Ghada Amer

Text by Maura Reilly, Laurie Ann Farrell. Interview with Martine Antle.

Ghada Amer (b. Cairo, 1963; lives and works in New York) rose to renown in the mid-1990s with depictions of erotic motifs she stitched onto her paintings. These works compellingly interwove an ironic take on traditional role models with a confident reimagination of the painterly medium by combining it with embroidery. In 2014, the artist turned to working with clay, initially using it to produce models for her steel sculptures, then developing increasingly impromptu shapes. After making abstract colorful clay sculptures that stand out for their coarse-grained contours, she was awarded a two-year residency at the Greenwich House Pottery in New York, where she created works that are without parallel in the worlds of fine art or ceramics. Amer starts out with large-format thin slabs of clay that are extraordinarily difficult to handle, painting women's portraits on both sides and then bending the slabs and standing them on edge. This book presents numerous works from both series of ceramics as well as documentary photographs showing the artist at work in the studio. With two essays by Justine Ludwig and Britta Schmitz and a conversation between Sebastian Preuss and Ghada Amer.

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)

Your mother was a fish / A. M. Homes.

The rich history and culture of the Arab American people is found in the passionate works of its artists. Whether they be traditional media such as painting and calligraphy, or more sophisticated media such as digital work and installation, the pieces represent the beauty of heritage, the struggles of growing up in war-torn countries, the identity conflicts of female artists in male-dominated societies, and the issues surrounding migration to a Western culture very different from one's own. Many of the artists included here, though their works appear in museums and galleries throughout the world, have never before been featured in a reference book. Interviews conducted by the author provide a personal look into the experiences and creative processes of these artists. Artists included: *Etel Adnan *Wasma Chorbachi *Nihad Dukhan *Kahlil Gibran *Sari Khoury *Emily Jacir *Sari Khoury *Mamoun Sakkal *Mary Tuma *Madiha Umar *Afaf Zurayk

Artists, critics, curators, and scholars develop theories of craft in relation to art, chronicle how fine art institutions understand and exhibit craft media, and offer accounts of activist crafting.