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Katy Nelson is a book designer, typographer, and typeface designer based in Brooklyn, New York. Working in collaboration with publishers, editors, curators, and artists, she specializes in the design and production of illustrated books. Say hello.

Selected Publications

Carol Rosenblatt
[NAME] Publications
2024

Sales copy: Carol Simon Rosenblatt: Paintings and Other Containers is the first book published by The Hearing Trumpet, a new imprint of Miami-based press [NAME] Publications focused on documenting the work of underrecognized artists. Active from the 1970s to the 2010s, Carol Simon Rosenblatt worked across media, exploring the primacy of materials as active agents. Paintings and Other Containers showcases Rosenblatt’s paintings, photographs, mixed-media work, ceramics, and glass with generous full-page plates alongside text contributions by Diane Neumaier, Kristina Parsons, and Raimundo Figueroa.

Carol Simon Rosenblatt: Paintings and Other Containers, [NAME] Publications, 2024. Edited by Lucie Steinberg. Contributions by Kristina Parsons, Diane Neumaier, Raimundo Figueroa, and Jon Rosenblatt. Designed by Katy Nelson. Printed and bound in Belgium by Die Keure

Louis Fratino
Magic Hour Press
2024

Sales copy: Since his critically acclaimed 2019 solo exhibition in New York, American painter Louis Fratino (born 1993) has been at the forefront of figurative painting’s international resurgence. This is the first major monograph for the artist, gathering more than 50 of his most important works to date. Although he has spoken of his admiration for modernist painters including Picasso and Marsden Hartley, Fratino’s approach to the medium is highly personal, reconstructed from memories of his own fleeting perceptions. His figures radiate desire; whether poised in a moment of tranquility or entwined in a coital knot, he depicts them with a frankness that speaks to the intimacy of the artist’s tender gaze. For this publication, Fratino’s work is presented in a generously sized folio format inspired by 1930s avant-garde publications such as Minotaure and Verve, and its dust jacket features a new artwork by the artist.

Louis Fratino, Magic Hour Press, 2024. Edited by Jordan Weitzman, with Craig Garrett and Charles Gute. Contributions by Virginia Anderson and Carroll Dunham. Designed by Katy Nelson. Jacket by Louis Fratino. Produced by Katy Nelson and Christina Grillo. Printed and bound in Italy by Trifolio

A.K. Burns
Dancing Foxes / Wexner Center
2023

Sales copy: Deploying science fiction, material feminism, ecoanarchism, queer theory, and technoscience, artist A.K. Burns critically explores the fraught relationships between humanity and nature in an epic multimedia work Negative Space (2015–23). This four-part nonlinear allegory provokes questions about marginalized bodies, resources, environmental fragility, and technology. First developed as a series of video installations, the four nonlinear episodes of Negative Space are united in this publication, which—through imagery, research, commissioned critical and creative writings—probe preconceptions of space and to imagine new relationships to the spaces we occupy and the meaning of our bodies in these spaces. Set in a speculative present, the premise of the Negative Space tetralogy is to envision a new materialist cosmology wherein hierarchical relations permute. Within Negative Space, there is a conceptual proposal, to perceive and act from an inverted position: as a formal term in art, negative space denotes the matter between and around the subject, a definable or known entity that is the focus of attention. Open to shifting possibilities, negative space is instead a compositional gap, emerging from a “subordinate” position, that holds potential for alternative forms of agency.

A.K. Burns: Negative Space, Dancing Foxes Press & Wexner Center for the Arts, 2023. Edited by Karen Kelly and Barbara Schroeder. Texts by CA Conrad, Mel Y. Chen, Aruna D’Souza, Megan Hicks, Simone White, and Karen Archey. Designed by Katy Nelson and A.K. Burns. Art Direction by Azi Rad. Printed and bound in Belgium by Graphius

Anne Truitt
Yale University Press
2023

Sales copy: Spanning more than fifty years, this comprehensive volume collects the letters, journal entries, interviews, lectures, reviews, and remembrances of the groundbreaking twentieth-century artist Anne Truitt (1921–2004). Alexandra Truitt, the artist’s daughter and a leading expert on her work, has carefully selected these writings, most of which are previously unpublished, from the artist’s papers at Bryn Mawr College as well as private holdings.

Revelations about the artist’s life abound. Among Truitt’s earliest writings are excerpts from journals written more than a decade before her first artistic breakthrough, in which she establishes themes that would occupy her for decades. In later texts she shares uncommon insights into the practices of other artists and writers, both predecessors and peers. Like Truitt’s published journals, these writings offer a compelling narrative of her development as an artist and efforts to find her voice as a writer. They show that Truitt’s creative impulse to translate the inner workings of her mind into a symbolic language, so important to understanding her sculpture, predates her art.

Always Reaching: The Selected Writings of Anne Truitt, Yale University Press, 2023. Edited by Alexandra Truitt, with foreword by Miguel de Baca. Designed by Katy Nelson for Joseph Logan Design. Printed in China by 1010 Printing International Limited

Cindy Sherman
Hauser & Wirth
2023

Sales copy: This publication presents a new body of work by Cindy Sherman that continues her explorations of the genre of portraiture going back to her early work of the 1970s. Across thirty-six photographs, the artist collages parts of her own face to construct the identities of various sitters, using digital manipulation to accent the layered aspects and plasticity of the self. The book also includes a text by Sherman chronicling her process in the studio, offering an intimate glimpse into her thinking about the work.

Sherman’s ground-breaking photographs have interrogated themes around representation and identity in contemporary media for over four decades. Since the early 2000s, Sherman has constructed personae with digital manipulation, capturing the fractured sense of self in modern society—a concern the artist has uniquely encapsulated from the outset of her career. As critic and curator Gabriele Schor writes on her process, ‘Sherman’s complex analysis of her face and her subtle employment of expression indicates that the working method of making up and costuming the self enables two processes: an intuitive and fluid process motivated by curiosity, and an intended process whose stimulus is conceptual and which has a ‘subject matter’.’

In the new body of work, Sherman has removed any scenic backdrops or mise-en-scène—the focus of this series is the face. She combines a digital collaging technique using black and white and color photographs with other traditional modes of transformation, such as make-up, wigs and costumery, to create a series of unsettling characters who laugh, twist, squint and grimace in front of the camera. To create the fractured characters, Sherman has photographed isolated parts of her body—her eyes, nose, lips, skin, hair, ears—which she cuts, pastes and stretches onto a foundational image, ultimately constructing, deconstructing and then reconstructing a new face.

In the double role of both photographer and model, Sherman upends the usual dynamic between artist and subject. Here, the sitter does not technically exist—all portraits are comprised of composites of the artist’s face—however, they still read as classical portraiture and, despite the layers, the image still gives a true impression of the ‘sitter’.

Tightly cropped, with frames full of hair, stretched-out faces or swathes of material, Sherman’s construction of her characters disrupts the voyeur-gaze and subject-object binaries that are often associated with the tradition of portraiture. In works such as Untitled #661 (2023), subtle changes, such as the positioning of a towel, the copy and pasting of an eyebrow from one image to another, or the elongation of a facial feature, alter the entire demeanor and representation of the imagined ‘sitter.’

