed with related interdisciplinary artwork and conversations with experts from different fields (other artists, archivists, academics), Christensen takes readers along a path from the international "e-waste" industry to institutional archives, eventually leading her to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).At JPL, Christensen began a dialog with a group of exo-planetary scientists, engineers and machine learning experts to develop long-lived space mission concepts that include an update of the Voyager spacecrafts’ 1977 "Golden Record," to be embedded on a hypothetical future interstellar spacecraft. She and the scientists are designing an artwork generated by an extraterrestrial system that tells a distinctly new story of life on Earth. In taking on this challenge, Christensen—a female pioneer redefining the intersection of art, technology, and outer space—must envision an artwork for an evolving, autonomously-upgrading spaceship headed toward a potentially habitable planet in another star system. Her years-long investigation into upgrade culture leads to design concepts that potentially transcend technological obsolescence altogether.

Colorful explosions of “bad objects”: the eccentric constructions of two American artists generations apartThis volume brings together the paintings and drawings of Elizabeth Murray (1940–2007) and the work of New York–based sculptor Jessi Reaves (born 1986). Despite the generations that separate Murray and Reaves, this publication highlights each artist’s lyrical, playful and rigorous engagements with the decorative, domestic and bodily.Published to accompany an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Wild Life explores Murray and Reaves’ often ambiguous conceptions of the body and the home, wherein both body and home are continuously coming together and falling apart.This book features a newly commissioned conversation between Reaves and Johanna Fateman as well as a reprint of a historical interview between Murray and Kate Horsfield, which together chart the two artists’ irreverent plays with color and form, high and low cultural references, and notions of masculinity and femininity.

Previously uncollected dance writings from the legendary art critic who defined the Pictures Generation, in a handsome clothbound editionPioneering AIDS activist, art critic, educator and curator Douglas Crimp is known for the fluidity and acuity of his writing on an array of passions. His book AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (1987) deconstructed the art world's complicated and mostly disheartening responses to the AIDS crisis; On the Museum's Ruins (1993) explored postmodernist art practices in relation to the politics of institutions; and Before Pictures (2016), a brilliant combination of memoir and criticism, chronicled Crimp's first decade in 1970s New York. This new book collects the critic's incisive pieces on dance (a lifelong interest) and dance on film, which, according to Artforum, "galvanized the field and synthesized histories of ballet, modern dance and postmodern performance." Written from 2006 to 2010, these in-depth essays are devoted to choreographers and filmmakers such as Charles Atlas, Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, Tacita Dean, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Yvonne Rainer. Before his death in July 2019, Crimp penned a new essay specifically for this book that probes the idea and definition of the "dance film." This beautifully designed clothbound volume, which shows Crimp as an outstanding and ever-evolving writer, includes an introduction by curator Lynne Cooke, who co-curated Crimp's landmark 2010 show at the Museo Reina Sofia, Mixed Use, Manhattan. Douglas Crimp (1944-2019) is famed for his scholarly contributions to the fields of postmodern theory and art, institutional critique, dance, film, queer theory and feminist theory. His writings are marked by his desire to merge the often disjunctive worlds of politics, art and academia. From 1977 to 1990, he was the managing editor of the journal October. Before his death, Crimp was Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History and Professor of Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York.

A long-overdue appreciation of the influential sculpture of Liz Larner and its radically adventurous formal and conceptual vocabularyLos Angeles–based sculptor and installation artist Liz Larner (born 1960) was originally a photographer: in some of her earliest projects, she documented the volatility of bacterial cultures in petri dishes. However, she soon realized that she was more compelled by the dishes themselves and how they presented questions about what an art object can entail. Since then, she has continued to pursue her interest in formal unpredictability through a focus on sculpture and architectural space. Composed of a diverse variety of materials, her sculptures frequently function as optical illusions that seem to bend the space around them. Sometimes rigidly technical in their geometry and at other times soft-edged and amorphous, Larner’s sculptures are striking both for their fluctuation of form and for their representation of spatial politics.Repositioning her enduring formal and material concerns alongside her relationship to a feminist sculptural position, this monograph offers an opportunity to consider Larner’s artistic project within today’s expanded discourses of embodiment, gender and posthumanism, and to recalibrate our understanding of it in relation to male-dominated Postminimalism and installation art, which have often underpinned Larner’s critical reception. Poet Ariana Reines, cultural critic and theorist Catherine Liu, and curators Connie Butler and Mary Ceruti consider the physical properties and sociopolitical implications of the materials present in Larner’s work, which range from ceramic to steel chain to surgical gauze to human hair.

How Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s nomadic life traversing cultures and continents has informed her explorations of identityThis first comprehensive monograph on the work of China-born, Netherlands-based artist Evelyn Taocheng Wang (born 1981) unfolds along the path of her biography—beginning with her early studies in Chengdu, China, her arrival in 2008 in Berlin and Bleckede, Germany, from China, followed by a move to Frankfurt am Main to attend the Städel Academy as a guest student; time in Amsterdam at De Ateliers, Rotterdam; and, most recently, stays in Germany.Wang’s multimedia art—from painting to video—synthesizes themes of class, gender, fashion, cultural identity, art history and popular culture. The publication traces how the artist’s personal life experiences and encounters during these various stages interweave with her artistic research and practice. Richly illustrated, the book offers a comprehensive presentation of her drawings, paintings, collages, photography, video, narrative writing, installation, sewing and performance, set in dialogue with diverse text contributions by artist friends and colleagues. Essays by a range of writers expand on aspects of Wang’s work, including its narrative strategies, Western and East Asian art historical references, and its focus on cultural identity, political imagery and performance.

Drawing on avant-garde cinema and found photographs, Saunders’ multimedia works explore the mobility and affective power of imagesThis publication encompasses eight years of work by Cambridge, MA- and Berlin-based artist Matt Saunders (born 1975), who engages painting as a time-based medium through cameraless photography, animation, and innovative painting and printmaking processes. Best known for his haunting portraits and landscapes (using imagery culled from avant-garde cinema and found photographs) and moving-image works, Saunders uses analog materials to explore the affective power of images.Focusing on his experimentation with color processes, the stunning reproductions in this volume range from his first color film, Century Rolls (2012), to his more recent large-scale video installations. Moving image folds together with painting, photography and print, enlivening our relationship to images and their capacity for uncanny returns, echoes and ghosts.

A long-form collaborative exploration of images and their enduring traces on the American landscapeIn 2012, Leslie Hewitt (born 1977) and Bradford Young (born 1977) produced Untitled (Structures), a series of silent, nonlinear film vignettes that grew out of an invitation from the Menil Collection, Houston, to consider the museum’s civil rights–era photograph collection. The invitation, which inspired years of research into the aftereffects of the Great Migration, the civil rights movement and the ongoing struggle for human rights, prompted Hewitt and Young to shoot new work in Chicago, Memphis and Arkansas in an array of important sites, found and not found in the museum’s photographs. Exposing the tensions between still photography and moving images, Hewitt and Young’s project interrogates the ways in which history is embedded in contemporary topographic, corporeal and psychological landscapes. Taking the film as its point of departure, this publication furthers the artists’ inquiries into the project’s poetic and political themes, including psychogeography, anti-monumentalism and the intersections of image, memory and architecture.

Fifty years of media critique from the leading exponent of feminist video artThroughout her five-decade career, New York–based artist Dara Birnbaum (born 1946) has relentlessly dissected the process of watching and has argued against the passive absorption of mass media, information and ideology, through various techniques—many of which can be described as subversive reactions or reversals. As media itself has evolved over the years, from the monolithic nature of TV broadcast networks to the Internet’s decentralization of information, Birnbaum’s work has remained consistently prescient and vital, incorporating new technologies and providing a touchstone for generations of younger artists.Including original scholarship by leading critics and curators of moving image and media art, this book examines Birnbaum's key works and concepts to illustrate how much her practice has to teach in a technology and media laden culture that demands constant participation and response.

Higa’s critical work on Asian American art history and the art of Japanese Americans imprisoned in World War II US internment camps provides a compelling view into the historical realities of racially marked identity and art-makingEdited by artist, curator, writer and editor Julie Ault, Hidden in Plain Sight brings together essential writings by the trailblazing art historian and curator Karin Higa (1966–2013). The selected essays, written between 1992 and 2011, focus on the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans in Western US states to specially constructed concentration camps, the artistic production and communities that took root within them and the individual and collective narratives of Asian American artists amid discriminatory policies, restricted political agency and racism. While exploring issues of identity and immigration, Higa recuperates significant artists and oeuvres from historical neglect and engages contemporary artists to examine how art acts as a source for and transmitter of cultural identity.This book reveals how Higa’s conviction that art and lived experience are indissolubly linked was at the root of her methodological modeling of an Asian American art history. Moving between portrayals of artists’ networks in the camps and Little Tokyo communities and case studies of oeuvres and biographies, Higa recovers vital art practices and hidden histories of creative struggle and efflorescence. In the process, she maps—across ethnic, geographic, and stylistic boundaries—the fertile creative milieux of individual practices and communities. Higa shows how artists of Asian descent have negotiated the divide between the United States and their ancestral homes by using their freedom as artists to define their culture more broadly.

