Other Books

 The first survey of more than fifty years of drawing by a legendary sculptor and draftswoman.

Lee Bontecou (b. 1931) established a significant reputation in the 1960s with pioneering sculptures and reliefs made of raw and expressionistic materials. Her art is simultaneously organic and mechanical, and infused with biological, geological, and technological motifs.  These same qualities also animate a less-known but compelling body of work: her drawings. 

Ranging from her early soot on paper works created using powder from a welding torch to recent drawings in pencil and colored pencil that evoke cosmoses and microcosmic worlds, this stunning book is the first retrospective survey of Bontecou’s consistently innovative drawings.  More than sixty full-color plates, populated by imagery ranging from black voids to mechanomorphs to hybrid descendants of teeth, plants, and fish, are complemented by original essays from leading scholars who explore themes such as the drawings’ historical contexts, Bontecou’s use of the iconography of the void, and the eco-apocalyptic themes of an artist who came of age in the roiling political atmosphere of the 1960s.   

• Hardcover

Aperture 240 - Fall 2020

“Native America” is a special issue about photography and Indigenous lives and guest edited by the artist Wendy Red Star.

“Native America” considers the wide-ranging work of photographers and lens-based artists who pose challenging questions about land rights, identity and heritage, and histories of colonialism. Several contributors revisit or reconfigure photographic archives—from writer Rebecca Bengal’s look at the works of Richard Throssel and Horace Poolaw, to artist Duane Linklater’s intervention in a 1995 issue of Aperture, “Strong Hearts,” the magazine’s first volume devoted to Native American photographers.

“I was thinking about young Native artists,” says Red Star, “and what would be inspirational and important for them as a road map.”

That map spans a diverse array of intergenerational image-making, counting as lodestars the meditative assemblages of Kimowan Metchewais and installation works of Alan Michelson, the stylish self-portraits of Martine Gutierrez, and the speculative mythologies of Karen Miranda Rivadeneira and Guadalupe Maravilla. “Native America” also features contributions by distinguished writers and curators, including strikingly personal reflections from acclaimed poets Tommy Pico and Natalie Diaz.

With additional essential contributions from Rebecca Belmore and Julian Brave NoiseCat, as well as a portfolio from Red Star, the issue looks into the historic, often fraught relationship between photography and Native representation, while also offering new perspectives by emerging artists who reimagine what it means to be a citizen in North America today.

Format: Paperback
Publication date: 2020-09-08
Measurements: 9.25 x 12 x 0.6 inches

Lead support of the “Native America” issue of Aperture magazine is provided in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Henry Luce Foundation. Further generous support is provided by the Philip and Edith Leonian Foundation and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.Significant support of Aperture magazine is provided by The Kanakia Foundation. Additional lead support is provided by Jon Stryker and Slobodan Randjelović.

• For the summer 2019 issue of Aperture, Swinton, as guest-editor, draws upon the central themes of Orlando—gender fluidity, consciousness without limits, and the deep perspective of a long life—to offer a collection of images and writings that celebrate openness, curiosity, and human possibility. Virginia Woolf’s prescient 1928 novel Orlando tells the story of a young nobleman who, during the era of Queen Elizabeth I, lives for three centuries without aging and mysteriously shifts gender along the way.  In 1992, filmmaker Sally Potter released a now-classic adaptation of the book with Tilda Swinton in the starring role as Orlando. Since then, Woolf’s tale has continued to hold sway over Swinton, who describes the book’s ability “to change like a magic mirror. Where I once assumed it was a book about eternal youth, I now see it as a book about growing up, about learning to live.”“Woolf wrote Orlando,” Swinton notes, “in an attitude of celebration of the oscillating nature of existence.  She believed the creative mind to be androgynous. I have come to see Orlando far less as being about gender than about the flexibility of the fully awake and sensate spirit. 
• This issue of Aperture will be a salute to indetermination and limitlessness, and a heartfelt celebration of the fully inclusive and expansive vision of life exemplified by the extraordinary artists collected here.”This issue features contributions by artists and writers, including Michael Cunningham, Zackary Drucker, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Isaac Julien, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, Jamal Nxedlana, Elle Pérez, Sally Potter, Walter Pfeiffer, R. Ruby Rich, Antwaun Sargent, Viviane Sassen, Collier Schorr, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Mickalene Thomas, Lynne Tillman, Justin Torres, Marina Warner, Carmen Winant, and more
• Format: Paperback / softback
  Publication date: 2019-06-04
  Measurements: 9.25 x 12 x 0.6 inches

The Sande Society of the Mende people of Sierra Leone is a secret female regulatory society that both guards and transmits the ideals of feminine beauty so fundamental to the aesthetic criteria in Mende culture. 

