University of Pennsylvania,Institute of Contemporary Art – förlag

At first glance, The Puppet Show seems a flip title. Organized by Philadelphia ICA Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner and Carin Kuoni, this exhibition catalogue focuses--with both humor and gravity--on the surprisingly prodigious amount of puppet imagery in contemporary art. It takes as its historic point of departure one of the first episodes of avant-garde art history: Alfred Jarry's 1896 puppet play Ubu Roi, which the South African artist William Kentridge, in collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company, has adapted into an allegory of apartheid. Other puppets are featured in works from more than 30 well-established, international artists, including Anne Chu, Terence Gower, Pierre Huyghe, Christian Jankowski, Laurie Simmons, Kiki Smith and Kara Walker. This volume also looks at puppets in Modern art and popular culture--from Sophie Tauber Arp’s Dada marionettes to the Internet phenomenon of the “sockpuppet”--a well-known person’s fake online persona, created in order to boost public opinion.

An artist’s attempts at achieving personal happiness, from meditation to pharmaceuticalsAustrian-born, New York-based graphic designer, typographer and artist Stefan Sagmeister (born 1962) often tests and transgresses the boundary between art and design, through his imaginative implementation of typography. The Happy Film Pitch Book both documents Sagmeister’s touring exhibition, The Happy Show, and anticipates his ongoing feature length film, The Happy Film. In both projects, Sagmeister undergoes a series of self-experiments (each experiment lasting three months)--with meditation, cognitive therapy, and mood-altering pharmaceuticals--attempting to improve his personal happiness. I am usually rather bored with definitions,” Sagmeister says. “Happiness, however, is just such a big subject that it might be worth a try to pin it down.” The Happy Show, Sagmeister’s first museum show in the United States, documents his adventures in video, print, infographics, sculpture and interactive installations, most of which were custom-made for this exhibition. Here, Sagmeister offers his own witty and poignant thoughts and reasons for his ten-year exploration of happiness. Throughout the book, Sagmeister’s trademark maxims serve as access points to a larger exploration of happiness, its cultural significance, our constant pursuit of it and its notoriously ephemeral nature.

A multimedia portrait of four famed utopian sites celebrating a Black, spiritual AmericaThrough films, objects, and installation, Chicago-based filmmaker Cauleen Smith (born 1967) offers an emotional axis by which to navigate four distinct universes: Alice Coltrane and her Sai Anantam ashram; a 1966 photo shoot by Bill Ray at Simon Rodia's Watts Towers in Los Angeles; Noah Purifoy and his desert assemblages in Joshua Tree; and black spiritualist Rebecca Cox Jackson and her Shaker community in 19th-century Philadelphia.These locations, while not technically utopian societies, embody sites of historical speculation and radical generosity between artist and community. In reimagining a future through this mix, Smith casts a world that is black, feminist, spiritual and unabashedly alive.This volume, wrapped in a frosted and foil-stamped dust jacket, contains full-color photographs of the multi-room installation and provides further insight into Smith's creative process and myriad influences through two interviews and a manifesto written by the artist.

From public-access television to social media: EAI’s groundbreaking history with video artThis volume marks the 50th anniversary of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), one of the first nonprofit organizations dedicated to the advocacy and development of video art.

On the politics of land, the body and space in multimedia and multidisciplinary worksJamaican artist Deborah Anzinger (born 1978) works at the intersection of Black feminist thought, geography and space to create sculptures, videos, paintings and installations combining synthetic and living materials. An Unlikely Birth compiles her material and conceptual experiments.

The first monograph on the groundbreaking video artist and member of the seminal Video Venice News and Studio Z groupsThis is the first major retrospective on the groundbreaking Los Angeles–based video artist Ulysses Jenkins (born 1946). Since the 1970s, Jenkins has interrogated questions of race and gender as they relate to ritual, history and state power. From his work with Video Venice News, a Los Angeles media collective he founded in the early 1970s, to his involvement with the artists’ group Studio Z (alongside figures such as David Hammons, Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger), to his video and performance works, Jenkins explores how white supremacy is embedded in popular culture. Beginning as a painter and muralist, Jenkins was introduced to video just as the first consumer cameras were made available, and he quickly seized upon the technology as a means to broadcast critical depictions of multiculturalism. This catalog features an extensive portion of Jenkins’ archive, early documentary films, photographs and ephemera, as well as his video art.

