Explorations by 12 native American artists and writers into the images that have our ideas of Indianness, and the complex relationship of photography to identity.

The New Press is proud to publish a new paperback edition of "Mixed Blessings," the first book to discuss the cross-cultural process taking place in the work of contemporary Latino, Native, African, and Asian American artists. Rich with illustrations of artworks in many different media, and filled with incisive quotes and unsettling reports, it is more than a book about art; it is a complex meditation on the relationships of people to their cultures. Lucy R. Lippard, one of our most original and insightful writers on art, challenges conventional approaches and explores the role of images in a changing society. Among her subjects are the uncertainty of exile; the confusion of identity in attempts to climb out of the melting pot; and art that speaks for itself, reversing stereotypes and reclaiming history and memory. The New Press edition features a new introduction by Lippard that reconsiders the issues first presented in "Mixed Blessings " when it appeared in 1990 and evaluates the state of multicultural art today.

Janet Pritchard’s romance with the American West began with horseback riding, watching movies, and hearing her dad’s dreams of being a cowboy. When she began to spend adolescent summers in Wyoming during the 1960s, her world changed forever, as she fell under the spell of natural wonder in the shadow of the Grand Tetons. Only later did she recognize her feelings as a response to what nineteenth-century Romantics called the sublime. A vintage 1916 picture postcard of Golden Gate Canyon by F. Jay Haynes inspired this project. When Pritchard turned it over and read the message face=Calibri>– “I cannot describe the Yellowstone as the dictionary is only a book. It is more than scenery. In some places, it is so beautiful that the men take off their hats, and the women are silent!” face=Calibri>– she was back in a childhood place of wonder tempered by a lifetime of work as an artist and teacher in landscape photography. Formed by fire and ice, embraced by a nation seeking an ancient past with a future as grand as the landscapes it inhabited, Yellowstone was established as the world’s first national park by an Act of Congress in 1872. One hundred fifty years later, the park and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem continue to occupy an iconic role in the public imagination of Yellowstone as a place that is both real and ideal. Here, in this complex ecosystem where wild nature and culture meet, the complexities of our relationship to the natural world are revealed unlike any other place. Yellowstone is truly unique, and each generation who visits it invests Yellowstone with ideas, beliefs, and values reflecting its historical moment. In More than Scenery: Yellowstone, an American Love Story, Janet Pritchard surveys these relationships with her captivating photographs and insightful text, and Lucy R. Lippard’ sets the table with her heartfelt introduction to the world’s romance with Yellowstone. This book reveals why Yellowstone is so important to American and the world and how its landscapes reflect more than scenery.

Distinguished photographer Edward Ranney presents nearly one hundred extraordinary photographs of the Peruvian huacas--the sacred rock shrines carved by Inca artisans roughly between 1440 and 1532 AD. Ranney's photographs evoke the sacred power that the highland landscape around Cuzco held for the Incas, revealing how aspects of nature such as caves and springs, in addition to rock outcrops, were integral to Inca culture and served as a focus of ritual attention. This extended to items on a more intimate scale, as with special stones or unusual landscape details. The book concludes with an extensive series of pictures featuring the shrines and landscape of Machu Picchu. In her closing essay, Lucy R. Lippard discusses the cultural context of the huacas and how contemporary research and thinking view this unique achievement of ancient America.

A spirited memoir by artist Aviva Rahmani, offering a relatable narrative to discuss trigger point theory and the importance of eco-art activism. Divining Chaos is an intimate personal memoir of unparalleled transparency into the moments in Rahmani's life that shaped her as an artist and activist. Detailing the history that led her to two seminal projects-Ghost Nets, restoring a coastal town dump to flourishing wetlands, and The Blued Trees Symphony, which applied her premises to challenge natural gas pipelines with a novel legal theory about land use-Rahmani shares the decisions that shaped her life's work and thinking. Her discussions about trigger point theory argue for how to predict, confront, and determine outcomes to the ecological challenges we face today.

Dive into the art world of the closely allied artists Mark Dion & Alexis Rockman. Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: Journey to Nature’s Underworld accompanies the first two-person survey exhibition of these closely allied artists, offering a compelling tour through ecological concerns central to their celebrated careers and into the shadowy depths of the threatened natural world. Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman were among the earliest contemporary artists to address, and even anticipate, the epic ecological problems we now face. This publication unites some twenty-five sculptures and paintings by both artists along with selected works on paper and a major new collaborative diorama. As explored in the book’s introduction, an essay by Lucy R. Lippard, and a new joint interview, the artists probe our strained relationship with the environment and the consequences of reigning ideologies about nature.

In Ranch Gates of the Southwest, Daniel Olsen and Henk van Assen present more than 100 full-color photographs of ranch gates taken across Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona. From rugged and functional to stylized and adorned, ranches with names such as F. V. Cuahope Ranch, High Lonesome, Felix River Ranch, and Rancho Quatro Hermanas reveal cultural history, landscape features, and individualism through language and design. Lucy R. Lippard's introduction offers historical and cultural context of ranches and their gates. Landscape architecture professor Kenneth I. Helphand explains the environmental history of ranches from land appropriation and naming to the impact of gates on the landscape. In their own essays, Olsen and van Assen tell the behind-the-scenes story of making the book and describe type design and language from their perspectives as designers and photographers. Ranch Gates of the Southwest is both a sumptuous documentary record and a tribute to a quintessentially American symbol.

