Marilyn Monroe, Ronaldinho, and now Lolita—the layers of newspaper that line Rose Wylie’s studio floor are a frequent source of material for the artist. Drawing from such wide-ranging cultural areas as film, literature, mythology, news images, sports, and individuals she meets in her day-to-day life, Wylie paints colorful and exuberant compositions that are uniquely recognizable. This new limited-edition zine, titled 

, puts these larger-than-life works front and center, Wylie’s animated, vivacious strokes now canvassing the page.

Bold, wild, and continually humorous, Rose Wylie creates paintings and drawings that at first glance appear aesthetically simplistic, not seeming to align with any recognizable style or movement, but on closer inspection are revealed to be wittily observed and subtly sophisticated mediations on the nature of visual representation itself. These works make use of an idiosyncratic visual lexicon, the directness of cartoonish figures, and a flattened perspective, but simultaneously betray a deep awareness of art history and painterly conventions.

, this zine presents a new series of paintings and works on paper made specifically for Wylie’s second solo exhibition at David Zwirner, London in 2018. Loosely referencing a house that was constructed across the street from Wylie’s residence in Kent, England, 

 continues the artist’s ongoing fascination with the shifting nature of memory and the multi-layered external associations that become attached to it over time.

Rose Wylie: Lolita's House

Clarrie Wallis

Rose Wylie trained as an artist in the 1950s, but it was her re-engagement with painting in the early 1980s, after a period spent raising a family, that marked the beginning of a remarkable career that continues to evolve and impress. This monograph, the first of its kind, follows Wylie\s fascinating artistic journey, celebrating her achievements while also examining her current practice.

Rose Wylie\s large-scale paintings are inspired by a wide range of visual culture. Her subject-matter ranges from contemporary Egyptian Hajj wall paintings and Persian miniatures to films, news stories, celebrity gossip and her observation of daily life. Often working from memory, she distills her subjects into succinct observations, using text to give additional emphasis to her recollections. In weaving together imagery from different sources with personal elements, Wylie's paintings offer a direct and wry commentary on contemporary culture. Her pictures refuse judgment but reveal a concern with the everyday that makes visible its enigmatic core.

Drawing on a series of extended interviews with the artist, Clarrie Wallis unpicks the complexities of Wylie's visual language, so providing an important contribution to our understanding and appreciation of a significant and increasingly celebrated figure in contemporary British art.

Rose Wylie

Hal Foster

Richard Serra

“The rhythm of the body moving through space has been the motivating source of most of my work.”—Richard Serra

Drawn from talks between celebrated artist Richard Serra and acclaimed art historian Hal Foster held over a fifteen-year period, this volume offers revelations into Serra’s prolific six-decade career and the ideas that have informed his working practice. 

 is both an intimate look at Serra’s life and work, with candid reflections on personal moments of discovery, and a provocative examination of sculptural form from antiquity to today. Serra and Foster explore such subjects as the artist’s work in steel mills as a young man; the impact of music, dance, and architecture on his art; the importance of materiality and site specificity to his aesthetic; the controversies and contradictions his work has faced; and his belief in sculpture as experience. They also discuss sources of inspiration—from Donatello and Brancusi to Japanese gardens and Machu Picchu—revealing a history of sculpture across time and culture through the eyes of one of the medium’s most brilliant figures.

Introduced with an insightful preface by Foster, this probing dialogue is beautifully illustrated with duotone images that bring to life both Serra's work and his key commitments.

Richard Serra: Conversations about Sculpture

Edited with text by Anna Szech. Text by Fabienne Eggelhöfer

 examines a previously little-explored aspect of the artist’s oeuvre. Among the nearly 10,000 works Klee created in the course of his career are some of the most pioneering and influential examples of modernist abstraction—works that continue to resonate today.

Starting in 1913, this book presents around 100 works from all periods of Klee’s career, reproducing paintings and drawings from numerous renowned institutions and private collections in Europe and overseas. The works are grouped under four themes—nature, architecture, painting, and graphic characters—that show how Klee constantly oscillated between the semi-representational and the absolute abstract.

Paul Klee: The Abstract Dimension

Boris Friedewald

This beautiful volume offers high-quality reproductions and the latest biographical information on Paul Klee, who helped pave the way for Modernism.

Readers of this book will find much to discover and relish in Paul Klee's art. Reproductions of his iconic works as well as those that are more rarely exhibited are featured alongside in-depth biographical information that looks beyond his many artistic achievements to explore the life and times of the artist. Photographs of Klee and his circle, as well as entertaining and enlightening anecdotes, offer a multifaceted perspective on a groundbreaking artist and the events that helped shape his colorful and imaginative work.