This type of warping of the face is akin to the use of prosthetics that Sherman began using in the mid 1980s in series such as History Portraits (1988) or her later series Masks from the 1990s, exploring the more grotesque or abject aspects of humanity. Like her use of costumes, wigs and makeup, the application of prosthetics would often be left exposed, breaking, rather than upholding, any sense of illusion. Similarly to the use of prosthetics, the use of digital manipulation in her new series exaggerates the tensions between identity and artifice.

This is heightened in works such as Untitled #631 (2010/2023) and Untitled #652 (2023), where Sherman combines both black and white and coloured fragments, highlighting the presence of the artist’s hand and disrupting any perception of reality, whilst also harking back to the hand-colored and handcut works that she made in the 1970s.

By employing this layering technique, Sherman creates a site of multiplicity, exploring the notion that identity is a complex, and often constructed, human characteristic that is impossible to capture in a singular picture.

Cindy Sherman: 2023, Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2023. Edited by Jake Brodsky. Designed by Katy Nelson. Pre-press by Jan Scheffler. Produced by Christine Stricker. Printed and bound in Germany by DZA Druckerei zu Altenburg GmbH. Photos courtesy of Hauser & Wirth Publishers

Jamie Isenstein
Gluck50 Milan
2022

Based on Jamie Isenstein’s exhibition of the same name at Gluck50 Milan, Spectacle is published in a bilingual English-Italian edition documenting a body of work Isenstein developed while on residency in Northern Italy. Exploring the multiple meanings of “spectacle,” Isenstein’s work investigates the legacy of church reliquaries, anatomy exhibitions, and lens technology to answer the question, “what makes a body an object?” Through her performance-sculptures and video works, Isenstein “confuses subjects and objects by turning bodies into objects and objects into bodies.”

Jamie Isenstein: Spectacle, Gluck50 Milan, 2022. Texts by Jamie Isenstein and Nicola Trezzi. Translated by Aurelia Di Meo. Designed by Katy Nelson. Printed and bound in Italy by Ediprima

Matt Saunders
Dancing Foxes Press
2022

Sales copy: Drawing on avant-garde cinema and found photographs, Saunders’s multimedia works explore the mobility and affective power of images. This publication encompasses eight years of work by Cambridge, MA- and Berlin-based artist Matt Saunders (born 1975), who engages painting as a time-based medium through cameraless photography, animation, and innovative painting and printmaking processes. Best known for his haunting portraits and landscapes (using imagery culled from avant-garde cinema and found photographs) and moving-image works, Saunders uses analog materials to explore the affective power of images.

Focusing on his experimentation with color processes, the stunning reproductions in this volume range from his first color film, Century Rolls (2012), to his more recent large-scale video installations. Moving image folds together with painting, photography, and print, enlivening our relationship to images and their capacity for uncanny returns, echoes, and ghosts.

Matt Saunders: Poems of Our Climate, Dancing Foxes Press, 2022. Edited by Deirdre O’Dwyer. Texts by Anthony Byrt, Mathew Hale, Hannah Klemm, Miranda Lichtenstein, Jennifer L. Roberts, and Matt Saunders. Designed by Katy Nelson for Joseph Logan Design. Printed and bound in Belgium by Graphius

My Barbarian
Whitney Museum of American Art
2022

Sales copy: The first monographic publication on the art collective My Barbarian (Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and Alexandro Segade) offers new insights into the work of this singular group of performers. My Barbarian has used performance to theatricalize social issues, adapting narratives from modern plays, historical texts, and mass media; this volume accompanies a major retrospective celebrating the group’s twentieth anniversary. An overview essay relates their work’s formal qualities to several historical moments over this span: the club era following September 11, 2001; postcolonial theater after the 2008 financial collapse; and political theater responding to the pressing issues of today. Other contributions read the collective’s output through a lens of queer and other critical theory, and contextualize it within the twenty-first-century experimental performance scene. A richly illustrated visual chronology features texts on each of My Barbarian’s past works written by the artists. Performances and video works are re-created using stills alongside photos, drawings, scripts, and personal materials drawn from the artists’ archives, many never previously published.

Selected as a “50 Books” winner in the AIGA 50 Books | 50 Covers Competition.

My Barbarian, Whitney Museum of American Art / Yale University Press, 2022. By Adrienne Edwards, Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and Alexandro Segade. Designed by Joseph Logan and Katy Nelson. Cover artwork and lettering by Alexandro Segade. Produced by Nerissa Vales and Sue Medlicott, The Production Department. Printed in Turkey by Ofset Yapimevi

The Pavilions
Glenstone
2022

Sales copy: In 2018, Glenstone Museum opened the Pavilions, part of an expansion that includes additional exhibition space and over 130 additional acres of grounds. Designed by Thomas Phifer, the Pavilions features 11 distinct gallery spaces. Glenstone: The Pavilions features photographs by acclaimed architecture photographer Iwan Baan as well as contributions from architectural historian and critic Paul Goldberger; architect, preservationist, and historian Michelangelo Sabatino; and architect and curator Susana Ventura.

This publication documents the evolution of the design and construction of the Pavilions, starting with the selection of architecture firm Thomas Phifer and Partners in 2010 and culminating in a portfolio of images of the finished project by renowned architecture photographer Iwan Baan. Highlighting the collaborative process behind the Pavilions, this book features a transcript of a panel discussion held at Glenstone in 2018 in which Glenstone’s Founders, Mitchell P. and Emily Wei Rales, were in conversation with Phifer and landscape architect Adam Greenspan of Peter Walker and Partners. Noted architectural historian and critic Paul Goldberger moderated the discussion, having served as an adviser during the architectural selection process and throughout every phase of the design, and has also contributed an essay to this volume. Two additional texts offer insightful commentary as well—architect, preservationist, and historian Michelangelo Sabatino elaborates on the typology of the Pavilions and situates Glenstone within the history of museum architecture, and architect and curator Susana Ventura meditates on the visitor’s heightened aesthetic experience of moving through the building.

Glenstone: The Pavilions, Glenstone, 2022. Foreword by Emily Wei Rales. Text by Paul Goldberger, Michelangelo Sabatino, Susana Ventura. Photography by Iwan Baan. Designed by Joseph Logan and Katy Nelson. Printed in Rhode Island by Meridian

Relative Intimacies
Sternberg Press
2022

Sales copy: Our most intimate spaces are increasingly sites of intersubjective relations. The widespread presence of technological networks especially has made visible the ways that agency and subjectivity are often distributed, engendering theories of hybrid subjects who might integrate the human with other biological or technological agents. These incursions into traditional notions of subjectivity not only destabilize our sense of autonomy but also explode the human sensorium, reminding us that it is only one of many viable systems for sensing, perceiving, and communicating. This collection of essays, conversations, and artworks explores how technology now mediates our encounters and, in doing so, forms alternate, networked subjectivities. It asks how intersubjective intimacy might be theorized epistemologically, aesthetically, philosophically, and politically, and considers how such relative intimacy might connect physical matter and cybernetic systems or forge new subjectivities between constellations of actors. Bringing together academic, curatorial, and artistic perspectives, Relative Intimacies initiates points of contact between artificial, biological, and emotional intelligence.

