Boaz Vaadia (1951–2017), the internationally acclaimed sculptor, amassed a prodigious body of work over his 40-year artistic career. With Boaz Vaadia: Sculpture, Grounds For Sculpture in Hamilton, New Jersey, presented the first retrospective exhibition of his indoor and outdoor works in 2016 in a comprehensive survey of the artist's journey from abstraction to figuration. Detailing 125 works installed in two buildings and throughout the 42-acre sculpture park, the exhibition's color catalogue presents Vaadia's ritualistic and highly personal early works, his later sculptures in stone, slate, and bronze, and his explorations of the ancient genre of bas-relief. With the global recognition his art has received, he continued working at the edge, discovering new possibilities in the constantly shifting grounds of his sculpture. Boaz Vaadia: Sculpture is a celebration of the artist's long and prolific career, and his unwavering advancement of his art.

A compelling exploration of fragments in sculpture across time and cultures.

Some objects draw power from the way they have been broken. Becoming beautiful abstract shapes, they provoke consideration of how destruction can create something so aesthetically appealing. Beyond the visual, these fragments are compelling because they force us to confront the often unsettling stories of their breakage.

Published in conjunction with the National Gallery of Art and accompanying a traveling exhibition, this lavishly illustrated book explores our enduring fascination with broken statues through a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, featuring contributions by scholars and artists, along with examples of striking works from around the world spanning the third millennium BCE to the present. 

Organized in three sections, Broken begins by investigating what makes fragments so intriguing and reveals the optical and neurological processes behind the strong emotions they evoke. It then moves to the act of breaking itself, exploring the forces—both natural and human—that shaped these objects, the power dynamics of iconoclastic dismantling and defacement, and how various cultures treat broken statues. The book concludes by considering one of the most powerful ways humans have responded to fragments over the course of history: by creating new works that are intentionally fractured.

The trajectory of Don Gummer's career as a sculptor began in New York City in the late 1970s with his wall reliefs of painted wood, carefully layered geometric works exhibiting a strong architectural influence. Moving beyond wood to stone, bronze, stainless steel, aluminum, and glass as his primary materials, his artworks evolved into subtly inventive freestanding sculptures, often of monumental scale, that exhibit his unfailing attention to craftsmanship and detail.

In a 2001 interview with Peter Plagens, American artist and art critic, Gummer described his interest in sculpture as "the recontextualization of natural phenomena, of unaltered things brought into aesthetic balance by choosing and placing." Using balance, proportion, and his unique sense of harmony, the artist is able to make durable materials seem almost buoyant. Negative space becomes an intrinsic element in his work, imparting a sense that his exquisite, seemingly permanent forms are ultimately as fleeting as any of nature's creations would be. The Artist Book Foundation is delighted to present Don Gummer, a new monograph on the artist and his highly acclaimed body of work.

Intricate and innovative, George Sherwood's kinetic sculptures invite us to observe, experience, contemplate and engage more fully in the natural world around us.

American sculptor George Sherwood, with degrees in both art and engineering, explores aesthetic systems of space and time, as well as the dynamic interplay of objects in motion. Sherwood’s kinetic sculptures invite us to observe, experience, contemplate and engage more fully in the natural world around us. His works are often made of stainless steel, a reflective material that serves to integrate the works into the unique and often transient light of their environments. The choreography of each piece is governed by a set of basic movements, facilitated by an arrangement of aerodynamic surfaces connected by rotational points.

The Artist Book Foundation is pleased to present George Sherwood: Wind, Waves, and Light, the first monograph on this award-winning artist’s lustrous, subtly transformative works. Featuring 100 sculptures from Sherwood’s early whimsical explorations to his monumental commissions that have graced private and public gardens, city sites, and exhibition spaces around the world, readers will witness how changing winds, shades of light, times of day, precipitation, and the seasons’ changing colors alter the sculptures, animate their surroundings, and ignite the imagination.

In 1957, encouraged by Georgia O’Keeffe, artist Yayoi Kusama left Japan for New York City to become a star. By the time she returned to her home country in 1973, she had established herself as a leader of New York’s avant-garde movement, known for creating happenings and public orgies to protest the Vietnam War and for the polka dots that had become a trademark of her work. Her sculptures, videos, paintings, and installations are to this day included in major international exhibitions.

An expansive and revelatory study of Robert Smithson’s life and the hidden influences on his iconic creations

This first biography of the major American artist Robert Smithson, famous as the creator of the Spiral Jetty, deepens understanding of his art by addressing the potent forces in his life that were shrouded by his success, including his suppressed early history as a painter; his affiliation with Christianity, astrology, and alchemy; and his sexual fluidity. Integrating extensive investigation and acuity, Suzaan Boettger uncovers Smithson’s story and, with it, symbolic meanings across the span of his painted and drawn images, sculptures, essays, and earthworks up to the Spiral Jetty and beyond, to the circumstances leading to what became his final work, Amarillo Ramp.