Paul Klee: Life and Work

A detail from a painting by Oscar Murillo, titled manifestation, dated 2019.

Oscar Murillo in his studio, 2022. Photo by Jason Schmidt

Victor Wang

Spotlight Series

The Colombian-born, London-based artist Oscar Murillo is known for an inventive practice that encompasses paintings, works on paper, installations, actions, live events, collaborative projects, and videos. Taken as a whole, his body of work demonstrates a sustained emphasis on the notion of cultural exchange and the multiple ways in which ideas, languages, and even everyday items are displaced, circulated, and increasingly intermingled.

In recent years, Murillo has traveled extensively throughout the world to research and prepare exhibitions and other projects, making works both in the studio and in unexpected locations. As a result, airplanes, which are able to move more or less freely and without regard for borders, and the contemplative isolation afforded by these long journeys, have become an important site of production for the artist. His large-scale canvases, in turn, are a synthesis in both form and content of his experiences. By combining personal allusions with more universally recognizable references, Murillo aligns these paintings with preceding art-historical movements that conceptualized art not as a hermetic language but rather as a critical tool for interpreting a world outside of itself—comprising, as he notes, “an accumulation of thought, gesture, discourse, action, and motion.”

Through his command of gesture, form, and spatial organization, Murillo is able to convey a complex and nuanced understanding of the specific conditions of globalization and its attendant state of flux, while nevertheless maintaining the universality of human experience within this milieu. Published on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition of paintings and works on paper at David Zwirner, Hong Kong, in 2018, 

 is accompanied by an essay by curator and writer Victor Wang, who attests to Murillo’s work as being guided by mobility. This publication is available in both English only and 

Oscar Murillo: the build-up of content and information

César Aira

Katherine Silver

ekphrasis

By César Aira. Translated by Katherine Silver. Foreword by Will Chancellor. Afterword by Alexandra Kleeman

Translated into English for the first time, 

, a speech by the renowned novelist César Aira, was delivered at a 2010 colloquium in Madrid dedicated to bridging the gap between writing and the visual arts.

On Aira’s dizzying and dazzling path, everything comes under question—from reproducibility of artworks to the value of the written word itself. In the end, Aira leaves us stranded on the bridge between writing and art that he set out to construct in the first place, flailing as we try to make sense of where we stand. Aira’s 

 series is dedicated to doing—exploring the space in which words give meaning to objects, and objects shape our words.

Like the great writers Walter Benjamin and Hermann Broch before him, Aira operates in the space between fiction and essay writing, art and analysis. Pursuing questions about reproducibility, art making, and limits of language, Aira’s unique voice adds new insights to the essential conversations that continue to inform our understanding of art.

On Contemporary Art

The rich, revealing, and thrilling story of five women whose lives and painting propelled a revolution in modern art, from the 

Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, 

 is the impassioned, wild, sometimes tragic, always exhilarating chronicle of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstract painting—not as muses but as artists. From their cold-water lofts, where they worked, drank, fought, and loved, these pioneers burst open the door to the art world for themselves and countless others to come.

Gutsy and indomitable, Lee Krasner was a hell-raising leader among artists long before she became part of the modern art world's first celebrity couple by marrying Jackson Pollock. Elaine de Kooning, whose brilliant mind and peerless charm made her the emotional center of the New York School, used her work and words to build a bridge between the avant-garde and a public that scorned abstract art as a hoax. Grace Hartigan fearlessly abandoned life as a New Jersey housewife and mother to achieve stardom as one of the boldest painters of her generation. Joan Mitchell, whose notoriously tough exterior shielded a vulnerable artist within, escaped a privileged but emotionally damaging Chicago childhood to translate her fierce vision into magnificent canvases. And Helen Frankenthaler, the beautiful daughter of a prominent New York family, chose the difficult path of the creative life. Her gamble paid off: At twenty-three she created a work so original it launched a new school of painting.

These women changed American art and society, tearing up the prevailing social code and replacing it with a doctrine of liberation. In 

acclaimed author Mary Gabriel tells a remarkable and inspiring story of the power of art and artists in shaping not just postwar America but the future.

Lee Krasner, Elaine De Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, And Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters And The Movement That Changed Modern Art

Ninth Street Women

Portrait of Neo Rauch, 2023. Photo by Uwe Walter.

