Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago – förlag

Published on the occasion of Nora Schultz's exhibition Parrottree-Building for Bigger than Real, January 12 – February 23, 2014. It was Schultz's first solo museum show in the US and the first show curated at the Renaissance Society by new Chief Curator and Executive Director, Solveig Øvstebø. Nora Schultz: Parrottree is a unique and ambitious hybrid between exhibition catalog and artist’s book. Along with photo documentation of the Renaissance Society installation and an essay by the curator Solveig Øvstebø, the publication also includes The Parrot Magazine by Nora Schultz, a 64-page magazine "made by parrots for parrots and for all birds that need to integrate into human society under aggravated circumstances." Additionally, experimental writing pieces by Keren Cytter and Seth Price, and a visual art project by John Kelsey were all commissioned specifically for this book.

In 2019, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University co-organized an exhibition of a newly commissioned body of work by the Canadian artist Liz Magor. The accompanying publication, Liz Magor: BLOWOUT, is the artist’s first US catalog in ten years, and it features thorough photographic documentation of the new work, commissioned texts by Mitch Speed and Sheila Heti, and a conversation between the artist and curators Dan Byers and Solveig Øvstebø.For more than four decades, Magor’s practice has quietly dramatized the relationships that develop among objects, and she describes this body of work as “a collection of tiny and intense narratives.” Each written contribution responds in its own way to Magor’s new installations, which feature altered stuffed toys, bits of paper, and rat skins—sculptural “agents,” in the artist’s words—suspended in transparent Mylar box forms, and thirty-two pairs of secondhand shoes, each displayed within its own box amidst elaborate embellishments.

Los Angeles-based artist Silke Otto-Knapp has developed a painting practice characterized by its rigorous process and attentiveness to the medium’s possibilities. Using layers of black watercolor pigment, she builds up delicate surfaces, producing subtle variations in density and a powerful sense of atmosphere. Otto-Knapp’s exhibition at the Renaissance Society, In the waiting room, presented a new group of large-scale free-standing paintings in that evokes a multidimensional stage set. Some depict silhouetted bodies while others introduce scenic elements reminiscent of painted backdrops.Offering a close look at the exhibition, this volume includes an array of illustrations, a conversation between curator Solveig Øvstebø and the artist, and four newly commissioned essays by Carol Armstrong, Darby English, Rachel Hann, and Catriona MacLeod, grounded in art history and performance studies.

Taking its title from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, exhibition Black Is, Black Ain't (April 20 – June 8, 2008) explored a shift in the rhetoric of race from an earlier emphasis on inclusion to a present moment where racial identity is being simultaneously rejected and retained. Curated by the Renaissance Society's Associate Curator and Education Director Hamza Walker, the exhibition brought together works by twenty-seven black and non-black artists whose work collectively examines a moment where the cultural production of so-called "blackness" is concurrent with efforts to make race socially and politically irrelevant. The publication features essays by Huey Copeland, Darby English, Greg Foster-Rice, Amy M. Mooney, Kymberly N. Pinder, Krista Thompson, Hamza Walker, and Kenneth Warrren.

This catalogue was published on the occasion of Varda Caivano's exhibition The Density of the Actions, February 22–April 19, 2015 at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.The book features texts by Barry Schwabsky, Paula van den Bosch, Terry R. Myers, Peter St John, Georges Perec, and Solveig Øvstebø, as well as 43 color and 6 black and white images of Caivano’s paintings and the Renaissance Society installation.

In 2015 the Renaissance Society presented an exhibition of newly commissioned works by Los Angeles-based artist Mathias Poledna. Coinciding with the museum’s centennial, it marked the final show in the institution’s first hundred years.For this project Poledna used the notion of iconoclasm and its various historical contexts as a conceptual backdrop for two new works: a 35-mm film installation, co-produced with and premiering at the Renaissance Society, and a substantial alteration to the gallery space: the demolition, dismantling and removal of the gallery’s ceiling structure, a steel truss grid that had horizontally bisected the double-height gallery since 1967. This catalog—featuring a cover designed by artist Peter Downsbrough—documents the exhibition and its installation, and in doing so celebrates a century of the Renaissance Society.

