Tiempos Violentos / Shattered Glass

Tiempos Violentos / Shattered Glass

Americas Society is pleased to announce the December 9 presentation by Americas Society Visual Arts Director Gabriela Rangel of the Tiempos Violentos/Shattered Glass catalague at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City. This bilingual publication includes essays by guest curators Bertha Aguilar, Alejandra Olvera and Sandra Zetina. It is also fully illustrated and presents over 75 color images, including all the pieces exhibited as well as many others.

This bilingual publication includes essays by guest curators Bertha Aguilar, Alejandra Olvera and Sandra Zetina. It is also fully illustrated and presents over 75 color images, including all the pieces exhibited as well as many others.

Shattered Glass is the result of a joint project between Americas Society Art Gallery in New York, the Graduate Program in Art History at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil. The purpose of this collaboration is to enable graduate students to structure and intervene a Mexican Museum public art collection. The objective was to find links within a group of works that span from different time periods, which refer to the contemporary experience of violence. Amongst the 39 pieces included in the exhibition are works by David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, León Ferrari, Gunther Gerzo, Daniel Joseph Martínez, Mireia Sallarés, Pablo Vargas Lugo, Helen Escobedo and many others.

Price: $35. To purchase this catalogue, please contact: artgallery@as-coa.org

Art and Myth in Ancient Peru: The History of the Jequetepeque Valley

Art and Myth in Ancient Peru: The History of the Jequetepeque Valley

Art and Myth in Ancient Peru: The History of the Jequetepeque Valley is an exhibition that showcases Pre-Columbian art from the north coast of Peru, presenting 3,000 years of the region’s cultural history, illustrating the diverse artistic styles employed by the various societies that occupied the Valley.

Art and Myth in Ancient Peru: The History of the Jequetepeque Valley is an exhibition that showcases Pre-Columbian art from the north coast of Peru. The show presents 3,000 years of the region’s cultural history, illustrating the diverse artistic styles employed by the various societies that occupied the Valley. The comprehensive selection includes striking examples of the Cupisnique, Moche, Chimu, and Inca ceramic traditions among others, in addition to textile and metal objects.

This publication includes essays by Cecilia Pardo Grau (Curator of Collections and Pre-Columbian Art at Museo de Arte Lima), Luis Jaime Castillo (Archeology Professor, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú) and brief descriptive texts by the leading scholars and archeologists of the field including: Christopher B. Donnan, Carlos G. Elera, Carol Mackey, Jeffrey Quilter, and Julio Rucabado.

Price: $15. To purchase this catalogue, please contact: artgallery@as-coa.org

Dias & Riedweg...and it becomes something else

Dias & Riedweg...and it becomes something else

This fully illustrated publication includes essays by exhibition curator Gabriela Rangel; and important critics on the field like John Hanhardt, Beatriz Jaguaribe and Heike Arzápalo. The book also includes interviews to the artists by Paulo Herkenhoff and Gabriela Rangel

Dias & Riedweg …and it becomes something else was the first solo exhibition in the United States of Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg. A duo of artists that have worked together since 1993 testing the critical potential of the moving image, using video to delve into the relationship between ethics and aesthetics and art and politics. This publication examines their work and analyzes how their pieces examine global issues associated with immigration, hybrid identities, and the tensions between group and individual interactions.

Price: $15. To purchase this catalogue, please contact: artgallery@as-coa.org

Fernell Franco: Amarrados [Bound]

Fernell Franco: Amarrados [Bound]

This fully illustrated catalogue includes essays by exhibition curator Maria Iovino; photographic historian Sagrario Berti; testimony by Fernell Franco; and a personal note by Graciela Iturbide.

This fully illustrated catalogue includes essays by exhibition curator Maria Iovino; photographic historian Sagrario Berti; testimony by Fernell Franco; and a personal note by Graciela Iturbide.

The exhibition Fernell Franco: Amarrados [Bound] focused on the homonymous series comprising large-scale black and white photographs developed by Franco in the early 1980s. Fernell Franco (Cali, 1942-2006) is considered one of the few photographers who developed a distinct lyrical view of the shift towards modernity in Latin America.

