Amy Tobin

Megan Rooney: Echoes and Hours is the first monograph to explore the work of one of the most exciting emerging painters of her generation. Rooney’s sensuous and compelling paintings reinvigorate the power of abstraction. They embody a sense of boundless energy and life, whilst reflecting the artist’s deep knowledge of painting and the potential of each viewer’s encounter. Vibrant colour and gesture combine in dense, apparently infinite layers. Each canvas captures the ebb and flow of Rooney’s process, from repetitive overpainting to the use of abrasives to remove pigment. This major new book accompanies Rooney's first solo exhibition in the UK. It explores the variations in her painting practice across a series of new works made for the exhibition. The book illustrates these works including a temporary mural at Kettle's Yard painted directly on the gallery walls, as well as documenting earlier, formative paintings. Three newly commissioned essays and an interview with the artist in her studio explore Rooney's practice and the resonances of her hugely captivating work.

Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends is the first book to document the extraordinary activity at the LYC Museum & Art Gallery in Banks, Cumbria between 1972 and 1983. The LYC was the singleminded effort of the artist Li Yuan-chia, who moved to the rural North of England by way of London, Bologna, Taipei and Guangxi, China. At the LYC, Li organised exhibitions, published books, exhibited archealogical artefacts, arranged workshops and welcomed an array of visitors from local and international artists and art workers to nearby residents and travellers, many of whom became friends. In this book, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at Kettle's Yard, the curators Hammad Nasar, Amy Tobin and Sarah Victoria Turner, establish Li's work at the LYC as a form of worldmaking, connecting his cosmic conceptual art practice, to his interest in participation and friendship as well as his engagement with nature and the landscape. Nasar, Tobin and Turner's account is accompanied by nine short texts – by Elizabeth Fisher, Ysanne Holt, Annie Jael Kwan, Lesley Ma, Gustavo Grandal Montero, Luke Roberts, Nick Sawyer & Harriet Aspin, Nicola Simpson and Diana Yeh – that trace the diverse threads and ramifications of Li's practice historically and in the present. Richly illustrated, Making New Worlds offers a provocative new way of thinking the history of British art in the 20th century.

A fresh perspective on collaboration, collectivity, and conflict in the women’s art movement of the 1970s Women Artists Together is a thought-provoking study of how the women’s liberation movement galvanized a generation of women artists. It offers a fresh perspective on the history of the women’s art movement and considers how it was shaped by collaboration and togetherness. Retracing 1970s liberation politics, Amy Tobin emphasizes how artworks emerged from—and contested—feminist paradigms and contexts. Taking class, gender, race, and sexuality as central concerns, the book includes examples of inspirational feminist activism as well as fallings out, disagreements, and antagonism. Across four chapters, Tobin looks at the work of UK- and US-based artists including Judy Chicago, Mary Beth Edelson, Rose English, Harmony Hammond, Candace Hill-Montgomery, Claudette Johnson, Suzanne Lacy, Howardena Pindell, Ingrid Pollard, Carolee Schneemann, Cecilia Vicuña, and Kate Walker. Groups include the Feminist Art Programme at Cal Arts, Women’s Workshop of the Artists’ Union, Where We At, Black Women Artists Inc., and the South London Art Group, publications such as Heresies and Chrysalis, along with writers and curators including Lucy R. Lippard and Arlene Raven.