Franklin Sirmans

A whimsical monograph dedicated to the first museum exhibition of Othello's vibrant, playful and spiritually charged ceramics Miami-born artist Woody De Othello (born 1991) presents coming forth by day, a new body of work exploring the primordial earth through ceramic and wood sculptures, tiled wall works and a large-scale bronze. The installation integrates grounding elements such as clay-painted walls, potted flora and concealed herbal scents to evoke a sensorial experience of place. Rooted in precolonial and diasporic African traditions, Othello draws on spiritual practices, nkisi power figures, Dogon ritual objects and Egyptian pyramids. His anthropomorphic forms and richly glazed finishes suggest a charged presence—objects that lean, rest or embrace as if shaped by memory and emotion. Known for stretching everyday objects into expressive, bodily forms, Othello blurs the line between figure and vessel. This exhibition, his first major solo museum show in Miami, reflects an ongoing unearthing of ancestral heritage and underscores how material and form become vessels for history, emotion and spiritual continuity. This book was published in association with Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Rawles’ transcendent, hyperrealistic paintings of Black bodies in water reckon with the legacy of racial injustice Merging hyperrealism, poetic abstraction and the cultural and historical symbolisms of water, Los Angeles–based artist Calida Rawles (born 1976) creates unique portraits of Black bodies submerged in and interacting with bright, mysterious bodies of water. The water, itself a sort of character within the paintings, functions as an element that signifies both physical and spiritual healing, as well as historical trauma and racial exclusion. For her first solo museum show at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Rawles creates a bridge between her signature style and a story within Miami’s history that is often ignored and obscured. She takes as her subject the residents of Overtown, a once prosperous Miami neighborhood dismantled by systemic racism and gentrification. For the first time, Rawles photographed her subjects submerged in water at the formerly segregated Virginia Key Beach. By taking photographs in situ, Rawles directly engages with the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade, the Jim Crow–era south and Miami’s own ecological history.

Long overdue, this first comprehensive survey spans three decades of Simmons’ richly layered, socially engaged art Covering 30 years of sculptures, paintings, works on paper, large-scale wall drawings, installations and site-specific works, this book presents the art of Gary Simmons, one of the most respected artists of his generation. Since the late 1980s, Simmons has played a key role in situating questions of race, class and gender identity within art discourse. He is notable for combining pop-cultural imagery with conceptual artistic strategies to expose and analyze histories of racism inscribed in US visual culture. Over the course of his career, Simmons has revealed traces of these histories in the fields of sports, cinema, literature, music, and architecture and urbanism while drawing on popular genres such as hip-hop, horror and science fiction. His approach is cool and unflinching in its interrogation of historical and cultural narratives, yet the results consistently deliver a strong emotional charge. This publication offers readers the opportunity to gain a holistic understanding of the complex, profoundly moving work of this influential artist. Gary Simmons was born in 1964 in New York City, where he was raised. Today he lives and works in Los Angeles. He received a BFA in 1988 from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and an MFA in 1990 from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia; he also studied at Hunter College, New York. He has received numerous awards, including the Studio Museum in Harlem Joyce Alexander Wein Prize (2013), the George Gund Foundation USA Gund Fellowship (2007) and the National Endowment for the Arts Interarts Grant (1990).

A career-spanning overview of Dupont’s multimedia interrogations of surveillance culture and technological ubiquity This definitive volume, spanning more than two decades, surveys the works and writings of New York–based artist Richard Dupont (born 1968), and their prescient bearing on a paradigm-shifting period of technological and cultural transformation. Much of Dupont’s work stems from a complete digital model of his body created between 2002 and 2004 and 3D body scans obtained while participating in a US military anthropometry study. This overview reveals how Dupont’s work mirrors digital technology’s infiltration of our lives and the extent to which the commodification and virtualization of the body have become commonplace in our culture of “self-surveillance.” Illustrations emphasize his works’ physical aspect, where traditional materials and techniques such as plaster and bronze casting play a role, as do the use of experimental techniques and materials such as cast polyurethane, poured silicone, 3D-printed resins, digital scanning and the manipulation of found objects.

A comprehensive study of one of the most versatile artists and acute observers of our time, who fuses art and fashion American artist Sterling Ruby works in a large variety of media, including sculpture, ceramics, painting, and video art. Ruby is influenced by a wide range of sources, including marginalized societies, maximum-security prisons, modernist architecture, artefacts and antiquities, graffiti, waste and consumption, and urban gangs. Through these, he examines the psychological space where individual expression confronts social constraint.

Noah Purifoy made art in order to enact social change. Created mostly from found objects, his neo-Dadaist sculpture both embodies and reflects the environment in which it was created - whether the burnt ruins of the 1966 Watts Riots or the unforgiving climate of the Mojave Desert. This book follows Purifoy's remarkable life and career, during which he transitioned from high-end furniture designer to assemblage artist, social worker, arts administrator and finally creator of a desert art museum. Illustrated throughout with works from every stage of Purifoy's career, this volume also includes essays by acclaimed curators, critics, journalists and fellow artists - all champions of this profoundly thoughtful sculptor whose work has been under recognized for far too long. Published in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.