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. The Artist Book Foundation is delighted to announce the forthcoming publication of Don Gummer, a new monograph on the artist and his highly acclaimed body of work. Gummer was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1946 and grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he attended the Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University. He subsequently received both a BFA and an MFA from Yale University’s School of Fine Arts. 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’s works can be found in many public collections including the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio; the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts; and Chase Manhattan Bank and Chemical Bank, both in New York City. He has received a number of awards from prestigious organizations such as the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he was Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. Some of his most recent sculptures appeared around Indianapolis in conjunction with his 2016 exhibition, Back Home Again.

Empty Plinths: Monuments, Memorials, and Public Sculpture in Mexico responds to the unfolding political debate around one of the most contentious public monuments in North America, Mexico City’s monument of Christopher Columbus on Avenida Paseo de la Reforma. In convening a diverse collective of voices around the question of the monument’s future, editors José Esparza Chong Cuy and Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa probe the unstable narratives behind a selection of monuments, memorials, and public sculptures in Mexico City, and propose a new charter that informs future public art commissions in Mexico and beyond. At a moment when many such structures have become highly visible sites of protest throughout the world, this new compilation of essays, interviews, artistic contributions, and public policy proposals reveals and reframes the histories embedded within contested public spaces in Mexico.

Empty Plinths is published alongside a series of artist commissions organized together with several major cultural institutions in Mexico City, including the Museo Tamayo, the Museo de Arte Moderno, and the Museo Experimental el Eco.

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 forces 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 inertia 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. Van Alstine’s works have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions and are found in the permanent collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art, and the Phillips Collection, to name but a few. His works are also found in numerous public and private collections. The Artist Book Foundation is gratified to announce the publication of this lavishly illustrated monograph on an esteemed and prolific contemporary artist.

More Art in the Public Eye offers critical insight into the ever-growing field of socially engaged public art by demonstrating how the committed collaboration of artists, community members, and cultural producers can meaningfully impact our collective futures. Presented through the lens of More Art's fifteen-year history, the public art projects featured in this book expose issues of systemic inequality and injustice, stoke debate, and inspire alternatives. Artists and participants reflect on their works in newly conducted interviews, while essays from thinkers and actors in the field help situate the projects and the mission of socially engaged art in terms of greater cultural and political paradigms. More Art in the Public Eye establishes the framework for the conditions under which organizations like More Art operate, highlights the many meta-questions behind socially engaged public art, and seeks to amplify the wide array of voices that make up a project.

Contributors. Rebecca Amato, Michael Birchall, Ofri Cnaani, Michelle Coffey, Jennifer Dalton, Emma Drew, Pablo Helguera, Mary Jane Jacob, Jessica Lynne, Jeff Kasper, Kimsooja, Micaela Martegani, Andrea Mastrovito, Tony Oursler, William Powhida, Ernesto Pujol, Michael Rakowitz, Kirk Savage, Dread Scott, Andres Serrano, Gregory Sholette, Xaviera Simmons, Krzysztof Wodiczko

Empty Plinths: Monuments, Memorials, and Public Sculpture in Mexico responds to the unfolding political debate around one of the most significant public monuments in North America, Mexico City’s monument of Christopher Columbus on Avenida Paseo de la Reforma. In convening a diverse collective of voices around the question of the monument’s future, editors José Esparza Chong Cuy and Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa probe the unstable narratives behind a selection of monuments, memorials, and public sculptures in Mexico City, and propose a new charter that informs future public art commissions in Mexico and beyond. At a moment when many such structures have become highly visible sites of protest throughout the world, this new compilation of essays, interviews, artistic contributions, and public policy proposals reveals and reframes the histories embedded within contested public spaces in Mexico.

Empty Plinths is published alongside a series of artist commissions organized together with several major cultural institutions in Mexico City, including the Museo Tamayo, the Museo de Arte Moderno, and the Museo Experimental el Eco.

The story of the improbable campaign that created America’s most enduring monument.

The Statue of Liberty is an icon of freedom, a monument to America’s multiethnic democracy, and a memorial to Franco-American friendship. That much we know. But the lofty ideals we associate with the statue today can obscure its turbulent origins and layers of meaning. Francesca Lidia Viano reveals that history in the fullest account yet of the people and ideas that brought the lady of the harbor to life.

Our protagonists are the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and his collaborator, the politician and intellectual Édouard de Laboulaye. Viano draws on an unprecedented range of sources to follow the pair as they chase their artistic and political ambitions across a global stage dominated by imperial rivalry and ideological ferment. The tale stretches from the cobblestones of northeastern France, through the hallways of international exhibitions in London and Paris, to the copper mines of Norway and Chile, the battlegrounds of the Franco-Prussian War, the deserts of Egypt, and the streets of New York. It features profound technical challenges, hot air balloon rides, secret “magnetic” séances, and grand visions of a Franco-American partnership in the coming world order. The irrepressible collaborators bring to their project the high ideals of liberalism and republicanism, but also crude calculations of national advantage and eccentric notions adopted from orientalism, freemasonry, and Saint-Simonianism.

As entertaining as it is illuminating, Sentinel gives new flesh and spirit to a landmark we all recognize but only dimly understand.

Marshall Fredericks’s Detroit sculptures capture the spirit of the Motor City and its dramatic transformation from the 1950s to the present day. In this book, Janna Jones analyzes eight of these enormous works of public art, situating them and their structures in metro Detroit’s distinctive midcentury milieu and bringing much-needed critical attention to this sculptor’s oeuvre. Sadly, some of these artworks have suffered along with the city as it shrank from its postwar zenith. Both the buildings and the sculptures erected for them deserve to be rescued from neglect, and then maintained and preserved for the future.
 

To reclaim a sense of hope for the future, German activists in the late twentieth century engaged ordinary citizens in innovative projects that resisted alienation and disenfranchisement.

By most accounts, the twentieth century was not kind to utopian thought. The violence of two world wars, Cold War anxieties, and a widespread sense of crisis after the 1973 global oil shock appeared to doom dreams of a better world. The eventual victory of capitalism and, seemingly, liberal democracy relieved some fears but exchanged them for complacency and cynicism.

Not, however, in West Germany. Jennifer Allen showcases grassroots activism of the 1980s and 1990s that envisioned a radically different society based on community-centered politics—a society in which the democratization of culture and power ameliorated alienation and resisted the impotence of end-of-history narratives. Berlin’s History Workshop liberated research from university confines by providing opportunities for ordinary people to write and debate the story of the nation. The Green Party made the politics of direct democracy central to its program. Artists changed the way people viewed and acted in public spaces by installing objects in unexpected environments, including the Stolpersteine: paving stones, embedded in residential sidewalks, bearing the names of Nazi victims. These activists went beyond just trafficking in ideas. They forged new infrastructures, spaces, and behaviors that gave everyday people real agency in their communities. Undergirding this activism was the environmentalist concept of sustainability, which demanded that any alternative to existing society be both enduring and adaptable.

A rigorous but inspiring tale of hope in action, Sustainable Utopias makes the case that it is still worth believing in human creativity and the labor of citizenship.