America is haunted. Ghosts from its violent history--the genocide of Indigenous peoples, slavery, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and traumatic wars--are an inescapable and unsettled part of the nation's heritage. Not merely in the realm of metaphor but present and tangible, urgently calling for contact, these otherworldly visitors have been central to our national identity. Through times of mourning and trauma, artists have been integral to visualizing ghosts, whether national or personal, and in doing so have embraced the uncanny and the inexplicable. This stunning catalog, accompanying the first major exhibition to assess the spectral in American art, explores the numerous ways American artists have made sense of their own experiences of the paranormal and the supernatural, developing a rich visual culture of the intangible. Featuring artists from James McNeill Whistler and Kerry James Marshall to artist/mediums who made images with spirits during séances, this catalog covers more than two hundred years of the supernatural in American art. Here we find works that explore haunting, UFO sightings, and a broad range of experiential responses to other worldly contact.
This is the most comprehensive book ever published on the Chicago surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-77), a key figure in midcentury American surrealism. From the late 1930s until her death, Abercrombie made paintings populated by objects of personal significance--moons, towers, cats, pennants, Victorian furniture, shells, snails and doors--to create allegories for her own often precarious psychological states. Often presiding over these symbols was Abercrombie herself, who appears in numerous pictures as proud observer or witchy caricature. Abercrombie exhibited in Chicago and New York in the 1940s and '50s, and her salon became a center of Midwestern culture, hosting jazz musicians (such as her close friend Dizzy Gillespie), writers and artists. This book includes new scholarship by Robert Cozzolino; a memoir of Abercrombie by Robert Storr; the artist's own writing; a definitive text by art historian Susan Weininger; and a memoir by the artist's daughter, Dinah Livingston.
An award-winning writer rescues seven first-rate twentieth-century women artists from oblivion--their lives fascinating, their artwork a revelation. Who hasn't wondered where-aside from Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo-all the women artists are? In many art books, they've been marginalized with cold efficiency, summarily dismissed in the captions of group photographs with the phrase "identity unknown" while each male is named. Donna Seaman brings to dazzling life seven of these forgotten artists, among the best of their day: Gertrude Abercrombie, with her dark, surreal paintings and friendships with Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins; Bay Area self-portraitist Joan Brown; Ree Morton, with her witty, oddly beautiful constructions; Loïs Mailou Jones of the Harlem Renaissance; Lenore Tawney, who combined weaving and sculpture when art and craft were considered mutually exclusive; Christina Ramberg, whose unsettling works drew on pop culture and advertising; and Louise Nevelson, an art-world superstar in her heyday but omitted from recent surveys of her era. These women fought to be treated the same as male artists, to be judged by their work, not their gender or appearance. In brilliant, compassionate prose, Seaman reveals what drove them, how they worked, and how they were perceived by others in a world where women were subjects-not makers-of art. Featuring stunning examples of the artists' work, Identity Unknown speaks to all women about their neglected place in history and the challenges they face to be taken as seriously as men no matter what their chosen field-and to all men interested in women's lives.
One girl, one painting a day...can she do it? Linda Patricia Cleary decided to challenge herself with a year long project starting on January 1, 2014. Choose an artist a day and create a piece in tribute to them. It was a fun, challenging, stressful and psychological experience. She learned about technique, art history, different materials and embracing failure. Here are all 365 pieces. Enjoy!
Chicago has for decades years been one of the most prominent cities where European surrealism is avidly collected and displayed. However, there has yet to be a scholarly exhibition and catalogue that addresses the local manifestations of this international mode of art. A Home for Surrealism focuses on a select group of painters whose work in the 1940s and '50s both transformed the domestic and domesticated the surrealist, particularly in Chicago. Working independently, but within a chain of social and artistic relationships, this group explored the interior as a site of projected imagination and fantasy, and the self as the generator of such altered perception. Including contributions by Robert Cozzolino, Adam Jolles, and Joanna Pawlik, the book provides a richly illustrated account of an international movement's unlikely--but somehow ever so fitting--home in America.
This exhibition catalogue focuses on the art and friendships of the American artists Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-1977), Sylvia Fein (b. 1919), Marshall Glasier (1902-1988), Dudley Huppler (1917-1988), Karl Priebe (1914-1976), and John Wilde (b. 1919). The first intensive study of this close-knit group explores the artistic and personal relationships they shared. Cozzolino provides insight into a figurative branch of postwar American modernism that has been often neglected in favor of abstract expressionism. Distributed for the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison
In this dictionary of American art, 945 alphabetically arranged entries cover painters, sculptors, graphic artists, photographers, printmakers, and contemporary hybrid artists, along with important aspects of the cultural infrastructure.
Tucked away among the letters, diaries, and other ephemera in the Smithsonian's archives lies a trove of rarely seen snapshots of some of the twentieth century's most celebrated artists. Unlike the familiar official portraits and genius-at-work shots, these humble snaps capture creative giants with their guard down, in the moment, living life. Pablo Picasso stands proudly on a balcony with young daughter Maya—a tiny, meticulously inked annotation penned by an unknown hand proclaims that "he's very much in love." Jackson Pollock morosely carves a turkey while his mother, Stella, and wife, Lee Krasner, look on. A young Andy Warhol clowns for the camera with college friend Philip Pearlstein, and in a later shot more closely resembles his famously enigmatic public self at a gallery opening with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
For decades now, the story of art in America has been dominated by New York. It gets the majority of attention, the stories of its schools and movements and masterpieces the stuff of pop culture legend. Chicago, on the other hand . . . well, people here just get on with the work of making art. Now that art is getting its due. Art in Chicago is a magisterial account of the long history of Chicago art, from the rupture of the Great Fire in 1871 to the present, Manierre Dawson, László Moholy-Nagy, and Ivan Albright to Chris Ware, Anne Wilson, and Theaster Gates. The first single-volume history of art and artists in Chicago, the book—in recognition of the complexity of the story it tells—doesn’t follow a single continuous trajectory. Rather, it presents an overlapping sequence of interrelated narratives that together tell a full and nuanced, yet wholly accessible history of visual art in the city. From the temptingly blank canvas left by the Fire, we loop back to the 1830s and on up through the 1860s, tracing the beginnings of the city’s institutional and professional art world and community. From there, we travel in chronological order through the decades to the present. Familiar developments—such as the founding of the Art Institute, the Armory Show, and the arrival of the Bauhaus—are given a fresh look, while less well-known aspects of the story, like the contributions of African American artists dating back to the 1860s or the long history of activist art, finally get suitable recognition. The six chapters, each written by an expert in the period, brilliantly mix narrative and image, weaving in oral histories from artists and critics reflecting on their work in the city, and setting new movements and key works in historical context. The final chapter, comprised of interviews and conversations with contemporary artists, brings the story up to the present, offering a look at the vibrant art being created in the city now and addressing ongoing debates about what it means to identify as—or resist identifying as—a Chicago artist today. The result is an unprecedentedly inclusive and rich tapestry, one that reveals Chicago art in all its variety and vigor—and one that will surprise and enlighten even the most dedicated fan of the city’s artistic heritage. Part of the Terra Foundation for American Art’s year-long Art Design Chicago initiative, which will bring major arts events to venues throughout Chicago in 2018, Art in Chicago is a landmark publication, a book that will be the standard account of Chicago art for decades to come. No art fan—regardless of their city—will want to miss it.
