Remember radicalism? A time when the Toronto art scene was in formation - and destruction? When there were no models and anything was possible? The late 1970s was a key period when Toronto thought itself Canada's most important art centre, but history has shown that the nascent downtown art community - not the established uptown scene of commercial galleries - was where it was happening. It was a political period. Beyond the art politics, art itself was politicised in its contents and context. Art's political dimension was continually polemically posed - or postured - by artists in these years. Beyond politics, posturing, in fact, was a constant presence as the community invented itself. It was also a period rich in invention of new forms of art. Punk, semiotics, and fashion were equally influential, not to mention transgressive sexuality. It was the beginning of the photo-blowup allied to the deconstructed languages of advertising. Video and performance aligned in simulations of television production as the "underground" mimicked the models of the mainstream for its own satiric, critical purposes. With no dominant art form and the influence of New York in decline, there were no models and anything was possible: even the invention of the idea of an art community as a fictional creation. Is Toronto Burning? takes you on a journey through this period rich in invention of new forms of art. It brings together artworks by Susan Britton, David Buchan, Colin Campbell, Elizabeth Chitty, Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge, Judith Doyle, General Idea, Isobel Harry, Ross McLaren, Missing Associates (Peter Dudar & Lily Eng), Clive Robertson, Tom Sherman, and Rodney Werden alongside archival documents. The artworks were all shown at the exhibition of the same name at the end of 2014 at The Art Gallery of York University, curated by Director Philip Monk. In partnership with The Art Gallery of York University.

An exploration of the artistic and cultural influences that shaped writer and illustrator Edward Gorey The illustrator, designer, and writer Edward Gorey (1925-2000) is beloved for his droll, surreal, and slightly sinister drawings. While he is perhaps best known for his fanciful, macabre books, such as The Doubtful Guest and The Gashlycrumb Tinies, his instantly recognizable imagery can be seen everywhere from the New Yorker to the opening title sequence of the television series Mystery! on PBS. Gorey's Worlds delves into the numerous and surprising cultural and artistic sources that influenced Gorey's unique visual language. Gorey was an inveterate collector--he called it "accumulating." A variety of objects shaped his artistic mindset, from works of popular culture to the more than twenty-six thousand books he owned and the art pieces in his vast collection. This collection, which Gorey left to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art upon his death, is diverse in style, subject, and media, and includes prints by Eugene Delacroix, Charles Meryon, Edvard Munch, and Odilon Redon; photographs by Eugene Atget; and drawings by Balthus, Pierre Bonnard, Charles Burchfield, Bill Traylor, and Edouard Vuillard. As this book shows, these artistic pieces present a visual riddle, as the connections between them-to each other and to Gorey's works-are significant and enigmatic. The essays in Gorey's Worlds also examine the artist's consuming passions for animals and ballet. Featuring a sumptuous selection of Gorey's creations alongside his fascinating and diverse collections, Gorey's Worlds reveals the private world that inspired one of the most idiosyncratic artists of the twentieth century. Exhibition Schedule: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, February 10 - May 6, 2018

New York-based Todd James (born 1969) pioneered a distinct cartoon-based graffiti style in New York in the 1980s, working under the name REAS and gaining the respect of both a street-culture audience and the art and design market. He has since produced work for the Beastie Boys, Eminem and Iggy Pop, among others. This unique artist's book is the first publication by James in half a decade, and collects 60 of his drawings, all created exclusively for this volume. Bearing close resemblance to his best-known graffiti work, each drawing is complete unto itself yet also represents a potential painting for the future. "Yield to Temptation" is of a piece with James' broader concerns: American excess as represented by the forms and fictions of sexuality and the ravages of war. James invites his audience to glamorize these issues, even as he undercuts any assumptions about them. His drawings have the expressive, minimal intensity of a cartoon Franz Kline and evoke the Day-Glo era of 1970s print culture, where "Schoolhouse Rock" crosses over into "Playboy" cartoons. "Yield to Temptation" is being published on the occasion of James' solo exhibition in Tokyo.

This publication comprises the first monographic survey dedicated to artist Kevin Schmidt. Based in Vancouver, Schmidt is an interdisciplinary artist working across performance, video, photography and installation who has exhibited widely across North America and Europe. He is perhaps best known for performance expeditions and interventions into the natural world, which are documented in photographs, installations and videos, such as his eleven-and-a-half-hour Epic Journey, which documents a marathon nighttime screening of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in a small boat as it drifted down the Fraser River, or his Aurora with Roman Candle, which shows him firing roman candles at the Aurora Borealis.At a time when we might consider cultural production as being democratised through the Internet, Schmidt combines notions of the heroic with the seemingly amateur by using visible reminders of construction and theatrical devices-smoke machines, stage lights and DIY photographic equipment. Through this he proposes a utopian assertion of "the commons", where both land and culture are publicly accessible to all.Presented in partnership with Kamloops Art Gallery and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, this publication features essays by Charo Neville, Kathleen Ritter and an artist interview with Nigel Prince. The book charts Schmidt's ongoing body of work addressing the tensions between man and nature, performance and document and indoors and outdoors. These propositions are tackled through references to landscape, the invocation of the sublime at the point of apprehending such wild beauty, and by juxtaposing seemingly disparate elements within these environments. Works are often situated in remote locations, where Schmidt stages remarkable events that transfer elements of urban culture into untouched natural contexts. In this way, he simultaneously examines both the seductive elements of contemporary cultural production and the constructions that surround the idea of nature.