Contributions by Cecilia Bengolea, Dora Budor, Lou Cantor, Constant Dullaart, Hal Foster, Kevin Gotkin, Camille Henrot, Sun-Ha Hong, Tobias Kaspar, Devin Kenny, Agnieszka Kurant, Lynn Hershman Leeson, John Miller, Frederick Cruz Nowell, Samantha Ozer, Aleksandra Przegalińska, Farid Rakun, Tiana Reid, Patrick Urs Riecher, Isabel De Sena, Jenna Sutela, Elena Vogman, Emily Watlington, and X Zhu-Nowell.

Relative Intimacies, Sternberg Press. Volume III of the Intersubjectivity series. Edited by Lou Cantor and Emily Watlington. Designed by Katy Nelson for Joseph Logan Design. Printed and bound in Poland by Zakład Poligraficzny

Anne Truitt
Yale University Press
2022

Sales copy: This posthumously published work serves as the fourth and final volume in Anne Truitt’s remarkable series of journals. In the spring of 1974, the artist Anne Truitt (1921–2004) committed herself to keeping a journal for a year. She would continue the practice, sometimes intermittently, over the next six years, writing in spiral-bound notebooks and setting no guidelines other than to “let the artist speak.” These writings were published as Daybook: The Journal of an Artist (1982). Two other journal volumes followed: Turn (1986) and Prospect (1996). This book, the final volume, comprises journals the artist kept from the winter of 2001 to the spring of 2002, two years before her death.

In Yield, Truitt’s unflinching honesty is on display as she contemplates her place in the world and comes to terms with the intellectual, practical, emotional, and spiritual issues that an artist faces when reconciling her art with her life, even as that life approaches its end. Truitt illuminates a life and career in which the demands, responsibilities, and rewards of family, friends, motherhood, and grandmotherhood are ultimately accepted, together with those of a working artist.

Yield: The Journal of an Artist, Yale University Press, 2022. By Anne Truitt. Edited by Alexandra Truitt, with preface by Alexandra Truitt and foreword by Rachel Kushner. Designed by Katy Nelson for Joseph Logan Design. Printed in Pennsylvania by Sheridan

Louise Bourgeois
Jewish Museum / Yale
2021

Sales copy: An exploration of the art and writing of Louise Bourgeois through the lens of her relationship with Freudian psychoanalysis. From 1952 to 1985, Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) underwent extensive Freudian analysis that probed her family history, marriage, motherhood, and artistic ambition—and generated inspiration for her artwork. Examining the impact of psychoanalysis on Bourgeois’s work, this volume offers insight into her creative process. Philip Larratt-Smith, Bourgeois’s literary archivist, provides an overview of the artist’s life and work and the ways in which the psychoanalytic process informed her artistic practice. An essay by Juliet Mitchell offers a cutting-edge feminist psychoanalyst’s viewpoint on the artist’s long and complex relationship with therapy. In addition, a short text written by Bourgeois (first published in 1991) addresses Freud’s own relationship to art and artists. Featuring excerpts from Bourgeois’s copious diaries, rarely seen notebook pages, and archival family photographs, Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter opens exciting new avenues for understanding an innovative, influential, and groundbreaking artist whose wide-ranging work includes not only renowned large-scale sculptures but also a plethora of paintings and prints.

Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter, Jewish Museum & Yale University Press, 2021. By Philip Larrat-Smith with contributions by Juliet Mitchell. Designed by Katy Nelson for Joseph Logan Design. Printed in Italy by Conti Tipocolor

Peter Shire
Pre-Echo
2021

Sales copy: Shot in the Spring of 2019, these photos focus on the elaborate and colorful inventions and interventions in the studio of Peter Shire, the legendary Los Angeles artist, and the sole American member of  Memphis Milano, an Italian design and architecture collective founded by Ettore Sottsass.

Californian-sun suffused, unpopulated and serene, Ferry’s photos create an aleatory portrait of the artist and his work, as seen through captured details of the elaborately personalized tools of its making.

Drill presses, door knobs, clay extruders, flat files, book shelves, pottery wheels, toilet seats, and kitchen shelves; all pass through the baroque color world and hyper modification urge of Shire’s vision. The place of work holds the echo of the working life, with creativity, color and the layers of ideas dovetailing to reside physically on each of its surfaces.

Studio / Peter Shire: Photographs by Brian W. Ferry, Pre-Echo, 2021. Designed by Joseph Logan and Katy Nelson. Book photography via Pre-Echo (1–6) and Mast Books (7)

Erna Rosenstein
Hauser & Wirth
2020

Sales copy: Erna Rosenstein: Once Upon a Time is the first-ever monograph published outside of Poland that is devoted to the artist’s vast and complex oeuvre. Rosenstein (1913–2004) was a prolific artist whose varied output was informed by her experience as a Polish Jew during the Holocaust.

Released on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in New York, and edited and with a text by exhibition curator Alison M. Gingeras, this book serves as an introduction to Rosenstein and her story. Alongside an extensive plates section, poems by Rosenstein are included in the book, as well as a special insert reproducing a fairy tale authored and illustrated by the artist. Art historian Dorota Jarecka has also contributed an essay, and the book includes Rosenstein’s own narrative testimony of the war in Poland.

Erna Rosenstein: Once Upon a Time, Hauser & Wirth, 2020. Edited by Alison M. Gingeras. Designed by Katy Nelson for Joseph Logan Design. Printed in Germany by Offsetdruckerei Grammlich GmbH

Forever is Composed of Nows
A.I.R. Gallery
2020

Sales copy: Emily Dickinson’s iconic poem, “Forever is Composed of Nows,” presents the idea that every small moment is happening “now” and collectively adds up to “forever,” or a lifetime. What seems so intangible and distant is actually being created out of the experiences we have in the moment.

Similarly, regardless of space or time or context, the artists in the exhibition explore recurring moments—centered around home, family, relationships, work, nature, technology, play, adventure, joy, and trauma. These are the “nows” that appear, throughout our lives, in unexpected ways, if we but stop to notice. Like beads on a string, they make up our “forevers.”

The artists draw on a range of experiences, methods, and styles to present moments in which hope and optimism mingle with death and decay, and joy and humanism flirt with escape and disaster. It is a fragile forever now. But in their brave and compassionate responses to our contemporary world, their work offers hope and promise for the future.

Forever is Composed of Nows, A.I.R. Gallery, 2020. Edited by A.I.R. National Membership Committee, including Liz Biddle, Yvette Drury Dubinsky, Ann Schaumburger, and Erica Stoller with Nicole Knack and Roxana Fabius. Published in conjunction with an exhibition curated by Natasha Becker, Paola Gallio, and Yulia Topchiy. Designed by Katy Nelson. Printed in New York by Radix Media

Joan Snyder
Canada
2020

Sales copy: New York-based painter Joan Snyder (b. 1940) has been making expressive paintings full of personal candor for over 50 years. Snyder’s paintings integrate the modernist grid with raw figuration and nature. Her distinctive mark-making reveals itself in a brightly chromatic palette of pinks, reds, greens, violets; she builds up her paintings using thick mediums and collage materials including fabric, herbs and dried flowers. For The Summer Becomes a Room, her 2020 exhibition at Canada, the artist-run gallery in New York, Snyder made a series of large-scale diptych and triptych paintings, which variously reference the landscape, as well as poetry and music. This book was published alongside the show and features an introduction by Wallace Whitney, essays by Sean Scully and Helen Molesworth; it features the paintings from the show as well as select works from Snyder’s 2016 series titled ‘Love, Mom.’

The Summer Becomes a Room: Paintings by Joan Snyder, Canada, New York, 2020. Designed by Katy Nelson for Joseph Logan Design. Copy editing by Elina Alter. Color corrections by Jason Mandella. Printed in Turkey by Ofset Yapimevi

Jordan Casteel
New Museum
2020

Sales copy: In her large-scale oil paintings, New York-based artist Jordan Casteel (born 1989) takes up questions of Black subjectivity and representation by examining the gestures, spaces and forms of nonverbal communication that underpin portraiture. “There is a certain amount of mindfulness that it requires . . . to be present with someone in a moment.” she explains. “I’ve always had an inclination towards seeing people who might be easily be unseen.”

Published for Casteel’s first solo museum exhibition in New York, this volume brings together 40 large-scale paintings from throughout her career, including works from the celebrated series Visible Man (2013–14) and Nights in Harlem (2017), along with recent cropped “subway paintings” and portraits of her students at Rutgers University-Newark. Whether depicting former classmates from Yale, nude and in serene repose; street vendors near her home in Harlem; anonymous New Yorkers huddled on the subway; or her own students, posed largely in domestic interiors among their personal belongings, she explores how both public and private spheres can serve as frames for an inner life.

This generously illustrated, oversized publication honors the larger-than-life scale of the artist’s work. It is the first comprehensive monographic publication on Casteel’s work and includes texts by Dawoud Bey, Amanda Hunt and Lauren Haynes, and conversations conducted with the artist by Massimiliano Gioni and Thelma Golden.    

Jordan Casteel: Within Reach, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 2020. Edited by Massimiliano Gioni. Designed by Katy Nelson for Joseph Logan Design. Printed in Italy by Conti Tipocolor

Judd
Museum of Modern Art
2020

Sales copy: Published to accompany the first US retrospective exhibition of Donald Judd’s sculpture in more than thirty years, Judd explores the work of a landmark artist who, over the course of his career, developed a material and formal vocabulary that transformed the field of modern sculpture. Donald Judd was among a generation of artists in the 1960s who sought to entirely do away with illusion, narrative, and metaphorical content. Judd surveys the evolution of his work, beginning with his paintings, reliefs, and handmade objects from the early 1960s; through the years in which he built an iconic vocabulary of works in three dimensions, including hollow boxes, stacks, and progressions made with metals and plastics by commercial fabricators; and continuing through his extensive engagement with color during the last decade of his life. This richly illustrated catalogue takes a close look at Judd’s achievements, and using newly available archival materials at the Judd Foundation and elsewhere, expands scholarly perspectives on his work. Essays by curators and scholars address subjects such as his early beginnings in painting, the fabrication of his sculptures, his site-specific pieces, and his work in design and architecture.    

Judd, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2020. Edited by Ann Temkin. Designed by Joseph Logan and Katy Nelson. Printed in Italy by Verona Libri

Rachel Harrison
Greene Naftali
2020

Rachel Harrison: The Classics accompanies Drawings, on view at Greene Naftali from March 6 to July 31, 2000.

Press release excerpts:

Looking at these drawings, it appears that they are all based on photos of pink line drawings in a bound notebook.

Where were you when you made them?

I had just moved into a new studio and wasn’t ready to unpack.

So these are drawings on photographs of drawings on photographs of sculpture.

In the nineteenth century a series of major excavations of Greek and Roman statues were documented by French and British photographers. The relationship of the camera to sculpture goes back to its invention.

[. . .] References to classical sculpture turn up in your work with some regularity. There was that model of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, flocked in blue à la Yves Klein, in a piece in your last show at the gallery. And then there are your Studs sculptures—each a standard wooden stud mounted upright on a base—whose relationship to classical sculpture, though not immediately obvious, was made explicit in a recent exhibition at Tokyo’s Rat Hole Gallery by your pairing them with photographs of often desecrated Greek statues. As writer and museum director Johanna Burton has noted, the studs are all warped, “[w]hich studs are prone to do if faultily treated; this staple of Western construction asks wood to behave against its very nature, which is to be neither rigid nor straight.”

There’s also the fact that by strange coincidence, you’re presenting these drawings at a time when our current administration has proposed making all US federal buildings conform to the Neoclassical mold. In his essay for this show’s catalog, artist Paul Chan writes that your art is non-salvific—i.e. it resists “the self-certainty and self-regard that announces authority’s appearance.”

[. . .] Your sculptures, even when as abstract as The Studs, are often not only semi-figurative, but anthropomorphic—they loom, they huddle, they stumble, they proffer and enfold. Sometimes they even wear shoes. And your 2007 photographic series Voyage of the Beagle is a boisterous grouping of found figurative images ranging from a prehistoric menhir to a stuffed polar bear to a kitten printed on a plastic toilet-seat cover.

It's quite a crowded scene in these works. Why the layering of figures? Are they in conversation?

Italo Calvino wrote: “A classic is something that persists as a background noise even when the most incompatible momentary concerns are in control of the situation.”

—Anne Doran and Rachel Harrison

Rachel Harrison: The Classics, Greene Naftali, New York, 2020. Designed by Katy Nelson for Joseph Logan Design. Printed in Italy by Conti Tipocolor

Transmissions
Whitney / Dancing Foxes
2020

Sales copy: This book extends into book form Nick Mauss’s highly acclaimed 2018 exhibition Transmissions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which was heralded by the New York Times as “an installation, a collage of several art forms, a revisionist investigation of New York modernism and sexual expression, and an essay in queer theory. . . . The juxtapositions show that Transmissions is a work of creative imagination as much as revelation.” The richly illustrated volume includes never-before published reproductions of documents and artworks by Eugene Berman, Ilse Bing, Paul Cadmus, Maya Deren, Walker Evans, Peter Hujar, George Platt Lynes, Elie Nadelman, Isamu Noguchi, PaJaMa, Dorothea Tanning, Pavel Tchelitchew, Carl Van Vechten, and many more. Photographs by Paula Court and Ken Okiishi conjure the dance that was produced live daily for the exhibition’s duration, and an extensive conversation among the dancers brings rare insight into the process of making performance-based work. The essays consider subjects of ballet and the body, Mauss’s work as artist and exhibition maker, performance and historiography, and dance in museum spaces.   

Nick Mauss: Transmissions, Whitney Museum of American Art / Dancing Foxes Press, New York, 2020. Edited by Karen Kelly and Barbara Schroeder. Designed by Katy Nelson for Joseph Logan Design. Printed in Belgium by Die Keure

Walkout
Interference Archive
2020

Sales copy: May 2020 marked the 50th anniversary of the Kent State and Jackson State massacres, which set off a historically large-scale student strike across the nation. With the anniversary as an entry point and frame of reference, this 96-page full color publication uses posters, buttons, pamphlets, flyers, zines, and more to examine the broader scope of student movements that both led up to and followed those of May 1970.

Based on Interference Archive’s online exhibition of the same name, Walkout: A Brief History of Student Organizing focuses on how student organizing emerged in the post-World War II era as the avenue through which postwar generations could participate in public dialogue and critique existing systems. Organized by decade, materials in this publication focus on student organizing in the United States but make reference to the broader global context of student protests in France, Brazil, Japan, Mexico, and Canada. 

Walkout: A Brief History of Student Organizing, Interference Archive, New York, 2020. Designed by Katy Nelson. Printed in New York by Linco

Black Refractions
The Studio Museum in Harlem
2019

Sales copy: An authoritative guide to one of the world's most important collections of African-American art, with works by artists from Romare Bearden to Kehinde Wiley.

The artists featured in Black Refractions, including Kerry James Marshall, Faith Ringgold, Nari Ward, Norman Lewis, Wangechi Mutu, and Lorna Simpson, are drawn from the renowned collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Through exhibitions, public programs, artist residencies, and bold acquisitions, this pioneering institution has served as a nexus for artists of African descent locally, nationally, and internationally since its founding in 1968. Rather than aim to construct a single history of “black art,”Black Refractions emphasizes a plurality of narratives and approaches, traced through 125 works in all media from the 1930s to the present.

An essay by Connie Choi and entries by Eliza A. Butler, Akili Tommasino, Taylor Aldridge, Larry Ossei Mensah, Daniela Fifi, and other luminaries contextualize the works and provide detailed commentary. A dialogue between Thelma Golden, Connie Choi, and Kellie Jones draws out themes and challenges in collecting and exhibiting modern and contemporary art by artists of African descent. More than a document of a particular institution’s trailblazing path, or catalytic role in the development of American appreciation for art of the African diaspora, this volume is a compendium of a vital art tradition.

Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Studio Museum in Harlem/American Federation of Arts/Rizzoli, 2019. Designed by Katy Nelson for Joseph Logan Design. Texts by Thelma Golden, Kellie Jones, and Connie Choi

Glenn Ligon
Regen Projects
2019

Sales copy: Abstracted letter permutations and new neon works from American conceptualist Glenn Ligon.

New York-based Glenn Ligon (born 1960) is one of the most prominent and influential artists working today, in addition to being a writer and a curator. Over the course of his career, he has become known for his critical explorations of American history and society through text-based paintings, sculptures and films.This new series continues his ongoing interrogation into history, language and cultural identity by way of previous processes expanded by the artist. Featuring exhibition installation images as well as historical works, this publication includes an essay by Helen Molesworth, poems by Robin Coste Lewis and a conversation between Ligon and Hamza Walker that took place at Regen Projects in February 2019.

Glenn Ligon: Untitled (America) / Debris Field / Synecdoche / Notes for a Poem on the Third World, Regen Projects, 2019. Designed by Joseph Logan and Katy Nelson. Printed in Italy by Trifolio. Texts by Helen Molesworth, Robin Coste Lewis, Glenn Ligon, and Hamza Walker

Julie Mehretu
Whitney / LACMA
2019

Sales copy: One of The New York Times Best Art Books of 2019 and a “50 Books” winner in the AIGA 50 Books | 50 Covers Competition.

This sumptuous catalogue by Christine Y. Kim and Rujeko Hockley, accompanies a major mid-career survey of Mehretu’s work that opens at the Whitney Museum in June 2019. Designed to allow close viewing of Mehretu’s vast canvases, it features lush reproductions of her paintings in their entirety, as well as numerous full-page details. Accompanying rich images of work from throughout her career are numerous essays by leading curators, scholars, and writers. Long overdue, this magnificent volume pays tribute to an artist whose work and process intermingle in a unique and important examination of painting, history, geopolitics, and displacement.

The book is dedicated to the pioneering Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, who died before he could complete his contribution, but whose global engagement animates many of its other essays.

Julie Mehretu, The Whitney Museum of American Art / Los Angeles County Museum of Art / Delmonico Prestel, 2019. Designed by Katy Nelson and Joseph Logan. Edited by Christine Y. Kim and Rujeko Hockley

member: POPE.L
Museum of Modern Art
2019

Sales copy: Pope.L is a consummate thinker and provocateur whose practice across multiple mediums—including painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, theater and video—utilizes abjection, humor, endurance, language and absurdity to confront and undermine rigid systems of belief. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art that will feature a combination of videos, photographs, sculptural elements, ephemera and live actions, member: Pope.L, 1978–2001 presents a detailed study of 13 early works that helped define Pope.L’s career. Essays by curators, artists, filmmakers and art historians, plus an interview and artistic interventions by the artist, establish key details for each work and articulate how the artist continues to think about the legacy of these ephemeral projects unfolding in time.

Among the works included are performances rooted in experimental theater, such as Egg Eating Contest (1990), Aunt Jenny Chronicles (1991) and Eracism (2000), as well as street interventions such as Thunderbird Immolation a.k.a. Meditation Square Piece (1978), ATM Piece (1997) and The Great White Way: 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street (2001–09), among others. Together these works highlight the role of that performance has played within a seditious, emphatically interdisciplinary career that has established Pope.L as an influential force in contemporary art.      

member: POPE.L, 1978–2001, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2019. Edited by Stuart Comer. Designed by Katy Nelson for Joseph Logan Design

Ripple Paintings
Gladstone Gallery
2019

Sales copy: Ripple Paintings: Richard Prince (2019) was published following the 2017 inaugural exhibition of Richard Prince’s Ripple Paintings series. The publication is printed with six different colored paperback covers, referencing the color scheme of the works themselves.

Ripple Paintings: Richard Prince, Gladstone Gallery, 2019. Designed by Katy Nelson and Joseph Logan. Printed and bound in Italy by Trifolio

Robert Irwin
Chinati Foundation
2019

Sales copy: Robert Irwin: untitled (dawn to dusk) is a new publication devoted to the titular work by the legendary San Diego–based light and space artist Robert Irwin (born 1928), the most recent addition to the Chinati Foundation’s permanent collection. The artwork was inaugurated in July 2016 after 17 years of planning. Irwin’s building-cum-artwork is a career-defining summation of his pioneering art and fulfills a longstanding intention of Chinati founder Donald Judd to include a work by Irwin alongside the renowned collection of permanent installations in Marfa, Texas.

Robert Irwin: untitled (dawn to dusk) presents and contextualizes Irwin’s artwork through a photographic record of the installation over the course of one year, in addition to critical essays, drawings, plans and illustrations. The publication provides a comprehensive history of the project, describing Irwin’s friendship with Judd and Judd’s support of his work, Chinati’s invitation to the artist in 1999 and the evolution of Irwin’s concept as he visited the site and developed the design for the project.

Photography by Alex Marks documents the Irwin project and the effect that the changing seasons and times of day have on the experience of the work. 

Robert Irwin: untitled (dawn to dusk), Chinati Foundation, Marfa, 2019. Designed by Joseph Logan and Katy Nelson, Joseph Logan Design. Printed in Italy by Conti Tipocolor

Time for Change
[NAME] / El Espacio 23
2019

Sales copy: The artworks in the exhibition Time for Change: Art and Social Unrest in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection are united by an interest in art concerned with social change, art that looks at the conflicts and contradictions of contemporary society, art that critically analyzes and reframes historical events in the present. As both a supplement and response, this publication brings a variety of voices together to shed light upon the complexities of the works in the exhibition, as well as to provide insight into the critical discourses that inform and problematize their institutionalization. This reader is structured around six themes that thread together and establish cross-cutting interpretations of the works in the exhibition: “Entangled Histories,” “Extraction and Flows,” “Artivism: Art in the Social Sphere,” “State Terror,” “Spatial Politics,” and “Emancipatory Calls.” The texts and conversations herein attend to, reflect upon, and call our awareness to issues of trauma and the social body, repression, protest, the forced displacement of peoples, and the extractivist logic that preys upon territory, as well as the veiled, but nonetheless felt, injustices of social control. Each chapter joins new writing with previously published material, thereby offering readers a sense of the divergent, and at times contested, ways in which the exhibition and its works might be understood. The plates in this volume have been interspersed throughout the book, woven in and out of the texts according to the order in which they appear in the exhibition. In some cases the texts have been selected in direct correlation to the works, while in many others they were chosen as lenses through which to read the conditions and contexts of the works in question more broadly. Newly commissioned essays by Denise Ferreira da Silva, Coco Fusco, Suhail Malik, Laura Raicovich, Tobias Ostrander, and Antwaun Sargent.

Interviews with artists Tania Candiani, Claudia Coca, Gilda Mantilla and Raimond Chaves, and Barthélémy Toguo by curator José Roca.

Includes previously published material by Simone Browne, Tania Bruguera, Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Césaire, Ashon Crawley, Angela Davis, Okwui Enwezor, Nick Estes, Eugenio Dittborn, René Francisco Rodríguez, Carlos Garaicoa, Andrea Giunta, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Boris Groys, Miguel A. López, Audre Lorde, Rocío Magaña, Adriana Malvido, Deborah Paredez, Grégory Pierrot, Claudia Rankine, Doris Salcedo, Willie Jamaal Wright, Alex Zahara, and Octavio Zaya.  

Time for Change: Art and Social Unrest in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, [NAME] Publications / El Espacio 23, Miami, 2019. Edited by José Roca and [NAME] Publications. Designed by Katy Nelson. Printed in Italy by Point B Solutions

Andy Warhol
Whitney Museum of American Art
2018

Sales copy: One of the most emulated and significant figures in modern art, Andy Warhol (1928–1987) rose to fame in the 1960s with his iconic Pop pieces. Warhol expanded the boundaries by which art is defined and created groundbreaking work in a diverse array of media that includes paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, films, and installations.

This ambitious book is the first to examine Warhol’s work in its entirety. It builds on a wealth of new research and materials that have come to light in recent decades and offers a rare and much-needed comprehensive look at the full scope of Warhol’s production—from his commercial illustrations of the 1950s through his monumental paintings of the 1980s. Donna De Salvo explores how Warhol’s work engages with notions of public and private, the redefinition of media, and the role of abstraction, while a series of incisive and eye-opening essays by eminent scholars and contemporary artists touch on a broad range of topics, such as Warhol’s response to the AIDS epidemic, his international influence, and how his work relates to constructs of self-image seen in social media today.

Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, Whitney Museum of American Art / Yale University Press, 2018. Designed by Joseph Logan and Katy Nelson

Bruce Nauman
MoMA / Schaulager
2018

Sales copy: Bruce Nauman is widely acknowledged as a central figure in contemporary art, and the stringent questioning of values—both aesthetic and moral—that has long sustained his project remains urgent today. For more than fifty years, Nauman has explored how mutable experiences of time, space, sound, movement, and language provide an insecure foundation for our understanding of our place in the world. This richly illustrated catalogue, which includes rare and previously unpublished images, offers a comprehensive view of the artist’s work in all media—including drawings; early fiberglass sculptures; sound environments; architecturally scaled, participatory constructions; rhythmically blinking neons; and a recent 3-D video that harks back to one of Nauman’s earliest performances. A wide range of authors—artists, curators, and historians of art, architecture, and film—focus on topics that have been largely neglected, such as the architectural structures that posit real or imaginary spaces as models for ethical inquiry and mechanisms of control. Curator Kathy Halbreich’s introductory essay explores Nauman’s many acts of disappearance, withdrawal, and deflection as revelatory of his central formal and intellectual concerns. Eighteen further contributions tease out the various themes that run through this protean and elusive artist’s work. 

Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts, Museum of Modern Art, New York / Schaulager Museum, Basel, 2018. Edited by Kathy Halbreich. Designed by Joseph Logan and Katy Nelson

Günther Förg
Stedelijk / DMA
2018

Sales copy: Günther Förg (1952–2013) was a German painter, sculptor, and photographer with an irreverent approach to abstraction. Förg’s project tackled the latent instability between image and reality. His painterly surfaces may appear exquisitely sensitive, his installations elegantly precise, but these are mastered and executed with a cold detachment. His deft manipulations of the languages of abstraction obscured a darker message. This publication, the most comprehensive to date, offers an important new understanding of this extraordinary and complex artist. Three years in the making, it reinterprets Förg’s oeuvre to reveal an artistic project that raises important questions about the traditional role of an object as a conveyor of fixed meaning. The book’s subtitle—“A Fragile Beauty”—is an indication of how Förg successfully manipulated what is behind and beyond an object’s appearance.  

Günther Förg: A Fragile Beauty, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam / Dallas Museum of Art, 2018. Yale University Press. Designed by Joseph Logan and Katy Nelson. Printed in Belgium by Die Keure

Introducing Tony Conrad
Albright-Knox Gallery
2018

Sales copy: Throughout his six-decade career, Tony Conrad (1940–2016) forged a unique path through numerous artistic movements and a vast range of cultural forms—from Fluxus to rock music, from structural film to public access television. Published on the occasion of the first large-scale museum survey devoted to works Conrad presented in museum and gallery settings, this richly illustrated catalogue offers an in-depth introduction to Conrad's life and career.

Including new texts and Conrad’s own writings about selected works dating from 1966 to 2016, Introducing Tony Conrad surveys the artist's work in painting, sculpture, film, video, performance and installation. It includes the artist’s early structural films; projects in which he treated film as a sculptural and performative material; his series of Invented Acoustical Tools, presented as sculptures themselves; his ambitious films about power relations, set in the military and in prison; and his final sculptures and installations, which evoke and critique what he perceived as an emerging culture of surveillance, control and containment. The list of contributors testifies to Conrad’s wide and lasting influence; this volume includes texts by Constance DeJong, Diedrich Diederichsen, Anthony Elms, Branden W. Joseph, Tony Oursler and Christopher Williams, among many others.

Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective, Albright-Knox Gallery, Albany, 2019. Edited by Cathleen Chaffee. Published by Koenig Books. Designed by Joseph Logan and Katy Nelson

John Akomfrah
New Museum
2018

Sales copy: The New Museum will present the first American survey exhibition of the work of British artist, film director, and writer John Akomfrah (b. 1957, Accra, Ghana). Since the early 1980s, Akomfrah’s moving image works have offered some of the most rigorous and expansive reflections on the culture of the black diaspora, both in the UK and around the world. Akomfrah’s work initially came to prominence in the early 1980s as part of Black Audio Film Collective, a group of seven artists founded in 1982 in response to the 1981 Brixton riots. The collective produced a number of films notable for their mix of archival and found footage, interviews and realist depictions of contemporary England, and layered sound collages. In works like Handsworth Songs (1986), Akomfrah and Black Audio outlined the political and economic forces leading to social unrest throughout England. Akomfrah and Black Audio’s works were remarkable for their trenchant political inquiries and consistently experimental approach. They were also pioneering in their injection of narratives of black British history and culture into popular media through documentaries made for British television.

Throughout the 1990s, Akomfrah’s subject matter expanded beyond the social fractures of contemporary British society to focus on a wider historical context, from the persistent legacy of colonialism to the roots of the contemporary in classical literature. Moving into the early 2000s, Akomfrah also produced a series of atmospheric works addressing personal and historical memory. In the past several years, his multichannel video works have evolved into ambitious, large-scale installations shown in museums around the world.

Although Akomfrah’s work has had a direct and profound influence on subsequent generations of British artists working across media, the importance of his work has yet to be fully felt in America. The centerpiece of the exhibition at the New Museum will be Akomfrah’s celebrated three-screen video installation Vertigo Sea (2015). The work, which first premiered at the 2015 Venice Biennale and will have its first New York presentation at the New Museum, focuses on the ocean as an environmental, cultural, and historical force, connecting literature and poetry, the history of slavery, and contemporary issues of migration and climate change. The exhibition will also include The Unfinished Conversation (2012), Akomfrah’s complex reflection on the life and ideas of cultural theorist Stuart Hall; Expeditions – Signs of Empire (1983), the first work produced by Black Audio Film Collective; and a new version of Akomfrah’s Transfigured Night (2013/2018), a two-channel work looking at the relationship between the US and post-colonial African history.

John Akomfrah: Signs of Empire, New Museum, New York, 2018. Edited by Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari. Designed by Katy Nelson for Joseph Logan Design. Printed in Minnesota by Shapco

Judson Dance Theater
Museum of Modern Art
2018

In the early 1960s, an assembly of choreographers, visual artists, composers, and filmmakers made use of a church in New York’s Greenwich Village to present performances that redefined the kinds of movement that could be understood as dance—performances that Village Voice critic Jill Johnston would declare the most exciting in a generation. The group was Judson Dance Theater, its name borrowed from Judson Memorial Church, the socially engaged Protestant congregation that hosted the dancers’ open workshops. The Judson artists emphasized new compositional methods meant to strip dance of its theatrical conventions and foregrounded “ordinary” movements—gestures more likely to be seen on the street or at home. Although Judson Dance Theater would last only a few years, the artists affiliated with it, including Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Philip Corner, Bill Dixon, Judith Dunn, Ruth Emerson, David Gordon, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Fred Herko, Robert Morris, Steve Paxton, Rudy Perez, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann, and Elaine Summers, would challenge choreographic conventions and profoundly shape art making across various fields for decades to come.

Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done includes newly commissioned essays that highlight the history of Judson Dance Theater and its legacy in our own time. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, this lushly illustrated volume charts the development of Judson through photographs, film stills, choreographic scores, architectural drawings, and other archival materials, as it celebrates the group’s multidisciplinary and collaborative ethos and its reverberant achievements.  

Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018. Edited by Thomas J. Lax and Ana Janevski. Designed by Joseph Logan and Katy Nelson

Jutta Koether
Museum Brandhorst
2018

Sales copy: This chronological overview of the painting, performances and music of Jutta Koether (born 1958) reaches back to her beginnings in Cologne’s neo-expressionist circles of the early and mid-1980s, tracing her move to New York in the early 1990s and her large-scale paintings that layer motifs from pop culture, literature and art history.

Jutta Koether: Tour de Madame, Museum Brandhrost / Mudam Luxembourg, 2018. Designed by Joseph Logan and Katy Nelson. Printed in Italy by Verona Libri

Louise Bourgeois
Glenstone
2018

Louise Bourgeois: To Unravel a Torment accompanies the first exhibition of Louise Bourgeois’s (1911–2010) work at Glenstone and features nearly 30 major works drawn from the museum’s collection. From her early wooden Personages to her large hanging sculptures, from suites of drawings and prints to textile works and her immersive Cells, To Unravel a Torment surveys Bourgeois’s career through selected examples from her enormous body of work. Bourgeois was also a prolific writer, matching her sculptural language with reams of psychoanalytic musings on repression, symbolism, and material. To Unravel a Torment also brings together never-before-published diary entries by the artist, annotated by Bourgeois scholar Philip Larratt-Smith, a contribution by art historian Briony Fer, and extensive installation photography.    

Louise Bourgeois: To Unravel a Torment, Glenstone Museum, Potomac, 2018. Designed by Joseph Logan and Katy Nelson. Printed in Rhode Island by Meridian

Sarah Lucas
New Museum
2018

Sales copy: This catalog accompanies the New Museum’s exhibition Sarah Lucas Au Naturel. This is the most thorough survey of the provocative artist, sculptor, and photographer, Sarah Lucas, one of the most important living British artists. Sarah Lucas, having emerged in the UK in the late 1980s alongside artists including Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, gained notoriety for her bawdy and irreverent sculptures. Often using found objects, Lucas provokes viewers with works that challenge our notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. Featuring eight essays and an interview with the artist, this volume reveals the breadth and complexity of Lucas's work in sculpture, photography, and installation over the past three decades.

Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel, New Museum, New York, 2018. Edited by Massimiliano Gioni and Margot Norton. Designed by Joseph Logan and Katy Nelson. Published by Phaidon Press

Stories of Almost Everyone
Hammer Museum
2018

Sales copy: In its continued emphasis on an art of ideas—inherited from the legacies of conceptual and post-conceptual art—contemporary art often enlists objects to perform as evidence within constellations of research and inquiry. Whether they are borrowed from everyday life or sculpted into new forms, art objects are tasked with conjuring the descriptions that accompany them. What challenges does such mediation pose to the inherent muteness of objects? How do artists choose to speak on behalf of reticent artifacts and the otherwise inert by-products of material culture and the natural world? In what ways do museums and other institutions participate in these arrangements?

Stories of Almost Everyone is organized around the premise that contemporary art objects possess narrative histories and inner lives that the conventions of display can only, at best, approximate. This exhibition and publication address the means by which a broad range of contemporary artworks and artifacts traffic in meaning and mythology in equal measure. These varied approaches are as emboldened by a faith in objects to communicate their value as they are skeptical of the conditions of museological mediation and art’s promise to convey meaning.

Organized by Aram Moshayedi, with contributions by Julie Ault, Hannah Black, CAConrad, Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, Emanuele Coccia, Helmut Draxler, Dan Fox, Donatien Grau, Boris Groys, Bruce Hainley, Gabriela Jauregui, Hassan Khan, Wayne Koestenbaum, Chris Kraus, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Akira Mizuta Lippit, Daniel McClean, W. J. T. Mitchell, Sohrab Mohebbi, Linda Norden, Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, Charles Ray, Mayer Rus, Lynne Tillman, and Alaka Wali.

