Crocodile

Authored by twelve diverse American dance artists in the form of twelve small booklets, Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Studyapproaches and celebrates dance history as a subjective, artistic inquiry. It reimagines and radicalizes our understanding of dance throughout human history through the voices of working choreographers. Simultaneously, the project is dedicated to the power of an artist-centric view of history itself, thus placing the dance history back into the body, where it began. Here, history occurs in vertical layers of time and space and moves into the street, the football field, the yard, the screen, the memory, the womb, the sky, and the future.

Text by mayfield brooks, thomas f. defrantz, maura nguyễn donohue, Keith Hennessy, Bebe Miller, Okwui Okpokwasili, Eiko Otake, Annie-B Parson, Javier Stell-Frésquez, Ogemdi Ude, Mariana Valencia, and Andros Zins-Browne

An aesthetic and social history of art and dance in mid-20th-century New York interpreted by contemporary artist Nick Mauss. 

Over the past decade, Nick Mauss (b. 1980) has pursued a hybrid mode of working that melds the roles of curator, artist, and scholar. This catalogue leans heavily into the scholarship side of his practice, building on his 2018 Whitney Museum exhibition with a closer look at the relationship between modernist ballet and the New York avant-garde. In the 1930s through 1950s, ballet was introduced to a popular audience in New York and was simultaneously influenced by developments in Europe in painting, photography, fashion, music, and poetry. Mauss reflects on this period of rich cross-media production and synergy, ultimately arguing for the inseparability of dance and art history.

This most substantive monograph yet published on the work of German-born, New York–based multimedia artist Andrea Geyer focuses on her recent explorations of the marginalized yet pivotal role that women have played in the formulation of American modernism, tracing and honoring the ephemeral acts, initiatives, and stories that shaped it. Featuring full-color images of Geyer’s artworks and research materials, including documents, found photographs, and previously unpublished photographs by the artist, Dance in a Future with All Present offers insight into Geyer’s art and the multiple histories of modernism.

Includes texts by Matthew Jeffrey Abrams, Andrianna Campbell, Juli Carson, Barbara Clausen, Lynne Cooke, Dean Daderko, Saisha Grayson, Sharon Hayes, Megan Heuer, Danielle A. Jackson, Alhena Katsof, Kristan Kennedy, Thomas J. Lax, Ralph Lemon, André Lepecki, Renate Lorenz, Josiah McElheny, Fred Moten, Kristin Poor, Yvonne Rainer, Gabriela Rangel, Jeannine Tang, and Soyoung Yoon.

Copublished with Portland Institute of Contemporary Art in 2019.
Edited by Alhena Katsof, Karen Kelly, and Barbara Schroeder. 
Design by Dante Carlos.

From the 1970s until her death, Louisiana-born artist Tina Girouard (1946–2020) was a dedicated experimental artist, collaborator and art worker. Alongside her individual creative endeavors, she nurtured and was a part of numerous influential artist communities and organizations in New York, Louisiana and Haiti, including the Anarchitecture Group, the interdisciplinary cohort of 112 Greene Street, the restaurant Food, the Kitchen, P.S. 1 and the Festival International de la Louisiane. Her acts of upkeep, including domestic labor traditionally associated with “women’s work,” blurred the boundaries between artmaking and what she called life-making. Sign-In is the first comprehensive monograph on her interdisciplinary oeuvre. It gathers documentation of her work in video, performance, drawing, textile, wall works and installation, tracing Girouard’s practice and legacy across genres and geographies.

Edited by Andrea Andersson with Jordan Amirkhani
With new essays by Andrea Andersson, Jordan Amirkhani, Anaïs Duplan, Pamela M. Lee, Aruna D’Souza, and Lumi Tan

This collection of poetry, prose, and other texts is the first publication dedicated to the writing of the late performance, video, and visual artist Stuart Sherman.

The Stuart Sherman Papers presents a selection of facsimile reproductions from his archive at New York University's Fales Library. This collection of entries is not exhaustive but conveys the diversity in Sherman’s writing, which used the ever-expanding vocabulary of the English language as a plastic material to study the abundance of meaning that can be derived through playing with combinations, order, and proximity of words. The texts reproduced here leave his edits, scribbles, and notes to self intact, presenting the page as Sherman last engaged with it.

