Publications and Bookshop


In Conversation, 2020–2021: Dialogues with Artists, Curators, and Scholars documents a series of vital and diverse exchanges that transpired during the COVID-19 crisis. Each deep-dive discussion was originally broadcast live on Zoom during the height of the pandemic years, immediately transcribed, and edited by the participants—then published as small-form, illustrated chapbooks mailed for free to subscribers. Many of the dialogues occurred between participants who already knew each other well, lending an ease and generosity to these wide-ranging conversations. This collection emerges in the aftermath of the pandemic as a time capsule of sorts, charting the insights and practices of artists and their interlocutors as they grappled with profound social rupture. 

With Contributions by: Kemi Adeyemi, Jessica Bell Brown, Diedrick Brackens, Katherine Bradford, Tony Cokes, Christoph Cox, Aria Dean, Amber Esseiva, Ja’Tovia Gary, Renée Green, Larissa Harris, Lauren Haynes, Jamillah James, Wanda Liebermann, Candice Lin, David Reinfurt, David Serlin, Cauleen Smith, C. Riley Snorton, Gloria Sutton, Frank B. Wilderson III, Hentyle Yapp.  

Paperback
9 x 11.5 inches
172 pages

ISBN 9781735230535 
Designer: Chad Kloepfer
Publisher: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
Distribution: D.A.P. | Distributed Arts Publishers

In Conversation, 2020–2021: Dialogues with Artists, Curators, and Scholars is available for purchase at the Carpenter Center Bookshop and D.A.P. | Distributed Art Publishers 

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B. Ingrid Olson: History Mother, Little Sister

This first monograph on the Chicago-based multimedia artist B. Ingrid Olson (born 1987) accompanies two simultaneous exhibitions: History Mother and Little Sister, each on a separate floor of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Informed by notions of doubling and mirroring, unexpected uses of footnotes and architectural fixtures as well as the work of figures such as Madeline Gins and Eileen Gray, the exhibitions insinuate her own objects and images into a sometimes tense, playfully knowing relationship with Le Corbusier’s famous building, probing the normative, gendered and material experiments of the structure’s modular elements of concrete, glass, plywood and primary colors. The book’s innovative design brings together documentation of the site-specific installation, sketches and reproductions of other works made over the last decade, putting them into conversation with a selection of poetry and criticism that informs Olson’s practice.

Text by Andrew Blackley, Jennifer Bloomer, Anne Boyer, Beatriz Colomina, Maria Fusco, Renee Gladman, Gordon Hall, Kim Hyesoon, Diane Lewis, Lily Bea Moor, B. Ingrid Olson, Leah Pires, Michael Snow, Olga Tokarczuk, Rosmarie Waldrop.

Paperback
8.5 x 10.75 inches
184 pages

ISBN: 9781735230528
Designer: Chad Kloepfer
Publisher: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
Distribution: D.A.P. | Distributed Arts Publishers

B. Ingrid Olson: History Mother, Little Sister is available for purchase at the Carpenter Center Bookshop and D.A.P. | Distributed Art Publishers 

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE THROUGH OUR ONLINE STORE


 

Candice Lin: Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping

Candice Lin: Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping marks the first collaboration between the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and the Walker Art Center. This book chronicles the creation of a newly commissioned body of work by Los Angeles–based artist Candice Lin during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lin often investigates the legacies of colonialism by tracing the material histories of goods that circulated within global trade routes. For her Walker Art Center and Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts project, the artist brings together hand-dyed indigo textiles, plaster sculptures to be touched by visitors, large-scale ceramics partially inspired by Chinese tomb guardians, and a hallucinogenic video featuring dancing cats and spam texts. Taken together, this multipart installation addresses the anxiety, isolation, fear, and anger of this tragic year of pandemic and social upheaval, emphasizing touch, intimacy, and a collective questioning of our precarious present and future.

Included are new texts from Dan Byers, Carpenter Center John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director, and Victoria Sung, Walker Center of Arts Associate Curator, exploring Lin’s innovative use of materials and mediums and the theoretical frameworks that animate her art; and a conversation between Berkley Arts Research Center Director, Julia Bryan-Wilson, and UC Berkley associate professor of gender and women’s studies, Mel Y. Chen, discussing the animality and theories of interspecies assemblage that encompasses Lin’s work. Additionally featured is a fully illustrated plates section documenting the artist’s process of research, making, and installation, and an annotated selection by Sir Porte, Carpenter Center Curatorial and Programs Assistant, contextualizing Lin’s past exhibitions for works made over the last decade.

