A New York Times best art book of 2021 "[A] gold mine of a book . . . Funny, biting, morbid, it's a page-turner for sure."-Holland Cotter, New York Times Ray Johnson (1927-1995) was a renowned maker of meticulous collages whose works influenced movements including Pop Art, Fluxus, and Conceptual Art. Emerging from the interdisciplinary community of artists and poets at Black Mountain College, Johnson was extraordinarily adept at using social interaction as an artistic endeavor and founded a mail art network known as the New York Correspondence School. Drawing on the vast collection of Johnson's work at the Art Institute of Chicago, this volume gives new shape to our understanding of his artistic practice and features hundreds of pieces that include artist's books, collages, drawings, mail art, and performance documentation. In keeping with Johnson's democratic, rhizomatic, and antihierarchical ethos, this indispensable resource on the artist's oeuvre contains 700 illustrations, many of them never before published, and twenty-one short essays by various contributors that allow readers to dip into and out of the book in a nonlinear manner. Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago Exhibition Schedule: Art Institute of Chicago (November 26, 2021-March 21, 2022)

A beautifully illustrated look at the work of one of today's most unique and exciting artists Bisa Butler (b. 1973) is an American artist who creates arresting and psychologically nuanced portraits composed entirely of vibrantly colored and patterned fabrics that she cuts, layers, and stitches together. Often depicting scenes from African American life and history, Butler invites viewers to invest in the lives of the people she represents while simultaneously expanding art-historical narratives about American quiltmaking. Situating her interdisciplinary work within the broader history of textiles, photography, and contemporary art, contributions by a group of scholars-and entries by the artist herself-illuminate Butler's approach to color, use of African-print fabrics, and wide-ranging sources of inspiration. Offering an in-depth exploration of one of America's most innovative contemporary artists, this volume will serve as a primary resource that both introduces Butler's work and establishes a scholarly foundation for future research. Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago Exhibition Schedule: Katonah Museum of Art, New York (March 15-October 4, 2020) Art Institute of Chicago (November 14, 2020-September 6, 2021)

An eye-opening presentation of largely unknown figurative drawings by a renowned pioneer of abstraction Featuring one hundred figurative works on paper by Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015), this volume shows a new side of an artist best known for abstraction. These informal depictions of friends and expressive self-portraits—all rarely or never previously displayed or published—span the entirety of Kelly’s career, from the mid-1940s to the early 2000s. Throughout his life, Kelly made portraits as a means of keeping his hand adept at drawing, which provided a place to test his ideas, refine his bold use of lines, and interrogate the space between naturalism and abstraction. These works also capture his social milieu, which intersected with other creative circles and the queer community. He painstakingly recorded how his own appearance changed over time, and once described some of these sketches by saying, “I use myself in order to draw.” The accompanying critical essays unpack the ways in which such intimate efforts were fundamental to Kelly’s practice and situate this important aspect of his work within the artist’s wider oeuvre. Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago Exhibition Schedule: Art Institute of Chicago (July 1–October 23, 2023)

Dog and Cat were best friends. Since Dog was bigger than Cat, he assumed that his brain was bigger than Cat's brain. So, Dog believed that he, alone, could do the thinking for both of them. When Cat decided that he did not want Dog to make decisions for him, the chase began. Who was right? Who was wrong? What would you have done? You decide.