In Six Years Lucy R. Lippard documents the chaotic network of ideas that has been labeled conceptual art. The book is arranged as an annotated chronology, into which is woven a rich collection of original documents including texts by and taped discussions among and with the artists involved and by Lippard, who has also provided a new preface for this edition. The result is a book with the character of a lively contemporary forum that provides an invaluable record of the thinking of the artists - an historical survey and essential reference book for the period.

Colorfully written and illustrated memoir of the activist art writer Lucy Lippard Stuff: Instead of a Memoir is a short, abundantly illustrated autobiography of the American art writer, activist, and sometime curator Lucy R. Lippard. Describing tchotchkes, photographs, and art in her unpretentious New Mexico home, the author informally narrates key events and relationships in her 86-year-long, highly creative life, starting with her family roots and her childhood in New York, Louisiana, Virginia, and Maine. Through anecdotal and often humorous memories, we follow the author through her youth, adulthood, relationships, and her thirty-five years in New York City, where she organized dozens of exhibitions, authored hundreds of articles, and co-founded Heresies: A Feminist Journal of Art and Politics, the artist's-book center Printed Matter, and activist artists group PAD/D. Lippard touches on the roles she played in Conceptual Art and the Feminist Art movement in the 1960s through the 1980s. Her accounts of more recent years focus on the art, landscape, culture, and communities of the American Southwest, where she moved in the early 1990s. This “anti-memoir” also mentions Lippard’s twenty-five books, but few of her many honors.

In" The Lure of the Local" Lucy R. Lippard weaves together cultural studies, history, geography, and contemporary art to provide a fascinating examination of our multiple senses of place.

Divided into five parts--Around Here; Manipulating Memory; Down to Earth: Land Use; The Last Frontiers: Cities and Suburbs; and Looking Around--the book extends far beyond the confines of the art worlds, including issues of community, land use, perceptions of nature, how we produce the landscape, and how the landscape affects our lives. Praised by critics and readers alike, she consistently makes unexpected connections between contemporary art and its political, social, and cultural contexts.

A spirited memoir by artist Aviva Rahmani, offering a relatable narrative to discuss trigger point theory and the importance of eco-art activism. Divining Chaos is an intimate personal memoir of unparalleled transparency into the moments in Rahmani's life that shaped her as an artist and activist. Detailing the history that led her to two seminal projects-Ghost Nets, restoring a coastal town dump to flourishing wetlands, and The Blued Trees Symphony, which applied her premises to challenge natural gas pipelines with a novel legal theory about land use-Rahmani shares the decisions that shaped her life's work and thinking. Her discussions about trigger point theory argue for how to predict, confront, and determine outcomes to the ecological challenges we face today.

This first comprehensive work on Mary Shaffer illuminates her radical life and art, from a single mother in the '70s entering the male-dominated world of glass art to the renowned master she is today. A pioneering figure in the American Studio Glass Movement, she expanded the art form with her innovative mid-air slumping technique, which uses gravity to create flowing, organic shapes from glass. Nearly 200 photos covering four decades feature her iconic slumped and cast glass art, as well as large outdoor sculptures, conceptual installations, and commissioned pieces. Personal stories shed light on integral figures, moments, and developments in studio glass art throughout her career, giving rare insider insight to artists, students, and collectors. A foreword by Jane Adlin and contributions from Lucy R. Lippard and William Warmus delve further into Shaffer's artistic philosophy and legacy-one rooted in dissolving the binaries of liquid/solid, female/male, intangible/tangible, personal/political.

This book is a visual exploration of Ancestral Pueblo sites at Chacon Canyon and its extension throughout the San Juan Basin into the northern reaches of Mesa Verde. Pairing early photographs of the Chacoan world with contemporary rephotographic images, Goin sets out to examine how "ruins", which J B Jackson famously wrote bring a sense of time scale to the landscape, are constructed and interpreted according to cultural ideas held by archaeologists and preservationists bound by the limits of their disciplines and sense of cultural ownership. The book asks, "why save things, and what should be saved"? Lucy R Lippard's detailed text draws on the vast literature and ongoing research on the so-called "mysteries" of Chaco. Conflicting narratives stem from the differing ways time is measured in different cultures -- astronomically, historically, and environmentally. The stories that have come down from the many Native nations that are heirs to the Chaco and Mesa Verde worlds (Including Keres, Zuni, Tewa, Navajo and Ute) are juxtaposed, like the photographs, against the "scientific" views of those who control the sites and the literature today, raising the question of cultural ownership. Whose story is it to tell? To whom does the past belong? Time and Time Again offers a kaleidoscopic view, considering the multiple truths that are known and can be hypothesised about Chaco and Mesa Verde. The juxtaposition of historical photographs with contemporary images attempts to go beneath the surface to investigate the role of time in archaeological sites, especially those that have been "preserved" and reconstructed. The idea that two photographs can stop time without considering the intervening years is intriguing. The photographs -- primarily from the period of the late 19th century through the 1930s -- and rephotographed by Peter Goin provide two arbitrary points, paralleling the equally arbitrary choices made by historic preservationists working on ancient sites. The rephotograph shows what has happened but gives no hint about the interim or causes. Photography and tourism add another layer to the disjunctions between what is known and what is told. Another factor is an inquiry into how we measure time in these places -- astronomically, historically, as a narrative of natural change, and through stories told by generations of Hopi, Navajo, Keres and Tewa Pueblo people, who are variously heirs to the sites and the cultures. There is also the question of cultural "ownership". Whose story is it to tell? Whose ancestors built these structures and lived there? To whom does the past belong?