Price: $15. To purchase this catalogue, please contact: artgallery@as-coa.org

The Painted Photographs of Melvin Charney: Between Observation and Intervention

The Painted Photographs of Melvin Charney: Between Observation and Intervention

Melvin Charney has worked extensively on the frontier of art and architecture, making photographs, sculptures, installations, constructions, and gardens that take the city itself as a measure of our urban condition. A keen observer of the built world we inhabit, his work is informed by a comprehensive knowledge of architecture—its theory, history, and current practice—as well as his overall understanding of cities themselves.

Coproduced with the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Quebec.

This fully illustrated book contains essays by Gwendolyn Owens and Saul Ostrow; and an interview between Yasmeen Siddiqui and Melvin Charney.

Melvin Charney has worked extensively on the frontier of art and architecture, making photographs, sculptures, installations, constructions, and gardens that take the city itself as a measure of our urban condition. A keen observer of the built world we inhabit, his work is informed by a comprehensive knowledge of architecture—its theory, history, and current practice—as well as his overall understanding of cities themselves. Through his art, he plays the role of both observer and intervener.

Among Charney’s most compelling works are his painted photographs, the subject of this book and of an accompanying exhibition held at Americas Society in spring 2008. In his series PARABLES, IN FLIGHT, THE AMERICAN CITY, CITIES ON THE RUN, ONE FIT SIZES ALL, and BODYWORKS, Charney uses a single image as a starting point: a found photograph, a front-page picture of a building, or, more recently, seedier images culled from the back sections of newspapers and magazines. Set free from their original contexts and introduced afresh into Charney’s work, these buildings take on an entirely different life. Through this unique artistic process, Melvin Charney makes us more aware of the triumphs, tragedies, and absurdities of the modern city, and compels us to see the city and its buildings in a completely new way.

ISBN 978-1-879128-73-6

Price: $25. To purchase this catalogue, please contact: artgallery@as-coa.org

Moon Tears: Mapuche Art and Cosmology from the Domeyko Cassel Collection

Moon Tears: Mapuche Art and Cosmology from the Domeyko Cassel Collection

Moon Tears: Mapuche Art and Cosmology from the Domeyko Cassel Collection examined an indigenous group barely known outside of South America. 

Moon Tears: Mapuche Art and Cosmology from the Domeyko Cassel Collection examines an indigenous group barely known outside of South America. Gathering a number of important artifacts and curated Thomas Dillehay, the exhibition catalogue showcases Mapuche silverware, drums, textiles, and masks as means to explore the Mapuche social and religious worldview.
 
Bringing the Domeyko Cassel Collection to the United States for the first time, the exhibition uses a visual narrative to provoke deeper understanding of the Mapuche, descendents of the Araucanians. The Mapuche are the largest indigenous group in southern South America, known for successfully resisting European intrusion longer than any indigenous society in American history, until the Chilean army defeated them in the mid-1890s. The survival of the Mapuche today is strongly tied to their religion, ancestral knowledge, healing practices, and sacred places. Key to their religious views is the idea of a continuous relationship between ancestors and the living.
 
The objects reveal the sophisticated cosmology and social organization of the Mapuche from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. More than just static objects of a bygone day, they are the material and artistic representation of the Mapuche conceptions of resistance, public ceremony, gender, shamanism, and their social and historical landscapes.
 
Thomas Dillehay’s essay is divided into three themes exploring the links between the Mapuche’s traditions and present day life: Empires, resistance, and historic landscapes; late pre-Hispanic times; memorial landscapes; religion and cosmology; symbols, oral traditions and AdMapu; and today’s world. The essay is accompanied by an interview between Jacqueline Domeyko, director of the Colección Domeyko Cassel, and the Visual Arts staff of the Americas Society, which took place in the fall of 2008.

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

Carlos Cruz-Diez: (In)Formed by Color

Carlos Cruz-Diez: (In)Formed by Color

One of the finest exponents of Latin American Kinetic and Op art, the Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez is a legend among contemporaries such as Jesus Soto and Alejandro Otero. In 2008, the Americas Society orchestrated Cruz-Diez's first solo exhibition in the United States, for which Carlos Cruz Diez: InFormed by Color is the exhibition catalogue—the first comprehensive publication in English devoted to the artist.

Edited by Gabriela Rangel. Texts by Alexander Alberro, Nuit Banai, Mariela Brazón Hernández, Estrellita Brodsky, Ariel Jiménez, Isabela Villanueva.