This richly illustrated volume offers an in-depth look into artist Sadie Benning’s exhibition Shared Eye, presented at the Renaissance Society and the Kunsthalle Basel.The forty mixed-media panels in Shared Eye defy easy categorization: they include collage, painting, photography, and sculpture. The seriality of the installation also nods to the artist’s history with the moving image. Throughout the 1990s, Benning created an extraordinary body of experimental video work, improvising with materials at hand and a toy camera. More than two decades later, in Shared Eye we see the handmade aesthetic, grainy imagery, and durational logic of Benning’s early videos take on different forms to correspond to our current moment.The catalog documents the exhibition in full color, and it features an interview between the artist and Julie Ault, essays by John Corbett and Christine Mehring, and an introduction by the Renaissance Society’s executive director, Solveig Øvstebø, and Elena Filipovic, director of Kunsthalle Basel. These texts provide illuminating framework for the exhibition and key insights into how Benning pushes the limits of abstraction in response to our present political climate.

Over a fifty-year career, Robert Grosvenor has produced a body of work that is at once solidly physical and conceptual, muscular and fluid. Grosvenor frequently uses industrial materials and found objects as he experiments with texture and scale, resulting in sculptures that reveal a handmade quality and subtle vein of humor.In 2017, the Renaissance Society presented an exhibition of the sculptor’s untitled work from 1989 to 1990. Re-contextualized within a spare architectural installation, this assemblage of materials and found objects eludes interpretation at the same time as it asserts its form and construction. Such nuances, combined with its ambiguous scale, evoke what critic John Yau has suggested is the labor of an “anonymous worker.” Grosvenor has made significant contributions as a sculptor over the past fifty years, but relatively few books have been published about his work. This monograph documents the Renaissance Society show and also features new scholarship considering Grosvenor’s work with a broad scope. The text includes contributions by Yves-Alain Bois, Bruce Hainley, Susan Howe, John Yau, and Renaissance Society executive director and chief curator Solveig Øvstebø.

The title of Richard Rezac's Renaissance Society exhibition, Address, plays on the multivalent quality of the word. As a noun, it refers to a unique identifier of a precise location. As a verb, it refers to a form of communication crafted for a specific people, time, and place. This exhibition drew upon both elements of the word's two meanings: the artist deliberately created and selected works in response to the architecture of the Renaissance Society's gallery space, and the title also nods to the sculptures' relationship to their presumptive audience.This book showcases twenty pieces featured in the exhibition that are made of a wide range of materials including cherry wood, cast bronze, and aluminum and that span Rezac's career--including newly commissioned pieces.s Through the concept of address, the exhibit and book explore the artist's ongoing engagement with both tangible, mathematical ordering systems and the elusive mechanisms of memory and interpretation. This publication continues Rezac's address, extending it to a greater audience of readers through a generous selection of images, a conversation between the artist and curator Solveig vsteb , and new texts by Matthew Goulish, Jennifer R. Gross, and James Rondeau.

Alejandro Cesarco: Song, published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at the Renaissance Society, brings together both new commissions and existing works. In the exhibition, Cesarco creates rhythm by incorporating silences and withholdings. The works form an installation drawing on the poetics of duration, refusal, repetition, and affective forms. This presentation, as in the artist’s broader practice, represents a sustained investigation into time, memory, and how meaning is perceived. Centering on two related video works, the exhibition engaged deeply with histories of conceptual art. This catalog features an introduction by Solveig Øvstebø, a conversation between Alejandro Cesarco and Lynne Tillman, an essay by Julie Ault, and new short fiction by Wayne Koestenbaum in response to the exhibition.

