Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)

Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, Calif.)

Cornelia H. Butler

Menil Collection (Houston, Tex.)

Marlene Dumas

In her expressionistic drawings and paintings of the last three decades, acclaimed South African artist Marlene Dumas has focused on the human figure, probing themes of love, despair, desire and confusion in order to critique social and political attitudes towards women, children, people of colour and others who have been historically victimized. This substantial, fully illustrated volume, published on the occasion of Dumas's first major American survey, features a newly commissioned essay by renowned scholar Richard Schiff, placing the artist's work in relation to both American figurative painting since the 1980s and Abstract Expressionism. The book also includes curator Cornelia H. Butler's examination of Dumas's photographic sources and shorter texts by Lisa Gabrielle Mark and Matthew Monahan. Writings by the artist, as well as an extensive illustrated exhibition history and bibliography, complete this comprehensive examination of the work of one of the most thought-provoking artists working today.

Measuring Your Own Grave

Bamana masks and headdresses, Lega ivories, Dogon sculpture, and Benue bronzes are among the many exquisite African artifacts found in the renowned Menil Collection. This stunning book--the first comprehensive catalogue on the de Menils' collection of African art--features 115 of the museum's finest pieces. Dating primarily from the 19th and 20th centuries, these works come from North Africa and the Sahel, Coastal West Africa, and Central and East Africa. An essay by scholar Kristina Van Dyke discusses the formation of the collection, which was inspired in part by its relationship to modernist works and by the couple's interest in human rights. This insightful text also explains how the de Menils' visionary spirit was influenced by African art and places those objects within the context of the whole of the de Menils' collection, in which works from ancient, Byzantine, medieval, modern, Oceanic, and Native American cultures speak to the universal struggle for human understanding. Entries for the selected works were written by leading scholars in the field and are grouped into sections based on regions. Distributed for The Menil Collection

African Art from the Menil Collection

The eccentric visionary artist Forrest Bess (1911–1977) spent most of his life on the Texas coast working as a commercial fisherman. In his spare time, however, he painted prolifically, creating an extraordinary body of work rich with enigmatic symbolism. Bess experienced hallucinations that both frightened and intrigued him, and he incorporated images from these visions into small-scale abstract paintings starting in the mid-1940s. His canvases attracted an underground following, and between 1949 and 1967, Betty Parsons organized six solo exhibitions of Bess's work at her prominent New York City gallery. Since then, the art world has periodically rediscovered his work, most recently through a 2012 Whitney Biennial installation by American sculptor Robert Gober, which further exposed Bess's psychological, medical, and religious theories. Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible is the artist's first museum retrospective with catalogue in the United States and offers a fresh look at Bess's work and a better understanding of this curious and complicated artist.

Seeing Things Invisible

Forrest Bess

The Exquisite Corpse

Four Icons in the Menil Collection

Dick Hebdige

Whitney Museum of American Art

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Richard Marshall

Greg Tate

Robert Farris Thompson

Klaus Kertess

Des Moines Art Center

Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts

Rene Ricard

Complete survey of the work of JeanMichel Basquiat with more than 270 illustrations.

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York October 23, 1992 - February 14, 1993; The Menil Collection, Houston March 11 - May 9, 1993; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa May 22 - August 15, 1993; Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Alabama November 18, 1993 - January 9, 1994

Menil Collection (Houston, Tex.)

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