Field Language presents the work of an extraordinary couple who together left the rural lifeways of their Mennonite upbringing to go “into the world” to create forms of modern art that reflected on the places and culture they came from. Published on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition devoted to the working relationship between abstract painter Warren Rohrer and his wife, poet Jane Turner Rohrer, this sumptuously illustrated book explores the Rohrers’ painting and poetry in relation to their biographies and to the nature of modernism and modernity. The artists, poets, and historians contributing to this volume present a variety of perspectives on the Rohrers, situating their work within the context of modernism, the changing agricultural landscapes of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and the aestheticization of local craft practices. Through the work of these two highly original and creative artists, Field Language invites readers to consider relationships between global art movements and local visual cultures, issues of land use, the sustainability of rural communities and cultures, and our own relationships with agricultural landscapes, seasonal change, labor, and human need and desire. In addition to the editors, the contributors include Christopher Campbell, Steven Z. Levine, Nancy Locke, Sally McMurry, Janneken Smucker, William R. Valerio, Jonathan Frederick Walz, and Douglas Witmer.

A Small Radius of Light maps the territory artist G. Daniel Massad has explored for almost four decades. After earning degrees in English at Princeton and the University of Chicago and working for a time as a psychotherapist, Massad made the decision to pursue graduate work in painting in 1979. Two years later, while working on his MFA at the University of Kansas, Massad made an unexpected shift from abstraction to still life, and from oil to pastel as a painting medium. His abandonment of painterly gesture for knife-edge precisionism led him in the late 1980s to the painstaking reenactment of minute detail in order to express, as he puts it, “the way I encounter the world.” Since 1990, still life’s traditional tabletop and its implied interior space have given way in his work to less easily definable architectural fragments of brick or stone; the darkness surrounding these broken walls and cairns is deep, immeasurable, and richly potent. Over the last two decades, Massad has moved past description and metaphor, layering into his images other kinds of data—maps, words, numbers, constellations, personal symbols—all of which suggest readings of his remarkable still lifes as aniconic portraiture, implied narrative, and visual autobiography. This book accompanies an exhibition of the same name organized by the Palmer Museum of Art and features a comprehensive essay by curator Joyce Henri Robinson and forty-three “backstories” by the artist. These memoir-like reflections invite us to peer into Massad’s artistic, emotional, and mental process as he moves from making the intangible tangible, revealing along the way sources and associations that precede the final reenactment of the world around him—a world brought into focus by a small radius of light.

Patrons and collectors Barbara and James Palmer have long played a vital role in the museum that bears their name. A Gift from the Heart: American Art from the Collection of James and Barbara Palmer documents in its entirety what is arguably one of the finest private collections of American art in the country. Amassed over more than three decades, the collection features notable works by well-known nineteenth-century artists and boasts strengths in Ashcan realism and Stieglitz-circle modernism, as well as works by noted artists of the mid- to late twentieth century.

Much of the book comprises thematic essays written by invited scholars--university professors, museum and gallery professionals, and independent curators--who each consider the broader sociohistorical context of American art and culture as they delve into the particulars of the collection. Interspersed throughout the book are a series of short "In Focus" essays, highlighting a number of the most notable works in the collection. The remainder of the book is an extensive, fully illustrated catalogue of the 200+ paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and ceramics collected by the Palmers, including works that have already been donated to the museum and the remaining works, all of which will be gifted in the future.

Aside from the editor, the contributors are Robert Cozzolino, John Driscol, Randall R. Griffey, Molly S. Hutton, Lauren Lessing, G. Daniel Massad, Leo G. Mazow, Patrick J. McGrady, Jan Keene Muhlert, Marshall N. Price, Sarah Rich, and Elizabeth Hutton Turner.