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“The thing that people don’t understand is that Bob was my invention,” says Sheree Rose, the oft-overlooked partner of the late “supermasochist” performance artist Bob Flanagan. Unpacking this statement is at the heart of this important collection, which seeks to recuperate and showcase Rose’s contributions as performer, photographer, writer, and cultural innovator. While Rose is mostly known for blurring the boundaries between art and lived experience in the context of her full-time, mistress-slave relationship with Flanagan, Rated RX shifts focus from Flanagan to Rose, presenting a feminist project that critically reassesses the artistic legacies of Sheree Rose.
 
Curated with attention to queer-crip subjectivities and transgressive feminisms, Rated RX includes essays by and interviews with scholars, artists, and Rose’s collaborators that address gender politics, archival practices, minority embodiment, and disability in Rose’s work as well as more than eighty photographs and rare archival materials reflecting Rose’s recent and past performances. Offering a necessary corrective, Rated RX is the first collection to underscore Sheree Rose as a legendary figure in performance art and BDSM subcultural history, reflecting her lifetime of involvement in documenting the underground and the transformative role her work plays in sexual, subcultural, and art exhibitionism.
 

When DJ Lee’s dear friend vanishes in the vast Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness of Idaho and Montana, she travels there to seek answers. The journey unexpectedly brings to an end her fifteen-year quest to uncover the buried history of her family in this remote place. Although Lee doesn’t find all the answers, she comes away with a penetrating memoir that weaves her present-day story with past excursions into the region, wilderness history, and family secrets.

As she grapples with wild animal stand-offs, bush plane flights in dense fog, raging forest fires, and strange characters who have come to the wilderness to seek or hide, Lee learns how she can survive emotionally and how the wilderness survives as an ecosystem. Her growing knowledge of the life cycles of salmon and wolverine, the regenerative role of fire, and Nimíipuu land practices helps her find intimacy in this remote landscape.

Skillfully intertwining history, outdoor adventure, and mystery, Lee’s memoir is an engaging contribution to the growing body of literature on women and wilderness and a lyrical tribute to the spiritual connection between people and the natural world.

This is the first biography of the renowned American Chicano visual artist and activist Rupert García, drawing on fifty hours of interviews conducted over thirty years and accompanied by eighty images. This in-depth oral history gives an unparalleled look at García’s life and work, tracing his evolution as an artist and the political upheavals that shaped his life and worldview. 

Mario T. García’s testimonio places Rupert García’s art in historical perspective, from his beginnings as a working-class Mexican American from California’s Central Valley, his coming of age in the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War, his involvement in the antiwar movement during the San Francisco State student strike in 1968-69, and his participation in the Chicano Movement and beyond. Influenced by history and politics, García’s vital works of art represent a changing world through the eyes of an artist, speaking to issues of poverty, racism, capitalism, war, and the role of the artist in society.

His art—from revolutionary silkscreen posters to monumental pastels to portraits of political icons like Frida Kahlo, Che Guevara, and Dolores Huerta—serves to critique history and reassess it. It is work that will endure for generations to come.