With text contributions by Sally Banes, Mark Bradford, Michiel Huijben, and Nicholas Martin. Photographs by Nathaniel Tileston and Paolo Rapalino.

Editor: Michiel Huijben
Graphic design: Loes Verstappen
Copy editing: Harriet Foyster
Lithography: Marc Gijzen

Stuart Sherman (1945–2001) was a New York-based artist best known for his performances and video, but working in a variety of visual and literary media. He performed, exhibited, and lectured throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. Sherman died of AIDS in San Francisco in September 2001.

Building on the notion of ‘praise,’ Adama Delphine Fawundu frames this book as a celebration of life. She honors the stories whispered to her by her mother; she adorns her body in her grandmother’s textile work; she elevates the memory of various named and unnamed Black women of the diaspora and documents the iconic small Civil War era styled white wooded praise house on a patch of land off the side of a road in South Carolina not far from Beaufort creating an intimate body of work of color photography of an interconnected history.

This book about female figures—grandmothers, mothers, daughters, artists, caregivers, storytellers, and cooks—explores a range of emotions that consume us about family life and history. It is both an art book
and a memoir. Viewing it brings us face to face with known and unknown cultures and introduces us to various art practices shared, taught, and learned through the African diasporic traditions. Fawundu connects to the self through history, joy, and beauty and offers the reader ways to navigate fear based on migration and loss. It is a gift, too, as it allows us to imagine alongside the artist.

Adama Delphine Fawundu is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY of Mende, Bubi, and Krim descent.
Through photography, video, textile-based sculptural forms, and performance, she creates embodied entities inspired by Indigenous knowledge systems and spiritual retentions across time and space. She co-authored the book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. She is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University.

Edited by Chiara Figone

Contributions by Mistura Allison, Berette S Macaulay, Niama Sandy, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Deborah Willis

Published in conjunction with the first major U.S. museum show of Joan Jonas’s art in nearly fifteen years, this monograph features new scholarship on her multimedia installations and performance practice from the early 1970s to the present. Inspired by the format of a reader, it breaks new ground by contextualizing and expanding understandings of Jonas’s body of work through three thematic approaches: the critical notions of gender, being and otherness; the politics of landscape and ecology; and new conceptions of medium specificity and un-specificity. Richly illustrated, with never-before-published sketches and drawings, the volume includes an interview with the late Douglas Crimp and Jonas’s personal reflection on their enduring friendship.

Edited by Barbara Clausen and Kristin Poor with Kelly Kivland, with an introduction by Clausen; essays by Clausen, Adrienne Edwards, André Lepecki, Poor, and Jeannine Tang; interview with Douglas Crimp; writings by Joan Jonas; conversation between Heather Davis, Joan Jonas, and Zoe Todd; and coda by Kivland

Alvin Ailey is one of the most celebrated choreographers of the twentieth century. The creator of iconic works such as Blues Suite, Revelations, and Cry, he is widely recognized for the dance company he founded in 1958 when he was just twenty-seven years old. Ailey imagined and cultivated a platform for modern dance through his innovative repertoire, interdisciplinary sensibility, and support of dancers and choreographers. This expansive volume situates Ailey within a broader social, creative, and cultural context, looking at the artists who influenced and collaborated with him, the spaces and scenes he frequented, the dynamic themes within his dances, and how his vision and work changed contemporary dance. 

Essays by artists, scholars, and critics cover topics ranging from the Black church, the South, and the Great Migration to nightclubs, musical influences, and queerness. With more than four hundred images including photographs of works Ailey choreographed, archival materials such as notebooks, sketches, letters, and never-before-published behind-the-scenes photos, and conversations about the legacy of the company with Sylvia Waters, Judith Jamison, and Masazumi Chaya as well as several contemporary dancers and scholars, this study offers an unprecedented full picture of one of the twentieth century’s leading artists and the way his work continues to inspire today’s generation of dancers.

Contributions by Horace D. Ballard, Harmony Bench, Kate Elswit, Aimee Meredith Cox, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Malik Gaines, Jasmine Johnson, Joshua Lubin-Levy, Uri McMillan, Ariel Osterweis, J Wortham, CJ Salapare, Kyle Abraham, Claire Bishop, Masazumi Chaya, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Jennifer Homans, Judith Jamison, Sylvia Waters, Jamila Wignot and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar