Whitney Biennial 2019

Showcasing the work of an exciting group of contemporary artists, this book reflects the trends shaping art in the United States today.

Presenting the latest iteration of this crucial exhibition, always a barometer of contemporary American art The 2022 Whitney Biennial is accompanied by this landmark volume. Each of the Biennial's participants is represented by a selected exhibition history, a bibliography, and imagery complemented by a personal statement or interview that foregrounds the artist's own voice. Essays by the curators and other contributors elucidate themes of the exhibition and discuss the participants. The 2022 Biennial's two curators, David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, are known for their close collaboration with living artists. Coming after several years of seismic upheaval in and beyond the cultural, social, and political landscapes, this catalogue will offer a new take on the storied institution of the Biennial while continuing to serve--as previous editions have--as an invaluable resource on present-day trends in contemporary art in the United States.

"This lavishly illustrated retrospective of Jasper Johns's work offers a new perspective on the artist's work based on his own enduring fascination with mirroring and doubles"--

"The work of the sculptor Rachel Harrison is both the zeitgeist and the least digestible in contemporary art. It may also be the most important, owing to an originality that breaks a prevalent spell in an art world of recycled genres, styles, and ideas."--Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker In her sculptures, room-sized installations, drawings, photographs, and artist's books, Rachel Harrison (b. 1966) delves into themes of celebrity culture, pop psychology, history, and politics. This publication, created in close collaboration with the artist, explores twenty-five years of her practice and is the first comprehensive monograph on Harrison in nearly a decade. Its centerpiece is an in-depth plate section, which doubles as a chronology of Harrison's major works, series, and exhibitions. Objects are illustrated with multiple views and details, and accompanied by short texts. This thorough approach elucidates Harrison's complicated, eclectic oeuvre--in which she integrates found materials with handmade sculptural elements, upends traditions of museum display, and injects quotidian objects with a sense of strangeness. Six accompanying essays cover Harrison's earliest works to her most recent output. The book also includes a handful of photo-collages that the artist created specifically for this project. Published here for the first time, these pieces superimpose found images with reproductions of Harrison's own past work.

"Friendship, loss and the everyday populate Packer's canvases, full of disquieting detail." -Adrian Searle, The Guardian Through a uniquely textural style of oil painting that evokes the fluidity of watercolors, Jennifer Packer recasts classical genres in a fresh political and contemporary light while keeping them rooted in a deeply personal context. Combining observation, improvisation and memory, Packer's intimate portraits of friends and family members and flower paintings insist on the particularity of the Black lives she depicts. The title of this volume refers to an ecclesiastical description of the insatiable human quest for divine knowledge; with this in mind, Packer's work urges viewers to understand and appreciate the unique dimensions of Black lives beyond just the physical. Richly illustrated, this volume includes texts by fellow painters Dona Nelson and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, professors Rizvana Bradley and Christina Sharpe, and an interview between the artist and Serpentine Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist. American painter Jennifer Packer(born 1984) grew up in Philadelphia and received her MFA from Yale University in 2012. She was formerly the Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2012-13) and a Visual Arts Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA (2014-16). She currently works as an assistant professor of painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. Packer is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co in New York City, where the artist lives.

Providing a crucial record of the painter Noah Davis’s extraordinary oeuvre, this monograph tells the story of a brilliant artist and cultural force through the eyes of his friends and collaborators. Despite his exceedingly premature death at the age of 32, Davis’s paintings have deeply influenced the rise of figurative and representational painting in the twenty-first century. Davis’s emotionally charged work places him firmly in the canon of great American painting. Stirring, elusive, and attuned to the history of painting, his compositions infuse scenes from everyday life with a magical realist atmosphere and contain traces of his abiding interest in artists such as Marlene Dumas, Kerry James Marshall, Fairfield Porter, and Luc Tuymans. This catalogue is born of the unique relationship between Davis and Helen Molesworth, whom Davis entrusted to be the curator of his work. It is published on the occasion of the 2020 exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, which travels to The Underground Museum in Los Angeles, a space that Davis founded with his wife, artist Karon Davis. In her introduction, catalogue essay, and interviews with important figures in Davis’s life, Molesworth shows how the artist’s generosity and sense of responsibility galvanized a uniquely supportive artistic community, culture, and vision. Together with color illustrations and archival photographs, the book features heartfelt testimonials that unfold in the intimate yet expansive spirit of studio visits with people close to him.

Explores the uses of the abandoned Hudson River docks in New York City by artists and a newly emerging gay subculture between 1971 and 1983.

The first monograph on the powerful painting of Janiva Ellis, exploring abstraction, figuration, race and social acceleration This volume introduces the work of American painter Janiva Ellis, who participated in the New Museum Triennial 2018 and the Whitney Biennial 2019. Featuring a suite of new paintings created over the past year, Rats is published on the occasion of the first solo museum exhibition for Ellis, whose paintings use formal themes of speed and transformation to explore fractured states of personal and cultural perception. Her works produce abundant imagery, invented as well as appropriated. She draws from a broad array of material, including art history and pop culture, to comment on the insidious nature of white supremacist mythology and its denial of itself as a brutal social and structural force. The humor in her work aims to create space for release as well as renewal. Ellis uses figuration to paint Blackness expansively, communicating the complexity of navigating such a lopsided and violent landscape.