Throughout his life, Carlos Cruz-Diez, one of the great theorists of color, has always carried a camera with him. Through a compilation of unseen black and white photographs, this book shows a very unique part of his work. Cruz-Diez in Black and White is a journey through more than forty years of experiences, textures and characters that shaped the artist's vision of the world. The images that compose the book, offers a testimony of the life of the artist from the early days of his life in Venezuela in the 1940s, to his experiences in Europe in the 1950s and 1960.

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Text: Carlos Cruz-Diez and Edgar Cherubini Lecuna
Editor: The Cruz-Diez Foundation.

Price: $75. To purchase this catalogue, please contact: artgallery@as-coa.org

 Contributors and essay topics include:

• “Humboldt as the Second Columbus” by Dr. Jay Levenson (Director of the International Program, Museum of Modern Art, New York)
• “Connectivity: Humboldt and the Torrid Zone” by Georgia de Havenon (Exhibition Co-Curator)
• “Americans in Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Address Book” by Dr. Ingo Schwarz (Research Coordinator, Alexander von Humboldt Forschungsstelle, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften)
• “Humboldt and the American Pictorial Imagination” by Dr. Katherine Manthorne (Professor of Art of the United States, Latin America, and Their Cross-Currents, 1750-1950, The Graduate Center, City University of New York)
• “Artist-Travelers and the Sciences” by Dr. Pablo Diener (Professor, Department of History, Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso, Brazil)
• “The Picturesque Atlas: The Landscape Illustrations in Alexander von Humboldt’s Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas” by Dr. Alicia Lubowski-Jahn (Exhibition Co-Curator)
• “Alexander von Humboldt and his Unity of Nature, an interview with Mark Dion” by Dr. Wenzel Bilger (Program Director, Goethe-Institute New York), Mark Dion (Artist and Co-Director of Mildred’s Lane), and Gabriela Rangel (Director and Chief Curator of Visual Arts, Americas Society)
• “Field Station Honda: Mark Dion in Colombia” by José Roca (Artistic Director, FLORA ars+natura, Bogotá)

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Complete with plates section, exhibition checklist, map of Alexander von Humboldt’s expeditions to the Americas, timeline of Alexander von Humboldt, and bibliography.

Hardcover: 160 pages
Publisher: Kerber Verlag/Americas Society

Price: $45. To purchase this catalogue, please contact: artgallery@as-coa.org

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Co-presented by Americas Society and Museo Xul Solar

Xul Solar and Jorge Luis Borges: The Art of Friendship documents the eponymous exhibition at Americas Society on view from April 18- July 20, 2012. The first solo exhibition dedicated to painter, musician, writer, astrologer and occultist Xul Solar in New York, the show examines the public and private aspects of his long friendship and intellectual exchange with famed writer Jorge Luis Borges. Since the 1920s their unique and long lasting friendship cultivated an eccentric intellectual discourse that had local as well as international repercussions. Solar developed a colorful and fantastic system of paintings in which he blended metaphysical ideas with regional interests in pre-Hispanic cultures and the reinvention of language. His boundless imagination and curiosity was nurtured by fertile dialogues with Borges, which allowed him to collaborate in magazines, conceive illustrations for publications, and work on translations. The exhibition features collaborative works, paintings, artistic objects and books, as well as translations by Solar and Borges.

A fully illustrated, hard-cover, 160-page publication accompanies the exhibition. Edited by Gabriela Rangel, the publication includes some forty five color plates. The publication will include six essays 10—14 pages each, as well as a plaquette featuring poems written specifically for the occasion of the exhibition. The essays in the publication make significant contribution into the field of writings on Xul Solar English, relatively scarce until now.

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Contributors and essay topics include:

• Patricia Artundo writes on Solar as a visionary and introduces San Signos, book of his meditations done under the guidance of the English mystic Aleister Crowley, previously not discussed in the English-language literature.
• Sergio Baur’s essay focuses on the interchanges between Solar and Borges within institutional framework of avant-garde periodicals in Buenos Aires.
• María Kodama writes on Borges’s literary influence and legacy in the Argentine and international context.
• Sylvia Molloy’s essay unfolds important aspects of Solar’s and Borges’s intellectual exchanges that led to their respective artistic productions.
• Gabriela Rangel writes on cosmopolitanism in Buenos Aires, as well as the philosophical aspects of private and personal relationship, such as friendship, becoming institutionalized and imprinted in official history.
• Poets Monica De La Torre, Cecilia Vicuña, and Lila Zemborain write original poems specifically for the publication in relation to Solar’s visionary works.