Unthought Environments brings together art influenced by the forces that are integral to our daily lives, yet are easily forgotten or overlooked, such as the ancient elements of air, fire, water, and earth; weather systems; geopolitics; and the hidden physical components of our virtual world. Informed by media studies, ecology, and philosophy, these multi-media artworks explore the elemental sphere as it intersects with the human-made.This exhibition catalog brings together images from the exhibition alongside texts that engage directly with the works as well as the larger issues that drive them. Essays by Karsten Lund, John Durham Peters, Keller Easterling, Ina Blom, Marissa Lee Benedict, Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen, and Peter Fend are included, as well as a conversation with Lund, Nicholas Mangan, Robin Watkins, and Nina Canell.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition, Let me consider it from here features color reproductions of artworks by Saul Fletcher, Brook Hsu, and Tetsumi Kudo and transcriptions of the audio works of Constance DeJong, alongside newly commissioned poems by Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Simone White, and Lynn Xu, and an epilogue by Solveig Øvstebø. These artists frequently draw from their own histories, humors, and instincts as they grapple with or reimagine what’s happening in the world around them. Across a range of mediums, their works open up spaces that oscillate between strange and familiar, registering deeply personal experiences as well as more ambient cultural and political pressures.  Their practices are all similarly anchored in solitude and stretch outward to meet the world, guiding us to the liminal realms between the public and the intimate, the concrete and the fantastical.

Considers two parts of a project by artist Jill Magid that centers around flows of currency.  Conceived as a story in multiple chapters, this book focuses on two parts of a larger project by artist Jill Magid in which she explores the circulation of pennies against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through Tender, a public artwork in New York City produced by Creative Time, and Tender: Balance, an exhibition at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, Magid both observes intimate financial and social transactions and delves into economic systems that are harder to see, intervening in the flows of currency in subtle, poetic ways.  Along with visuals from these two parts of the project, the book offers insights into Magid’s extensive research process and three new essays that provide greater social and art historical context for her work. In their contribution, Claire Bishop and Nikki Columbus consider how Magid’s process makes wide-ranging connections to create a constellation of ideas. Jamilah King addresses the ongoing shift toward a cashless economy and who is left behind, and Aden Kumler explores histories of modifying currency. The book culminates in a conversation between the artist and curators Justine Ludwig and Karsten Lund, in which they reflect on the project’s conceptual touchstones and on events contemporary to the work.

Catalog for an exhibition of Matthew Metzger’s paintings at the Renaissance Society.  Published on the occasion of Matthew Metzger’s exhibition Heirloom at the Renaissance Society, this is the first book dedicated to the artist’s paintings, which echo and explore various kinds of abstraction. Anchored by the new paintings Metzger made for this exhibition—a set of works conceived as an installation for the Renaissance Society’s space that also serve as the subject of an essay by curator Karsten Lund—the book also features four other series of paintings by the artist, each of which further charts his evolving aesthetic and conceptual strategies.  For this publication, Metzger has also invited six writers—including Kris Cohen, Fumi Okiji, Hamza Walker, Jan Verwoert, and Anna Zett—to reflect on how abstraction functions more broadly, whether as a psychological tendency, a social phenomenon, or a technological side effect, among many other possibilities.

An exhibition catalog centering on a film by artist Diane Severin Nguyen.  This catalog, published on the occasion of the exhibition If Revolution is a Sickness, presents the first monographic book on work by artist Diane Severin Nguyen, which considers how songs and shared histories are woven together across different times and places. The book centers on a new film by Nguyen that is set in Warsaw, Poland, and it loosely follows the character of an orphaned Vietnamese child who grows up to join a South Korean pop-inspired dance group. Popular within a subculture of Polish youth, the genre of K-pop is used by Nguyen as a vernacular structure as she traces a relationship between Eastern Europe and Asia that has roots in Cold War allegiances.  In addition to extensive imagery from the film and behind-the-scenes footage, the book also features essays by Cat Zhang on K-pop’s online communities and by Nathanäel on music, history, and geography; a pair of reflections on the film by curators Myriam Ben Salah and Sohrab Mohebbi; and a conversation between the artist and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster. Also included with the book is a flexi-disc record featuring a song with music and lyrics co-written by Nguyen. If Revolution is a Sickness, was commissioned by SculptureCenter in New York and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.