An exploration of the nature of visibility through a series of camera obscuras paired with silver gelatin prints of the sunIn the two related bodies of work that form this volume’s centerpiece, New York–based photographer Zoe Leonard (born 1961) poses fundamental questions about the medium of photography and the nature of sight. In a series of large-scale installations, the artist employed the principle of the camera obscura, pairing it with gelatin silver photographs of the sun. The image in Leonard’s room-size camera obscuras is immersive and continuous, shifting constantly in response to the fleeting light of the outside world and unraveling in the surrounding space to come into its full vibrancy.Leonard’s camera obscuras have been sited in cities in Europe and the United States, from Venice and London to New York and Marfa. This title explores this body of work through photographs that document these installations in five international cities.

Poetics as artistic practice and world-making: practitioners from Bernadette Mayer and Sky Hopinka to Liliane Lijn and Shanzhai Lyric explore the wilder, parapoetic shores of languageThrough work by artists and poets of various generations and geographies, as well as additional thinkers and artistic contributors, SIREN considers the ways in which language is increasingly employed by artists in works that trouble the line between language as a literary practice and language as a visual one. Both human and nonhuman forms of language-making and poetics are insisted upon, from precolonial myth to scientific speculation, fungal networks to gut bacteria, text to textile, poem to algorithm.Contributors include: Ruth Estévez, Hana Noorali and Lynton Talbot, Don Mee Choi, Anaïs Duplan, Katja Aufleger, Patricia L. Boyd, Bia Davou, Sky Hopinka, Liliane Lijn, Bernadette Mayer, Rosemary Mayer, Nour Mobarak, Senga Nengudi, Rivane Neuenschwander, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Aura Satz, Ser Serpas, Shanzhai Lyric, Jenna Sutela, Iris Touliatou, Christa Wolf and Dena Yago.

Chronicling an epic multimedia project 10 years in the making, A.K. Burns’ first monograph grapples with climate change, community and sociopolitical agencyDeploying science fiction, material feminism, eco-anarchism, queer theory and technoscience, New York–based artist A.K. Burns (born 1975) explores the fraught relationships between humanity and nature in an epic multimedia work, Negative Space (2015–23). This nonlinear allegory provokes questions about marginalized bodies, environmental fragility and technology. Developed as a cycle of four video installations, Negative Space imagines new relationships to the spaces we occupy and the impact of our bodies in these spaces through imagery, research and critical and creative writings. Set in a speculative present, the tetralogy envisions a new materialist cosmology wherein hierarchical relations are transformed.

A critical reappraisal of a classic collection’s modernist legacy for women artistsTaking as its point of departure the art collection at Kykuit—the former home of the Rockefeller family, now a museum—Inspired Encounters asks: if exclusively women-identifying artists remained in this legendary modernist collection, what would be revealed? Essentially the product of three people whose lives intertwined around MoMA—Alfred H. Barr Jr., Dorothy Canning Miller and Nelson A. Rockefeller—Kykuit's holdings include work by Anni Albers, Mary Bauermeister, Lee Bontecou, Mary Callery, Valerie Clarebout, Dorothy Dehner, Grace Hartigan, Louise Kruger, Marisol, Louise Nevelson and Lenore Tawney. The book augments this group with works by Louise Bourgeois, Elizabeth Catlett, Lin Emery and Fanny Sanín to expand the possibilities of a “closed” collection. Commissioned works by Sonya Clark, Maren Hassinger, Elana Herzog, Melissa Meyer, Barbara Takenaga and Kay WalkingStick reflect on the collection.

Leaving fingerprints and tool marks behind, a São Paulo artist evokes the cycles of the cosmosThis volume takes an expansive view of the bold and influential practice of Brazilian artist Erika Verzutti (born 1971), surveying more than 60 pieces made over the past 15 years. In Verzutti’s art, moons recur as symbols of renewal and the multiple phases that a person or entity can pass through. Her work presents novel modes of perception by orbiting outside set systems of being—zooming out, in a telescopic sense, to the point where the relations we take so seriously here on Earth can be rethought. Vibrant illustrations of individual works and installation views of New Moons, the artist’s first US museum survey, highlight how her approaches to display and presentation reveal such relationships. Presenting original scholarship on the art historical and theoretical aspects of Verzutti’s practice as well as the artist’s own writing, this book offers insights on the inspiration and multifaceted ideas at play across her work.

