David Askevold broke into the art scene when his work was included in the seminal exhibition Information at New York's MOMA 1970, which cemented Conceptualism as a genre. He later became recognized as one of the most important contributors to the development and pedagogy of conceptual art; his work has been included in many of the genre's formative texts and exhibitions.

This illustrated volume takes readers on an eclectic journey through the various strains of Askevold's pioneering practice -- sculpture/installation, film and video, photography and photo-text works, and digital imagery. David Askevold moved from Kansas City to Halifax in 1968 to lecture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

During the early 1970s, his famous Projects Class brought such artists as Sol Lewitt, Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Dan Graham, and Lawrence Weiner to work with his students, focusing critical attention on his adopted city and on his own unorthodox approach to making art. He quickly became on one of the most important conceptual artists practicing in Canada and throughout his career he remained at the vanguard of contemporary practice.

"David Askevold: Once Upon a Time in the East" features essays by celebrated writer-curators Ray Cronin, Peggy Gale, Richard Hertz (author of "The Beat and the Buzz"), and Irene Tsatsos as well as several of Askevold's contemporaries including Aaron Brewer, Tony Oursler, and Mario Garcia Torres. It accompanies an exhibition that will open at the National Gallery of Canada in October 2011 and will tour thereafter to the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax.

In 1972 the artist Adrian Piper began periodically dressing as a persona called the Mythic Being, striding the streets of New York in a mustache, Afro wig, and mirrored sunglasses with a cigar in the corner of her mouth. Her Mythic Being performances critically engaged with popular representations of race, gender, sexuality, and class; they challenged viewers to accept personal responsibility for xenophobia and discrimination and the conditions that allowed them to persist. Piper's work confronts viewers and forces them to reconsider assumptions about the social construction of identity. "Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment" is an in-depth analysis of this pioneering artist's work, illustrated with more than ninety images, including twenty-one in color.

Over the course of a decade, John P. Bowles and Piper conversed about her art and its meaning, reception, and relation to her scholarship on Kant's philosophy. Drawing on those conversations, Bowles locates Piper's work at the nexus of Conceptual and feminist art of the late 1960s and 1970s. Piper was the only African American woman associated with the Conceptual artists of the 1960s and one of only a few African Americans to participate in exhibitions of the nascent feminist art movement in the early 1970s. Bowles contends that Piper's work is ultimately about our responsibility for the world in which we live.

"State of Mind," the lavishly illustrated companion book to the exhibition of the same name, investigates California's vital contributions to Conceptual art--in particular, work that emerged in the late 1960s among scattered groups of young artists. The essays reveal connections between the northern and southern California Conceptual art scenes and argue that Conceptualism's experimental practices and an array of then-new media--performance, site-specific installations, film and video, mail art, and artists' publications--continue to exert an enormous influence on the artists working today.

This book on Stephen Willats pulls together key strands of his practice and threads them through histories of British cybernetics, experimental art, and urban design. For Willats, a cluster of concepts about control and feedback within living and machine systems (cybernetics) offered a new means to make art relevant. For decades, Willats has built relationships through art with people in tower blocks, underground clubs, middle-class enclaves, and warehouses on the Isle of Dogs, to investigate their current conditions and future possibilities. Sharon Irish’s study demonstrates the power of Willats’s multi-media art to catalyze communication among participants and to upend ideas about “audience” and “art.” Here, Irish argues that it is artists like Willats who are now the instigators of social transformation.