Aria Dean

Kerry James Marshall: The Histories is the most extensive publication on the artist to date, celebrating half a century of his work. It reveals the complex ways in which he has transformed histories of Western painting, centering Black bodies in ambitious compositions set in barber shops, public housing projects, parks, and beauty salons. It charts his use of portraiture to memorialise individuals such as Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, and Olaudah Equiano. A new series, illustrated here for the first time, looks at under-acknowledged aspects of the history of Africa. With lavish illustrations of all the works in the accompanying exhibition, it also includes chapters on Marshall’s Rythm Mastr project and his various public commissions including his stained glass windows for the cathedral in Washington D. C.. A survey by Mark Godfrey is accompanied by shorter essays by Aria Dean, Darby English, Madeleine Grynsztejn, Cathérine Hug, Nikita Sena Quarshie, Rebecca Zorach, and an interview between Kerry James Marshall and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh.

The most significant critical, theoretical, and art historical texts by the artist, writer, and filmmaker Aria Dean. Compiled here for the first time, the selected writings of Aria Dean (b. 1993, Los Angeles) mount a trenchant critique of representational systems. A visual artist and filmmaker, Dean has also emerged as one of the leading critical voices of her generation through a body of writing that maps the forces of aesthetic theory, image regimes, and visibility onto questions of race and power. Dean's work across media has long been defined by what she calls a "fixation on the subject and its borders," and the texts collected here filter that inquiry through digital networks, art history, and Black radical thought. Equally at home discussing artists who embrace difficulty--from Robert Morris to David Hammons, Lorna Simpson, and Ulysses Jenkins--and conceptual frameworks such as Afropessimism, Dean often contends with how theoretical positions brush against the grain of lived reality: how the Structuralism handed down from the academy, for instance, can be commingled with critiques of structural racism, or how Georges Bataille's notion of base matter transforms through an encounter with Blackness. Dean's thinking embraces a definition of "Black art that luxuriates in its outside-the-world-ness," as she writes in this volume, which works to elucidate "Blackness's proclivity for making and unmaking its own rules as it produces objects" of cultural necessity. Originally published in November--of which Dean is a founding editor--as well as in Texte zur Kunst, e-flux journal, and in exhibition contexts, the essays compiled in Bad Infinity were written over a six-year span that charts our rapidly evolving forms of subjectivity and sociality.

Figuration is one of the oldest art forms, but it continually evolves, along with our changing understanding of human identity. The artists featured here often source imagery from the Internet, and draw on aesthetics developed in Internet-first channels. Digital techniques and affordances are incorporated into rendering processes with traditional media: brushstrokes are more precise, lines are sharper, and color is more highly keyed. In these works, expressionism is located more in the composition than in the paint handling. This richly illustrated collection of figurative works is accompanied by texts that connect the present moment in painting to the early 1980s, when the emergence of artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, David Salle, and Julian Schnabel revitalized the art dialogue after the extended dissolution of Minimalism, and to its roots in the practice of painters like Picabia.