While Smithson is widely known for his monumental earthwork at the edge of the Great Salt Lake, Inside the Spiral delves into the arc of his artistic production, recognizing it as a response to his family’s history of loss, which prompted his birth and shaped his strange intelligence. Smithson configured his personal conflicts within painterly depictions of Christ’s passion, the rhetoric of science fiction, imagery from occult systems, and the impersonal posture of conceptual sculpture. Aiming to achieve renown, he veiled his personal passions and transmuted his professional persona, becoming an acclaimed innovator and fierce voice in the New York art scene.

Featuring copious illustrations never before published of early work that eluded Smithson’s destruction, as well as photographs of Smithson and his wife, the noted sculptor Nancy Holt, and recollections from nearly all those who knew him throughout his life, Inside the Spiral offers unprecedented insight into the hidden impulses of one of modern art’s most enigmatic figures. With great sensitivity to the experiences of loss and existential strife that defined his distinct artistic language, this biographical analysis provides an expanded view of Smithson’s iconic art pilgrimage site and the experiences and works that brought him to its peculiar blood red water.

For nearly fifty years, John Van Alstine has created abstract sculptures forged from steel and stone. In John Van Alstine: Sculpture, 1971–2018, three notable essayists explore the sculptor's abstract landscapes that reveal the complex synergy between natural foces and man-made elements; by grappling with the challenges of balancing stone and steel, Van Alstine's indoor, outdoor, and site-specific sculptures are measured and calculated, yet simultaneously poetic; their swooping angular lines create expansive spaces beyond the limits of their stone-and-steel frames to unveil our collective history and imagination, illuminating a deft interplay of natural energies and the human experience.

The artist weaves into his works elements of mythology, celestial navigation, implements, human figures, movement, urban forms, and found objects, while using motion, balance, and intertia to incorporate the eternal forces of gravity, tension, and erosion. In an essay on his drawings, Van Alstine details the critical role they play in the initiation and planning of his projects, offering the reader a firsthand perspective on the artist's creative process. The Artist Book Foundation is gratified to publish this lavishly illustrated monograph on an esteemed and prolific contemporary artist.

Liu Shiming (1926–2010) is a revered Chinese artist whose works have had a distinct impact on the course of modern Chinese sculpture. Born in Tianjin in 1926, Shiming attended the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, where he was part of the first generation of sculptors trained by the People’s Republic of China to study both traditional Chinese art and French modernist principles. Shiming received early recognition for his work, and his student project Measuring Land (1950) was one of the first works exhibited abroad following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. 

Though well respected in China, the sculptor, who died in 2010 at the age of eighty-four, is only now beginning to win the wider recognition he deserves. Meanwhile, contemporary competitors are numberless, most of them Instagram-friendly, while art history tends to focus on towering names and indisputably major movements and events: Braque and Picasso inventing Cubism, Duchamp’s readymades redefining art itself, Warhol’s mind-bending Brillo Boxes, and so on. So why examine an artist in the middle ground? Perhaps, first, because that is where the vast majority of us live, trying to make sense of our lives and grateful for the occasional insight, release, or enrichment that visual art can bring us. Second, because the story of Liu Shiming reveals a great deal about the forces that have shaped postwar art worldwide. He was a man who sought to lead a simple life, dedicated entirely to art, in the midst of China’s epochal, dangerously complex twentieth-century social and political changes. 
 

Returning to Chicago from France, Taft established a bustling studio and began a twenty-one-year career as an instructor at the Art Institute, succeeded by three decades as head of the Midway Studios at the University of Chicago. This triumphant era included ephemeral sculpture for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition; a prolific turn-of-the-century period marked by the gold-medal-winning The Solitude of the Soul; the 1913 Fountain of the Great Lakes; the 1929 Alma Mater at the University of Illinois; and large-scale projects such as his ambitious program for Chicago's Midway with the monumental Fountain of Time. In addition, the book charts Taft's mentoring of women artists, including the so-called White Rabbits at the World's Fair, many of whom went on to achieve artistic success.

Lavishly illustrated with color images of Taft's most celebrated works, Lorado Taft: The Chicago Years completes the first major study of a great American artist.