A catalog for an exhibition of the latest chapter in Miriem Bennani’s CAPS film project.Meriem Bennani is a Moroccan artist who lives and works in New York. Life on the CAPS is the final chapter in her film trilogy of the same name. Set in a supernatural, dystopian future surrounding a fictional island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, it is rooted in Bennani’s research and reflections on the histories of island societies, biotechnology, and vernacular music. Layering live-action footage and computer-generated animation, Bennani intuitively adapts editing techniques that evoke documentary film, science fiction, phone footage, music videos, and reality TV. Her one-person exhibition at the Renaissance Society marked the debut of this personal, electric yet melancholic consideration of what it is to live in a state of limbo, and this accompanying book captures the film through a combination of still images and selections from a transcript of the film.Enacting a variety of cunning shifts, Life on the CAPS moves fluidly from the imaginary to the geopolitical and ranges from the microscopic scale of DNA to the global eye of surveillance. At the same time, it engages with the power of individual experience as well as the power of collectivity while building on an emotive, formal experimentation that refutes boundaries.This volume includes transcripts of conversations between Meriem Bennani and Omar Berrada, Fatima Al Quadiri and Bidoun, Amal Benzekri, and Aziz Bouyabrine.

A catalog of an exhibition by contemporary artist Max Guy that uses The Wizard of Oz as a way to ask questions about society and culture.This book accompanies Max Guy’s exhibition “But tell Me, is it a civilized country?,” an installation of new works centered on The Wizard of Oz. The title is drawn from a conversation between the Witch of the North and Dorothy in which the Witch defines “civilized” as not including magic.Anchored in Chicago—where L. Frank Baum’s novel was written and first published, and home to enduring monuments to Oz fandom—the exhibition and book bridge the parallel universes of the Emerald City and its birthplace, drawing out the traces each carries of the other. A number of latent currents course underneath the work: critical perspectives on modernist urbanism, the peculiar products of fan culture, and the transformative power of storytelling and other acts of world-making.This catalog features essays by artist and writer Brit Barton and the exhibition’s curator, Michael Harrison, as well as a transcription of a conversation between Guy and artist and writer Irena Haiduk. The book will also include a new artist project made specifically for the book in the form of an annotated bibliography created by Guy of writings and images that relate to and inspire his practice.

A companion to Aria Dean’s Abattoir, U.S.A.!Aria Dean’s moving image work Abattoir, U.S.A.!, presented in the eponymous exhibition at the Renaissance Society between February and April 2023, surveys the interior of an empty slaughterhouse. This slaughterhouse was built and animated using Unreal Engine, a 3D computer graphics tool for creating virtual environments. The viewer follows a linear path through an impossible architecture—a seamless combination of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first-century design elements and non-Euclidean spaces. Dean was initially inspired by philosophers Georges Bataille and Frank Wilderson, each of whom address the slaughterhouse in their writings –whether as a metaphor or paradigm—as crucial to the construction of civil society.  Abattoir, U.S.A.! also builds on Dean’s own research into the slaughterhouse and industrial architecture and the ways they reveal modernism’s intimacy with death on conceptual, political, and material levels.This book documents the exhibition as well as selected material from Dean’s process and research. It includes essays by film scholar Erika Balsom, who writes on the history of abattoirs and their relation to modernism, Afropessimist theory, and the dehumanizing rationality of capitalism.  Architect and writer Keller Easterling contributes a quasi-fictional text from her ongoing series of Draft Teenage Essays, which are part of her collection of experimental writings titled No One Thing. This volume also includes transcripts of two conversations: one between Dean and film historian Bruce Jenkins in which they discuss Dean’s work in relation to historical avant-garde films; and another with Dean and co-director of Rhizome Michael Connor, media artist Filip Kostik, and composer Evan Zierk, who created the soundtrack for Abattoir, U.S.A.! Together they discuss the technical process of using Unreal Engine and the nature of virtuality.

