Ink arts have flourished in China for more than two millennia. Once primarily associated with elite culture, ink painting is now undergoing a popular resurgence. Ink Worlds explores the modern evolution of this art form, from scrolls and panel paintings to photographic and video forms, and documents how Chinese ink arts speak to present-day concerns while simultaneously referencing deeply historical materials, themes, and techniques. Presenting the work of some two dozen artists from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States in more than 100 full-color reproductions, the book spans pioneering abstract work from the late 1960s through twenty-first century technological innovations. Nine illustrated essays build a compelling case for understanding the modern form as a distinct genre, fusing art and science, history and technology, painting and film into an accessible theory of contemporary ink painting. The Yamazaki/Yang collection is widely recognized as one of the most important private collections of contemporary Chinese ink art. Ink Worlds is the first book to represent the collection from the perspective of contemporary art history. From its atmospheric mountainscapes to precise calligraphy, this book is a revelation, bringing together the past, present, and future of an enduring and adaptable art form.

The German-Swedish artist Ann Wolff is a pioneer of the studio glass movement in Europe. Born in Lubeck in 1937, she has achieved international fame for her sculptures which mainly use the material glass, but she has always drawn as well.This volume now presents a collection based on a selection of sixty hitherto unpublished drawings from the 1980s. The works, executed in pencil on paper, focus on a female figure seen in reflections and duplications, sometimes surreal and whimsical in connection with animals and intermediate beings, and sometimes with a man or a child: dream worlds, pictures of the subconscious, often inspired by fairy tales. The pictures unfold their narrative potential as investigations of the female self in the social milieu of an age characterised by feminist movements and discussions regarding the relationship between the sexes.

Made in Brooklyn is a belated critique of the Maker Movement: from its origins in the nineteenth century to its impact on labor and its entanglement in the neoliberal economic model of the tech industry. Part history, part ethnography, Made in Brooklyn provides a unified analysis of how the tech industry has infiltrated artistic practice and urban space.

In 1916, as World War I raged around them, a group of bohemians gathered at a small cabaret in Zurich, Switzerland. After decorating the walls with art by Picasso and other avant-garde artists, they embarked on a series of extravagant performances. Three readers simultaneously recited a poem in three languages a monocle-wearing teenager performed a spell from New Zealand another young man sneered at the audience, snapping a whip as he intoned his Fantastic Prayers." One of the artists called these sessions both buffoonery and a requiem mass." Soon they would have a more evocative name: Dada.In Destruction Was My Beatrice , modernist scholar Jed Rasula presents the first narrative history of Dada, showing how this little-understood artistic phenomenon laid the foundation for culture as we know it today. Although the venue where Dada was born closed after only four months and its acolytes scattered, the idea of Dada quickly spread to New York, where it influenced artists like Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray to Berlin, where it inspired painters George Grosz and Hannah Hoech and to Paris, where it dethroned previous avant-garde movements like Fauvism and Cubism while inspiring early Surrealists like Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, and Paul Eluard. The long tail of Dadaism, Rasula shows, can be traced even further, to artists as diverse as William S. Burroughs, Robert Rauschenberg, Marshall McLuhan, the Beatles, Monty Python, David Byrne, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, all of whom,along with untold others,owe a debt to the bizarre wartime escapades of the Dada vanguard.A globe-spanning narrative that resurrects some of the 20th century's most influential artistic figures, Destruction Was My Beatrice describes how Dada burst upon the world in the midst of total war,and how the effects of this explosion are still reverberating today.

Raqib Shaw is one of the most extraordinary and sought-after artists working in the world today. Born in Calcutta in 1974 and raised in Kashmir, he came to London to study in 1998 and has lived there ever since. Inspired by a broad range of influences, including the old masters, Indian miniatures, Persian carpets and the Pre-Raphaelites, his paintings are infused with memories and longing for his homeland in Kashmir. His technique constitutes a completely unique kind of enamel painting. Spending months on preparatory drawings, tracings and photographic studies, he then transfers the composition onto prepared wooden panels, establishing an intricate design with acrylic liner, which leaves a slightly raised line. He adds the enamel paint using needle-fine syringes and a porcupine quill, with which he manoeuvres the paint. The finished works are intricate, magical and breathtaking in their colour and complexity. This book accompanies an exhibition of eight paintings by Raqib Shaw at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, alongside two paintings which have long obsessed him and have influenced specific works: Sir Joseph Noel Paton's The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, 1849 (National Gallery of Scotland) and Lucas Cranach's An Allegory of Melancholy, 1528 (private collection). The book includes the first full-length biographical study of the artist.

