Synopses & Reviews
Born to a prominent family in Havana but exiled to the United States as a girl, Ana Mendieta (1948and#150;1985) is regarded as one of the most significant artists of the postwar era. During her too-brief career, she produced a distinctive body of work that includes drawings, installations, performances, photographs, and sculptures. Less well known is her remarkable and prolific production of films. This richly illustrated catalogue presents a series of sequential color stills from each of twenty-one original Super 8 films that have been newly preserved and digitized in high definition for the 2015 exhibition, combined with related photographs, and reference still images from all of the artistand#8217;s 104 filmworks; together these illustrations sample the full range of the artistand#8217;s film practice from 1971 to 1981. The book includes Mendietaand#8217;s first published comprehensive filmography resulting from three years of collaborative research conducted by the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection and the University of Minnesota as well as original essays by John Perreault, Michael Rush, Rachel Weiss, Lynn Lukkas, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, and Laura Wertheim Joseph. The first book-length treatment of Mendietaand#8217;s moving-image practice,
Covered in Time and History aims to locate her films centrally within her larger oeuvre and at the forefront of the multidisciplinary shifts that characterized visual arts practice during the 1970s.
Published in association with the Katherine E. Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota.
Synopsis
One of the most innovative, provocative, and influential of America's contemporary artists, Bruce Nauman spent his formative years in Northern Californiaand#151;first as a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, then living in and around San Francisco. This splendidly illustrated book explores Nauman's relationship to the place where he created his earliest and most strikingly original works during the mid to late 1960s.
A Rose Has No Teeth demonstrates that Nauman established much of his artistic vocabulary during this period and that he laid the groundwork for fundamental ideas he addressed throughout his oeuvre, such as the role of the artist, the function of art, and the primacy of the idea over its form. Curator Constance M. Lewallen describes how the late 1960s were not only a time of political and social change in the San Francisco Bay Area; this was also a watershed period in art internationally, when Minimalism gave way to Post-minimalism and Conceptual Art, expanding into performance, film and video, installation, text works, and the photographic documents. This book shows that Nauman was at the forefront of these revolutionary changes and almost single-handedly redefined what it meant to be an artist.
Copub: University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
About the Author
Constance M. Lewallen is Senior Curator for Exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and author of
Ant Farm, 1968-1978; The Dream of an Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982), both from UC Press;
Everything Matters: Paul Kos, A Retropective; and
Joe Brainard: A Retrospective. Robert Riley, independent curator and writer concentrating on contemporary
media and time-based Arts, served as Founding Curator of Media Arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 1986-2000. Robert Storr is a critic, artist, and Dean of the School of Art at Yale University. Anne Wagner is Professor of Modern Art at the University of California, Berkeley.