Landscape Body Dwelling documents and offers reflections on Charles Simond’s inaugural installation for Dumbarton Oaks’ contemporary art series, which launched in spring 2009. This volume demonstrates how contemporary culture connects us with the past, reinvigorating historical tropes while enlivening the institutions that continue to speak them.

A deep dive into the practice of performance artist Leigh Bowery that reveals the fullness of his extravagant range.

Leigh Bowery: Performative Costuming and Live Art is a critical exploration of the creative practice, social-historical context, and cultural impact of the late London-based artist Leigh Bowery. The diversity of Bowery’s work and his marginality as an artist who emerged during the 1980s from a subcultural milieu complicated and thwarted his cultural value, hindering his incorporation into art institutions and performance art narratives for some time. Drawing on a variety of disciplines and challenging research contexts, Sofia Vranou seeks to historicize Bowery’s multifaceted body of work and critically situate it within the expanded fields of visual culture and performance studies.

Through close analysis of Bowery’s key looks and non-theatrical performances, the book investigates the implications of his work in dominant histories of performance art and urgent discourses surrounding normativity, representations of illness, and identity politics. Thought-provoking and engaging, it focuses on Bowery’s costuming as a performative strategy that effectively blurs the boundaries between art and life; delves into his aesthetics of freakishness and narcissistic desire, reflects on his involvement with  BDSM practices and the performance of extremity, and unpacks the posttranssexual ethos behind his hybrid embodiments and trans-queer visual language.
 

Leon Bibel (1913–1995) was a prolific modern American artist who painted, printed, stamped, etched, sketched, and carved. He produced pieces that ranged from social realism to dreamy expressionism and was an aesthetic experimentalist, never working for too long in any medium or style. And despite Bibel's obvious talent, his work would have languished in obscurity were it not for the New Deal programs like the Federal Art Project and Public Works of Art Project.
 
Leon Bibel, the first biography of this eclectic artist, recounts his life from his birth in Szczebrzeszyn, Poland, in 1913, to his death in New Jersey in 1995. After immigrating to the United States in the 1920s, Bibel came of age during the Great Depression, when New Deal agencies recognized his abilities and supported his artistic endeavors. Working-class artists faced challenges after these programs folded, and Bibel would later spend twenty years as a New Jersey chicken farmer before resurrecting his art career in the 1960s.
 
Historian Richard Haw shows how Bibel's life was defined by the New Deal, his visionary artwork shaped by the era's commitment to social and economic justice. With reproductions of more than 240 of Bibel's works, most in vivid color, this book reveals how he depicted everything from the trauma of unemployment to the dignity of work, from the horrors of lynching to the pleasures of everyday life.

The Life and Work of Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757): The Queen of Pastel is the first extensive biographical narrative in English of Rosalba Carriera. It is also the first scholarly investigation of the external and internal factors that helped to create this female painter's unique career in eighteenth-century Europe. It documents the difficulties, complications, and consequences that arose then -- and can also arise today -- when a woman decides to become an independent artist. This book contributes a new, in-depth analysis of the interplay between society's expectations, generally accepted codices for gendered behaviour, and one single female painter's astute strategies for achieving success, as well as autonomy in her professional life as a famed artist. Some of the questions that the author raises are: How did Carriera manage to build up her career? How did she run her business and organize her own workshop? What kind of artist was Carriera? Finally, what do her self-portraits reveal in terms of self-enactment and possibly autobiographical turning points?

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. 
 

An engaging exploration of the quest for individuality within the rich tapestry of artistic traditions, by one of India’s best-known artists.
 
“The fulfillment of a modern Indian artist's wish to be part of a living tradition, i.e. to be individual and innovative, without being an outsider in his own culture, will not come of itself, it calls for concerted effort.”
 
In Living Tradition, a critical study of modern Indian art as it has evolved through continuous interaction with several traditions—foreign and indigenous—K. G. Subramanyan, one of India's most celebrated artists, offers a theoretical groundwork for that “concerted effort.” In the course of his study, he explores the distinctions between Indian and European traditions, the continuities in India's folk traditions, and the attempts of several thinkers and artists to identify an Indian artistic tradition or to deny it altogether in a quest for personal expression or universality. With over seventy-five illustrations in color complementing Subramanyan's thought-provoking essay, Living Tradition provides readers with a visually engaging exploration of the vibrant tapestry of Indian art.
 
Subramanyan played a pivotal role in shaping India’s artistic identity after Independence. Mani-da, as he was fondly called, seamlessly blended elements of modernism with folk expression in his works, spanning paintings, murals, sculptures, prints, set designs, and toys. Beyond his visual artistry, his writings have laid a solid foundation for understanding the demands of art on the individual. In the year of his centenary, Seagull is proud to publish his writings in special new editions.
 

The Logic of Disorder presents for the first time to the English-speaking world the writings of seminal Mexican contemporary artist Abraham Cruzvillegas. Renowned for his sculptures and drawings, Cruzvillegas’s artistic practice ranges from pedagogy to performance. It is through his writings, however, that we can best recognize the impressive depth of knowledge and theoretic clarity of an artist whose work never ceases to impress audiences across the globe.

Each of the texts included in this volume is fully annotated and is accompanied by a number of critical studies by leading curators and scholars, including Claudio Lomnitz of Columbia University and Mark Godfrey from Tate Modern.

Sculptor Lorado Taft helped build Chicago's worldwide reputation as the epicenter of the City Beautiful Movement. In this new biography, art historian Allen Stuart Weller picks up where his earlier book Lorado in Paris left off, drawing on the sculptor's papers to generate a fascinating account of the most productive and influential years of Taft's long career.

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.