Chicago is home to more intact African American street murals from the 1970s and 1980s than any other U.S. city. Among Chicago's greatest muralists is the legendary William "Bill" Walker (1927-2011), compared by art historians to Diego Rivera. Francis O'Connor, America's foremost mural historian, called Walker the most accomplished contemporary practitioner of the classical mural tradition that runs from Giotto to Rivera. Though his art could not have been more public, Walker maintained a low profile during his working life and virtually withdrew from the public eye after his retirement in 1989. Author Jeff W. Huebner met Walker in 1990 and embarked on a series of insightful interviews in 2008. Those meetings form the basis of Walls of Prophecy and Protest, the story of Walker's remarkable life and the movement that he inspired. Featuring thirty-five color images of Walker's work, this handsome edition reveals the artist who was the primary figure behind Chicago's famed Wall of Respect and who created numerous murals that depicted African American historical figures; protested social injustice; and centered imagination, love, respect, and community accountability.

Leading international artists and art educators consider the challenges of art education in today's dramatically changed art world. The last explosive change in art education came nearly a century ago, when the German Bauhaus was formed. Today, dramatic changes in the art world-its increasing professionalization, the pervasive power of the art market, and fundamental shifts in art-making itself in our post-Duchampian era-combined with a revolution in information technology, raise fundamental questions about the education of today's artists. Art School(Propositions for the 21st Century) brings together more than thirty leading international artists and art educators to reconsider the practices of art education in academic, practical, ethical, and philosophical terms. The essays in the book range over continents, histories, traditions, experiments, and fantasies of education. Accompanying the essays are conversations with such prominent artist/educators as John Baldessari, Michael Craig-Martin, Hans Haacke, and Marina Abramovic, as well as questionnaire responses from a dozen important artists-among them Mike Kelley, Ann Hamilton, Guillermo Kuitca, and Shirin Neshat-about their own experiences as students. A fascinating analysis of the architecture of major historical art schools throughout the world looks at the relationship of the principles of their designs to the principles of the pedagogy practiced within their halls. And throughout the volume, attention is paid to new initiatives and proposals about what an art school can and should be in the twenty-first century-and what it shouldn't be. No other book on the subject covers more of the questions concerning art education today or offers more insight into the pressures, challenges, risks, and opportunities for artists and art educators in the years ahead. Contributors Marina Abramovic, Dennis Adams, John Baldessari, Ute Meta Bauer, Daniel Birnbaum, Saskia Bos, Tania Bruguera, Luis Camnitzer, Michael Craig-Martin, Thierry de Duve, Clementine Deliss, Charles Esche, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Hans Haacke, Ann Lauterbach, Ken Lum, Steven Henry Madoff, Brendan D. Moran, Ernesto Pujol, Raqs Media Collective, Charles Renfro, Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Michael Shanks, Robert Storr, Anton Vidokle

Born in South Korea in 1971, Haegue Yang is renowned for creating immersive environments from a diverse range of materials. Yang s sculptures and installations conjure abstract narratives which play with our sensory pre-conceptions of scent, sound, light and tactility. Often using recognisable household objects, her work liberates forms from their functional context and applies new connotations and meanings to them. Interweaving industrially made objects with labourintensive and craft-based processes, Yang articulates her interest in folk and pagan cultures, and their deep connection with seasonal rituals in relation to natural phenomena. For this book and its accompanying exhibition at Tate St Ives, the context of the Cornish landscape and its ancient archaeological heritage is an important point of departure for Yang, whose work combines materials, theories and cultural references to make astute and surprising connections between local contexts and wider geographies and histories. Recurring themes of migration, postcolonial diasporas, political struggle and social mobility underpin Yang s research, culminating in a body of work that is an apposite comment on our own time.