Editor: Gabriela Rangel
Creative Writing Editor: Lila Zemborain
Associate Editors: Anya Pantuyeva
Assistant Editor: Christina De León
Designer: Kate Johnson
Copyeditor: Richard Koss
Translator: Christopher Leland Winks

Observed: Milagros de la Torre
February 8 - April 14, 2012

The publication Observed: Milagros de la Torre was a collaborative project between Americas Society and Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI), which hosted the concurrent exhibition Indicios: Milagros de la Torre from March 6 - July 1, 2012. Featuring nearly 40 photographic works from the 1990s to the present, Observed was the artist’s first monographic show in New York. Focused on stark, object-based images, the catalogue examines contemporary issues related to violence, memory, and the socio-political construction of identity. As the exhibition’s curator Edward Sullivan has suggested, the notion of pain also plays a prevalent role throughout de la Torre’s work. Never displayed in an active or aggressive manner, physical or emotional trauma manifests itself through quiet allusion. Several of her series develop out of her own experiences in countries that have experienced waves of crippling violence, such as Mexico and Peru, or that have had extended periods of censorship.

De la Torre begins each series with an in-depth investigative process in libraries and archives. Research has served as a fundamental basis for her images, many of which are examinations of criminality and surveillance. The Lost Steps (1996) is a seminal project deeply informed by nineteenth-century photographic techniques. De la Torre employed these techniques to focus on images of incriminating evidence taken from the archive of the Palace of Justice in Lima, Peru during the violent years of the Shining Path. The seemingly everyday objects, shown in an isolated manner, convey stories of acts of terrorism, passion, and other crimes. In Censored (2001), using pages from seventeenth and eighteenth-century manuscripts from the collection of the University of Salamanca, de la Torre depicts passages inked-out by officials during the Spanish Inquisition. The series is encompassed by abstract images capturing the stroke and stain of each censored text.

This fully illustrated, bilingual publication features essays by Edward J. Sullivan, Miguel López, and an interview between Anne Wilkes Tucker and Milagros de la Torre. This catalogue is part of the Visual Arts of the Americas Modern and Contemporary Publication Series.

• Learn more about the exhibition.

Price: $20. To purchase this catalogue, please contact: artgallery@as-coa.org

In addition to essays by Michael Asbury, Claudia Calirman, Gabriela Rangel, and Judith Rodenbeck, Antonio Manuel: I Want to Act, Not Represent! also includes an interview with the artist conducted by Beverly Adams and a text by the artist exploring his serial work Urnas quentes (Hot Ballot Boxes). Finally, the publication contains a facsimile reproduction of A arma fálica (A Phallic Weapon), Antonio Manuel’s fotonovela starring Hélio Oiticica, Tineca, and Paulo, with texts written in collaboration with Lygia Pape, photographs by Kiko (Marcos Lins Andrade) and graphic design by Luciano Figueiredo.

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Price: $34. To purchase this catalogue, please contact: artgallery@as-coa.org

This fully illustrated publication accompanied the exhibition Arturo Herrera: Les Noces (The Wedding), organized by the Americas Society, which explored the intricate relationship between abstraction, animation, modern dance, and music. The exhibition introduced Herrera’s groundbreaking installation Les Noces, the artist’s first work to incorporate music and moving images to New York audiences. Internationally renowned for his explorations of a variety media, including collage, photography, prints, sculpture, and video, Herrera’s practice is deeply informed by the history of modernist abstraction. Les Noces is a two-channel digital projection based on the 1923 ballet performed by Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russes and scored by Igor Stravinsky. The artist digitally reworked fragments of his artwork to create a dance of abstract black and white images set to Stravinsky's music.

Arturo Herrera: Les Noces (The Wedding) features essays by Nuit Banai (Visual and Critical Studies Professor at Tufts University); Lynn Garafalo (Professor of History of Dance, Columbia University); and Gabriela Rangel (Director of Visual Arts and Chief Curator at Americas Society); as well as an interview with Arturo Herrera, Christopher Newton (Dancer, Royal Ballet), and Dame Monica Mason (Director, London Royal Ballet).

Distributed by ARTBOOK | D.A.P.

Price: $20. To purchase this catalogue, please contact: artgallery@as-coa.org