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Tania El Khoury’s Live Art is the first book to examine the work of Tania El Khoury, a “live” artist deeply engaged in the politics and histories of the South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region. Since the 2011 Syrian uprisings, El Khoury has conceived and created works about lived experiences at and across international borders in collaboration with migrants, refugees, and displaced persons as well as other artists, performers, and revolutionaries. All of El Khoury’s works cross borders: between forms of artistic practice, between artists and audiences, and between art and activism. Facilitating critical dialogue about the politics of SWANA and the impact of globalization, her performances and installations also test the boundaries of aesthetic, political, and everyday norms. This interdisciplinary and multimedia reader features essays by artists, curators, and scholars who explore the dynamic possibilities and complexities of El Khoury’s art. From social workers to archeologists to archivists, contributing authors engage with the radical epistemological and political revolutions that El Khoury and her collaborators invite us all to join.

The Brodsky Center at Rutgers: Three Decades, 1986-2017, chronicles the history and artists involved with an internationally acclaimed print and papermaking studio at Rutgers University. Judith K. Brodsky conceived, founded, and directed the atelier, which, from its onset, provided state-of-the-arts technology and expertise for under-represented contemporary artists — women, Indigenous, and from diasporas of the African, Eastern European, Latin and Asian communities — to make innovative works on paper. These artistic creations presented new narratives to American and global visual arts from voices previously not heard or seen. Some of the artists featured in the book include Faith Ringgold, Elizabeth Catlett, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Miriam Schapiro, Pepón Osorio, Kiki Smith, and Richard Tuttle, among many other talented and influential printmakers and artists. 

Published in partnership with the Zimmerli Museum.
 

Discover the unpublished writings of pioneering photographer Ilse Bing and explore her powerful reflections on photography, memory, exile, and modern life.

The Chosen Moment presents a remarkable trove of unpublished writings by Ilse Bing (1899–1998), the innovative German Jewish photographer. Written between the 1950s and 1990, these texts combine memoir, reflection, and theory, tracing Bing’s journey from Frankfurt to Paris to New York amid a backdrop of technological innovation, women’s increasing professional achievement, European cultural collapse, Jewish persecution, and the anxieties of the atomic age.

Featuring an introduction contextualizing Bing’s biography and artistic practice, as well as more than 50 illustrations, this volume restores Bing’s voice through her own words, reinscribing her in the history she helped shape.

• Explores Bing’s ideas around vision, time, memory, and chance.
• Presents Bing’s concept of “the chosen moment” in photography and places her in dialogue with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s influential “decisive moment.”
• Positions her within key modernist and critical traditions while grounding her work in the Jewish experience, World War II, and women’s roles in photographic history.

Reconsider the history of modern photography and encounter a singular artist, thinker, and witness in this important anthology.

The voice behind the legend—Zelda Fitzgerald in her own words.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald has long been perceived as the tragic "other half" of the Scott and Zelda legend. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, the high-spirited tomboy turned flapper was talented in dance, painting, and writing but lived in the shadow of her husband's success. Her writing can be experienced on its own terms in Matthew Bruccoli's meticulously edited The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald.

The collection includes Zelda's only published novel, Save Me the Waltz, an autobiographical account of the Fitzgeralds' adventures in Paris and on the Riviera; her celebrated farce, Scandalabra; eleven short stories; twelve articles; and a selection of letters to her husband, written over the span of their marriage, that reveals the couple's loving and turbulent relationship.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald has long been an American cultural icon. The Collected Writings affirms her place as a writer and as a symbol not only of the Lost Generation but of all generations as she struggled to define herself through her art.

 

A play from the inimitable Kate Hamill, based on the true story of the groundbreaking Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi

During the seventeenth century, Italian artists strove to reshape the very image of humanity. Artemisia Gentileschi—the daughter of a painter—dreams of making her mark at a time when a woman is not thought capable of being an artist, let alone one of the greats. Just as her career begins to gain unexpected momentum, a series of devastating betrayals crack the foundation of her work—and her life. In electrifying verse and gorgeous artwork, The Light and The Dark depicts the deeply moving true story of a young woman who changed the very image of women in society . . . weaving a magnetic and empowering tapestry of ambition, rage, and resilience across the ages.

A firsthand account of the life and work of Barbara T. Smith, one of the most important yet underrecognized performance artists in the United States.
 
For over fifty years, Barbara T. Smith has been at the forefront of artistic movements in California. Her work across many mediums explores concepts that strike at the core of human nature, including sexuality, physical and spiritual sustenance, technology, and death. In this memoir, Smith weaves together descriptive accounts of her pioneering performances with an intimate narrative of her life.
 
The Way to Be covers the years 1931 to 1981, up to the artist’s fiftieth birthday, resulting in an exhaustive catalogue of her early work. It reveals the personal stories and events behind her pieces and the challenges she faced in an art world dominated by sexism and machismo. Drawing on Smith’s archive at the Getty Research Institute, this enthralling book presents previously unpublished notes, documents, photographs, and firsthand accounts of her life and practice, as well as her more recent reflections on the past. The Way to Be demonstrates Smith’s lasting contributions to the field of contemporary art and provides an engaging commentary on a recent period of great cultural and political change.
 
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center from February 28 to July 16, 2023.

A riveting biography of a California modernist artist-designer that asks what it means to commit to a creative life.

In the summer of 1951, Claire Falkenstein faced the greatest decision of her life: remain in Paris and pursue her artistic ambitions or return to her husband in California? She was just shy of her 42nd birthday, did not speak French, knew almost no one in Paris, and had nowhere to live, but she did know this: “If I come home now,” she wrote her husband, “it will be the end of me as an artist.”

Drawing on extensive archival research, Marin R. Sullivan chronicles the extraordinary life and career of Falkenstein (1908–1997), one of the most innovative and iconoclastic artists of the 20th century.

• Features more than 75 reproductions of Claire Falkenstein’s work and photographs of her life.
• Explores her role in shaping San Francisco’s modernist scene.
• Chronicles her years in Europe, where she created the celebrated entrance gates to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy.
• Traces Falkenstein’s rise as a prominent public sculptor in Southern California.
• Vividly written by Marin R. Sullivan, an art historian and expert in 20th-century sculpture.

Discover the powerful and captivating story of an artist who defied convention, challenged expectations, and dedicated herself to a creative life.

In Transatlantic Disbelonging, Bimbola Akinbola redirects the focus in diaspora studies from questions of loss and longing to acts of unapologetic self-definition through the study of Nigerian diasporic women artists navigating disparate geographies, allegiances, and identities. Drawing on the work of contemporary visual and performance artists, experimental filmmakers, and writers—including Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Zina Saro-Wiwa, ruby onyinyechi amanze, and Nnedi Okorafor—Akinbola articulates how these artists use their experiences as cultural outsiders to redefine home and national belonging on their own terms. Taking a capacious interdisciplinary approach, she explores how these women employ anti-respectability, taboo, the erotic, and play to challenge oppressive colonial legacies and expectations pertaining to gender and morality. For the artists in this book, their artmaking is a form of homemaking that embraces ambivalence and reinvents alienation as possibility. Theorizing these practices as acts of “disbelonging,” Akinbola radically reimagines diasporic identity formation, illustrating how artists use creative practices to enact and embody belonging and community in expansive ways.