Emigration, being lost in a strange world, the search for a new identityand longing for things and people that have been lost form the central topics in the work of the Albanian artist Adrian Paci. The volume presents his iconic works which have earned him a world reputation. Adrian Paci emigrated from Albania to Italy with his family in the late 1990s. His own experience of flight, of giving up shared communities and his searching for a new identity have left their mark on his artistic work. Over the last 20 years expressive works have been created in the form of videos, photos, painting and sculptures which treat theseexistential experiences. The accompanying essays take up this politically topical subject and examine Paci's oeuvre from various angles. An interview with the artist rounds out the volume.

In this first systematic introduction to contemporary Chinese art, Wu Hung provides an accessible, focused and much-needed narrative of the development of Chinese art across all media from the 1970s to the 2000s. From its underground genesis during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), contemporary Chinese art has become a dynamic and hugely influential force in a globalized art world where the distinctions between Eastern and Western culture are rapidly collapsing. The book is a richly illustrated and easy-to-navigate chronological survey that considers contemporary Chinese art both in the context of China's specific historical experiences and in a global arena. Wu Hung explores the emergence of avant-garde or contemporary art - as opposed to officially sanctioned art - in the public sphere after the Cultural Revolution; the mobilization by young artists and critics of a nationwide avant-garde movement in the mid-1980s; the re-emphasis on individual creativity in the late 1980s, the heightened spirit of experimentation of the 1990s; and the more recent identification of Chinese artists, such as Ai Weiwei, as global citizens who create works for an international audience.

Exploring key issues for the anthropology of art and art theory, this fascinating text provides the first in-depth study of community art from an anthropological perspective.The book focuses on the forty year history of Free Form Arts Trust, an arts group that played a major part in the 1970s struggle to carve out a space for community arts in Britain. Turning their back on the world of gallery art, the fine-artist founders of Free Form were determined to use their visual expertise to connect, through collaborative art projects, with the working-class people excluded by the established art world. In seeking to give the residents of poor communities a greater role in shaping their built environment, the artists' aesthetic practice would be transformed."Community Art" examines this process of aesthetic transformation and its rejection of the individualized practice of the gallery artist. The Free Form story calls into question common understandings of the categories of "art," "expertise," and "community," and makes this story relevant beyond late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Britain.

A daring reassessment of Louise Nevelson, an icon of twentieth-century art whose innovative procedures relate to gendered, classed, and racialized forms of making In this radical rethinking of the art of Louise Nevelson (1899–1988), Julia Bryan-Wilson provides a long-overdue critical account of a signature figure in postwar sculpture. A Ukraine-born Jewish immigrant, Nevelson persevered in the male-dominated New York art world. Nonetheless, her careful procedures of construction—in which she assembled found pieces of wood into elaborate structures, usually painted black—have been little studied. Organized around a series of key operations in Nevelson’s own process (dragging, coloring, joining, and facing), the book comprises four slipcased, individually bound volumes that can be read in any order. Both form and content thus echo Nevelson’s own modular sculptures, the gridded boxes of which the artist herself rearranged. Exploring how Nevelson’s making relates to domesticity, racialized matter, gendered labor, and the environment, Bryan-Wilson offers a sustained examination of the social and political implications of Nevelson’s art. The author also approaches Nevelson’s sculptures from her own embodied subjectivity as a queer feminist scholar. She forges an expansive art history that places Nevelson’s assemblages in dialogue with a wide array of marginalized worldmaking and underlines the artist’s proclamation of allegiance to blackness.