In eighteenth-century Europe, connoisseurs, financiers, artists, and aristocrats alike all avidly collected the terracotta vases and statues made by Claude Michel, called Clodion. Yet, despite the widespread enthusiasm for his work, Clodion’s terracottas have since then been largely dismissed as decorative, feminine, or mere luxury. Modeling Sculpture, the first English-language monograph dedicated to Clodion’s terracotta oeuvre, counters such conventional narratives. Against the understanding of “serious” sculpture as works that publicly perpetuate the heroic actions and virtues of great men, author Elizabeth Saari Browne argues instead that philosophically engaged sculpture might be found in materials, forms, and places where one least expects it. Across this richly illustrated, multi-disciplinary study, earthen clay emerges as a medium suited to the flexible modes of thought advocated by some of the period’s most renowned philosophers, naturalists, and even arts reformers. This book therefore foregrounds clay’s potential to challenge the perceived primacy of white figurative statuary in art historiography, emblematic of hierarchical notions of class, power, learning, and prestige. 

The first of its kind, this authoritative open-access volume offers tips, guidelines, and best practices on preserving, installing, and storing neon artworks.

Neon lighting first emerged as a cutting-edge technology in the late nineteenth century, illuminating the night sky with bright, colorful commercial signage. Artists soon began to test its potential, and figures like Chryssa, Bruce Nauman, Dan Flavin, Mary Weatherford, and Glenn Ligon created iconic works that established neon as a legitimate artistic medium. As the earliest neon artworks approach one hundred years old, their conservation becomes ever more important. Unfortunately, the practice of preserving light-based art is absent from most conservation training programs. This publication fills that gap, offering an invaluable resource for conservators, collectors, preparators, and anyone else with a professional involvement with, or just curiosity about, neon artifacts.

Ellen Moody and Taylor Healy, conservators working with light- and time-based art, have created a comprehensive manual to serve as a practical tool kit for the installation, preservation, and storage of neon art. They provide foundational knowledge on history, technology, terminology, and best practices, along with step-by-step instructions, real-world case studies, and templates for documentation and identification. The online version of the publication is enhanced with informative, practical videos that give hands-on guidance on repairs and maintenance. This is an indispensable compendium for anyone actively engaged with or interested in the preservation of neon.

The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at getty.edu/publications/neon/ and includes zoomable illustrations, videos, and downloadable appendices. Also available are free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book.

Unlock the stories of Pablo Neruda’s rare nineteenth-century carved-wood ship figurehead collection in Chile, why they mattered in his tumultuous life, and how we benefit from them now.

Poet Pablo Neruda’s nineteenth-century ship figurehead collection in Chile is one of the most significant in the world. Containing carved wood images of dramatically postured men and women, these figures are now better understood due to years of research, a willingness to challenge Neruda’s ever-changing stories about them, and a realization that the names Neruda chose for his figureheads perhaps had more to do with his life than theirs. The rhythm and beauty of Neruda’s worn wood figures is counterpoint to his own tumultuous life as an author, politician, and communist dissident.

Collecting ship figureheads was central to Neruda’s passion for owning things made of wood, a material he said was his best friend, and for standing out among others as he gradually built the public persona that helped move him toward winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. With his choir of immobilized figureheads stationed upright in his living room and facing the Pacific Ocean, Neruda was surrounded by dramatic images from the sea that ignited his most powerful feelings. 

The nineteenth century saw figureheads on the bows of ships of sail and steam, yet when a figurehead was lost or removed, its history soon disappeared. The significant ship figureheads that Neruda avidly collected preserve that history and reveal new dimensions concerning his life and work. Each year, his collection is viewed by thousands of visitors to the Pablo Neruda Foundation’s house museum at Isla Negra.

The first major monograph on Peter DeCamp Haines, this title explores how the sculptor's interest in psychology and anthropology deeply informed his art.

This book is the first major monograph on the work of Peter DeCamp Haines (March 27, 1942–October 25, 2024), which builds on the evolution of Modernism as much as it harkens back to the Bronze Age. The clearest expression of this is a series of 1,000 elemental bronze “artifacts” he created over the course of nearly fifty years, to which he contributed yearly, ranging from palm-size pieces to colossal outdoor works. He called this output “a personal archaeology,” or “an archaeology of the subconscious,” referencing ancient tools, animal and human shapes, and the synchronicity of antique forms with the purely abstract.

Haines’s interest in psychology and anthropology deeply informed his art. Working in a Modernist tradition, his career pursued a continuing exploration of the formal attributes of sculpture: form, scale, negative space, and composition. As Haines saw it, one of the satisfactions of sculpture is that ideas such as wholeness, beauty, and timelessness can be expressed without words and one of the critical elements of this wordless communication is negative space. Thus, the doorways, windows, and silhouettes of his sculptures can suggest an area larger than the sculpture itself.

