The oeuvre of Mel Chin (b. 1951 in Houston) encompasses a wide variety of media including sculpture, video, drawing, painting, land art, and performance art. Eschewing a trademark style, the common thread through Chin's practice is his conceptual rigor, thoughtful historicism, and concern for social justice. His land-based works such as Revival Field from the early 1990s and Operation Paydirt (2008-ongoing), garnered significant international press for presenting the science of soil remediation as an art form. Challenging the traditional concept of a retrospective as a linear presentation of a single individual's work over time, the publication celebrates the artist's practice of constant evolution, re-examination, and collaboration. The catalogue will also include an extensive illustrated chronology of his career. Exhibition: New Orleans Museum of Art, USA (21.02-25.05.2014) and further venues.

This striking, oversized book, designed to evoke encyclopedias, is a highly creative amalgam of collage with a political bent and poetry. From 2011 to 2012, American artist Mel Chin (b. 1951) extracted all of the images from a twenty-five-volume set of Funk & Wagnall's Universal Standard Encyclopedia (ca. 1953-56) and began visually re-editing. Thousands of images rendered by photomechanical reproduction that served a populist, mid-century encyclopedia are reconfigured with 21st-century hindsight and idiosyncratic connections that convey social and artistic commentaries. Surrealism, humor, sarcasm, politics, history, and beauty permeate these sometimes raucous, often confounding, but consistently stunning images. Over 500 black-and-white collages are accompanied by twenty-five poems, one per encyclopedia volume, commissioned by Chin and author Nick Flynn specifically for this publication. Writers range from the well-known to the surprising. The Funk & Wag from A to Z offers mischievous fun with pointed commentary and hilarity. Distributed for The Menil Collection

Examining the changing attitudes toward the city as the site for public art.

Examining the difficulties of conflict resolution, Transforming Conflict through Insight demonstrates how applying Bernard Lonergan's philosophy of insight to mediation can lead to more productive and constructive negotiations. Kenneth R. Melchin and Cheryl A. Picard provide both an overview of conflict research and an introduction to Lonergan's "insight theory," offering an outstanding piece of ethical philosophy and a useful method of mediation. Introducing readers to a method of self-discovery, the different kinds of operations involved in learning, and the role of feelings and values in shaping interactions with others in conflict, this volume also includes the practical experience of mediators who detail strategies of insight mediation for working creatively through conflict. Attending to the important role played by transformative learning in navigating conflicts, the authors show how insights and learning can move people past obstacles caused by feelings of threat. Informative, compassionate, and convincing, Transforming Conflict through Insight is a welcome resource for working to resolve difficulties in an ethical and educational manner.

An argument for the centrality of the visual culture of waste—as seen in works by international contemporary artists—to the study of our ecological condition. Ecological crisis has driven contemporary artists to engage with waste in its most non-biodegradable forms: plastics, e-waste, toxic waste, garbage hermetically sealed in landfills. In this provocative and original book, Amanda Boetzkes links the increasing visualization of waste in contemporary art to the rise of the global oil economy and the emergence of ecological thinking. Often, when art is analyzed in relation to the political, scientific, or ecological climate, it is considered merely illustrative. Boetzkes argues that art is constitutive of an ecological consciousness, not simply an extension of it. The visual culture of waste is central to the study of the ecological condition. Boetzkes examines a series of works by an international roster of celebrated artists, including Thomas Hirschhorn, Francis Alÿs, Song Dong, Tara Donovan, Agnès Varda, Gabriel Orozco, and Mel Chin, among others, mapping waste art from its modernist origins to the development of a new waste imaginary generated by contemporary artists. Boetzkes argues that these artists do not offer a predictable or facile critique of consumer culture. Bearing this in mind, she explores the ambivalent relationship between waste (both aestheticized and reviled) and a global economic regime that curbs energy expenditure while promoting profitable forms of resource consumption.

Through 140 drawings, thought experiments, recipes, activist instructions, gardening ideas, insurgences and personal revolutions, artists who spend their lives thinking outside the box guide you to a new worldview; where you and the planet are one. Everything here is new. We invite you to rip out pages, to hang them up at home, to draw and scribble, to cook, to meditate, to take the book to your nearest green space. Featuring Olafur Eliasson, Etel Adnan, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Jane Fonda & Swoon, Judy Chicago, Black Quantum Futurism Collective, Vivienne Westwood, Cauleen Smith, Marina Abramovic, Karrabing Film Collective, and many more.

In the 1990s, the New Orleans murder rate exploded. In 1996, 350 people were killed—the highest number in the city’s history, and the highest rate in the nation. In response to this crisis, gallery owner and artist Jonathan Ferrara and artist Brian Borrello, launched a powerful project: Guns in the Hands of Artists. Over sixty artists, including painters, glass artists, sculptors, photographers, and poets, used decommissioned guns taken off the city streets via a gun buyback program to express a thought, make a statement, open a discussion, and to stimulate thinking about guns and gun violence in America. As gun violence continues to devastate the nation on a daily basis, Guns in the Hands of Artists reemerged in 2012 as a community-based social activist art project that has since traveled to six cities across the US. Using art as a mirror for life and interweaving the works of thirty diverse artists with the voices of seventeen national thought leaders, this book is an important outgrowth of the exhibition and an extension of its efforts to employ art as a vehicle for dialogue, as a call to action, and—ultimately—as an agent of change. Essays by: Walter Isaacson, Senator Tim Kaine, Lupe Fiasco, Richard Ford, Joe Nocera, Trymaine Lee, Lolis Eric Elie, John M. Barry, Dan Cameron, Lucia McBath, Harry Shearer, Jonathan Ferrara, Brian Borrello, Maria Cuomo Cole, Michael Waldman, E. Ethelbert Miller, Mayor Mitchell J. Landrieu, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and Captain Mark Kelly.

Kenneth Melchin states two objectives for his book Living with Other People: 1) to present the main elements of a study of Christian ethics based on the work of Bernard Lonergan; and 2) to provide readers with tools for moral self-understanding and deliberation.

In Latinx Art Arlene Dávila draws on numerous interviews with artists, dealers, and curators to explore the problem of visualizing Latinx art and artists. Providing an inside and critical look of the global contemporary art market, Dávila's book is at once an introduction to contemporary Latinx art and a call to decolonize the art worlds and practices that erase and whitewash Latinx artists. Dávila shows the importance of race, class, and nationalism in shaping contemporary art markets while providing a path for scrutinizing art and culture institutions and for diversifying the art world.

Rethinks the criteria governing agency and receptivity, health and toxicity, productivity and stillness