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Honorable Mention, ALAA-Arvey Foundation Book Award, Association of Latin American Art
Finalist, 2024 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, College Art Association

How Mexican artists and intellectuals created a new identity for modern Mexico City through its ties to Aztec Tenochtitlan.

After archaeologists rediscovered a corner of the Templo Mayor in 1914, artists, intellectuals, and government officials attempted to revive Tenochtitlan as an instrument for reassessing Mexican national identity in the wake of the Revolution of 1910. What followed was a conceptual excavation of the original Mexica capital in relation to the transforming urban landscape of modern Mexico City.

Revolutionary-era scholars took a renewed interest in sixteenth century maps as they recognized an intersection between Tenochtitlan and the foundation of a Spanish colonial settlement directly over it. Meanwhile, Mexico City developed with modern roads and expanded civic areas as agents of nationalism promoted concepts like indigenismo, the embrace of Indigenous cultural expressions. The promotion of artworks and new architectural projects such as Diego Rivera’s Anahuacalli Museum helped to make real the notion of a modern Tenochtitlan. Employing archival materials, newspaper reports, and art criticism from 1914 to 1964, Resurrecting Tenochtitlan connects art history with urban studies to reveal the construction of a complex physical and cultural layout for Mexico’s modern capital.

The intertwining story of a noted anti-Nazi artist and the former rabbi who revived his reputation.

During World War II, the Polish-Jewish immigrant Arthur Szyk became America’s leading anti-Nazi artist. His art was so effective that Adolf Hitler reportedly put a bounty on his head while the US military declared him a “citizen-soldier” of the free world. Szyk steadfastly fought for the rescue of European Jewry during the Holocaust, creating artworks like De Profundis, which imagines Jesus sharing the suffering of countless lifeless Jews. His civil rights art challenged segregation and his illuminated Declaration of Independence resides in the Library of Congress. Szyk’s masterwork, an illustrated Passover Haggadah, is considered by many to be one of the most beautiful books ever produced by human hands.

Once world-famous, Arthur Szyk was all but forgotten after his death in 1951. Reviving the Artist Who Fought Hitler recounts Irvin Ungar's decades-long journey to restore Szyk to public consciousness, and become the principal collector, dealer, scholar, and promoter of Szyk’s art in the United States, Europe, and Israel. Richly illustrated and full of forgotten history, this memoir is an inspiring story of artistic passion and an invitation to commune with a heroic advocate for all humanity.

On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet led a bloody military coup in Chile that overthrew Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist government. The coup ushered in a cruelly repressive dictatorship that would govern the country for the next seventeen years, constituting a watershed moment in Cold War history. 

This book recounts the untold story of how Chicano Movement poets, artists, musicians, and theater groups in the United States used their work to express solidarity with the international campaign to restore democracy in Chile. Such expressions of solidarity were especially prominent in the San Francisco Bay Area, where hundreds of Chilean exiles settled following the coup. Upon arrival, they joined a diverse Latinx population that was home to a Chicanx arts community whose members’ political orientations primed them to lend their talents to anti-imperialist causes. These Chicanxs were also drawn to the campaign against the dictatorship through friendship and acquaintance with members of the Chilean exile community. 

David Spener shows how the Bay Area’s unique cosmopolitan social context offered Chicanxs and Chileans meaningful opportunities for dialogue and collaboration with each other as well as with Latinxs of other national origins. Chicanxs often adopted a pan-ethnic raza identity that they could share with Chilean, Nicaraguan, Puerto Rican, Salvadoran, and other Latinx activists. This did not mean, however, that they abandoned the political identities that they had gained from the Chicano Movement. Instead, many came to see themselves as uniting with other Latinxs, first Chileans and then Nicaraguans and Salvadorans, in a struggle against U.S. imperialism throughout the Americas.

For many, the name Richard Segalman conjures up a vision of light-infused paintings of women gathered on a beach, gazing out the window of a New York City brownstone, or dressed in vcostumes from another era. But just as Edgar Degas, approaching his 60th year, surprised gallery goers with an exhibition not of ballerinas or race horses, but of highly atmospheric monotype landscapes, so too does Segalman surprise us with this exceptional collection of monotypes he began to produce in 1993, at nearly 60. "I reached a sort of plateau and needed a new direction," says the artist. "I came across a monotype... took a course... made one and I was hooked."

The significance of Segalman's shift into this medium is most powerfully conveyed through his arresting black-and-white prints that range from anonymous crowds on Coney Island beaches or New York City streets to a solitary figure in private contemplation. This monochromatic focus makes perfect sense: Segalman's first gallery appearance in New York—a sold-out show that gave him the courage to embrace the life of an artist—consisted entirely of black-and-white charcoal drawings, several stunning examples of which open this book.

Author Susan F. Castle's essay about the artist and his muses—the people, places, and things for which Richard Segalman has an abiding love—illuminates the exceptional work collected for this monograph. She combines excerpts from interviews with the artist and the three master printmakers with whom he has worked in Woodstock and Brooklyn, New York, and in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In addition, Anthony Kirk's insightful introudction provides an essential historical perspective on the artist and his printmaking process.

In a unique and groundbreaking 2015 presentation of important contemporary art rarely seen in the traditional environs of the Hudson River Valley, the Thomas Cole National Historic Site and Olana, Frederic Edwin Church's Persian-inspired mansion, showcased the work of contemporary American artists such as Chuck Close, Cindy Sherman, Maya Lin, Martin Puryear, and Gregory Crewdson, some of the 30 artists featured in the exhibition. Stephen Hannock, celebrated Luminist painter and one of the exhibition's co-curators, stated that "this is a terrific opportunity to open up contemporary art, as well as these historic properties, to audiences who will see firsthand these shared artistic concerns."