Some of the loveliest works of Archaic art were the Athenian korai—sculptures of beautiful young women presenting offerings to the goddess Athena that stood on the Acropolis. Sculpted in the sixth and early fifth centuries B.C., they served as votives until Persians sacked the citadel in 480/79 B.C. Subsequently, they were buried as a group and forgotten for nearly twenty-four centuries, until archaeologists excavated them in the 1880s. Today, they are among the treasures of the Acropolis Museum.

Mary Stieber takes a fresh look at the Attic korai in this book. Challenging the longstanding view that the sculptures are generic female images, she persuasively argues that they are instead highly individualized, mimetically realistic representations of Archaic young women, perhaps even portraits of real people. Marshalling a wide array of visual and literary evidence to support her claims, she shows that while the korai lack the naturalism that characterizes later Classical art, they display a wealth and realism of detail that makes it impossible to view them as generic, idealized images. This iconoclastic interpretation of the Attic korai adds a new dimension to our understanding of Archaic art and to the distinction between realism and naturalism in the art of all periods.

Speaking of Furniture: Conversations with 14 American Masters is a fresh, stimulating, and in-depth examination of the modus operandi of 14 accomplished—and diverse—furniture makers. An engaging history of studio furniture, this colorful, informative study includes engaging conversations with James Krenov, Wendell Castle, Jere Osgood, Judy Kensley McKie, David Ebner, Richard Scott Newman, Hank Gilpin, Alphonse Mattia, John Dunnigan, Wendy Maruyama, James Schriber, Timothy S. Philbrick, Michael Hurwitz, and Thomas Hucker. The insightful interviews illuminate how these creative and gifted craftspeople arrived professionally and what their craft means to them individually.

In his enlightening foreword, Edward S. Cook, Jr. maps out the background of the studio furniture movement. Author and furniture maker Roger Holmes offers an insider's perspective on the art and craft of producing exquisite contemporary furniture in his conversational introduction and maintains, "Art or craft, this is very personal work." This elegant presentation skillfully sheds light on the thought processes and techniques of a celebrated and exceptional gathering of studio furniture makers who are as unique as they are stellar. As sculptor and furniture designer Wendell Castle remarks, "What I admired was that... fine art and craft were the same thing."

Realist sculptor Carole A. Feuerman's human-figure sculptures express a refreshing perspective on the mundane but intensely personal activities of modern life. her powers of observation and versatility find unique expression through various materials that include marble, bronze, vinyl, and painted resins, while she incorporates both ancient and contemporary methods in the creation of her works. Swimmers: Carole Feuerman is a gorgeous and shimmering glimpse at transitory, contemplative moments in time, often captured in a veil of clear resin that replicates tumbling water droplets.

In his astute and insightful essay, John Yau describes Feuerman's exquisitely rendered figures as subjects "caught in a moment of transition that radiates an intense eroticism." She evokes an inward life for her figures that invites our speculation, while revealing a mysterious chasm between them and the viewer that can never be plumbed. We cannot know their thoughts and perhaps that is exactly the point. Feuerman fuses the tactile nature of her sculpture with a visual verisimilitude that provides us a fleeting glimpse into private and isolated environments—women stepping out of the shower, in the rain, or swimming—that suggest a meditative bliss.

With sculpture, paintings, prints, and drawings, award-winning artist John Himmelfarb explores the iconic American truck. An in-depth consideration of the vehicles that are intrinsically and culturally significant to the American landscape, Trucks: Recent Works by John Himmelfarb showcases the artist's diverse and lighthearted approach, adeptly shifting between mediums, style, and message during his decade-long contemplation of trucks and their specific functions. Under his skillful hands, the utilitarian vehicles of commerce and construction become unique and provocative art forms.

In 2005 and 2006, the truck as narrative becomes center stage for Himmelfarb's work. With his seamless, animated traverse of multiple mediums, viewers cannot help but smile as they appreciate the common truck through unique perspectives. In 2007, another tectonic change occurs in Himmelfarb's pursuit of his theme: as a result of a three-month residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center's Arts/Industry program, he begins his first meaningful foray into three-dimensional works.

An examination of Japanese contemporary art through the lens of ecocriticism and environmental history

Collectively referred to by the word tsuchi, earthy materials such as soil and clay are prolific in Japanese contemporary art. Highlighting works of photography, ceramics, and installation art, Bert Winther-Tamaki explores the many aesthetic manifestations of tsuchi and their connection to the country’s turbulent environmental history, investigating how Japanese artists have continually sought a passionate and redemptive engagement with earth.