In this eloquent and moving book, Sylvia Ardyn Boone describes the Society, its rituals and organization, and the mask worn by its members. Her book is an evocative account of Mende life and philosophy as well as a unique contribution to the study of African art, one based on African conceptions about the person and the human body.

This invaluable guide enables students to get the most from their art history course. Written in an accessible style, the book introduces two basic art historical methods - formal analysis and contextual analysis. In this new edition revising author Michael Cothren has extended the discussion on iconography and iconology, as well as adding discussions on the effects of the market and museums on art. Greater emphasis is placed on the global and multicultural aspects of art creation and analysis with new images and more case studies. There is more step-by-step guidance on how to use these methods to prepare for exams and write papers.

• Paperback
• 168 pages
• Publication date:  August 10, 2021

An unprecedented visual history of African women told in striking and subversive historical photographs--featuring an Introduction by Edwidge Danticat and a Foreword by Jacqueline Woodson.

Most of us grew up with images of African women that were purely anthropological--bright displays of exotica where the deeper personhood seemed tucked away. Or they were chronicles of war and poverty--“poverty porn.” But now, curator Catherine E. McKinley draws on her extensive collection of historical and contemporary photos to present a visual history spanning a hundred-year arc (1870–1970) of what is among the earliest photography on the continent. These images tell a different story of African women: how deeply cosmopolitan and modern they are in their style; how they were able to reclaim the tools of the colonial oppression that threatened their selfhood and livelihoods.

Featuring works by celebrated African masters, African studios of local legend, and anonymous artists, The African Lookbook captures the dignity, playfulness, austerity, grandeur, and fantasy-making of African women across centuries. McKinley also features photos by Europeans--most starkly, striking nudes--revealing the relationships between white men and the Black female sitters where, at best, a grave power imbalance lies. It’s a bittersweet truth that when there is exploitation there can also be profound resistance expressed in unexpected ways--even if it’s only in gazing back. These photos tell the story of how the sewing machine and the camera became powerful tools for women’s self-expression, revealing a truly glorious display of everyday beauty.

by Jeffrey K. Smith

By Ronni Baer ; with essays by Henk van Nierop, Herman Roodenburg, Eric Jan Sluijter, Marieke de Winkel, and Sanny de Zoete ; essays translated by Diane Webb.

The Dutch Republic in the 17th century was home to one of the greatest flowerings of painting in the history of Western art. Freed from the constraints of royal and church patronage, artists created a rich outpouring of works that circulated through an open market to patrons and customers at every level of Dutch society. The closely observed details of daily life captured in portraits, genre scenes and landscapes offer a wealth of information about the possessions, activities and circumstances that distinguished members of the social classes, from the nobility to the urban poor. The dazzling array of paintings gathered here--by artists such as Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch and Gerard ter Borch, as well as Rembrandt and Vermeer--illuminated by essays from leading scholars, invites us to explore a vibrant early modern society and its reflection in a golden age of brilliant painting.

• Hardcover, 344 pages

by Claire Chao  & Isabel Sun Chao 

A high position bestowed by China's empress dowager grants power and wealth to the Sun family. For Isabel, growing up in glamorous 1930s and '40s Shanghai, it is a life of utmost privilege. But while her scholar father and fashionable mother shelter her from civil war and Japanese occupation, they cannot shield the family forever.

Lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched, Remembering Shanghai follows five generations from a hardscrabble village to vibrant Shanghai to the bright lights of Hong Kong. By turns harrowing and heartwarming, this vivid memoir explores identity, loss and the unpredictable nature of life against the epic backdrop of a nation and a people in turmoil.

by Rachel Z. DeLue

Arthur Dove, often credited as America’s first abstract painter, created dynamic and evocative images inspired by his surroundings, from the farmland of upstate New York to the North Shore of Long Island. But his interests were not limited to nature. Challenging earlier accounts that view him as simply a landscape painter, Arthur Dove: Always Connect reveals for the first time the artist’s intense engagement with language, the nature of social interaction, and scientific and technological advances.

