Sue Scott

Nancy Princenthal

Helaine Posner

Eleanor Heartney

The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium

Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art

After the Revolution

Christopher Lyon

Kiki Smith

Through her explorations of the human body and the natural world, internationally acclaimed artist Kiki Smith has confronted the most urgent social and spiritual issues of our day. Direct and accessible, Smith's expressive art engages social and cultural issues in a sometimes viscerally disturbing way. In her recent work, Smith has extended these themes, incorporating rites of passage and cycles of life, death, and rebirth through an iconography of animal, human, and fairy tale imagery. Helaine Posner's monograph is a comprehensive survey of Smith's work in installation, sculpture, and graphic media. She discusses its origins and proposes an interpretive framework, locating it with the artistic traditions that have nourished Smith and tracing its development from the 1980s to present. An interview with Smith adds the artist's own perspective on the work.

Donald Hall

Thomas Walter Laqueur

MIT List Visual Arts Center

"Corporal Politics documents an exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center featuring the works of eight internationally recognized artists: Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Rona Pondick, Annette Messager, Robert Gober, David Wojnarowicz, Lilla LoCurto, and William Outcault. The work of these artists showcases a striking, recent artistic phenomenon: the disturbing isolation of body parts, internal organs, and bodily fluids to express the vulnerability of our bodies to physical violence, sexual oppression, and ultimate loss. From a sculpture of glass sperm to images confronting AIDS, the works of art represented here poignantly question ideals of coherent identity and an integrated self in our times."--Back cover.

Artists Louise Bourgeois ... Et Al

Corporal Politics

David Frankel

Offers a look at the work and life of the American artist who uses such materials as glass, metal, wood, paper, ink, paint, and wax in her work

Carrie Lambert-Beatty

Gerardo Mosquera

Tania Bruguera

Tania Bruguera is an interdisciplinary artist who explores exile and survival. Bruguera recently developed a form she calls "Arte de Conducta," or behavior art, in which she constructs situations that compel audience response.

On the Political Imaginary

Bell Hooks

Andrew Perchuk

Simon Watney

The Masculine Masquerade explores often-ignored issues of masculinity in the visual arts as well as models and concepts of masculinity in literature, film, and the mass media. Drawing on the work of feminist and gay studies and the work being done in areas of psychology, sociology, and gender studies, the essays analyze the conventional and limited definition of masculinity as a social and cultural construct. They seek to expand that definition to include multiple masculinities and factors such as race, class, ethnicity, and object choice. Helaine Posner, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center, examines masculinity in the contemporary visual arts, including the works of Matthew Barney, Mary Kelly, Lyle Ashton Harris, Clegg & Guttmann, Keith Piper, and Donald Moffett. Andrew Perchuk, independent curator and critic, focuses on the art of the immediate postwar period to investigate T. J. Clark's notion that the terminology surrounding the New York School was expressed in the language of sexual difference, with severe consequences for artists whose work could not be inserted into this narrative. Steven Cohan, Associate Professor of English, Syracuse University, looks at postwar film in The Spy in the Gray Flannel Suit:Gender Performance and the Representation of Masculinity in North by Northwest. Harry Brod, Department of Philosophy, University of Delaware, traces the history of masculinity as masquerade, from classic conceptions of masquerade as distinctly feminine to contemporary theories of gender as performative. bell hooks, Professor of English, City College, investigates the historical definition of black male sex roles and the commodification of blackness through close readings of the films of Eddie Murphy and Spike Lee, among others. Simon Watney, writer, activist, and critic, considers the current and changing impact of AIDS on the gay male community in "Lifelike": Imagining the Bodies of People with AIDS. Finally, Glenn Ligon employs stereotypic images of black men constructed for white pleasure, drawn from 1970s pornographic magazines, and explores the possibility of recovering and transforming these images into non-racist expressions of pleasure and desire. Distributed for the MIT List Visual Arts Center

Masculinity and Representation

The Masculine Masquerade

Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art

Eugenio Valdés Figueroa

Features the works of nine photographers and video artists on the cutting edge of the Cuban art scene.

Conceptual Photography and Video from Cuba

Utopia Post-Utopia

The authors of After the Revolution return with an incisive study of the work of contemporary women artists. In After the Revolution, the authors concluded that "The battles may not all have been won . . . but barricades are gradually coming down, and work proceeds on all fronts in glorious profusion." Now, with The Reckoning, authors Heartney, Posner, Princenthal, and Scott bring into focus the accomplishments of 24 acclaimed international women artists born since 1960 who have benefited from the groundbreaking efforts of their predecessors. The book is organized in four thematic sections: "Bad Girls" profiles artists whose work represents an assault on conventional notions of gender and racial difference. "History Lessons" offers reflections on the self in the context of history and globalization. "Spellbound" focuses on women’s embrace of the irrational, subjective, and surreal, while "Domestic Disturbances" takes on women's conflicted relationship to home, family, and security. Written in lively prose and fully illustrated throughout, this book gives an informed account of the wonderful diversity of recent contemporary art by women. "An indispensable contribution to the literature on contemporary art by women." (Whitney Chadwick, author of Women, Art and Society) "In the 2007 book After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art, [the authors] set a new standard in documenting and evaluating the work of a dozen key women artists, spanning generations between the 1960s to the 2000s. . . The beat goes on with the appearance of The Reckoning, written by the same authors in the same accessible scholarly style, but reflecting important historical changes over the past decade and more. In line with the increased presence of women in mainstream art, the book includes twice as many artists as its predecessor. And its global reach has expanded vastly, stretching from Europe and the Americas to Africa and China." (Holland Cotter, The New York Times)

Women Artists of the New Millennium

The Reckoning

Francesc Torres

Torres videotaped in the abandoned village of Belchite in northeastern Spain, which was virtually destroyed in 1937 in a major battle of the Spanish Civil War. The artist also videotaped in New York's South Bronx, an urban battlefield scarred by peacetime destruction, which has become increasingly dead and abandoned with intermittent outbursts of violence. The installation consists of an environment of highly stylized ruins depicting both sites and including tenement buildings, a bombed-out church, a basketball court, and the shell of an automobile. Torres has also produced a self-contained, single-channel videotape on this subject. The theoretical premise for Belchite/South Bronx is that the difference between war and peace exists only on statistical and rhetorical levels.

A Trans-cultural and Trans-historical Landscape

Belchite-South Bronx

"Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" asked the prominent art historian Linda Nochlin in a provocative 1971 essay. Today her insightful critique serves as a benchmark against which the progress of women artists may be measured. In this book, four prominent critics and curators describe the impact of women artists on contemporary art since the advent of the feminist movement.

"This publication accompanies the concurrent exhibitions Louise Fishman: A Retrospective, curated by Helaine Posner and organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY; and Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock, curated by Ingrid Schaffner and organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia."

Helaine Posner

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