Exploring the decades-long working relationship between Fred Sandback and Dia Art Foundation, which served as a venue for his “situational” sculptureIn 1968, sculptor Fred Sandback (1943–2003) mounted his first solo exhibition at Heiner Friedrich’s Munich gallery, displaying works made from elastic cord or acrylic yarn that traced planes and volumes in space. Thus began a long-term relationship that extended to Dia Art Foundation, the institution cofounded by Friedrich in 1974. Until now, there has been little published on Sandback’s extraordinary alliance with Dia. Essayists Julian M. Rose, Corinna Thierolf and Edward A. Vazquez, as well as conversation partners Matilde Guidelli-Guidi and Curtis Harvey, unearth and explore archival documents, sketches and photographs to reveal how the institution offered Sandback both space and time to meticulously hone his sculptural interventions in the architectural environments of Dia, including the Fred Sandback Museum in Winchendon, Massachusetts, and Dia Beacon, New York.

Untangling the conceptual threads that unite a distinguished artist’s two- and three-dimensional artworksPublished with The Westmoreland Museum of American Art.Spanning two decades of the multifaceted work of Pakistani American visual artist Anila Quayyum Agha (born 1965), Interwoven documents immersive installations, embroidery, drawings, paintings and wall sculptures. Such visual gateways, the "patterns used to break patterns," as the New York Times put it in a recent profile on the artist, poetically convey the contradictions and layered dimensions of the American journey. Whether immersive rooms of light or delicate, intimate drawings, Agha’s works prompt feelings of wonder, disarming audiences with their beauty and allowing them to ponder deep questions regarding themes such as the history of women, the role of spirituality and the immigrant experience. The book includes essays that explore Agha’s work through the lenses of biography, feminism and art and architectural history.

Himid invites readers into her process through an intimate view of two new bodies of work that engage themes of power and memoryPublished with The Contemporary Austin and The FLAG Art Foundation, New York.Best known for her paintings that excavate the legacy of colonialism and expand the possibilities of Black representation, Lubaina Himid (born 1954) played a pivotal role in the British Black Arts Movement in the 1980s and became the first Black woman to win the Turner Prize in 2017. Published on the occasion of Himid’s most recent solo exhibition for The Contemporary Austin’s 2024 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize, Make Do and Mend provides readers with a rare behind-the-scenes look into Himid’s process for two new bodies of work: a suite of 10 Strategy Paintings depicting Black men and women seated around tables invested in problem-solving the dynamics of power, and 64 sculptural plank paintings, entitled Aunties, that formally evoke East African funerary objects and Postminimalism, as they pay tribute to the relationships between women.

Beloved artist and collagist Carmen Winant takes on the issue of "practice" as it relates to art and athleticsThe acclaimed American visual artist and writer Carmen Winant (born 1983) is best known for her multimedia works that center found imagery to explore representations of women. Her newest book, How We Practice, is part critical writing and part experimental essay, while also a self-portrait of Winant’s life in long-distance competitive running.The book asks a single, knotty question: What is "practice"? Winant attempts to answer this by posing others, such as: What is the difference between going to a practice and having one? Are practice and theory dialectical? Does practice ever end?This project works to define the often contradictory term as it functions across contemporary art discourse, in the process offering new ways to read it. The book examines "practice" in relation to legitimacy in the newfound role of artist-as-professional and the influence of MFA programs in promoting creative work as white-collar labor. It imports influences from outside the field of art production—most notably, by looking to the world of athletics—to approach the implications, strategies and potentialities of practice vis-à-vis labor and exhaustion, repetition and pleasure, gender and rehearsal.

Douglas' first US survey charts his global influence and innovation across 40 works and reimagines D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915)Published with Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.Since the 1980s, Canadian artist Stan Douglas (born 1960) has created films, installations, photographs and other multidisciplinary projects that address moments of rupture where "history could go one way or the other." Across formats, his images recall things that haunt: unresolved moments, political tumult and violent turning points; plots that retain a hold, however imperceptible, on the present. His work operates within the genres of cinema, photography and theater to present a point of view that is always staged. Douglas' rigorous explorations of these charged histories show us how to "think historically in the present" and frame contemporary crises in a longer timeline.