Rachael Z. DeLue rejects the traditional assumption that Dove can only be understood in terms of his nature paintings and association with photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz and his circle. Instead, she uncovers deep and complex connections between Dove’s work and his world, including avant-garde literature, popular music, meteorology, mathematics, aviation, and World War II. Arthur Dove also offers the first sustained account of Dove’s Dadaesque multimedia projects and the first explorations of his animal imagery and the role of humor in his art. Beautifully illustrated with works from all periods of Dove’s career, this book presents a new vision of one of America’s most innovative and captivating artists—and reimagines how the story of modern art in the United States might be told.

• Hardcover

by Kathryn Watterson (Author), Cornel West (Foreword)

 I Hear My People Singing shines a light on a small but historic black neighborhood at the heart of one of the most elite and world-renowned Ivy-League towns―Princeton, New Jersey. The vivid first-person accounts of more than fifty black residents detail aspects of their lives throughout the twentieth century. Their stories show that the roots of Princeton’s African American community are as deeply intertwined with the town and university as they are with the history of the United States, the legacies of slavery, and the nation’s current conversations on race.

Drawn from an oral history collaboration with residents of the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood, Princeton undergraduates, and their professor, Kathryn Watterson, neighbors speak candidly about Jim Crow segregation, the consequences of school integration, World Wars I and II, and the struggles for equal opportunities and civil rights. Despite three centuries of legal and economic obstacles, African American residents have created a flourishing, ethical, and humane neighborhood in which to raise their children, care for the sick and elderly, worship, stand their ground, and celebrate life. Abundantly filled with photographs, I Hear My People Singing personalizes the injustices faced by generations of black Princetonians―including the famed Paul Robeson―and highlights the community’s remarkable achievements. The introductions to each chapter provide historical context, as does the book’s foreword by noted scholar, theologian, and activist Cornel West.

An intimate testament of the black community’s resilience and ingenuity, I Hear My People Singing adds a never-before-compiled account of poignant black experience to an American narrative that needs to be heard now more than ever. 

• Hardcover

 Anatomy: Exploring the Human Body is a visually compelling survey of more than 5,000 years of image-making. Through 300 remarkable works, selected and curated by an international panel of anatomists, curators, academics, and specialists, the book chronicles the intriguing visual history of human anatomy, showcasing its amazing complexity and our ongoing fascination with the systems and functions of our bodies. Exploring individual parts of the human body from head to toe, and revealing the intricate functions of body systems, such as the nerves, muscles, organs, digestive system, brain, and senses, this authoritative book presents iconic examples alongside rarely seen, breathtaking works. The 300 entries are arranged with juxtapositions of contrasting and complementary illustrations to allow for thought-provoking, lively, and stimulating reading. 

 Art AIDS America is the first comprehensive overview and reconsideration of 30 years of art made in response to the AIDS epidemic in the United States. This book foregrounds the role of HIV/AIDS in shifting the development of American art away from the cool conceptual foundations of postmodernism and toward a new, more insistently political and autobiographical voice. Art AIDS America surveys more than 100 works of American art from the early 1980s to the present, reintroducing and exploring the whole spectrum of artistic responses to HIV/AIDS, from in-your-face activism to quiet elegy. 

 For 500 years the holy city of Vrindavan in northern India has been a haven for India's dispossessed widows.  Their ultimate dream is to reach Moksha--heaven--where they will find freedom from the cycle of death and rebirth and live surrounded by their gods forever. Fazal Sheikh's photographs capture the meditative mood of the city and his portraits of the widows convey their sense of acceptance of life's nearing its end and a longing for what is to come. 

A Material Legacy: The Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Collection of Contemporary Art (Duke University Press) is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2016.