The collected exhibition essays of Hamza Walker, former director of education at the Renaissance Society.Hamza Walker was director of education at the Renaissance Society for twenty-one years, between 1994 and 2015. During that time, he wrote essays about almost every single exhibition, both those he curated and many others curated by Suzanne Ghez. These texts were published first in the Renaissance Society’s newsletters and then eventually on the exhibition posters, which were distributed far more widely. In the course of this workman-like writing in the service of the institution, Walker developed not only his distinctive personal writing style and a keen eye but also a theory of what museum education could be and do. In his writing, Walker draws on his art's historical knowledge but looks equally to current events (both minutely local and international), insisting on the mutual relevance and related nature of the two. In Walker’s own words, “If we’re going to live up to the idea that art is for everybody, it needs a set of wider reference points,” an emphasis that has arguably shaped the identity of the institution in turn.This book collects those essays together into a volume that celebrates Walker’s brilliant, joyful, and generous writing. It also serves as a lively record of two decades of the Renaissance Society’s exhibition programming and reflects the prevalent theories, issues, and fashions of the art world during that time, not to mention the events occurring in the wider world.

A decade of Ghislaine Leung’s inventive “scores” and practices, revealing the fluid, rigorous, and evolving vision of a leading contemporary artist.Ghislaine Leung is an artist whose practice unfolds through concise “scores”—written instructions that indicate how a work is to be realized, interpreted, and performed by institutions, collaborators, or participants. These scores investigate value, labor, and the systems that shape art’s production and presentation, among other things, while leaving room for flexibility and variation in their execution. Her 2024 solo exhibition Holdings at the Renaissance Society provided the occasion for the present publication, which extends and deepens the insights of the show into a decade-long portrait of her work.Spanning ten years of Leung’s practice, the book offers a richer and more expansive perspective than has previously been available. Rather than presenting a definitive interpretation or career survey, it extends an open-handed invitation into a world defined by fluidity and openness. At its heart lies a comprehensive “inventory,” comprising two complementary lists that Leung has never published before: a complete record of her works since 2015, and a set of personal “sub-scores”—self-instructions or protocols that relate to how she works, how she participates, and how her life beyond art intersects with her creative practice.The publication is further enriched by essays and conversations from a range of writers, curators, and collaborators, offering diverse perspectives on Leung’s scores, sub-scores, and evolving practice. Together, these contributions illuminate the themes, processes, and relationships that have shaped her work, creating a comprehensive yet open-ended introduction to one of contemporary art’s most inventive and distinctive voices.

Explore Isabelle Frances McGuire’s uncanny worlds, where cultural archetypes—from presidents to vampires—are reimagined through sculpture, installation, video, and performance, tangling with American history and the loops of contemporary culture.  Across a growing body of work, artist Isabelle Frances McGuire engages with figures that loom large in the cultural imagination, exploring the stories they generate and giving them new, uncanny life. Their Renaissance Society exhibition Year Zero brought together figures ranging from a U.S. President to vampires and the Hollywood ingénue, weaving personal biography, political lore, and popular culture. The exhibition centered on revisiting and transforming familiar archetypes, testing the looping repetitions of contemporary culture, and infusing these figures with a feral energy that surprises and challenges expectations.This publication offers a multi-faceted view of McGuire’s exhibition and greater insights into their inventive practice, highlighting how the artist reimagines cultural symbols and narratives. McGuire merges a hands-on sculptural sensibility with digital techniques, including 3D printing and milling controlled by computer, producing installations, sculptures, props, videos, and performances. The book presents these strategies and approaches as a lens through which readers can encounter the inventiveness and playful experimentation that define their work.In two essays, the volume provides insights into different aspects of McGuire’s practice. Max Hart examines the role of play and surprise in her work, while Karsten Lund, curator of Year Zero, situates the exhibition within a broader trajectory of artists engaging with cultural codes. Complementing these essays is a reprint of George Saunders’ short story "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline," a satirical take on the American habit of historical re-creation and the violence that shadows it.