Catalog of an exhibition held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Oct. 30, 2015-Mar. 7, 2016; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Apr. 17-Sept. 4, 2016; and the de Young, San Francisco, Nov. 5, 2016-Feb. 26, 2017.

With over 200 illustrations of iconic works as well as preparatory studies and historic photographs, this book offers fresh insight into Koons’s polarizing and influential career.

"Bill Traylor (ca. 1853-1949) is regarded today as one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century. A black man born into slavery in Alabama, he was an eyewitness to history--the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, the Great Migration, and the steady rise of African American urban culture in the South. Traylor would not live to see the civil rights movement, but he was among those who laid its foundation. Starting around 1939, Traylor--by then in his late eighties and living on the streets of Montgomery--took up pencil and paintbrush to attest to his existence and point of view. In keeping with this radical step, the paintings and drawings he made are visually striking and politically assertive; they include simple yet powerful distillations of tales and memories as well as spare, vibrantly colored abstractions. When Traylor died, he left behind more than one thousand works of art. In Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor, Leslie Umberger considers more than two hundred artworks to provide the most comprehensive and in-depth study of the artist to date; she examines his life, art, and powerful drive to bear witness through the only means he had, pictures. The author draws on a wealth of historical documents--including federal and state census records, birth and death certificates, slave schedules, and interviews with family members-- to clarify the record of Traylor's personal history and family life. The story of his art opens in the late 1930s, when Traylor first received attention for his pencil drawings on found board, and concludes with the posthumous success of his oeuvre"--

Illustrated by over 50 of Edward Hopper's most powerful evocations of New York, Avis Berman's essay explores how Hopper and his work illuminate each other by analyzing what his New York is - and is not. Ever the contrarian, he offers an alternative to what other American artists seized on - the new, the gigantic, the technologically exciting. Hopper stayed away from tourist attractions or landmarks of the city's glamorous skyline. His preference for nondescript vernacular buildings is emblematic of the larger Hopper paradox: he makes emptiness full, silence articulate, banality intense, plainness mysterious, and tawdriness noble.

Beginning in the late 1970s, David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) created a body of work that spanned photography, painting, music, film, sculpture, writing, and activism. Largely self-taught, he came to prominence in New York in the 1980s, a period marked by creative energy, financial precariousness, and profound cultural changes. Intersecting movementsgraffiti, new and no wave music, conceptual photography, performance, and neo-expressionist paintingmade New York a laboratory for innovation. Wojnarowicz refused a signature style, adopting a wide variety of techniques with an attitude of radical possibility. Distrustful of inherited structuresa feeling amplified by the resurgence of conservative politicshe varied his repertoire to better infiltrate the prevailing culture. Wojnarowicz saw the outsider as his true subject. Queer and later diagnosed as HIV-positive, he became an impassioned advocate for people with AIDS when an inconceivable number of friends, lovers, and strangers were dying due to government inaction. Wojnarowiczs work documents and illuminates a desperate period of American history: that of the AIDS crisis and culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. But his rightful place is also among the raging and haunting iconoclastic voices, from Walt Whitman to William S. Burroughs, who explore American myths, their perpetuation, their repercussions, and their violence. Like theirs, his work deals directly with the timeless subjects of sex, spirituality, love, and loss. Wojnarowicz, who was thirty-seven when he died from AIDS-related complications, wrote: To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific ramifications.

Catalogue produced to accompany the traveling exhibition RICHARD PETTIBONE: A RETROSPECTIVE held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, from April 30 - August 1, 2005; the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, from November 19, 2005 - February 12, 2006; and at the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California, from March - July, 2006.

This publication has been produced on the occasion of the retrospective exhibition at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, encompassing more than six decades of the œuvre of the influential American artist Carolee Schneemann (born 1939). In it, renowned scholars and experts approach various aspects of the artist's work based on new research. Starting with Schneemann's early portraits and landscapes of the 1950s, the book traces the developments that led to the assemblages and painting constructions created in the 1960s. During this period, she combined painterly investigations of the figure with art historical inquiries while incorporating photographs and other objects of personal significance into her works. An early proponent of techniques designed to reduce the influence of subjective creative choices, she resorted to unusual expedients: fire, for example, became a constitutive part of her process. Schneemann's ambition to expand painting beyond the canvas's confines was evident early on, and her explorations quickly encompassed other media and disciplines including dance, performance, photography, and film. She was a leading protagonist in New York's downtown avant-garde arts scene, which flourished in these fields, while also synthesizing different disciplines in the forms of Happenings and events. Schneemann soon became a vital element in the visual compositions that, in the role of artist, she was creating, posing herself the question “Can I be both image and image-maker?” The same irreverent spirit and embrace the sensuality is palpable in her experimental films, dances, Kinetic Theater pieces, and radical performances, culminating in her multimedia installations, all of which can be seen to grow out of her efforts to expand painting. --

Moreover, it provides a broad picture of the historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic context in which Alexander's works in particular, and those of his cosmopolitan colleagues in general, were produced and discussed."--BOOK JACKET.

Examines all periods in Lichtenstein's career, going well beyond his brushstrokes and the classic Pop romance and war cartoon paintings that made him famous. Gives special consideration to Lichtenstein's historical influences, from Picasso and Cubism through Surrealism, Futurism, and British Pop. Examines the various styles and subjects featured in paintings created throughout his lifetime and includes a complete chronology of his life and work.