Comprised of more than 30 large-scale works in two- and  three-dimensions and drawn entirely from the Nancy A. Nasher and David  J. Haemisegger Collection, A Material Legacy is a  multi-generational exhibition that illustrates the material impulse found in contemporary art-making practices. Nearly all of the works in  the exhibition have been made in the previous decade, providing an almost real-time glimpse into the varied approaches and innovative techniques of art being made in the second decade of the 21st century. The exhibition reveals the various ways in which contemporary artists manifest a material tendency,  from the politically-charged works of Ivan Navarro and Kara Walker, the  formal complexity of Tony Cragg, and the ascetic repetition of Sol  Lewitt, to the colorful exuberance of Katharina Grosse and Elliot  Hundley, among many others. 

• Hardcover, 112 pages
• 100 color illustrations

By Dawn's Early Light: Jewish Contributions to American Culture from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War

By Dawn's Early Light: Jewish Contributions to American Culture from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War by Leonard L. Milberg is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2016. 

This 352-page catalogue, with 13 scholarly essays, discusses how Jews began to speak publicly the colonial period. At the dawn of the Republic, they were new to American public life. Yet as the United  States started its grand experiment with liberty, and began to invent a culture of its own. Jews, too, began a grand experiment of living as  equals. In a society that promised exceptional freedom, this was both liberating and confounding. As individuals, they were free to  participate as full citizens in the hurly-burly of the new nation’s  political and social life. But as members of a group that sought to  remain distinctive, freedom was daunting. In response to the challenges  of liberty, Jews adopted and adapted American and Jewish artistic idioms  to express themselves in new ways as Americans and as Jews. In the  process, they invented American Jewish culture, and contributed to the  flowering of American culture during the earliest days of the Republic. 

The exhibition, organized by the Princeton University Library, featured more than 160 books, maps, manuscripts, prints, and paintings, including  some of the earliest novels, plays, scientific treatises, and religious  works produced by Jews in the United States.    

• Paperback
• 75 full-color illustrations  

Gainsborough's Family Album is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum  in 2019.   

Spanning more than four decades, Gainsborough's family portraits chart the period from the mid-1740s, when he plied his trade in his native Suffolk, to his most successful latter years at his luxuriously appointed studio in London's West End. Alongside this story of a provincial 18th-century artist's rise to fame and fortune runs a more private narrative, about the role of portraiture in the promotion of family values, at a time when these were assuming a recognizably modern form. 

In the first of three introductory essays, David H. Solkin writes on Gainsborough himself, placing his family portraits in the context of earlier practice. Ann Bermingham explores Gainsborough's portraits of  his daughters, with particular reference to two finished double  portraits painted seven years apart and the tragic story arising from  them. Susan Sloman discusses Margaret's role as her husband's business  manager, its effect on the family dynamic and hence the visual representation of its members. 

• Hardcover

This volume features a total of 83 vintage prints by eight Magnum photographers―Werner Bischof, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Ernst Haas, Erich Lessing, Jean Marquis, Inge Morath, and Marc Riboud―in large-format reproductions, around the theme of “photographic humanism”: people and their everyday surroundings, photographed unsensationally by committed photojournalists who believed in educating and bettering the world through their work.

Houses or domestic buildings are often among the first projects young architects design. For David Adjaye, such early commissions connected him to a rising generation of creators with whom he shared a range of sensibilities. His artistry, clever use of space, and inexpensive, unexpected materials resulted in many innovative and widely published houses. 

This monograph presents the fifteen finest and most recent examples, from Africa to Brooklyn, from desolate farmlands to urban jungles. Chronicled through informed descriptions and detailed and photographically rich visual documentation, the results testify to the importance of Adjaye’s growing inventiveness and provide powerful ideas for residential architecture.

300+ illustrations, 250+ in color 

 Through its thematic organization into six chapters―Realism and Beyond, Post-Pop Landscapes, New Romanticism, Constructed Realities, Abstracted Topographies, and Complicated Vistas―the book affords a generous window into the very best of contemporary landscape painting, from Cecily Brown’s sensual, fleshy landscapes to Peter Doig’s magic realist renderings of Trinidad, Maureen Gallace’s serene views of beach cottages and the foaming ocean, David Hockney’s radiant capturings of seasonal change in the English countryside, Julie Mehretu’s dynamically cartographic abstractions, Alexis Rockman’s mural-sized, postapocalyptic dioramas, and far beyond.