This book presents the fascinating untold story of art-world tastemaker Edith Halpert, who sold, promoted, and effectively defined American art in the 20th century.
This enlightening and thought-provoking look at New York City’s postwar art scene focuses on the galleries and the artists that helped transform American art. While the achievements of New York City’s most renowned postwar artists—de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, Franz Kline— have been studied in depth, a large cadre of lesser-known but influential artists came of age between 1952 and 1965. Also understudied are the early, experimental works by more well- known figures such as Mark di Suvero, Jim Dine, Dan Flavin, and Claes Oldenburg. Focusing on innovative artist-run galleries, this book invites readers to reevaluate the period—uncovering its diversity, creativity, and nuances, and tracing the spaces’ influence during the decades that followed. Inventing Downtown charts the development of artist-run galleries in Lower Manhattan from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s, showing how the area’s multicultural spirit played a major role in shaping the artworks exhibited there. The book explores 14 key spaces in which styles such as Pop, Minimalism, and performance and installation art thrived. Excerpts from 33 revealing interviews with artists, critics, and dealers, conducted by Billy Klu&̈ver and Julie Martin, offer unique personal insight into the era’s creative milieu. Taken together, the book’s essays and interviews provide a distinctly new assessment of how downtown New York’s fertile environment nurtured an innovative art scene.
In an era when American artists didn't count and women were expected to stay home, Edith Gregor Halpert burst onto the fledgling New York gallery scene, defying all cultural and societal rules. In 1926, Halpert, just twenty-six years old, opened one of the first art galleries in Greenwich Village and set about turning the art world upside down. Her Downtown Gallery, which she ran for forty-four years, laid the groundwork for the art market's modern era, and its aggressive promotion and sales tactics. Halpert cultivated the most illustrious art collectors of the day, invented the market for folk art, and pushed the first group of American artists working in a modern vernacular into the history books, including Stuart Davis, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ben Shahn, and Arthur Dove. Despite all this, Edith Halpert herself has been lost to history. Until now. In The Girl with the Gallery, journalist Lindsay Pollock brings Halpert and her era vividly back to life, tracing the story of how this remarkable woman, who started out a penniless Jewish immigrant, made it her mission to fight for American art and artists. Illlustrated with eight pages of full color photographs, this is biography at its finest, an unforgettable story of class, money, vanity, jealousy, and tragic loss.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.
Presenting the latest iteration of this crucial exhibition, always a barometer of contemporary American art The 2022 Whitney Biennial is accompanied by this landmark volume. Each of the Biennial's participants is represented by a selected exhibition history, a bibliography, and imagery complemented by a personal statement or interview that foregrounds the artist's own voice. Essays by the curators and other contributors elucidate themes of the exhibition and discuss the participants. The 2022 Biennial's two curators, David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, are known for their close collaboration with living artists. Coming after several years of seismic upheaval in and beyond the cultural, social, and political landscapes, this catalogue will offer a new take on the storied institution of the Biennial while continuing to serve--as previous editions have--as an invaluable resource on present-day trends in contemporary art in the United States.
The renowned Caldecott Honoree and illustrator of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom provides a moving, intimate, and inspiring inside look at her colorful picture book career. Lois Ehlert always knew she was an artist. Her parents encouraged her from a young age by teaching her how to sew and saw wood and pound nails, and by giving her colorful art supplies. They even gave her a special spot to work that was all her own. Today, many years and many books later, Lois takes readers and aspiring artists on a delightful behind-the-scenes tour of her books and her book-making process. Part fascinating retrospective, part moving testament to the value of following your dreams, this richly illustrated picture book is sure to inspire children and adults alike to explore their own creativity.
Judith Nasby, founding director and curator of the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, animates the story of the gallery from its humble beginnings in the hallways of a university campus in 1916 to its latest incarnation as the internationally recognized Art Gallery of Guelph. The book is beautifully illustrated with eighty images of artworks in the permanent collection, beginning with the gallery's first acquisition, Tom Thomson's 1917 masterpiece The Drive, the last large canvas he painted before his tragic death. As curator, Nasby oversaw the creation of one of the most comprehensive sculpture parks in Canada and the amassing of a permanent collection of some nine thousand artworks. In The Making of a Museum Nasby reveals how the museum developed its internationally recognized collection of contemporary Inuit drawings and wall hangings that toured four continents. She discusses the development of the collection's specializations in contemporary works by Canadian silversmiths; historical European etchings; Woodland and Northeastern Indigenous beadwork; and others that arose from curatorial collaborations, such as molas by Kuna women artists from Panama and contemporary paintings and indigenous woodcuts from Chongqing, China. Nasby recounts her long career as founding director and curator, peppering the hundred-year history of cultural development on the University of Guelph campus and in the city with humorous anecdotes and personal insights to reveal how arts institutions can be created through dedication, serendipity, and perseverance.