Ralph Keuning

Harald Kunde

Ulf Küster

Norman Rosenthal

Klaus Werner

Texts by Ralph Keuning, Harald Kunde, Ulf Küster, Norman Rosenthal, and Klaus Werner

 is a survey of the painting of Neo Rauch. It begins with his first solo show in 1993 at the renowned Galerie Eigen + Art in Leipzig and traces in detail the developments in his oeuvre up to the present day, using paintings from prominent international collections as examples. Accompanying essays by well-known curators and art historians provide fundamental insights into Rauch’s complex body of work.

When Rauch was a student of Arno Rink at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, Germany was still a divided country. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, when his large, cryptic paintings first debuted in the art world, Rauch became the trailblazer for the New Leipzig School, and its most famous representative, with paintings combining elements of Pop art, comics, and advertising graphics.

Paintings 1993–2017

Neo Rauch: Dromos

Texts by by Brett Littman and Jeff Fleming. Interview with the artist by Ena Swansea

Neo Rauch: Aus dem Boden / From the Floor

 reproduces the first exhibition entirely devoted to his drawings in the United States. Neo Rauch is one of the best-known artists from the Leipzig school in Germany. His psychologically complex paintings have been widely collected and written about for more than twenty years. Featuring more than one hundred fifty never or rarely seen works that span over thirty years of Rauch’s career, this catalogue presents drawing as an essential but often overlooked aspect of his oeuvre. A collaboration between The Drawing Center and the Des Moines Art Center, the show was presented first in Des Moines in 2018.

The drawings, which Rauch describes as “dreams on paper,” are made during periods of intense painting activity and are left on the floor of the studio for his assistant to pick up and place in flat files for storage. Rauch, who never makes preparatory sketches or drawings before he begins painting, uses the medium instead to mine his own subconscious and to visualize characters and scenarios for the works in progress. His drawings range from thumbnail compositional sketches for paintings, to phone doodles, figure and landscape studies, and to more formal and completed works.

Kevin Moore

Painters often draw from existing visual materials, such as photographs and reproductions of past works of art, to inspire and construct their work. Swedish artist Mamma Andersson (born 1962)—known for her dreamlike, faintly narrative compositions inspired by Nordic painting, folk art and cinema—is no exception.

But Andersson takes this process a step or two further, importing images of stacks of books and stray photographs, clipped from various sources, directly into her painted compositions. With careful observation, Andersson's dreamy landscapes and interiors slowly come to reveal common imagery and accumulated biblio-ephemera filtered through, and sharing space with, the artist's muted palette, melancholic scenery and textural paint. 

focuses on this aspect of Andersson's painting practice, exploring how her use of appropriation and collage charges her paintings with an eerie, uncanny sense of familiarity.

Mamma Andersson: Memory Banks

Lucas Arruda at the print shop René Tazé, Paris, 2023. Photo by Matthew Avignone

Fernanda Brenner

Chris Sharp

Texts by Fernanda Brenner and Chris Sharp

Cahiers d’Art in Paris presents a solo show by Lucas Arruda and a new monograph on the artist. While all of Arruda’s works are untitled, this exhibition, like each of his solo presentations to date, is named 

. Drawn from private collections, on view are intimately sized paintings of landscapes and seascapes characterized by their subtle rendition of light as well as new prints edited by Cahiers d’Art, a historic publisher that works directly with artists on limited-edition books, prints, and catalogues raisonnés. Made in the Paris workshop of American printer Michael Woolworth, Arruda’s print works are an extension of his painting practice, which focuses on near-abstract, atmospheric compositions created from memory.

Published by Cahiers d’Art with three different cover images, the monograph explores Arruda’s pursuit of light in his paintings. The book includes seventy-five illustrations and texts by Fernanda Brenner, curator and director of Pivô, an independent art center in São Paulo, and Mexico-based curator and writer Chris Sharp, as well as excerpts from a conversation between the artist and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Lucas Arruda

Anni Albers

Michael Beggs

Brenda Danilowitz

Charles Darwent

Ulrike Growe

Donald Judd

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen

Jeannette Redensek

Jerry Zeniuk

Josef Albers (1888–1976) was one of the leading pioneers of 20th-century modernism: he was an extraordinary teacher, writer, painter, and color theorist, who is best known for the 

, published by Yale University Press in 1963.