Featuring essays by exhibition curators Julia Paoli and Nigel Prince, as well as a specially commissioned text, Julia Dault is an engaging and long overdue introduction to the artist and her work. Physical negotiations are central to the textured paintings and improvised sculptures for which Julia Dault is celebrated. In her multilayered paintings, Dault employs organic and synthetic supports such as canvas, leather, vinyl, spandex and wooden frames, which act as surfaces to hold paint or as a means of imposing patterns. Whether adding or subtracting paint from these materials, she uses unusual tools such as rubber combs and squeegees that standardise her gestures. Repetition and transparency are important to Dault; looked at closely, her paintings reveal the process of their creation. In partnership with The Power Plant, Toronto and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. Julia Dault's recent solo exhibitions include Jessica Bradley, Toronto; China Arts Objects, Los Angeles; and Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Zurich.

A timely reassessment of some of the most daring projects of abstraction from South America Emphasizing the open-ended and self-critical nature of the projects of abstraction in South America from the 1930s through the mid-1960s, this important new volume focuses on the artistic practices of Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Tomas Maldonado, Alejandro Otero, and Lygia Clark. Megan A. Sullivan positions the adoption of modernist abstraction by South American artists as part of a larger critique of the economic and social transformations caused by Latin America's state-led programs of rapid industrialization. Sullivan thoughtfully explores the diverse ways this skepticism of modernization and social and political change was expressed. Ultimately, the book makes it clear that abstraction in South America was understood not as an artistic style to be followed but as a means to imagine a universalist mode of art, a catalyst for individual and collective agency, and a way to express a vision of a better future for South American society.

German artist Martin Bruno Schmid (b. 1970) works at the intersection of art and architecture; his tools are drills, saws, and sandpaper, his process includes hammering, shredding, and cutting. Material is extracted, and rarely applied. Schmid addresses the very subject of construction itself with his minimalistic and exceptionally radical interventions in public spaces. In doing so he pushes the frontiers of what is feasible and makes visible what we take for granted. His interventions are a celebration of all the technologies of civilisation that enable us to spend our lives protected and safe, but they are also a test of our certitude. This latest monograph on his work provides a comprehensive insight into Schmid's widely varied oeuvre and opens a gateway to the Stuttgart artist's creative world. Text in English and German.

Alaska has long been a nurturing home for artists, with its stunning natural beauty, rich cultural life, and unique communities. In recent years, artists in Alaska have had an additional source of support: the awarding of annual grants to craftsmen, musicians, performers, visual artists, and writers by the Rasmuson Foundation. Creative Alaska profiles the award winners from 2004 to 2013 in three categories: Distinguished Artists, Fellowships, and Project Awards. Richly illustrated accounts of each of the artists and their work illuminate the challenges and opportunities of the artistic life in Alaska and the powerful impact of the Rasmuson Foundation's support.

Public Enquiries is the culmination of a multidisciplinary research project that operated through a series of public hearings in Stockholm, Copenhagen and Gothenburg (2015-2016). The hearings focused on Kerstin Bergendal's Park Lek (2010-2014), which was described at the time as a utopian art project and a concrete intervention in the urban planning process. Public Enquiries maps how Bergendal's extraordinary art project contested and ultimately transformed the local government processes used to shape a segregated urban area of Stockholm. Though Park Lek is primarily examined within the context of Scandinavian society, the writers additionally go on to outline how the project can function as a blueprint for how artistic practice can act as an agent in reconstructing local democracy worldwide, making Public Enquiries a must-read for anyone with an interest in the current state of socially engaged art practice anywhere.This title is co-published with Valand Academy, a school for film, photography, literary composition and fine art at the University of Gothenburg in Gothenburg, Sweden"

Lesley Dill is an American artist working at the intersection of language and fine art in printmaking, sculpture, installation and performance, exploring the power of words to cloak and reveal the psyche. Dill transforms the emotions of the writings of Emily Dickinson, Salvador Espriu, Tom Sleigh, Franz Kafka, and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, into works of paper, wire, horsehair, foil, bronze and music — works that awaken the viewer to the physical intimacy and power of language itself. Lesley Dill – Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me features a uniquely inspired group of sculptures and two-dimensional works more than a decade in the making. It is testimony of Dill’s ongoing investigation into the significant voices and personas of America’s past. For the artist, the American voice grew from early America’s obsessions with divinity and deviltry, on fears of the wilderness out there and wilderness inside us. The plates, in colour throughout, are supplemented with essays by Lesley Dill, Brooklyn-based writer Nancy Princenthal, Figge Art Museum’s curator Andrew Wallace, and researcher and tribal historian Juaquin Hamilton-Youngbird. The book also features a literary text by writer by Tom Sleigh and a poem by author and poet Ray Young Bear.