Paperback
9 x 12 inches
168 pages

ISBN: 9781735230511
Designer: Chad Kloepfer
Publisher: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts / Walker Art Center
Distribution: D.A.P. | Distributed Arts Publishers

Candice Lin: Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping is available for purchase at the Carpenter Center Bookshop and D.A.P. | Distributed Art Publishers 

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE THROUGH OUR ONLINE STORE


 

Renée Green: Pacing

American artist Renée Green (born 1959) spent two years engaged with the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, during which she presented a series of interlinked public programs and exhibitions, culminated with her major exhibition Within Living Memory (2018). Green’s Carpenter project, Pacing, is a meditation spurred by inhabiting an architectural icon—Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center—while exploring the historical and institutional legacies of modernism’s other forms, including cinema, visual art, poetry, music and literature.

This handsome publication illuminates Green’s unfolding process, with a sequence of exhibitions that took place from 2015 and culminating in Pacing: Facing in Toronto; Tracing in Como, Italy; Placing in Berlin; Spacing in Lisbon; and Begin Again, Begin Again in Los Angeles. The result is a meditation on creative processes across histories and media, partially inspired by two architectural icons: Rudolf M. Schindler and Le Corbusier. Despite grand ambitions, Le Corbusier was only able to realize two buildings in the Americas, the Carpenter Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Casa Curuchet, in La Plata, Argentina. In Pacing, dreams, projections and geographically distant buildings are put into dialogue through time, weaving a layered constellation of unexpected relations.

Lavishly illustrated, Renée Green: Pacing features new texts by Gloria Sutton and Fred Moten, and brings together a series of previously unpublished conversations between the artist and Yvonne Rainer, Nora M. Alter and Mason Leaver-Yap. Additional contributions are provided by Nicholas Korody, William S. Smith and Carpenter Center director Dan Byers.

Paperback
9 x 11.75 in.
300 pages
ISBN: 9781735230504
Designer: Wkshps with Chad Kloepfer
Publisher: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts / Free Agent Media
Distribution: D.A.P. | Distributed Art Publishers

Renée Green: Pacing is available for purchase through and  D.A.P. | Distributed Art Publishers

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Tony Cokes – If UR Reading This It’s 2 Late: Vol. 1-3

Published on the occasion of Tony Cokes’s solo exhibitions across Goldsmiths CCA, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University and ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels, Tony Cokes – If UR Reading This It’s 2 Late: Vol. 1-3 is the first monograph on Cokes’ practice, and creates a visual cartography of a body work that spans twenty years. It features four critical pathways into Cokes’s decades-long practice, with an introduction by the exhibition’s curators, Dan Byers, Sarah McCrory and Niels Van Tomme, and essays contributed by Christoph Cox, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sohrab Mohebbi, and a dialog between Cokes and artist Kerry Tribe. Tony Cokes’s work deals with mediation and distribution, and as such, this book becomes another conduit for the dissemination of theory, critique, and counter-narrative – a process that he so powerfully engages in as an artist.

Tony Cokes – If UR Reading This It’s 2 Late: Vol. 1-3 provides an opportunity to see a broad range of powerful artworks made by Cokes since the 1990s, alongside two newly commissioned films. Cokes’ video works are eviscerating critiques and affective art works, bringing together color theory, sound, music, and texts quoting a polyphony of voices such as Louis Althusser, Malcolm X, David Bowie, Public Enemy and Donald Trump. Meeting political and social commentary with cultural theory and a critique of capitalism, Cokes’ films viscerally confront the social condition, as well as the specific prejudices and threats suffered by black subjects. Recent works range across minimal techno, the Bush administration’s use of color to engender a perpetual culture of fear, and music used to torture detainees during the so-called ‘war on terror’. 

Paperback
122 pages
9.4 in x 11.8
ISBN: 9781912685523
Designer: Scott King
Publisher: Goldsmiths Press

Tony Cokes – If UR Reading This It’s 2 Late: Vol. 1-3  is available for purchase at the Carpenter Center Bookshop. 

