Jan Verwoert Knihy

This book is the first dedicated to David Hammons' early works on paper, specifically his monoprints and collages created between 1968 and 1979. In these pieces, Hammons utilized his body as a drawing tool and printing plate, exploring unconventional image-making techniques. He would grease his body or that of another person with substances like margarine and baby oil, pressing or rolling body parts onto paper, and adding charcoal and powdered pigment. The resulting impressions serve as intimate indexes of faces, skin, and hair, existing between spectral portraits and physical traces. These body prints mark the origin of Hammons' artistic language, which has evolved over his long career, emphasizing the artifacts and subjects of contemporary Black life in the United States. More than fifty years later, these works celebrate the sacredness of objects touched by the Black body while critiquing racial oppression. The highlighted body prints introduce major themes from Hammons' 50-year career, integral to postwar American art history. The book also features a conversation between curator Linda Goode Bryant and artist Senga Nengudi, alongside a photo essay by Bruce W. Talamon, who documented Hammons in his Los Angeles studio in 1974.

The current economic situation and society’s low confidence in its institutions demands that artists become more imaginative in their self-organization. If labels such as ‘alternative,’ ‘non-profit’ and ‘artist-run’ dominated the self-organized art scene of the late nineties, the separatist position implied by the use of these terms has been moderated during the intervening years. This new anthology of accounts from the frontline includes contributions by artist practitioners as well as their institutional counterparts providing a fascinating account of the art world as a matrix of positions where the balance of power and productivity constantly shifts. Artists, curators and critics discuss empirical and theoretical approaches from Europe, Africa and South and North America on how self-organization today oscillates between the self and the group, self-imposed bureaucratization and flexibility, aestheticization and activism.

This first monograph on Phillip Lai (b.1969, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) charts the artist's sculptural development over the course of the last two decades. Text in English and Chinese.

In over de toekomst en de kunstenaarsinitiatieven reflecteren kunstenaars, (inter)nationale curatoren en schrijvers op de rol van kunstenaarsinitiatieven in deze tijd en op nieuwe vormen van samen denken en samen werken.Het boek biedt droom- en denkmodellen voor iedereen in de kunstwereld en daarbuiten, en wil een bijdrage leveren aan een levendig debat over de betekenis van kunstenaarsinitiatieven. Hoe spelen ze in op een werekd in verandering en hoe verhouden ze zich tot de lokale gemeenschap?