The first monograph on the influential contemporary Cuban–American interdisciplinary artist and writer Coco Fusco. Tomorrow, I will become an island is the first in-depth study of the performances, videos and social practice of the influential Cuban–American artist Coco Fusco. Featuring contributions by renowned scholars of art history, performance art and Cuban cultural politics as well as an essay by the artist herself, the book offers a comprehensive review of Fusco’s interdisciplinary art practice and her transnational perspective on race, gender and power. For more than three decades, Fusco has been a leader in conversations around the intersection of identity, feminism, culture, and politics in the Americas and beyond. Emerging during the 1980s as a pioneering advocate of multiculturalism in the arts, Fusco utilizes performance, video, exhibition making, archival research and writing to reflect upon the ways that intercultural relations and colonial histories shape the construction of the self and perceptions of cultural difference. Her work has critically examined society from a postcolonial perspective, engaging with debates about cultural politics throughout the Americas, Europe and elsewhere. This expansive approach is highlighted through a broad range of works that address themes including post-revolutionary Cuba, racial stereotypes, feminist politics, animal psychology, ethnographic displays, suppressed colonial records, military interrogation and sex tourism. The book will accompany an international touring retrospective of the artist’s work starting in 2023.

Delegation is the first comprehensive monograph by Apsaalooke/Crow artist Wendy Red Star, whose photography recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective. Red Star centers Native American life and material culture through imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations. Whether referencing nineteenth-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, she constantly questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation. Including a dynamic array of Red Star's lens-based works from 2006 to the present, and a range of essays, stories, and poems, Delegation is a spirited testament to an influential artist's singular vision. Copublished by Aperture and Documentary Arts

The first comprehensive publication to capture Hayes's unique blend of performance and social engagement which has been at the forefront of questions of feminist history, queer time, and protest culture for over a decade American artist Sharon Hayes uses photography, film, video, sound, performance, and text to interrogate the intersections between the personal and collective sphere. Her deeply affective and queer approach to history and politics draws particular attention to the language of twentieth-century activism as well as drama, anthropology, and journalism. This book is the first to feature all of Hayes's most significant projects, from the ten-hour performance My Fellow American 1981-1988 to her Monument Lab addressing the absence of monuments to women in Philadelphia. A professor of fine art at the University of Pennsylvania, Hayes's work has been shown at the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Documenta 12 in Kassel, and the 55th Venice Biennale, as well as in the most prestigious museums around the world. Her re-examination of protest, speech, and history is one of the most powerful reflections of the complexity and the urgency of our times. Sharon Hayes is the latest addition to the acclaimed Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series.

Positioning Alice Neel as a champion of civil rights, this book explores how her paintings convey her humanist politics and capture the humanity, strength, and vulnerability of her subjects   “One of the most ambitious and thorough collections of Neel’s work to date.�—Allison Schaller, Vanity Fair   “For me, people come first,� Alice Neel (1900–1984) declared in 1950. “I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being.� This ambitious publication surveys Neel’s nearly 70-year career through the lens of her radical humanism. Remarkable portraits of victims of the Great Depression, fellow residents of Spanish Harlem, leaders of political organizations, queer artists, visibly pregnant women, and members of New York’s global diaspora reveal that Neel viewed humanism as both a political and philosophical ideal. In addition to these paintings of famous and unknown sitters, the more than 100 works highlighted include Neel’s emotionally charged cityscapes and still lifes as well as the artist’s erotic pastels and watercolors. Essays tackle Neel’s portrayal of LGBTQ subjects; her unique aesthetic language, which merged abstraction and figuration; and her commitment to progressive politics, civil rights, feminism, and racial diversity. The authors also explore Neel’s highly personal preoccupations with death, illness, and motherhood while reasserting her place in the broader cultural history of the 20th century. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (March 22–August 1, 2021)   Guggenheim, Bilbao (September 17, 2021–January 30, 2022)   de Young Museum, San Francisco (March 12–July 10, 2022)

Today's artists have an unprecedented level of choice with regard to materials and methods available to them, yet the processes involved in making artworks are rarely addressed in books or exhibitions on art. Here, Glenn Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson argue that the materials and methods used to make artworks hold the key to artists' motivations, their attitudes to authorship, uniqueness and the value of objects, the economic and social contexts from which they emerge, and their approach to the perceived opposition between materiality and conceptualism in art. The book's introduction sets out a history of trends in artistic production and the possible catalysts for the proliferation of production strategies since the mid-twentieth century, followed by nine chapters that explore different methods and media. Detailed examples are interwoven with the discussion, including visuals that reveal the intricacies of each technique or material and its overall effect when presented as an artwork. Artists featured include Ai Weiwei, Ron Arad, Chris Burden, Katharina Fritsch, Isa Genzken, Jeff Koons, Los Carpinteros, Haroon Mirza, Takashi Murakami, Gerhard Richter, Doris Salcedo and Santiago Sierra

This volume offers a comprehensive look at the career of Mika Rottenberg (born 1976). Each chapter is devoted to one of the major videos/installations for which Rottenberg has become known, with an abundance of installation views, video stills, planning diagrams and source materials. Additional illumination is provided through texts by Rottenberg herself that accompany each project. The book also includes drawing and photography, significant bodies of work by Rottenberg not previously explored in book form. Also included is a major new text by award-winning poet, novelist, humorist and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum, as well as texts on the artist by Rose Art Museum director Christopher Bedford, and author and theorist Julia Bryan-Wilson. The book also contains a thorough biography and bibliography of the artist to date, making this a comprehensive resource on Rottenberg.