In this major monograph on Grayson Perry, now updated and expanded, writer and art historian Jacky Klein explores the artist's work through a discussion of his major themes and subjects. Klein's text is complemented by intimate and perceptive commentaries by Perry on individual pieces, giving unique access to his imaginative world and creative processes. This third edition not only has updates throughout, but also includes two new chapters, on the 'House for Essex', designed and built in 2015 with Living Architecture (a UK not-for-profit holiday rental company founded by philosopher and writer Alain de Botton, which aims to promote, educate and enhance appreciation of modern architecture), and on 'Identity Politics', covering new work made since the previous edition of this book was published in 2013.

Earl Krentzin (1929-2021) was a virtuoso silversmith who poured his considerable talents into figurative sculpture, creating whimsical theatrical settings in silver with a wry humour. He was an anomaly in the world of modern craft, having more in common with the 16th-century goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini than with his 20th-century peers. This first full scale monograph on the artist offers the breadth of Krentzin's engaging creations, which he based on his love of toys, movement, and the mechanical arts. Readers will find humour and pathos in his theatrical settings and verisimilitude in every tiny detail, set amidst the burgeoning crafts scene in Detroit. All will discover a modern master who used amusements and daydreams to unlock the imagination.

Many of Cy Twombly's paintings and drawings include handwritten words and phrases--naming or quoting poets ranging from Sappho, Homer, and Virgil to Mallarme, Rilke, and Cavafy. Enigmatic and sometimes hard to decipher, these inscriptions are a distinctive feature of his work. Reading Cy Twombly poses both literary and art historical questions. How does poetic reference in largely abstract works affect their interpretation? Reading Cy Twombly is the first book to focus specifically on the artist's use of poetry. Twombly's library formed an extension of his studio and he sometimes painted with a book open in front of him. Drawing on original research in an archive that includes his paint-stained and annotated books, Mary Jacobus's account--richly illustrated with more than 125 color and black-and-white images--unlocks an important aspect of Twombly's practice. Jacobus shows that poetry was an indispensable source of reference throughout Twombly's career; as he said, he "never really separated painting and literature." Among much else, she explores the influence of Ezra Pound and Charles Olson; Twombly's fondness for Greek pastoral poetry and Virgil's Eclogues; the inspiration of the Iliad and Ovid's Metamorphoses; and Twombly's love of Keats and his collaboration with Octavio Paz. Twombly's art reveals both his distinctive relationship to poetry and his use of quotation to solve formal problems. A modern painter, he belongs in a critical tradition that goes back, by way of Roland Barthes, to Baudelaire. Reading Cy Twombly opens up fascinating new readings of some of the most important paintings and drawings of the twentieth century.

The first major work to examine Joseph Cornell's relationship to American modernism Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) is best known for his exquisite and alluring box constructions, in which he transformed found objects-such as celestial charts, glass ice cubes, and feathers-into enchanted worlds that blur the boundaries between fantasy and the commonplace. Situating Cornell within the broader artistic, cultural, and political debates of midcentury America, this innovative and interdisciplinary account reveals enchantment's relevance to the history of American modernism. In this beautifully illustrated book, Marci Kwon explores Cornell's attempts to convey enchantment-an ephemeral experience that exceeds rational explanation-in material form. Examining his box constructions, graphic design projects, and cinematic experiments, she shows how he turned to formal strategies drawn from movements like Transcendentalism and Romanticism to figure the immaterial. Kwon provides new perspectives on Cornell's artistic and graphic design career, bringing vividly to life a wide circle of acquaintances that included artists, poets, writers, and filmmakers such as Mina Loy, Lincoln Kirstein, Frank O'Hara, and Stan Brakhage. Cornell's participation in these varied milieus elucidates enchantment's centrality to midcentury conversations about art's potential for power and moral authority, and reveals how enchantment and modernity came to be understood as opposing forces. Leading contemporary artists such as Betye Saar and Carolee Schneemann turned to Cornell's enchantment as a resource for their own anti-racist, feminist projects. Spanning four decades of the artist's career, Enchantments sheds critical light on Cornell's engagement with many key episodes in American modernism, from Abstract Expressionism, 1930s "folk art," and the emergence of New York School poetry and experimental cinema to the transatlantic migration of Symbolism, Surrealism, and ballet.