This generously illustrated overview of Albers’s work, accompanying the first major exhibition on the artist in more than thirty years, features all aspects of his long, creative career. Beginning with Albers\s time at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, the publication follows the artist to America and describes major themes of his work there as well as the importance of his frequent travels to Mexico. Paintings, prints, furniture, household objects, works in glass, photographs, and pre-Columbian sculptures are beautifully reproduced and discussed by a team of experts. The juxtaposition of Renaissance sculptures and icons with paintings by Albers underlines the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of his art, and Albers’s influence on 1960s Minimalist art is also explored.

Including a comprehensive biography, the book convincingly demonstrates how this great artist transformed modern design by using line, color, surface, and space to challenge the perception of the viewer.

Josef Albers: Interaction

Introduction by Beatrix Ruf and Martijn van Vieuwenhuyzen. Texts by Alison M. Gingeras and Jamieson Webster, Jack Bankowsky, and Mark Godfrey.

Exploring new works by the provocative and irreverent American multimedia artist Jordan Wolfson.

Jordan Wolfson is known for his thought-provoking works in a wide range of media, including video, sculpture, installation, photography, and performance.

Produced in partnership with the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, this book focuses on two major new works, 

(2014). Operating somewhere between sculpture and interactive installation, these pieces rely on Wolfson’s contradictory relationship with technology to create an unsettling tension between the figure and the spectacle. Like 

, Wolfson’s virtual-reality piece shown at the Whitney Biennial, and indeed much of his work in other media, the perspective becomes more complex once the works engage with viewers through movement and sound.

With original texts by Jack Bankowsky, Alison Gingeras, and Joey Frank illustrated with details of Wolfson’s other major works and installations—including his critically acclaimed films 

(2012)—this is the most important book on Wolfson’s work to date.

Jordan Wolfson: Manic / Love / Truth / Love

John Ruskin

Robert Hewison

By John Ruskin. Introduction by Robert Hewison

The Arena Chapel in Padua was completed in 1303; Giotto, then considered the preeminent painter in Italy, was commissioned to paint it in 1306. The resulting fresco cycle, detailing the history, birth, life, and death of Christ, ranks among the greatest artworks ever created.

John Ruskin helped redefine art criticism in the nineteenth century through his attention to detail, his playful and engaging prose, and the conviction with which he discussed the subjects that mattered most to him. Ruskin’s ekphrastic writing became a way for readers to approach the experience of looking at great art without actually seeing it in person. Despite having written about Giotto on numerous occasions in 

, he never treated the Arena Chapel in its own right. Here Ruskin examines the panels and brings them life, describing their many hidden details, all the result of Giotto’s unrivaled genius. As Ruskin says, “Giotto was…one of the greatest men who ever lived.”

Long out of print, the Arundel Society first published 

between 1853 and 1860. It stands as Ruskin’s most compelling set of reflections on Giotto’s masterpiece—an artwork that, in Ruskin’s estimation, changed the very course of art history. Originally accompanied by a set of black and white woodcuts of the panels in the Chapel, this new edition presents each panel in vivid color photography, adding a useful visual aid to Ruskin’s lyrical descriptions. The result is a book that serves not only as an introduction for students of art history, but also as a discussion of what it means to be a great artist, by one of most influential writers ever to tackle visual art.

Giotto and His Works in Padua

Portrait of Kerry James Marshall, 2018. Photo by Jason Bell

Texts by Jacqueline Francis, Catharina Manchanda, and Lowery Stokes Sims

Contemporary artists Robert Colescott (1925–2009), Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955), and Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971) are distinguished by their attention to a history of representation, which they re-visit and revise to reflect on individual and collective Black experience. Equally engaged with social and political histories, and the history of art, Colescott, Marshall, and Thomas have created works that at times poignantly and satirically critique dominant narratives and posit alternatives. By considering these artists together, this thought-provoking book expands our understanding of contemporary history painting, a genre first defined during the 17th century and known for didactic paintings that often depicted Biblical or mythological subjects, and expressed the tastes and narratives of a ruling class. Colescott, Marshall, and Thomas marry appreciation of these traditional forms of representation to a deep understanding of contemporary American culture to create insightful works that disrupt historic narratives and read canonic art history against the grain.

Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas

Figuring History

David Breslin

One of the most significant artists to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s reduced formal vocabulary, conceptual rigor, and evocative use of everyday materials resonates with meaning that is at once specific and mutable, rigorous and generous, poetic and political.