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Anna Oppermann: Drawings

Published on the occasion of her first solo show in the United States in twenty years, Anna Oppermann: Drawings surveys the early drawings of this underrecognized German artist. Co-published with Inventory Press, this book is the first on Oppermann produced in the United States and features a number of new texts on her work by Connie Butler, Chief Curator, Hammer Museum, UCLA; Meta Marina Beeck, Assistant Curator, Kunsthalle Bielefeld; and a conversation between Carpenter Center director Dan Byers and Ute Vorkoeper, Curator, Anna Oppermann Estate.

Beginning in the mid-1960s through the early ‘70s, Oppermann (1940–1993), best known for her immersive installations, created an astonishing series of surreal drawings that uniquely explode the private space of the home, a traditionally feminine sphere.

These early drawings contribute to a feminist re-centering of such spaces associated with women, casting everyday objects as symbolic, consequential protagonists: houseplants sprawl to take over the picture plane, windows and mirrors provide views into other worlds, and tables display drawings that open out into new domestic scenes.

By placing her own body—her knees, arms, the back of her head—as reference points in the work, Oppermann coaxes the viewer to take on her subjectivity and perspective, emphasizing the gendered realms of the home and the relationships that we form both within and to our private spaces.

Paperback
112 pages
8.5 x 13.5 inches
ISBN: 978-1-941753-32-3
Designer: Chad Kloepfer
Publisher: Inventory Press

Anna Oppermann: Drawings is available for purchase at the Carpenter Center Bookshop. 

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Liz Magor: BLOWOUT

In 2018, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago co-organized an exhibition of a newly commissioned body of work by the Canadian artist Liz Magor. The accompanying publication, Liz Magor: BLOWOUT, is the artist’s first US catalog in ten years, and it features thorough photographic documentation of the new work, commissioned texts by Sheila Heti and Mitch Speed, and a conversation between the artist and curators Dan Byers Solveig Øvstebø.

For more than four decades, Liz Magor’s practice has quietly dramatized the relationships that develop among objects, and she describes this body of work as “a collection of tiny and intense narratives.” Each written contribution responds in its own way to Magor’s new installations, which feature altered stuffed toys, bits of paper, and rat skins—sculptural “agents”—suspended in transparent Mylar box forms, and thirty pairs of secondhand shoes each displayed within its own box amidst elaborate embellishments.

Hardcover
136 pages
10 x 8 inches
ISBN: 978-0-941548-78-6
Designer: James Goggin and Shan James, Practise
Publisher: University of Chicago Press.

Liz Magor: BLOWOUT  is available for purchase at the Carpenter Center Bookshop. 

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What Ever Happened to New Institutionalism?

New Institutionalism, a mode of curating that originated in Europe in the 1990s, evolved from the legacy of international curator Harald Szeemann, the relational art advanced by French critic and theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, and other influential factors of the time. New Institutionalism’s dispersed and varied approaches to curating sought to reconfigure the art institution from within, reshaping it into an active, democratic, open, and egalitarian public sphere. These approaches posed other possibilities and futures for institutions and exhibitions, challenging the consensual conception, production, and distribution of art. Practitioners engaged the art institution with renewed confidence by imbuing it with the potential for new aesthetic experiences and different relationships among artists, institutions, and spectators beyond engrained modernist ideologies. Working in these new modes, the art institution could become a site of fluidity, unpredictability, and risk.

What Ever Happened to New Institutionalism? reflects upon the aspirations of these curatorial strategies and assesses their critical efficacy today within the landscape of contemporary art and globalized culture. The first in a series of readers examining changing characteristics of art institutions, this publication thinks through New Institutionalism by bringing together facsimiles of seminal texts, new critical essays, a history of trends and practices, and commissioned artist projects and contributions. These are complemented by documentation from the inaugural year of programming at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University focused on reimagining CCVA as a twenty-first-century institution.

Artists and Writers

Martin Beck, Nina Beier, Silvia Benedito, Ulla von Brandenburg, Katarina Burin, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Jonas Ekeberg, Alex Farquharson, Fernanda Fragateiro, Simon Fujiwara, James Goggin, Tone Hansen, Owen Hatherley, Henriette Huldisch, Damon Krukowski, Maria Lind, Markus Miessen, Eline Mugaas, Elise Storsveen, Gloria Sutton, James Voorhies, Naomi Yang, Amy Yoes

Edited by James Voorhies

Published by Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and Sternberg Press, 2016
Designed by James Goggin of Practise
192 pages; 9.5 x 6.625 inches

What Ever Happened to New Institutionalism? is available for purchase at the Carpenter Center Bookshop

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