For the past thirty years Judy Pfaff's challenging and imaginative installations have set the pace during a dynamic and changing period in contemporary art. This richly illustrated book offers the first thorough look at the career of this influential artist who helped bring the revolutionary liveliness of the late 20th century to the walls and spaces of galleries and museums.
On the history of a pioneering installation-art space Long before it became commonplace, Rice Gallery was one of a handful of spaces in the US devoted to commissioning site-specific installation art. This book documents works by artists including El Anatsui, Shigeru Ban, Tara Donovan, Nicole Eisenman, Yayoi Kusama, Sol LeWitt and Judy Pfaff.
"Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" asked the prominent art historian Linda Nochlin in a provocative 1971 essay. Today her insightful critique serves as a benchmark against which the progress of women artists may be measured. In this book, four prominent critics and curators describe the impact of women artists on contemporary art since the advent of the feminist movement.
This facsimile edition collects all 19 issues of 'Art-Rite' magazine, edited by art critics Walter Robinson and Edit DeAk from 1973 to 1978. Robinson, DeAk and a third editor, Joshua Cohn, met as art history students at Columbia University, and were inspired to found the magazine by their art criticism teacher, Brian O'Doherty. 'Art-Rite', cheaply produced on newsprint, served as an important alternative to the established art magazines of the period. 'Art-Rite' ran for only five years, and published only 19 issues. But in that time the magazine featured contributions from hundreds of artists, a list that now reads like a who's-who of 1970s art: Yvonne Rainer, Gordon Matta-Clark, Alan Vega (Suicide), William Wegman, Nancy Holt, Jack Smith, Dorothea Rockburne, Robert Morris, Adrian Piper, Laurie Anderson, Carolee Schneemann and Carl Andre; critics such as Lucy Lippard contributed writing. Through its single-artist issues and its thematic issues on performance, video and artists' books, 'Art-Rite' championed the new art of its era.
"Balancing intense planning with improvisational decision-making, Judy Pfaff creates exuberant, sprawling sculptures and installations that weave landscape, architecture, and synthetic color into a tense yet organic whole. A pioneer of installation art in the 1970s, Pfaff synthesizes sculpture, painting, and architecture into dynamic environments in which space seems to expand and collapse, fluctuating between two and three dimensions." - Text from Art Babble (see link).
In 1985, winemaker Joe Benziger and Sonoma artist Bob Nugent struck on the idea of putting original art on special releases of Imagery Estate wines. The goal was straight-forward: commission the world's modern art luminaries to create works for reproduction onto wine labels. Two decades and 160 labels later, they have assembled a staggering collection of contemporary art, from the likes of Sol Lewitt, Terry Winters, Nancy Graves, John Baldessari, Judy Pfaff, and Bob Arneson. This book highlights 133 works of art, the best of the Imagery collection. The images are big and lush, and accompanied by biographical sketches of the artists' careers, as well as a short description of their individual ideas and methods. The pictorial index shows the works in their label-form, from 1985 to the most recent vintages. These images are evocations of wine's multi-faceted ability to inspire us.
Sandler discusses the major and minor artists and their works; movements, ideas, attitudes, and styles; and the social and cultural context of the period. He covers post-modernist art theory, the art market, and consumer society. American and European art and artists are included.