Documenting this American artist's first solo museum exhibition, Charles LeDray will focus on his obsessively crafted miniature sculptures in a variety of media, including textiles, ceramics, seashells, and bone, that reflect on childhood, gender, sexuality, and autobiography.

Conceptions of “nothing” are one of the driving themes of twentieth-century art. One thinks of Piet Mondrian's reductivist approach to abstraction, Marcel Duchamp's contention that art resides in ideas, not objects, Mark Rothko's painterly reach for the sublime, Andy Warhol's affirmations of the vacuity of Pop culture. The Big Nothing will focus on themes of nothing, nothingness and negation in contemporary art and culture, surveying the legacy of these and other manifestations of absence made manifest in contemporary art. Artist include Gareth James, Jutta Koether, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, Yves Klein, Bernadette Corporation, John Miller and James Welling, among others. Given its broad connotations, “nothing” provides general audiences with immediate access to looking at and thinking about the art of today. Part of a pan-Philadelphia cultural event initiated by the ICA, in which the city gives itself over to the art of nothing.

Architect Peter Eisenman and landscape architect Laurie Olin have been collaborating since 1980 on projects both built and unbuilt. Their key works include the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. This first book on their important and unusually egalitarian working relationship offers a revealing look at the development of a 25-year collaboration, beginning with the title work, a recent site-specific environmental installation, and continuing through a survey of their portfolio. Each of the two also maintains an individual practice and teaches: Olin is the Practice Professor of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Across the Open Field, Essays Drawn on the English Landscape, and co-author of Vizcaya, An American Villa and its Makers. Peter Eisenman was the first Irwin S. Chanin Distinguished Professor of Architecture at The Cooper Union and is currently the Louis I. Kahn Professor of Architecture at Yale. His books include Diagram Diaries and Chora L Works, co-authored with Jacques Derrida. Fertilizers includes essays by each of them, an interview and many seldom-seen images.

Since the 1980s, Douglas Blau has used words and pictures interchangeably to create a highly regarded and unique body of work. He emerged as a critic and curator in tandem with the Pictures Generation of artists. In 1987, his exhibition Fictions: A Selection of Pictures from the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries was the first in a maverick series to apply curatorial practice to the construction of explicit narratives. Blau creates picture epics and episodes from uniformly framed collages of printed matter: postcards, film stills, images of paintings and photographs, pictures of all kinds are cut and pasted into individual collage elements. These are composed into sequences based on formal and narrative associations that flow from frame to frame. Centuries of picture making appear distilled through Blau’s art into an essential repertoire of characters, plots, periods, styles, locations, and genres. Only the details and degrees of abstraction vary over time and through reproduction, the mechanics of which produce the shifts of tone, texture, and color that Blau orchestrates into each overall composition. This volume provides an overview of this pioneering collagist.

This first book on the Philadelphia-based artist features work from his 2009 ICA exhibition--an installation composed of a six-minute, animated, high-definition projected video and five bronze sculptures. Dread was premiered at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2008, where it received critical acclaim.

Philadelphia is home to two major art institutions, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art. Philadelphia artist Virgil Marti (born 1962) recently curated a show for the ICA of objects chosen from the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection; Set Pieces brings these objects together, shedding light both on the Museum’s outstanding collection of objects and on the roots of Marti’s own opulent, design-based aesthetic. Texts by I.C.A. Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner, Philadelphia Museum curator Joseph Risehl, gallerist Lia Gangitano (Participant Inc.) and Philadelphia-based poet Thomas Devaney round out the volume.

Focusing on Los Angeles and Philadelphia, First Among Equals considers the various modes that contemporary artists have developed to work with each other and reach across generations through negotiation and dialogue. Among the artists included are Kathryn Andrews, Bodega, Alex Da Corte, Extra Extra, Machete Group, Marginal Utility, P&Co., Mateo Tannatt and Wu Tsang.

Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere (both born 1970) have been working collaboratively for more than 14 years, 7 of them under the collective name neuroTransmitter. Often incorporating popular music and visual forms, their projects traverse the cultural contradictions at play in public spaces. This catalogue accompanies their first US survey.

Descent animates alternative modes of inheritance across generations of families, artists and artworks: used or surplus possessions, intergenerational collaborations, maternal memories and transatlantic journeys. Artists include Virginia Overton, Lisa Tan, Runo Lagomarsino, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky and Matriarch.

This volume features new and recent works by New York-based artists Ginny Casey (born 1981) and Jessi Reaves (born 1986) exploring the relationship between painting and sculpture, domestic objects and decorative surfaces, by reimagining the form and function of objects encountered in daily life.

