Artists Respond

How the Vietnam War changed American art By the late 1960s, the United States was in a pitched conflict in Vietnam, against a foreign enemy, and at home—between Americans for and against the war and the status quo. This powerful book showcases how American artists responded to the war, spanning the period from Lyndon B. Johnson’s fateful decision to deploy U.S. Marines to South Vietnam in 1965 to the fall of Saigon ten years later. Artists Respond brings together works by many of the most visionary and provocative artists of the period, including Asco, Chris Burden, Judy Chicago, Corita Kent, Leon Golub, David Hammons, Yoko Ono, and Nancy Spero. It explores how the moral urgency of the Vietnam War galvanized American artists in unprecedented ways, challenging them to reimagine the purpose and uses of art and compelling them to become politically engaged on other fronts, such as feminism and civil rights. The book presents an era in which artists struggled to synthesize the turbulent times and participated in a process of free and open questioning inherent to American civic life. Beautifully illustrated, Artists Respond features a broad range of art, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, performance and body art, installation, documentary cinema and photography, and conceptualism. Published in association with the Smithsonian American Art Museum Exhibition Schedule Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC March 15–August 18, 2019 Minneapolis Institute of Art September 28, 2019–January 5, 2020

Located less than a mile from Juárez, the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso is a non-collecting institution that serves the Paso del Norte region. In Curating at the Edge, Kate Bonansinga brings to life her experiences as the Rubin’s founding director, giving voice to a curatorial approach that reaches far beyond the limited scope of “border art” or Chicano art. Instead, Bonansinga captures the creative climate of 2004–2011, when contemporary art addressed broad notions of destruction and transformation, irony and subversion, gender and identity, and the impact of location on politics. The Rubin’s location in the Chihuahuan desert on the U.S./Mexican border is meaningful and intriguing to many artists, and, consequently, Curating at the Edge describes the multiple artistic perspectives conveyed in the place-based exhibitions Bonansinga oversaw. Exciting mid-career artists featured in this collection of case studies include Margarita Cabrera, Liz Cohen, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, and many others. Recalling her experiences in vivid, first-person scenes, Bonansinga reveals the processes a contemporary art curator undertakes and the challenges she faces by describing a few of the more than sixty exhibitions that she organized during her tenure at the Rubin. She also explores the artists’ working methods and the relationship between their work and their personal and professional histories (some are Mexican citizens, some are U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, and some have ancestral ties to Europe). Timely and illuminating, Curating at the Edge sheds light on the work of the interlocutors who connect artists and their audiences.

Nearly 200 comic book writers and artists provide fictional accounts of the terrist attacks of September 11, 2001.

A warning, a movement, a collection borne of protest. In Watch Your Head, poems, stories, essays, and artwork sound the alarm on the present and future consequences of the climate emergency. Ice caps are melting, wildfires are raging, and species extinction is accelerating. Dire predictions about the climate emergency from scientists, Indigenous land and water defenders, and striking school children have mostly been ignored by the very institutions – government, education, industry, and media – with the power to do something about it. Writers and artists confront colonization, racism, and the social inequalities that are endemic to the climate crisis. Here the imagination amplifies and humanizes the science. These works are impassioned, desperate, hopeful, healing, transformative, and radical. This is a call to climate-justice action. Edited by Madhur Anand, Stephen Collis, Jennifer Dorner, Catherine Graham, Elena Johnson, Canisia Lubrin, Kim Mannix, Kathryn Mockler, June Pak, Sina Queyras, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Rasiqra Revulva, Yusuf Saadi, Sanchari Sur, and Jacqueline Valencia Proceeds will be donated to RAVEN and Climate Justice Toronto.

This is a book of combat, in which little quarter will be given to certain tendencies in the art world and the pessimistic cynicism and childish hypocrisy by which they are pushed forward. Ruckstull makes his point with 175 illustrations from the art world.

Archaeological digs have turned up sculptures in Inuit lands that are thousands of years old, but "Inuit art" as it is known today only dates back to the beginning of the 1900s. Early art was traditionally produced from soft materials such as whalebone, and tools and objects were also fashioned out of stone, bone, and ivory because these materials were readily available. The Inuit people are known not just for their sculpture but for their graphic art as well, the most prominent forms being lithographs and stonecuts. This work affords easy access to information to those interested in any type of Inuit art. There are annotated entries on over 3,761 articles, books, catalogues, government documents, and other publications.

You are an artist. You've mastered your art form, and you're out in the world living the artist's life. But you also want to make a difference in the world as a teaching artist. You know how to pursue excellence in your art form; how can you pursue excellence in teaching artistry? A Teaching Artist's Companion: How to Define and Develop Your Practice is a how-to reference for veteran and beginning teaching artists alike. Artist-educator Daniel Levy has been working in classrooms, homeless shelters and correctional facilities for over thirty years. With humor and hard-won insight, Levy and a variety of contributing teaching artists narrate their successes and failures while focusing on the practical mechanics of working within conditions of limited time and resources. Levy organizes teaching artist practice within a framework of View, Design, and Respond. View is everything you value and believe about teaching and learning; Design is what you plan before you go into a classroom; Respond is how you react to and support your students face to face. With the aid of checklists, worksheets, and primary sources, A Teaching Artist's Companion invites you to define your own unique view, and guides your observing, critiquing, and shaping your practice over time.

Music Book is a 64-page facsimile artist's book by Sarah Cain, comprising a series of colorful abstractions painted directly over a collection of vintage sheet music. The original book of music was found in Switzerland and Cain's paintings within collide with and respond to the previous owner's handwritten notes. Music Book is an extension of Cain's works on paper that balance her installation and large-scale painting practice: these works are intimate meditations; intricate and small-scale. Cain has been painting Music Book since 2008 and has carried it through three studios. It is this journal of time that you can open up, start, close, put away, like a diary. Music Book is co-published by X Artists' Books and the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum on the occasion of Cain's exhibition, Sarah Cain--Enter the Center.

This book focuses on the performance art of Marilyn Arsem, an internationally acclaimed performance artist known for her innovative and experimental work. Arsem’s work addresses women’s history and myth-making capacities, the potency of site and geography, the idea of the audience as witnesses and the intimacy of one-to-one works. One of the most prolific performance artists working in the United States today, Arsem performs carefully choreographed durational actions that are developed site-responsively and range from deceptively simple interventions to elaborately orchestrated actions. This edited volume seeks to extend Arsem’s legacy beyond the audiences of her live performances and enter her work into the lexicon of the art world. Accompanied by 200 images, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of performance studies, feminist performance, feminist art history and performance history. It will also contribute to the history of alternative spaces and galleries, which is only now being written. I have had the privilege of knowing Marilyn for over 30 years. Her work has given me so many epiphanies about live art, time-based art practice and durational performance practice. How and why do you choose a single action and enact it over an extended period of time? How do you respond to site and create a sacred meditational zone; a reflexive space about the human condition? And most importantly, how do you teach future generations about the importance of living while making art as a spiritual and philosophical practice? This book is yet another example of Arsem’s legacy. Fundamental, I’d say. Guillermo Gómez-Peña Watching Marilyn Arsem perform can be a slow, careful, vulnerable and heart-stoppingly profound experience. To see her is to know better the complex, intermingling particularities of body, space, time, being and action. Reading this comprehensive, lucidly written and deeply insightful book – the first significant publication on Arsem’s practice as a performance artist – will enable new perspectives on a major artist’s work. It also sheds vivid light upon enduring themes for the critical encounter with art: duration and doing, materiality and nothingness, truth and representation, commitment and experiment, togetherness and solitude, experience and endurance. Dominic Johnson, Queen Mary University of London