Over the course of a career that spanned fifty years, Agnes Martin’s austere, serene work anticipated and helped to define Minimalism, even as she battled psychological crises and carved out a solitary existence in the American Southwest. ‘I paint with my back to the world’, she claimed; when she died at ninety-two, in Taos, New Mexico, it is said she had not read a newspaper in half a century. Here, for the first time, is an account of Martin’s extraordinary life, and a long- awaited critical discussion of her work. Nancy Princenthal tells her story chronologically – from Martin’s birth in Saskatchewan and her early days as an artist, living in derelict Manhattan shipping lofts with Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Ad Reinhardt and other artists as neighbours; to the seven years she stopped painting, just as her career was taking off, and the months she spent roaming the country in a pick-up truck; and her last thirty years, in Taos some of that time, in an adobe house she built with her own hands. Martin did not achieve recognition until she was in her late forties. Her work – pencilled grids on square canvases, washed with pale or neutral colours – at last receives the critical appraisal it deserves.

The 1970s was a time of deep division and newfound freedoms. Galvanized by The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique, the civil rights movement and the March on Washington, a new generation put their bodies on the line to protest injustice. Still, even in the heart of certain resistance movements, sexual violence against women had reached epidemic levels. Initially, it went largely unacknowledged. But some bold women artists and activists, including Yoko Ono, Ana Mendieta, Marina Abramovic, Adrian Piper, Suzanne Lacy, Nancy Spero and Jenny Holzer, fired up by women's experiences and the climate of revolution, started a conversation about sexual violence that continues today. Some worked unannounced and unheralded, using the street as their theatre. Others managed to draw support from the highest levels of municipal power. Along the way, they changed the course of art, pioneering a form that came to be called simply performance. Award-winning author Nancy Princenthal takes on these enduring issues and weaves together a new history of performance, challenging us to re-examine the relationship between art and activism, and how we can apply the lessons of that turbulent era to today

The book In the Deep Present by Craigie Horsfield contains the series of portraits made for Utrecht and Lugano on the occasion of the exhibition organised there in 2016 and 2017. More than 160 pieces are represented, along with various as-yet-unpublished illustrations of Horsfield's most recent work. Explanatory texts about the work of Craigie Horsfield by Bruno Fornari and Nancy Princenthal feature, as do the texts In the Deep Present by the artist himself. Text in English and Italian.

American artist Michelle Stuart (*1938 in California) is internationally known for a rich and diverse body of work stemming from her lifelong interest in the natural world and the cosmos. Working in drawing, sculpture, photography, video, installation and site-specific earthworks, she has pursued a subtle and responsive dialogue with nature, distinct from the epic gestures of American Land Art. Spanning the period from the late 1960s to the present day, this publication encompasses a varied and unconventional range of media, while highlighting Stuart's major contribution to the practice of drawing. During the seventies she won recognition for her monumental drawings made outdoors, which have the characteristics of specific sites ingrained in their surfaces. Other works respond to the Nazca Lines in Peru, the Uffington White Horse in the UK and New Mexican petroglyphs, pushing our understanding of drawing beyond the page. Featuring three new essays and an interview with Stuart, this publication will be the definitive resource on the pioneering artist's work to date. Exhibition schedule: Djanogly Art Gallery, Lakeside Art Centre, University of Nottingham, February 16-April 14, 2013 | Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York, July 21-October 27, 2013 | Santa Barbara Museum of Art, January 26-April 20, 2014