A convergence of histories and aesthetic paradigms for disentangling the body from space and placeThe artists in this volume interrogate the geographic implications of particular histories on specific spaces. From the intimate cartographies of a body to the imagined and constructed contours of the Black Atlantic; from the ecology of the North York Moors to the ruins of slave auction blocks, plantation fields, lynching trees and Underground Railroad routes in North America, to a magical realist vision of a river-bound voyage in Guyana.

Celebrations of sentiment, wit and thought: an overview on the beloved and influential American postminimalist Ree MortonThis volume accompanies the first major United States exhibition of artist Ree Morton (1936–77) in nearly four decades.During a brief but incredibly prolific career, Morton produced installations, sculptures and drawings rich in emotion and philosophically complex, that celebrated tropes of love, friendship and motherhood, radically asserting sentiment as a legitimate subject of artmaking. Her inclusion of personal narrative—through literary, theoretical and autobiographical references—and use of bold color and theatrical imagery infused her objects with sly humor and decorative energy, generating a feminist legacy increasingly appreciated in retrospect.Long celebrated by peers and younger generations, Morton’s influence on contemporary art remains considerable yet widely under-recognized.

Artworks, essays and poetry explore the racial implications of capitalist temporalitiesIn 2019, the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania presented the experimental exhibition Colored People Time. Divided into three chapters—Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts, Banal Presents—it used the Black vernacular phrase "Colored People's Time" (CPT) to explore the ways that dominant notions of time have been used to control and condemn Black people. CPT names a political performance by Black people to evade and ridicule the enforcement of punctuality and productivity.Alongside reproductions of historical objects from the Black Panther Party, Sutton E. Griggs, the National Institutes of Health/Getty Images, and the African Collection at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Colored People Time includes reprints of seminal essays, newly commissioned writing and poetry from Huey Copeland, Eve Ewing, Michael Hanchard, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Amber Rose Johnson, Carolyn Lazard, Jessica Lynne, Tausif Noor, Meg Onli, Gregory Pardlo, M. NourbeSe Philip, Monique Scott, Martine Syms and Michelle M. Wright.Artists include: Aria Dean, Kevin Jerome Everson, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Carolyn Lazard, Dave McKenzie, Cameron Rowland, Sable Elyse Smith and Martine Syms.

Documenting Michelle Lopez’s major site-specific installation and critical dialogues across sculpture, race, politics and powerIn Ballast & Barricades sculptor Michelle Lopez (born 1970) critiques symbols of nationalism, power and consumption, creating a precarious urban landscape from the material remains of crisis. This monograph brings together a decade of work on this topic.

Multimedia reveries on the power and rhetoric of public monuments and the persistence of the political pastThis publication documents the first solo museum exhibition of Philadelphia-based sculptor Karyn Olivier (born 1968), focusing on recent trajectories of her investigation into scale and public memory, particularly as activated for monuments and memorials. After several years developing a number of public commissions, and a year's study in Rome, Olivier revisited a handful of recent works alongside her first forays into video and sound, to consider the conflicted histories and unresolved spaces monuments too often shadow. Organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, the exhibition traveled to the University at Buffalo Art Galleries. Exhibition images from the venues are accompanied by the full narrative text for Oliver's first video; an overview essay from ICA Daniel and Brett Sundheim Chief Curator Anthony Elms; UB Art Galleries curator Liz Park's in-depth consideration of Moving the Obelisk; and a critical assessment by art historian Andrianna Campbell-LaFleur.

From the discarded to the mass-produced: Vaughn’s installations explore complex histories of production and raceThis volume presents recent works by artist Jessica Vaughn (born 1983) that address modular architecture’s promise of malleability and universality—at the expense of visibility for Black workers and workers of color.

A firsthand account of the 1980s Los Angeles art scene by groundbreaking artist Ulysses JenkinsWritten in 1990 and published as a limited-edition artist’s book in collaboration with Rosanna Albertini in 2018, this memoir by video artist Ulysses Jenkins (born 1946) details his family history, his formative years as a muralist in the 1970s and his experiments as an early practitioner of performance and video art.Doggerel Life also captures the flourishing artist communities of Los Angeles, including Jenkins’ collaborations with the influential Studio Z (alongside figures such as David Hammons, Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger); his founding of the media collective Video Venice News; and his time studying at Otis Art Institute with Charles White, Chris Burden and Betye Saar.