New York School Painters & Poets charts the collaborative milieu of New York City poets and artists in the mid-twentieth century. This unprecedented volume comprehensively reproduces rare ephemera, collecting and reprinting collaborations, paintings, drawings, poetry, letters, art reviews, photographs, dialogues, manifestos, and memories. Jenni Quilter offers a chronological survey of this milieu, which includes artists such as Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Alex Katz, Jasper Johns, Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers, George Schneeman, and Rudy Burckhardt, plus writers John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Edwin Denby, Larry Fagin, Frank O’Hara, Charles North, Ron Padgett, James Schuyler, Anne Waldman, and more.

“Giving us for the first time a full picture of the scene these artists and writers shared,” writes Carter Ratcliff in his foreword, “this book illuminates the unities and tensions, the playfulness and glamour and startling authenticity of their collaborations. Here we not only see evidence of a modus operandi. We also feel the exuberance of a certain modus vivendi, a way of life.”

By Jenni Quilter, Edited by Allison Power, with Advisory Editors: Bill Berkson and Larry Fagin, and Forewords by Bill Berkson and Carter Ratcliff

The first monograph on Korean artist Kwang Young Chun, renowned for exquisite handmade mulberry paper sculptures and textured surfaces that represent harmony and conflict in the unity of many. Covering the entirety of Kwang Young Chun’s career from his early abstract paintings to his famed Aggregation series—complex structures and canvases created from the antique, handmade mulberry paper pages of literary and academic texts and tinted with teas, fruits and flowers—this book documents a highly influential contemporary artist whose work, writes the New York Times, “…makes you sense something fundamental about great art that is too often forgotten or overlooked in today’s age of instant everything….”

The use of traditional materials and organic dyes, and his meticulous process, imbues Chun’s compositions with a timeless quality that has been recognised around the world. In 2001 Chun received the artist of the year award from the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea. His works are included in esteemed public collections such as the United Nations and Rockefeller Foundation in New York, the National Gallery of Australia at Canberra, and were recently exhibited in a three-man show with Anselm Kiefer and Gotthard Graubner at the Kunstwerk museum in Eberdingen-Nussdorf, Germany (2012).

This monograph is a sensitive and thoughtful accounting of the life and body of work of painter Li-lan.

Barbara Rogers came of age as an artist during the battle between figuration and abstraction. Never declaring full allegiance to the figurative movement or to pure abstraction, Rogers forged a style that placed the figure in a setting that includes rich foliage, creating tension through the suggestion of allegorical content.   This first documentation of Rogers's life and work details her earliest influences and education, the shift following Hurricane Iwa, and her work that has grown increasingly complex and ambitious. The book documents not only the progress of an individual artist, but reflects the trajectory of women working in the arts in the latter part of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

 

The author, a leading art critic, focuses a new lens on this radical movement, showing the nuances that defined Minimalism in its various phases, as characterized by the inflected object, the disintegrated object, the ironic object ­then the transition from the object to architecture, space, landscape, cityscape, body, performance, and conceptual art. No other account has documented in such detail the scope and impact of this artistic revolution, which the author argues spanned all mediums and pushed every aesthetic possibility of Minimalism to an extreme.