Exactly the opposite is true of Latinx art, loosely defined as work made by artists of Latin American birth or descent who live primarily in the United States. The marketing of modern and contemporary art from Latin America is one of the success stories of the globalist decades, giving a once-niche interest a presence in big North American museums. ‘LATINX ART: ARTISTS, MARKETS, AND POLITICS’ By Arlene Dávila ( Duke University Press ). It still does in this Met book, the catalog for the most beautiful exhibition of the 2020 season. On the evidence of art from the region, the culture early travelers encountered must have looked bewildering, rich and strange. It was the name given by traders crossing the oceanic Sahara to the welcoming grasslands that marked the desert’s southern rim, terrain that includes modern Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal. Sahel derives from the Arabic word for shore or coast. ‘SAHEL: ART AND EMPIRES ON THE SHORES OF THE SAHARA’ By Alisa LaGamma ( Metropolitan Museum of Art ).
They invite the close observation that is Mr. The book reproduces many of them in a deliberately compressed format - without borders, often seen in close-up and sometimes overlaid with additional images.
The works in the show are similarly diverse, triangulated among several generations of creators in the United States, Europe and Africa. Olowu’s extraordinary interdisciplinary, multicultural curatorial sensibility, first revealed in his gallery-like London boutique, where he surrounded his designs with all manner of jewelry, art, craft and vintage photographs, records and magazines.
This impressive little volume is a catalog of the exhibition “Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago,” organized for the Museum of Contemporary Art by the Nigerian-born fashion designer and self-taught curator, with nearly everything selected from the city’s museums and private collections. ‘DURO OLOWU: SEEING’ Edited by Naomi Beckwith (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago/ DelMonico Books /Prestel) Altogether, they indicate how Hesse achieved so much so quickly: She started young and never let up. Ranging from 1952 to 1970, they include art-school figure drawings, adaptations of older artists’ styles and sketches for her canonical late works. It reproduces more than 350 examples, almost all given to the museum over the years by the artist’s sister, Helen Hesse Charash. When Eva Hesse died at 34 in 1970, she left behind an influential body of sculpture as well as a mass of drawings and works on paper whose extent is sumptuously revealed by this monumental volume. ‘EVA HESSE: OBERLIN DRAWINGS’ Edited by Barry Rosen ( Hauser & Wirth ) The result is an up-close portrait of the overlapping cultural spheres of fin de siècle Paris, seen from a new and telling perspective. This catalog examines the facets of his many activities, one readable essay at a time. He was an important early admirer of the Pointillist Georges Seurat and also of African sculpture. art critic, publisher, editor, collector and art dealer. This unusual exhibition was devoted not to an artist, but to a workaholic polymath: an anarchist. ‘FÉLIX FÉNÉON: THE ANARCHIST AND THE AVANT-GARDE’ By Starr Figura, Isabelle Cahn, and Philippe Peltier ( Museum of Modern Art ) The book’s inclusions and theories can be debated, but it sets a standard for future efforts. It provocatively divides abstraction according to subject matter (the body, the cosmos, landscape, architecture), increasing its accessibility. A herculean effort, it reproduces the efforts of over 200 artists from all seven continents, usually with sharp capsule discussions. This large coffee table/art history book announces its singularity with its cover, a painting by Hilma af Klint, whose recently rediscovered achievement upended the history of modernist abstraction. ‘ABSTRACT ART: A GLOBAL HISTORY’ By Pepe Karmel ( Thames & Hudson ) Mixed with these are new projects by six contemporary artists - Mary Ellen Carroll, Rhea Karam, Mary Lum, Clifford Owens, Michael Rakowitz and Paul Ramirez Jonas - that illuminate additional aspects of the archive, revealing their contemporary implications. Barr Jr.’s sketches for his famous chart of modernist art movements. All are republished here, with actual-size reproductions of telegrams, photographs, carbon copies of letters (remember those?), newspaper clippings and an early V.I.P. This she did for each of its 18 issues, until 2018. In 2006 Tod Lippy, an artist and editor, invited Michelle Elligott, chief of the Museum of Modern Art’s fabled archives, to write a column on some aspect of its holdings for his just-founded magazine, Esopus. ‘MODERN ARTIFACTS’ By Michelle Elligott & Tod Lippy ( Esopus Books)