In the seven decades following 1955, Japan has experienced severe environmental degradation as a result of natural disasters, industrial pollution, and nuclear irradiation. Artists have responded to these ongoing catastrophes through modes of “mudlarking” and “muckracking,” utilizing raw elements from nature to establish deeper contact with the primal resources of their world and expose its unfettered contamination. Providing a comparative assessment of more than seventy works of art, this study reveals Japanese artists’ engagement with a richly diverse repertoire of earthy materialities, elucidating their aesthetic properties, changing conditions, and cultural significance. 

By focusing on the role of tsuchi as a convergence point for a wide range of creative practices, this book offers a critical reassessment of contemporary art in Japan and its intrinsic relationship to the environment. Situating art within the context of ecology and urbanization, Tsuchi shows artists striving to explore and reprocess raw forms of earth beneath the corruptions of human activity.

Sculptor and furniture designer Wendell Castle (1932–2018) carved a distinct path in furniture making over nearly six decades of a distinguished career, and this long-awaited recording of his oeuvre, Wendell Castle: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1958–2012, beautifully presents the extraordinary scope of his artistry and craftsmanship. The voluminous accounting of his works, beginning with Castle's earliest, mid-century works through to his unabashed experiments with unconventional materials (gel-coated fiberglass and metallic automobile paint) and his latest signature wood laminations, is comprehensive and detailed. Three essays of varying perpectives introduce the catalogue raisonné followed by an extensive accounting of his enormous oeuvre, his exhibitions, numerous awards, and the collections of his works, as well as a substantive bibliography.

With his organic and whimsical approach to his various mediums, Castle seamlessly merged sculpture and design into one discipline, obscuring the distinction between the two. He invented the technique of carving stacked laminations of wood, and his later explorations into the qualities of fiberglass as a sculptural medium are unparalleled.

Wendell Castle (1932–2018), master furniture maker, designer, sculptor, and educator, was in the sixth decade of his extraordinary creativity when an emblematic exhibition of his signature works was mounted by the Museum of Art and Design in 2016. It blended the artist's seminal works with his latest collection, produced with digital technology. In part a self-reflection, this eponymous, full-color companion book examines some of Castle's historically representative works as well as significant contemporary furniture pieces, continuing his highly respected and acclaimed sculptural/functional dialogue. Castle, ever the innovator, was remarkable for his openness to new technologies; he not only embraced an initially complex practice but has "remastered" it. His vast oeuvre represents a prodigious lifework that began in 1958 and aligns with the development of the American art furniture movement.

The solo exhibition was a somewhat self-reflective examination of his early ground-breaking works that tested the boundaries of traditional furniture making by presenting his later innovations using new digital technologies such as 3D scanning and modeling, and computer-controlled milling—a digital "remastering" of his immense oeuvre. Unique perspectives on the master's work are presented by informative essays by authors well-versed on Castle's celebrated career.

How do students develop a personal style from their instruction in a visual arts program? Women Artists on the Leading Edge explores this question as it describes the emergence of an important group of young women artists from an innovative post-war visual arts program at Douglass College.

The women who studied with avant-garde artists at Douglas were among the first students in the nation to be introduced to performance art, conceptual art, Fluxus, and Pop Art. These young artists were among the first to experience new approaches to artmaking that rejected the predominant style of the 1950s: Abstract Expressionism. The New Art espoused by faculty including Robert Watts, Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, Geoffrey Hendricks, and others advocated that art should be based on everyday life. The phrase “anything can be art” was frequently repeated in the creation of Happenings, multi-media installations, and video art. Experimental approaches to methods of creation using a remarkable range of materials were investigated by these young women. Interdisciplinary aspects of the Douglass curriculum became the basis for performances, videos, photography, and constructions. Sculpture was created using new technologies and industrial materials. The Douglass women artists included in this book were among the first to implement the message and direction of their instructors.

Ultimately, the artistic careers of these young women have reflected the successful interaction of students with a cutting-edge faculty. From this BA and MFA program in the Visual Arts emerged women such as Alice Aycock. Rita Myers, Joan Snyder, Mimi Smith, and Jackie Winsor, who went on to become lifelong innovators. Camaraderie was important among the Douglass art students, and many continue to be instructors within a close circle of associates from their college years. Even before the inception of the women’s art movement of the 1970s, these women students were encouraged to pursue professional careers, and to remain independent in their approach to making art. The message of the New Art was to relate one’s art production to life itself and to personal experiences. From these directions emerged a “proto-feminist” art of great originality identified with women’s issues. The legacy of these artists can be found in radical changes in art instruction since the 1950s, the promotion of non-hierarchical approaches to media, and acceptance of conceptual art as a viable art form.