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.

In 1974, women in a feminist consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed a mock organization called the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Emblazoning its logo onto t-shirts, the group wryly envisioned female collective textile making as a practice that could upend conventions, threaten state structures, and wreak political havoc. Elaborating on this example as a prehistory to the more recent phenomenon of "craftivism" the politics and social practices associated with handmaking Fray explores textiles and their role at the forefront of debates about process, materiality, gender, and race in times of economic upheaval. Closely examining how amateurs and fine artists in the United States and Chile turned to sewing, braiding, knotting, and quilting amid the rise of global manufacturing, Julia Bryan-Wilson argues that textiles unravel the high/low divide and urges us to think flexibly about what the politics of textiles might be. Her case studies from the 1970s through the 1990s including the improvised costumes of the theater troupe the Cockettes, the braided rag rugs of US artist Harmony Hammond, the thread-based sculptures of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuna, the small hand-sewn tapestries depicting Pinochet's torture, and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt are often taken as evidence of the inherently progressive nature of handcrafted textiles. Fray, however, shows that such methods are recruited to often ambivalent ends, leaving textiles very much "in the fray" of debates about feminized labor, protest cultures, and queer identities; the malleability of cloth and fiber means that textiles can be activated, or stretched, in many ideological directions. The first contemporary art history book to discuss both fine art and amateur registers of handmaking at such an expansive scale, Fray unveils crucial insights into how textiles inhabit the broad space between artistic and political poles high and low, untrained and highly skilled, conformist and disobedient, craft and art.

From her early rarely seen Riot Grrrl-influenced fanzines and performances to a career that has produced seminal films, fiction, sculptures, public art, and even a smartphone app, Miranda July has proven adept at articulating the poignancy and humour of the human plight while also achieving enormous acclaim along the way. This chronological retrospective includes July's performance and video projects, award- winning films, digital multimedia, and written pieces which make clear the multidimensionality of her work. The book includes photography, stills, and archival ephemera and is narrated by friends, collaborators, curators, assistants, and audience members including David Byrne, Spike Jonze, Lena Dunham, Carrie Brownstein, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, as well as July herself. This behind-the-scenes commentary reveals an intimate perspective on the process, struggles, and grit involved in forging one's own path. What emerges is just how singular her voice is-from a movie narrated by an injured cat to a performance that builds an intentional community; from sculpture that engages the public to an interfaith charity shop in a London department store. July may be impossible to categorise, but the importance of her work and her status as an essential cultural icon with wide-ranging appeal is irrefutable.

Wherever there have been nuclear weapons and nuclear fission, there have also been cameras. Camera Atomica explores the intimate relationship between photography and nuclear events, to uncover how the camera lens has shaped public perceptions of the atomic age and its anxieties. Photographs have a crucial place in the representation of the atomic age and its anxieties. Published in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario to coincide with a major exhibition there in 2014. Camera Atomica examines narratives beyond the "technological sublime" that dominates much nuclear photography, suppressing representations of the human form in favour of representations of B-52 bombers and mushroom clouds. The book proposes that the body is the site where the social environment interacts with the so-called "atomic road": uranium mining and processing, radiation research, nuclear reactor construction and operation, and weapons testing. Cameras have both recorded and - in certain instances - provided motivation for the production of nuclear events. Their histories and technological development are intimately intertwined. All photographs, including nuclear photographs, have the capability to function affectively by working on the emotions and fascinating audiences. Through a wide range of visual documentation, Camera Atomica raises questions such as: what has the role of photography been in underwriting a public image of the bomb and nuclear energy? Has the circulation of photographic images heightened or lessened anxieties, or done both at the same time? How should the different visual protocols of photography be understood?

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, in response to the political turbulence generated by the Vietnam War, an important group of American artists and critics sought to expand the definition of creative labor by identifying themselves as 'art workers'. In the first book to examine this movement, Julia Bryan-Wilson shows how a polemical redefinition of artistic labor played a central role in minimalism, process art, feminist criticism, and conceptualism. In her close examination of four seminal figures of the period - American artists Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and Hans Haacke, and art critic Lucy Lippard - Bryan-Wilson frames an engrossing new argument around the double entendre that 'art works'. She traces the divergent ways in which these four artists and writers rallied around the 'art worker' identity, including participating in the Art Workers' Coalition - a short-lived organization founded in 1969 to protest the war and agitate for artists' rights - and the New York Art Strike. By connecting social art history and theories of labor, this book illuminates the artworks and protest actions that were central to this pivotal era in both American art and politics. This is a Best Book of 2009, "Artforum Magazine".