Featuring several key bodies of work from throughout the artist's career, this publication showcases a series of distinct installations at David Zwirner in New York in 2017. The interplay with the specific architecture of the gallery and the way works are installed is highlighted throughout the catalogue, with images that explore the poetics of how space and work influence each other. Together, in their radical openness to interventions of site, audience, and context, the works on view challenge perceived notions of what constitutes an exhibition space, a public, an artwork itself. Despite the resolute abstraction of much of his work, Gonzalez-Torres worked with familiar materials, from his iconic candy spill works and his evocative light string pieces, but also including mirrors, clocks, and curtains. His work activates the architecture of the various spaces, the physicality of the viewer, the past and present, continuously maintaining its relevance.

Opening with details of the exhibition and images of visitors in the spaces, the publication walks the reader through each piece. New text by David Breslin explores the variety of works included here while contextualizing Gonzalez-Torres's contribution to art history.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Donald Shambroom

Published on the fiftieth anniversary of Marcel Duchamp’s death, 

 offers a radical reading of the artist’s final hours.

Just moments after Duchamp died, his closest friend Man Ray took a photograph of him. His face is wan; his eyes are closed; he appears calm. Taking this image as a point of departure, Donald Shambroom begins to examine the surrounding context—the dinner with Man Ray and another friend, Robert Lebel, the night Duchamp died, the conversations about his own death at that dinner and elsewhere, and the larger question of whether this radical artist’s death can be read as an extension of his work.

Shambroom’s in-depth research into this final night, and his analysis of the photograph, feeds into larger questions about the very nature of artworks and authorship which Duchamp raised in his lifetime. In the case of this mysterious and once long-lost photograph, who is the author? Man Ray or Duchamp? Is it an artwork or merely a record? Has the artist himself turned into one of his own readymades?

A fascinating essay that is both intimate and steeped in art history, 

 is filled with intricate details from decades of research into this peculiar encounter between art, life, and death. Shambroom’s book is a wonderful study of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.

Duchamp's Last Day

A gelatin silver print by Diane Arbus, titled Triplets in their bedroom, N.J. 1963, dated 1963.

John P. Jacob

, bastion of late modernism, featured the work of a photographer for the very first time. On its cover and in a six-page spread, it published selections from Diane Arbus's portfolio, 

. In the words of the magazine’s editor and photography skeptic, Philip Leider, “The portfolio changed everything . . . one could no longer deny [photography’s] status as art.” At the time of Arbus’s death, two months later, only four of the intended edition of fifty had been sold. Two had been purchased from Arbus by Richard Avedon (the first for himself, the second as a gift for his friend Mike Nichols); another was purchased by Jasper Johns; and a fourth by Bea Feitler, art director at Harper’s Bazaar. Arbus signed the prints in all four sets; each print was accompanied by an interleaving vellum slip-sheet inscribed with an extended caption. For Feitler, Arbus added an eleventh photograph, 

Acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., in 1986—and the only one of the four completed and sold by Arbus that is publicly held—that portfolio was the subject of an exhibition on view at the museum in 2018. This exceptional book replicates the nature of Diane Arbus’s original and now legendary object. Smithsonian curator John P. Jacob, who has unearthed a trove of new information in preparing the book and exhibition, weaves a fascinating tale of the creation, production, and continuing repercussions of this seminal work.

Diane Arbus: A box of ten photographs

Richard Shiff

Robert Storr

David Zwirner

Texts by Richard Shiff and Robert Storr. Foreword by David Zwirner

Published on the occasion of the twenty-five year anniversary of David Zwirner, this book paints a picture of the gallery’s growth and development through the lens of the artists that have shaped it.

Since its founding in 1993, David Zwirner has above all else been guided by its artist-centric ethos. Beginning with the gallery's early days on Greens Street in SoHo, to its transition and expansion to Chelsea, London, the Upper East Side, and Hong Kong, this book captures David Zwirner's devotion to its inimitable roster of artists and estates.

The heart of the publication is a wide-ranging, dynamic selection of the gallery's standout exhibitions—in many cases handpicked by David Zwirner himself. Many of these exhibitions highlight the countless works that ended up in major museum and private collections around the world. Also featured is an extensive gallery history that details all of the exhibitions by every artist and estate presented at David Zwirner, accompanied by archival imagery.

With contributions by Richard Shiff and Robert Storr, as well as a foreword by David Zwirner, this publication offers rare insights into the growth of a commercial gallery through its long-term commitment to artists.

David Zwirner: 25 Years

Mark Wigley

By Mark Wigley. Contributions by Gordon Matta-Clark.

Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Investigation 

is a detective story. It relentlessly pursues the legendary but invisible Anarchitecture Group show and Gordon Matta-Clark’s celebrated, hyper-visible, yet equally misunderstood building cuts. Of all the shows at the fabled 112 Greene Street space—an epicenter of New York’s downtown art scene in the 1970s—the Anarchitecture Group show of March 1974 is a constant reference point in discussion, despite the almost complete lack of evidence about it. It has become a foundational myth. Gordon Matta-Clark was supposedly the ringleader of an extended series of meetings with fellow artists that operated as a kind of collective research seminar challenging all conventional understandings of architecture. The meetings of this so-called Anarchitecture Group culminated in the exhibition as an anonymous statement in unlabeled photographs. But did it actually happen? It exists only through oblique archival traces and the conflicting memories of the participants. An unprecedented dossier of unpublished archival evidence is assembled here and subjected to ever deeper forensic analysis—cutting into both the concepts and the cuts to see what the elusive, mysterious, seductive, yet viral word Anarchitecture offers us today.

Contains interviews with Tina Girouard, Jene Highstein, Dickie Landry, Jeffrey Lew, Richard Nonas, Bernard Kirschenbaum, and Susan Weil Kirschenbaum.

Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Investigation

Bertold Brecht

David Crowley

Deeply political and historical, Christopher Williams’ photographs evoke a subtle shift in our perception by questioning the communication mechanisms and aesthetic conventions that influence our understanding of reality. Deploying a style of photography that references multiple sources and precedents, including the carefully composed and well-lit images of the 1920s New Objectivity movement, the photo-conceptualism that he encountered as a student at CalArts in the 1970s, and the advertisement industry, Williams creates layered works that critically, but also playfully, reveal the conditions of the medium in post-industrial society.

Each of the two volumes in this slipcased publication by Christopher Williams (born 1956) comprises an identical image sequence, but each contains a different text: the first volume includes Brecht's 

, and the second David Crowley's essay "Applied Fantastic: On the Polish Women’s Magazine Ty I Ja."

Christopher Williams: Normative Models

Texts by Valérie Rousseau and Debra Purden

Born into slavery around 1853-4 on a cotton plantation in Benton, Alabama, Traylor has become one of the most important self-taught artists of the twentieth century, and certainly one of the most celebrated African-American artists, along with Thorton Dial and William Edmondson. The story of Bill Traylor's life and work is a remarkable one. It is a story that deserves attention both nationally and internationally.

This publication, generously illustrated with full-page high-quality reproductions, provides a close examination of Traylor's recurrent themes, composition schemes, favored iconography, and contextual information related to the artist's biography, creative process and tools, visual environment, and artistic mindset.

Each artwork is considered in a context beyond that of an isolated image and in response to one another, forming a series of intricate and consistent narratives, intriguingly cinematic in its development. The elements of Traylor's biography are the anchors of an individual mythology. Instead of merely being a basic depiction, the subject becomes a visual statement structuring Traylor's mind, bringing together hidden symbols from Kongo Vodou, Hoodoo, Southern Baptist, Freemasonry, and Blues sources, as well as layers of references: slavery, uncensored violence in the Jim Crow era, and turbulence within the black enclave known as 'Dark Town' in Montgomery, Alabama.

Bill Traylor

Text by Leslie Umberger. Foreword by Stephanie Stebich. Introduction by Kerry James Marshall

A major new look at the work of one of America’s foremost self-taught artists.

Bill Traylor (ca. 1853–1949) came to art-making on his own and found his creative voice without guidance; today he is remembered as a renowned American artist. Traylor was born into slavery on an Alabama plantation, and his experiences spanned multiple worlds—black and white, rural and urban, old and new—as well as the crucibles that indelibly shaped America—the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Great Migration. 

 presents an unparalleled look at the work of this enigmatic and dazzling artist, who blended common imagery with arcane symbolism, narration with abstraction, and personal vision with the beliefs and folkways of his time.

Traylor was about twelve when the Civil War ended. After six more decades of farm labor, he moved, aging and alone, into segregated Montgomery. In the last years of his life, he drew and painted works depicting plantation memories and the rising world of African American culture. Upon his death he left behind over a thousand pieces of art. 

 convenes 205 of his most powerful creations, including a number that have been previously unpublished. This beautiful and carefully researched book assesses Traylor’s biography and stylistic development, and for the first time interprets his scenes as ongoing narratives, conveying enduring, interrelated themes.

 reveals one man’s visual record of African American life as a window into the overarching story of his nation.

Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor

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