The work of German sculptor Isa Genzken is brilliantly receptive to the ever-shifting conditions of modern life. In this first book devoted to the artist, Lisa Lee reflects on Genzken's tendency to think across media, attending to sculptures, photographs, drawings, and films from the entire span of her four-decade career, from student projects in the mid-1970s to recent works seen in Genzken's studio. Through penetrating analyses of individual works as well as archival and interview material from the artist herself, Lee establishes four major themes in Genzken's oeuvre: embodied perception, architecture and built space, the commodity, and the body. Contextualizing the sculptor's engagement with fellow artists, such as Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman, Lee situates Genzken within a critical and historical framework that begins in politically fraught 1960s West Germany and extends to the globalized present. Here we see how Genzken tests the relevance of the utopian aspirations and formal innovations of the early twentieth century by submitting them to homage and travesty. Sure to set the standard for future studies of Genzken's work, Isa Genzken is essential for anyone interested in contemporary art.

During the 1960s and 1970s, a loosely affiliated group of Los Angeles artists--including Larry Bell, Mary Corse, Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Doug Wheeler--more intrigued by questions of perception than by the crafting of discrete objects, embraced light as their primary medium. Whether by directing the flow of natural light, embedding artificial light within objects or architecture, or playing with light through the use of reflective, translucent, or transparent materials, each of these artists created situations capable of stimulating heightened sensory awareness in the receptive viewer. "Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface," companion book to the exhibition of the same name, explores and documents the unique traits of the phenomenologically engaged work produced in Southern California during those decades and traces its ongoing influence on current generations of international artists.
Foreword by Hugh M. Davies
Additional contributors:
Michael Auping
Stephanie Hanor
Adrian Kohn
Dawna Schuld

Artists:
Peter Alexander
Larry Bell
Ron Cooper
Mary Corse
Robert Irwin
Craig Kauffman
John McCracken
Bruce Nauman
Eric Orr
Helen Pashgian
James Turrell
De Wain Valentine
Doug Wheeler

Robert Gober rose to prominence in the mid-1980s and was quickly acknowledged as one of the most significant artists of his generation. Early in his career, he made deceptively simple sculptures of everyday objects--beginning with sinks and moving on to domestic furniture such as playpens, beds and doors. In the 1990s, his practice evolved from single works to theatrical room-sized environments. In all of his work, Gober's formal intelligence is never separate from a penetrating reading of the socio-political context of his time. His objects and installations are among the most psychologically charged artworks of the late twentieth century, reflecting the artist's sustained concerns with issues of social justice, freedom and tolerance. Published in conjunction with the first large-scale survey of the artist's career to take place in the United States, this publication presents his works in all media, including individual sculptures and immersive sculptural environments, as well as a distinctive selection of drawings, prints and photographs. Prepared in close collaboration with the artist, it traces the development of a remarkable body of work, highlighting themes and motifs that emerged in the early 1980s and continue to inform Gober's work today. An essay by Hilton Als is complemented by an in-depth chronology featuring a rich selection of images from the artist's archives, including never-before-published photographs of works in progress.
Robert Gober was born in 1954 in Wallingford, Connecticut. He has had numerous one-person exhibitions, most notably at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Schaulager, Basel. In 2001, he represented the United States at the 49th Venice Biennale. Gober's curatorial projects have been shown at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; The Menil Collection, Houston; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He lives and works in New York.

In the times when the Ukrainian art sphere was regulated by the Soviet institutions, local monumental and decorative arts existed at the frontier of the Party's propaganda and the artistic thirst to experiments. Nowadays, Ukrainian mosaics are wrested out of the architectural context of the country in both literal and metaphorical ways. The artworks are liquidated from the buildings they were specifically created for and indiscriminately despised as ideological pieces of no value. Furthermore, in legal terms mosaics are not defined as objects of art that makes them unguarded in the face of the decommunization process. Initially incepted as a guide, this book is an equally beneficial companion for the journey through space (in the context of the geographical area of modern Ukraine) and hitchhiking through time (in terms of Ukrainian cultural history). It incorporates the selection of Ukrainian mosaics which undermines the simplified perspective on the Soviet art heritage in Ukraine. The volume is generously supplemented with unique photographs of the documentary photographer Yevgen Nikiforov who continues the research, initially presented in the book Decommunized: Ukrainian Soviet Mosaics (2017). Together with the art historian Polina Baitsym who reveals striking linkages of the mosaics' plots with broader historical context, he will guide you through the testimonies of the genuine creativity of Ukrainian monumental artists which managed to flourish on the most infertile soil.