A sweeping retrospective of Tina Girouard's pioneering contributions across video, performance, textile and community-based art and morePublished with Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought.From the 1970s until her death, Louisiana-born artist Tina Girouard (1946–2020) was a dedicated experimental artist, collaborator and art worker. Alongside her individual creative endeavors, she nurtured and was a part of numerous influential artist communities and organizations in New York, Louisiana and Haiti, including the Anarchitecture Group, the interdisciplinary cohort of 112 Greene Street, the restaurant Food, the Kitchen, P.S. 1 and the Festival International de la Louisiane. Her acts of upkeep, including domestic labor traditionally associated with "women's work," blurred the boundaries between artmaking and what she called life-making. Sign-In is the first comprehensive monograph on her interdisciplinary oeuvre. It gathers documentation of her work in video, performance, drawing, textile, wall works and installation, tracing Girouard's practice and legacy across genres and geographies.

Artists, poets and writers reflect on Olson's contingency of form and the temporal conditions of cognition within and between her multimedia worksAs part of her yearlong exhibition in Reykjavik, American artist B. Ingrid Olson (born 1987) continuously reconfigured her artworks within the space in order to test the reciprocity between photography and sculpture. This became a guiding structure for the book, which models artistic practice as an evolving form.

From CCTV grids to posthumous image rights, Magid reveals the unseen technocratic architectures that govern contemporary lifePublished with Creative Time.Both catalogue raisonné and cultural object, With Full Consent is the first comprehensive monograph on American artist Jill Magid (born 1973). Known for navigating the boundaries between art, institutions and power, Magid's practice treats legal codes, surveillance systems and bureaucratic infrastructures as both medium and collaborator.

In Carroll’s civic-oriented conceptual art, humor and provocation sit alongside rigorous research and ethical commitmentPublished with Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.Working across performance, publishing, urban intervention and long-term social engagement, New York–based artist Mary Ellen Carroll (born 1961) uses conversation, contracts, zoning codes and bureaucratic processes as the key components of their conceptual language. Their practice unfolds through law, architecture and lived systems rather than discrete objects. The artist often operates in real time and in public view, embracing uncertainty, risk and contradiction as generative conditions. How To Talk Dirty and Influence People offers a comprehensive overview of Carroll’s work since the 1980s. Bringing together performance documentation, new critical essays, commissioned fiction and poetry and conversations with the artist, this publication presents the oeuvre of an artist whose work insists that speech, negotiation and persistence are powerful tools for reshaping social reality.

Taking William Cordova's (born 1971) exhibition ankaylli: spatial and ideological terrain at Marfa Contemporary as a point of departure, this publication highlights the way the artist (who was born in Lima and is based in Miami) layers referents and histories across cultures. Bringing together a constellation of Cordova's artworks in a wide variety of medium—sculptures, collages, Polaroids, a video, objects around town, a free newspaper and a website—in which Pre-Columbian traditions, modern art and architecture, and spiritualism overlap, the exhibition stages these objects in the fitting home of Marfa, a town equally known for Native American history, minimalism and star-gazing. This book includes references to all three: stepped pyramid patterns, geometric concrete forms and symbols of the cosmos.

The Conditions of Being Art is the first book to examine the activities of groundbreaking contemporary art galleries Pat Hearn Gallery and American Fine Arts, Co. (1983–2004), and the transnational milieu of artists, dealers and critics that surrounded them.Drawing on the archives of dealers Pat Hearn and Colin de Land—both, independently, legendary players on the New York art scene of the 1980s and '90s, and one of the great love stories of the art world—this publication illustrates their distinctive artistic practices, significant exhibitions and events, and daily business. Hearn and de Land championed art that challenged the business of running an art gallery; artists like Renée Green and Susan Hiller, Andrea Fraser and Cady Noland, who employed conceptualism and installation, social and institutional critique.Contributing to the history of exhibitions, institutions and curating, The Conditions of Being Art addresses a significant gap in this literature around experimental commercial spaces in recent art history. This publication is the first book-length critical account of the alternative commercial gallery practices of the 1990s, a moment and a scene that is extremely influential to many of today's art dealers, curators and artists.Hearn and de Land's gallery practices explored new experimental and ethical possibilities within the selling of art, testing the relationship of contemporary art to its markets. In this volume, full-color images, in-depth scholarly investigations and detailed gallery histories vibrantly document how Hearn and de Land tested new notions of what an art gallery could be.