The works of art selected for the exhibition were shown at the two venues to encourage visitors to experience both of the distinguished properties and the grandeur of their surroundings, and to present a complete overview and understanding of these contemporary works in a location where many art historians believe American art was born. The accompanying publication, River Crossings: Contemporary Art Comes Home, provides readers with a lavish record of this extraordinary and innovative exhibition, and offers unique and highly informative perspectives on the continuity of the American artistic tradition in two of the nation's most historic sites.

In addition to an impressive plate section of more than 60 works with brief artist biographies and descriptive narratives for the individual works, this comprehensive presentation features noteworthy, exceptional contributions. Stephen Hannock's preface details the development of this remarkable exhibition, while co-curator Jason Rosenfeld reveals in his essay the exhibition's importance relative to historical perception as he considers Cole's and Church's support of conemporary art in their time. Cultural historian Maurice Berger considers the realities of race and gender from the nineteenth-century Hudson River Valley to the present, and Marvin Heiferman, curator and writer, examines photography in the exhibition and its connections to Church's work and his use of the medium. Award-winning architectural and landscape photographer Peter Aaron generously provided the stunning installation, exterior, and landscape photographs, a gorgeous complement to this outstanding catalogue.

A poetic journey through memory, loss, and the stories that define us, Road Down Troublesome blends an unmistakable Appalachian voice with fierce emotional clarity. Through a series of poems that traverse emotional and physical landscapes, Skeen maps a journey toward insight in the wake of death, loss, and grief. The collection foregrounds the shaping forces of the mother-daughter relationship, ecological fragility, and the sustaining bonds of friendship. Opening with a nod to Lisel Mueller’s invitation to give grief language, the book culminates in “After,” a poem that embodies the stillness and transformation achieved through the act of telling.

In the mid-1950s, Swiss-born New Yorker Robert Frank embarked on a ten-thousand-mile road trip across America, capturing thousands of photographs of all levels of a rapidly changing society. The resultant photo book, The Americans, represents a seminal moment in both photography and in America's understanding of itself. To mark the book’s fiftieth anniversary, Jonathan Day revisits this pivotal work and contributes a thoughtful and revealing critical commentary. Though the importance of The Americans has been widely acknowledged, it still retains much of its mystery. This comprehensive analysis places it thoroughly in the context of contemporary photography, literature, music, and advertising from its own period through the present.

The first comprehensive study of the artist Robert Heinecken and his critical views on the culture of mass media

This is the first book-length study dedicated to the artist Robert Heinecken, whose innovative photographic practices sought to interrogate how mass media imagery facilitated the construction of individual and collective identities. Appropriating, rephotographing, and layering pictures culled from newspapers, advertisements, pornography, and television, Heinecken recombined and transformed the ubiquitous images of mass culture to encourage viewers to critically reflect on their sense of self. 

From the 1960s through the late 1990s, Heinecken’s controversial art continually challenged inherited ideas around consumerism, the facticity of reportage, and visual culture’s relationship to gender and identity politics. Embodying the evolution of contemporary art toward increasingly hybrid and conceptual approaches, his oeuvre includes examples of painting, sculpture, photomontage, performance, installation, time-based media, and artist’s books, all of which collectively exploit photography’s reproducibility to subvert society’s dominant ideologies and stereotypical modes of representation.

Author Matthew Biro presents an exhaustive look at Heinecken’s life and art, locating him within a lineage that encompasses the activities of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes and the postmodern strategies of the Pictures Generation artists. Assessing his career within the specific political and historical contexts from which he gleaned his material, and illustrated throughout with vibrant full-color reproductions of his art, this in-depth examination demonstrates Robert Heinecken’s significance as a key figure of twentieth-century art and an incisive commentator on modern life in America. 

A comprehensive look at a memorable period in the celebrated painter and printmaker's life and career, Robert Kipniss: Paintings and Poetry, 1950–1964 is the result of his many arduous months revisiting his more-than-half-a-century-ago writings and peoms that were stashed away and essentially forgotten. "Some of the poems are straightforward, some are infused with surreal irony, and some are angry," says Kipniss in his candid and honest preface. Thoughtful and articulate from conception to completion, his never-before-published poems are choreographed with his early paintings in this monograph's contemplation of these influential and foundational fourteen years. "When I stopped writing [in 1961] my vision was no longer divided between word-thinking and picture-thinking: these approaches had merged and in expressing myself I was more whole," reflects Kipniss in his retrospective musings.

This written and visual account of previously unpublished poems and critically acclaimed early paintings includes two astute and illustrative essays that further engage the reader in the evolution of the artist's prolific oeuvre. His prints, drawings, and paintings are remarkable for their eloquence and refinement, earning him international recognition for his expansive landscapes and small town vistas, as well as quiet interors and intimate still lifes.

Readers of this seminal volume are all the richer for catching a glimpse of an intensely personal segment of this accomplished artist's private history. In an unambiguous assessment, Kipniss elaborates, "The most significant insight that arose in this undertaking...came when I began to collate reproductions of my paintings of the 1950s. I could clearly see that my work in the two mediums were from very differing parts of my psyche, and that while they were both in themselves completely engaged, they were not in any way together."