The Fundacion Cisneros' Conversaciones/Conversations series is dedicated to preserving firsthand testimonies of leading artists and intellectuals from Latin America. Argentinian artist Liliana Porter has lived and worked in New York since 1964; her work has been exhibited internationally and is represented in many public and private collections. Using a wide range of media--including sculpture, printmaking, works on canvas, photography, video and installation--Porter playfully mixes the absurd with the philosophical to create extraordinary portrayals of everyday scenes and plights. In this, the seventh volume of the Conversaciones series, Porter is in dialogue with art historian and critic Ines Katzenstein. She describes with simplicity and humor the ways in which her work blends the real with the representational, often in hypothetical yet convincing mini-dramas using mass-produced, kitsch objects that elicit both our compassion and laughter."

Born in 1899 to Russian Aristocrats, Tamara de Lempicka escaped the Bolsheviks by exchanging her body for freedom, dramatically beginning a sexual career that included most of the influential men and women she painted. Her paintings, like the artist herself, glow with beauty and sexuality. Contemporary critics, however, dismissed her gorgeously stylised portraits and condemned her scandalous lifestyle. A resurgence of interest in her work occurred in the 1980s, spurred by such celebrity collectors such as Jack Nicholson, Barbra Streisand and Madonna.

A collection of essential quotations and other writings from artist and icon Jean-Michel Basquiat One of the most important artists of the late twentieth century, Jean-Michel Basquiat explored the interplay of words and images throughout his career as a celebrated painter with an instantly recognizable style. In his paintings, notebooks, and interviews, he showed himself to be a powerful and creative writer and speaker as well as image-maker. Basquiat-isms is a collection of essential quotations from this godfather of urban culture. In these brief, compelling, and memorable selections, taken from his interviews as well as his visual and written works, Basquiat writes and speaks about culture, his artistic persona, the art world, artistic influence, race, urban life, and many other subjects. Concise, direct, forceful, poetic, and enigmatic, Basquiat's words, like his art, continue to resonate. Select quotations from the book: "I cross out words so you will see them more; the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them." "I think there are a lot of people that are neglected in art, I don't know if it's because of who made the paintings or what, but, um . . . black people are never really portrayed realistically or I mean not even portrayed in modern art." "Since I was 17, I thought I might be a star." "The more I paint the more I like everything." "I think I make art for myself, but ultimately I think I make it for the world."

What did it mean for painter Lee Krasner to be an artist and a woman if, in the culture of 1950s New York, to be an artist was to be Jackson Pollock and to be a woman was to be Marilyn Monroe? With this question, Griselda Pollock begins a transdisciplinary journey across the gendered aesthetics and the politics of difference in New York abstract, gestural painting. Revisiting recent exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism that either marginalised the artist-women in the movement or focused solely on the excluded women, as well as exhibitions of women in abstraction, Pollock reveals how theories of embodiment, the gesture, hysteria and subjectivity can deepen our understanding of this moment in the history of painting co-created by women and men. Providing close readings of key paintings by Lee Krasner and re-thinking her own historic examination of images of Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler at work, Pollock builds a cultural bridge between the New York artist-women and their other, Marilyn Monroe, a creative actor whose physically anguished but sexually appropriated star body is presented as pathos formula of life energy. Monroe emerges as a haunting presence within this moment of New York modernism, eroding the policed boundaries between high and popular culture and explaining what we gain by re-thinking art with the richness of feminist thought. -- .