The first compendium on robotic art of its kind, this book explores the integration of robots into human society and our attitudes, fears and hopes in a world shared with autonomous machines. It raises questions about the benefits, risks and ethics of the transformative changes to society that are the consequence of robots taking on new roles alongside humans. It takes the reader on a journey into the world of the strange, the beautiful, the uncanny and the daring - and into the minds and works of some of the world's most prolific creators of robotic art. Offering an in-depth look at robotic art from the viewpoints of artists, engineers and scientists, it presents outstanding works of contemporary robotic art and brings together for the first time some of the most influential artists in this area in the last three decades. Starting from a historical review, this transdisciplinary work explores the nexus between robotic research and the arts and examines the diversity of robotic art, the encounter with robotic otherness, machine embodiment and human-robot interaction. Stories of difficulties, pitfalls and successes are recalled, characterising the multifaceted collaborations across the diverse disciplines required to create robotic art. Although the book is primarily targeted towards researchers, artists and students in robotics, computer science and the arts, its accessible style appeals to anyone intrigued by robots and the arts.

This book presents a detailed account of Guillermo Kuitca's major bodies of work, analysing his diverse range of imagery and reflecting on his engagement with the spaces in which we live. Following Kuitca's development from the 1980s to his latest body of work, the narrative reveals an artist who has continually challenged himself and his audience with new kinds of painterly language. In Kuitca's hands, everyday visual material such as road maps, street plans, architectural blueprints and theatre seating charts are transformed into remarkable paintings. Their impact comes from their apparent engagement with dark subjects such as the Holocaust and Argentina's 'Dirty War,' as well as the artist's innovative imagery and techniques. Drawing on conversations and studio visits the author has had with the artist, Guillermo Kuitca reveals the multifarious elements of a challenging and exciting body of work. It is essential reading for anyone fascinated by this truly original artist.

Philippe Apeloig's design career began in 1985 at the Musee d'Orsay when he designed the poster for the Museum's first exhibition, `Chicago, Birth of a Metropolis'. He is noted for his posters, many of which are in the collection of MoMA, and his typography, including the typefaces Octobre and Drop. This exhibition and book surveys and explores the entirety of Apeloig's graphic design process and philosophy. His posters, logos, visual identities, books and animations are reproduced along with the steps in their development, and the major influences that fuel his work.

While recent studies in neuroscience and psychology have shed light on our sensory and perceptual experiences of art, they have yet to explain how contemporary art downplays perceptual responses and, instead, encourages conceptual thought. The Psychology of Contemporary Art brings together the most important developments in recent scientific research on visual perception and cognition and applies the results of empirical experiments to analyses of contemporary artworks not normally addressed by psychological studies. The author explains, in simple terms, how neuroaesthetics, embodiment, metaphor, conceptual blending, situated cognition and extended mind offer fresh perspectives on specific contemporary artworks - including those of Marina Abramovic, Francis Alys, Martin Creed, Tracey Emin, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Marcus Harvey, Mona Hatoum, Thomas Hirschorn, Gabriel Orozco, Marc Quinn and Cindy Sherman. This book will appeal to psychologists, cognitive scientists, artists and art historians, as well as those interested in a deeper understanding of contemporary art.

A unique combination of memoir and artistic biography, interspersed with original artworks, from the acclaimed artist and author of SELF-PORTRAIT. We are both painters. We can connect to each other through images, in our own unvoiced language. But I will try and reach you with words. Through talking to you I may come alive and begin to speak. Celia Paul has felt a lifelong connection to the artist Gwen John. There are extraordinary parallels in their lives and work. Both have always made art on their own terms. Both were involved with older male artists. Both worked hard to keep themselves and the sacred flame of their creativity from being extinguished by others. Letters to Gwen John is Paul's imagined correspondence with Gwen John, whose life and work have loomed so large in hers. These intimate, passionate, haunting letters allow Paul to reach across eras, to weigh up the sacrifices she has made, and to explore the rich possibilities of a life apart. With illuminating insights into the life and work of Gwen John, Letters to Gwen John is a unique form of memoir and conversation, and an unforgettable insight into a life devoted to making art.

This catalog presents works of sixteen leading contemporary artists that refer to ancient pictorial forms, patterns and symbols: Adel Abdessemed, Marina Abramovic, Sanford Biggers, Louise Bourgeois, Peter Buggenhout, Nathalie Djurberg, Amar Kanwar, Bharti Kher, Sigalit Landau, Tea Makipaa, Ana Mendieta, Mariella Mosler, Kiki Smith, Nancy Spero, Philip Taaffe, and Su-Mei Tse.