Bill Arning

This career-spanning volume documents the first museum retrospective devoted to the work of Mary Weatherford, a daring practitioner of American abstraction and a leading painter of her generation. This career-spanning volume documents the first museum retrospective devoted to the work of Mary Weatherford, a daring practitioner of American abstraction and a leading painter of her generation. Over the last three decades, Mary Weatherford has developed a rich and diverse painting practice, from her early 1990s target paintings based on operatic heroines, to the expansive, gestural canvases overlaid with neon glass-tubing that brought attention to her practice in the 2010s. Mary Weatherford: Canyon-Daisy-Eden presents a survey of Weatherford's career, drawing from several distinct bodies of work made between 1989 and 2017. As constant experiments with colour, scale, and materials, these works as a whole reveal the continuity of Weatherford's interest in human experience, both personal and historical. Featuring 120 full-colour plates and expansive installation views, this volume-published by Gagosian in association with the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College-documents an exhibition presented at the Tang and at SITE Santa Fe.

For nearly three decades, Brooklyn-based Annabeth Rosen (born 1957) has demonstrably interrogated the place of ceramics in the contemporary art landscape. Formally trained in ceramics yet heavily influenced by painting, Rosen has expanded her practice into conceptually driven sculptural forms, exploring the temporal nature of the medium—melding performative aspects into both material and process. Her diminutive and occasionally monumental works composed through laborious, additive processes push the medium beyond spectacle and into conversations about endurance-based performance, feminist thought, contemporary painting and conceptual art. Rosen functions as an important link between such artist as Peter Voulkos, Jun Kaneko, Mary Heilman, Lynda Benglis and a new generation of artists working in the medium. Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped is the artist’s first major survey and covers 25 years of her work.

New York-based artist Paul Ramirez Jonas (born 1965) investigates how publics are constituted and convened through the exploration of public forms like the equestrian statue, the bronze plaque and the key to the city. Published to accompany the artist's first survey exhibition in the Americas, Atlas, Plural, Monumental is the most comprehensive publication on the artist's work to date, including sculptures, photographs, videos, drawings, public actions and participatory works made from 1991 to 2016. It includes an introductory essay by CAMH Director Bill Arning, an essay by curator Dean Daderko, and commissioned essays by Claire Barliant and Shannon Jackson, as well as a checklist of works included in the exhibition and biographic and bibliographic information.

The work of Jennie C. Jones (born 1968) spans multiple mediums, from paintings, sculptures and works on paper to audio collages and immersive sound installations. Jones employs the visual languages of abstraction and minimalism to draw out the parallels and disjunctions between the history of modernism and the history of African American music, particularly jazz. This volume documenting the artist’s midcareer survey at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston includes many of her best-known works alongside new paintings and a site-specific installation. The book, whose stunning design references the formal qualities of Jones’ work, includes an extensive plate selection alongside essays by Valerie Cassel Oliver, Hilton Als and George Lewis, and an interview between Jones and art historian Huey Copeland.

Powerful Babies brought together a diverse group of contemporary artists from across the United States and Northern Europe to celebrate Keith Harings legacy on the 25th anniversary of his death. The selection of artists for the 2015 exhibition at Spritmuseum, Stockholm was made by Bill Arning, Director of Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and Rick Herron, New York-based independent curator. From symbols to social practice, Haring's influence reverberates throughout the contemporary art landscape in new and unexpected ways. The exhibition included artists whose practices exemplify the innovation and veracity for which Harings work is known, as well as his embrace of humour, dance and nightlife, and social and political activism. Participating artists: Alexander Tovborg, Allen Grubesic, J. Morrison, Jaimie Warren, Jeanette Hayes, Joakim Ojanen, John Hanning, Juliana Huxtable, Katherine Bernhardt, Klara Liden, Kristina Matousch, Lori Ellison, M Lamar, Michael Alan, Misaki Kawai, Przemek Pyszczek, Raul de Nieves, Scooter LaForge, Steven Evans, Tad Beck, Thedra Cullar-Ledford, and Trenton Doyle Hancock. Published in conjunction with the exhibition at Spritmuseum in Stockholm.

In 1914, Marcel Duchamp purchased a bottle rack, called it a sculpture, put his name to it and the “readymade” artwork was born. It Is What It Is. Or Is It? considers the legacy of the readymade in contemporary artistic practice as the form approaches its 100th anniversary and attempts to recuperate the radicality of Duchamp’s foundational gesture. Taking stock of the readymade’s simple materiality and its economy of means, this catalogue includes work by 18 artists working in a variety of media from sculpture to photography, painting, video and installation-based works. It Is What It Is. Or Is It? includes works by Ellen Altfest, Fayçal Baghriche, Bill Bollinger, William Cordova, Latifa Echakhch, Daphne Fitzpatrick, Claire Fontaine, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rachel Hecker, Jamie Isenstein, Luis Jacob, Patrick Killoran, Jirí Kovanda, Klara Lidén, Catherine Murphy and Pratchaya Phinthong.