One of the finest exponents of Latin American Kinetic and Op art, the Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez (born in 1923) is a legend among contemporaries such as Jesus Soto and Alejandro Otero—and across Latin America and Europe—but has been woefully little exhibited in North America. Those who caught the groundbreaking 2007 traveling exhibition The Geometry of Hope will recall Cruz-Diez's standout contributions, which had viewers bumping into one another as they negotiated the color shifts and sensations of motion that his sculptural constructions induced. A pioneer in color theory and color perception, Cruz-Diez solicits physical participation in his audience. In late 2008, the Americas Society, known for its leading role in presenting innovative site installations by artists such as Gego, Lygia Pape and Pedro Reyes, orchestrated Cruz-Diez's first solo exhibition in the United States, for which Carlos Cruz Diez: InFormed by Color is the exhibition catalogue—the first comprehensive publication in English devoted to the artist.

FORMAT: Pbk, 9 x 9 in. / 150 pgs / 50 color / 30 b&w. ISBN: 9781879128088

This catalogue is no longer available.

Paula Trope, Emancipatory Action

Paula Trope, Emancipatory Action

Conceived as a monographic show, this exhibition focused on the process of collaboration that Brazilian artist Paula Trope has undertaken with children and adolescents for more than a decade.

Paula Trope, Emancipatory Action was the first show of Paula Trope in the United States and focused on issues related to authorship and artistic collaboration. Conceived as a monographic show, this exhibition focused on the process of collaboration that Brazilian artist Paula Trope has undertaken with children and adolescents for more than a decade. The term emancipation provides a framework to discuss the ethical fringes of the symbolic negotiation that takes place when an artist cedes or shares authorship in order to stimulate an active subject. This publication analyzes Trope’s work in relation to participation and examines the point of departure of artists who collaborate with marginal subjects. The book includes essays by Gabriela Rangel, Paulo Herkenhoff, and Doris Sommer; an interview between the artist and Nicolau Sevcenko; and a transcript of a roundtable on Relational Aesthetics and Participatory Art that took place between Doris Sommer, Nicolau Sevcenko, Ute Meta Bauer, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, and Lane Relyea.

Price: $25. To purchase this catalogue, please contact: artgallery@as-coa.org

 

Beginning with a Bang! From Confrontation to Intimacy

Beginning with a Bang! From Confrontation to Intimacy

Beginning with a Bang! proposes a movement between two artistic scenarios and is organized into two distinct sections. The first, a selection of action-based projects by artists working in Buenos Aires; the second, a documentary section exploring the rich historical foundations that link these projects to the 1960s and 1970s.

The exhibition Beginning with a Bang! From Confrontation to Intimacy proposes a movement between two artistic scenarios and is organized into two distinct sections. The first, a selection of action-based projects by artists working in Buenos Aires; the second, a documentary section exploring the rich historical foundations that link these projects to the 1960s and 1970s. A video by Pepe Lopez provides further insight into the exhibition.

The catalogue includes essays by Ana Longoni, Victoria Noorthoorn and Daniel Quiles; manifestos by Alberto Greco; Aldo Pellegrini; Manuel Peralta Ramos and Eduardo Costa, Raul Escari and Roberto Jacoby among others, as well as a historical timeline that features the shift between the explosive and experimental moment in the Argentine art scene of the 1960s, and the current scene emerging after the extreme crises in Argentina during the last 40 years.

Price: $15. To purchase this catalogue, please contact: artgallery@as-coa.org

Maya Textile Art: Collections of the Centro de Textiles del Mundo Maya

Maya Textile Art: Collections of the Centro de Textiles del Mundo Maya

This exposition aims to illuminate the collection of Maya textile selections as unique and inimitable “pieces of art” that are distinguished by the aesthetic quality of their composition, authenticity, and structural perfection, reaching beyond their utilitarian function and the rich symbolic content each incorporates.

This exhibition emphasized the artistic and creative character of Maya textiles and their masterful use of form, pattern, color, and texture, as well as their technical virtuosity.  It marked the first time that New York audiences were able to admire contemporary textiles juxtaposed with works of art, reflecting the splendor and continuity of the Maya culture that has spanned centuries and continues to thrive today. The exposition aimed to illuminate the collection of Maya textile selections as unique and inimitable “pieces of art” that are distinguished by the aesthetic quality of their composition, authenticity, and structural perfection, reaching beyond their utilitarian function and the rich symbolic content each incorporates. The catalogue includes texts by Maria Teresa Pomar and Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera. 2006  82 pp.

Price: $28. To purchase this catalogue, please contact: artgallery@as-coa.org