Stories of Almost Everyone, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, 2018. Edited by Aram Moshayedi. Designed by Joseph Logan and Katy Nelson. Printed in Minnesota by Shapco

Zoe Leonard
Whitney / MoCA
2018

Sales copy: This impressive volume showcases work from the Whitney’s 2018 exhibition Zoe Leonard: Survey, organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

From aerial landscapes to the Alaskan wilderness, American cities to natural history museums, there are few subjects that Zoe Leonard has not tackled in her 30-year career. Working primarily in photography and sculpture, Leonard consistently confronts the realities of change, love, and loss. This book brings audiences up to date on Leonard's impressive body of work and accompanies a long-awaited retrospective exhibition. It features images and examinations from every one of Leonard’s major series, including her early aerial and museum photographs, her landmark works⁠—Strange Fruit and Analogue⁠—and her most recent works, “In the Wake.” Essays in the book range from the critical to the personal, including explorations of sexual politics, immigration, and family. Breathtaking in scope and bringing together every facet of Leonard's oeuvre, this volume celebrates Leonard's unflinching eye and her intimate art.

Zoe Leonard: Survey, Whitney Museum of American Art / Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2018. Published by Prestel. Designed by Joseph Logan and Katy Nelson

Metaphors on Vision
Light Industry / Anthology
2017

Sales copy: Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of “Green”? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the “beginning was the word.”

So begins Stan Brakhage’s classic Metaphors on Vision. First published in 1963 as a special issue of Film Culture, it stands as the major theoretical statement by one of avant-garde cinema’s most influential figures, a treatise on mythopoeia and the nature of visual experience written in a style as idiosyncratic as his art. By turns lyrical, technical, and philosophical, this is a collection to be shelved alongside the commentaries of Robert Bresson and Maya Deren, Sergei Eisenstein and Nagisa Oshima. Yet despite its historical importance and undeniable influence, the complete Metaphors has remained out of print in the US for over forty years.

Now, Anthology Film Archives and Light Industry are proud to present the republication of Metaphors on Vision in a new, definitive edition, featuring a full facsimile of the publication’s original George Maciunas design as well as a corrected version of the text, overseen by P. Adams Sitney. These materials are complemented by Sitney’s introduction to the 1998 French translation of Metaphors on Vision, copious annotations, and an apparatus that meticulously tracks variations in the text across its many iterations.    

Metaphors on Vision by Stan Brakhage, Light Industry/Anthology Film Archives, New York, 2017. Edited by P. Adams Sitney, with Thomas Beard and Ed Halter. Designed by Joseph Logan and Katy Nelson; Original cover design by George Maciunas. Printed in Italy by Conti Tipocolor

Trigger
New Museum
2017

Sales copy: This catalogue, accompanying the New Museum exhibition “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” features an intergenerational group of more than forty artists working across film, video, performance, painting, sculpture, photography, and craft to explore gender beyond the binary and usher in more inclusive expressions of identity. The New Museum has been committed to urgent ideas since its inception, devoting many exhibitions and programs throughout its history to issues of representation with regard to gender and sexuality, among them “Extended Sensibilities” (1982), “Difference” (1984–85), “HOMO VIDEO” (1986–87), and “Bad Girls” (1994). Following in this tradition, Trigger extends these conversations around identity, while considering how even a fluid conception of gender is marked by ongoing negotiations of power and cannot be understood outside its complex intersections with race, class, sexuality, and disability.

Many of the artists in the exhibition embrace explicit pleasure and visual lushness as political strategies. Some deliberately reject or complicate overt representation, turning to poetic language, docufiction, and abstraction to affirm ambiguities and reflect shifting modes of embodiment. Representing no single point of view, and in some cases presenting productively contradictory positions, Trigger assembles artists for their singular efforts in considering gender’s capacity to represent a more general refusal of stable categorization—a refusal at the heart of today’s most compelling artistic practices.

Edited by Johanna Burton and Natalie Bell, the catalogue includes essays by Rizvana Bradley, Johanna Burton, and Jeannine Tang, as well as a conversation between Julia Bryan-Wilson and Mel Y. Chen. Three edited roundtable conversations with the exhibition’s advisory group (Lia Gangitano, Ariel Goldberg, Jack Halberstam, Fred Moten, and Eric A. Stanley) as well as monographic entries on the artists in the show provide further insight into the broader questions, ideas, and cultural shifts informing the exhibition and its artists. In addition to over two hundred pages of color reproductions, the catalogue’s institutional archival portfolio, organized by Kate Wiener, traces past Museum exhibitions that have centered on intersections of gender, sexuality, and representation, and the artists’ genealogies section, organized by Sara O’Keeffe, reveals artists’ own formative affinities and artistic filiations within art and culture.

Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, New Museum, New York, 2017. Edited by Johanna Burton and Natalie Bell. Designed by Joseph Logan and Katy Nelson. Printed in Belgium by Die Keure

Selected Web Projects

Immigrant Rights Voices
NYU / New Sanctuary Coalition
2020

Created in partnership with the NYU School of Law Immigrant Rights Clinic and New Sanctuary Coalition, this interactive map records instances of targeted retaliation against immigrant rights advocates during the Trump administration. Filters allow users to navigate by type of retaliation (surveillance, raids, detention, deportation, criminal prosecution, and excessive fines) and by the agency involved (private contractor, DHS, ICE, CBP, foreign authorities, USFWS, local police, FBI, state DMV, and USCIS). Read about the project here in Nick Pinto’s write-up for The Intercept.

Immigrant Rights Voices, interactive map, NYU School of Law Immigrant Rights Clinic and New Sanctuary Coalition, 2020. Designed by Katy Nelson and built by Nitesh Menon

Walkout
Interference Archive
2020

Exhibition announcement: May 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of the Kent State and Jackson State massacres, which set off a historically large-scale student strike across the nation. With the anniversary as an entry point and frame of reference, Walkout: A Brief History of Student Organizing uses archival material from the Interference Archive collection—posters, buttons, pamphlets, flyers, zines, and more—to examine the broader scope of student movements that both led up to and followed in the wake of May 1970.

From its roots in the changes wrought by World War II through the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s, Walkout traces major themes that led American students to strike in 1970 and that have propelled them since, with reference to international movements that influenced tactics and issues for agitation. Of significant note is the way that the graphic production of these movements helps us trace the impact of movements across generations: Walkout showcases material from student art collectives communicating their demands through visual material, including the Atelier Populaire (Paris, 1968), Poster Factory (Wisconsin, 1970), WIMP Collective (New York, 1970), Sublevarte Colectivo (Mexico, 1999), and École de la Montagne Rouge (Montreal, 2012).

Walkout: A Brief History of Student Organizing, virtual exhibition, Interference Archive, 2020. With curation and research by Jen Hoyer and Justin Mugits. Designed by Katy Nelson and built by Nitesh Menon

SIGNSIGNSIGNS
2016

Founded in 2016, SIGNSIGNSIGNS is an online collection of historical and contemporary political design. Seeking to give new life to graphics only available as low-res images, SIGNSIGNSIGNS vectorizes historical works and offers them as print-ready downloads for reuse today. SIGNSIGNSIGNS also encourages the creation of new visual responses to current events and distributes select works of contemporary protest art. Extended descriptions accompany each work, providing insight into their original contexts.

SIGNSIGNSIGNS, 2016–present. Co-founded by Joseph Logan, Sarah Yalaju, and Katy Nelson. Original website designed in 2016 by Sarah Yalaju. Current website designed in 2020 by Katy Nelson and built by Nitesh Menon