Publications
All of the publications listed below are available for sale in the Museum Shop. You can also email our Publications department to place an order or request a backlist of titles.
The Barbizon School and the Nature of Landscape
Rachel Keith
Brochure $3.00 2008
Available at the Kemper Art Museum shop
This publication offers an in-depth look at The Barbizon School and the Nature of Landscape, featuring an essay from the curator Rachel Keith, images, and a checklist.
Thaddeus Strode: Absolutes and Nothings
Sabine Eckmann and Meredith Malone
with a contribution by Benajmin Weissman
Cloth $30.00 2008 ISBN: 978-0-936316-24-6
Distributed by University of Chicago Press
Thaddeus Strode's vibrant large-scale paintings are universes unto themselves: wild mash-ups of California surf and skateboard culture, Zen philosophy, rock music, literature, film, and comic books. Thaddeus Strode: Absolutes and Nothings marks the artist's first major museum show, presented as part of the Kemper Art Museum's Contemporary Projects series. Strode's images draw on a wealth of motifs inspired by a broad range of sources in popular culture, freely combined with the artist's own creations. The strength and visual pleasure of Strode's aesthetic come from his self-reflexive combination of painterly styles and incongruous elements, in which enigmatic texts, phantoms, monsters, and castaways play off one another to produce cryptic--and captivating--fantasies.
Including over two dozen full-color images of works from 2001 to the present, as well as essays by Sabine Eckmann, Meredith Malone, and Benjamin Weissman, Absolutes and Nothings is a fascinating premier monograph from one of our most vital and exciting contemporary visual artists.
On the Margins
Carmon Colangelo
with essays by Eleanor Heartney and Paul Krainak
Cloth $30.00 2008 ISBN: 978-0-936316-24-6
Distributed by University of Chicago Press
War and disaster have shaped the first years of the twenty-first century, both in the United States and throughout the world. On the Margins brings together a culturally diverse group of international artists whose work addresses contemporary social and political conditions through a wide spectrum of styles and media.
The exhibition aims in part at underscoring the contrast between the realities of disaster and how they are presented--what we see and what we don't seethrough the lens of today's media. All of the works in the show were created in the last seven years. Through a range of aesthetic strategies and effects, from the confrontational, to the humorous, to the quietly elegiac, they consider the ways in which war and conflict around the world impactor fail to impactour everyday life. A diverse lineup of artists is included: Adel Abidin, Laylah Ali, Paolo Canevari, Enrique Chagoya, Willie Cole, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Willie Doherty, Jane Hammond, Martha Rosler, and Do-Ho Suh. The exhibition was curated by Carmon Colangelo, and the catalog includes essays by Eleanor Heartney and Paul Krainak addressing the themes and artworks in the exhibition, as well as an illustrated checklist and artist biographies.
Beauty and the Blonde
Catharina Manchanda
Brochure $3.00 2007
Available at the Kemper Art Museum shop
As an icon of beauty and object of desire, the blonde has captivated the American public for nearly a century. Beauty and the Blonde critically examines representations of the blonde during three formative decades of American cultural history. The brochure investigates how representations of blondeness in popular culture were appropriated and reexamined by American artists in painting, sculpture, film, and photography.
Window | Interface
Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick
with a contribution by Anne Fritz
Paper $15.00 2007 ISBN: 978-0-936316-22-2
Distributed by University of Chicago Press
Windows both connect and divide interior and exterior, public and private spaces. Interfaces update the function of the window in today's world of omnipresent screens and digital information. Window | Interface explores how artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Cerith Wyn Evans, Monika Fleischmann, Kirsten Geisler, Pierre Huyghe, Richard Long, and others have addressed the role of windows and interfaces as mediums of perception and transport. The book investigates art that explores the limits of the body in relation to the surrounding world and reveals the embodied character of human experience.
Andrea Fraser, "What do I, as an artist, provide?"
Meredith Malone
Brochure $3.00 2007
Available at the Kemper Art Museum shop
Since the mid-1980s, Andrea Fraser has achieved a certain renown for her work in critiquing institutions and dramatizing the relationship between art and its audiences. Influenced by feminism, psychoanalysis, appropriation, and site-specificity, Fraser's practice has often centered on sociological performance and discursive analysis of various art world positions: the docent, the curator, the visitor, the dealer, the collector, the critic, the art historian, and, as the title of this exhibition suggests, the artist. This exhibition brochure includes ten images and an essay from curator Meredith Malone exploring the themes and impact of Fraser's work.
Reality Bites: Making Avant-garde Art in Post-Wall Germany
Edited by Sabine Eckmann
with essays by Diedrich Diederichsen, Beate Kemfert, Gertrud Koch, Lutz Koepnick, Iain Whyte, and Sabine Eckmann
Cloth $55.00 2007 ISBN: 3775719067
Co-published with Hatje Cantz
The fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989 instigated a new era of German history, rapidly--yet profoundly--altering everyday German life. Reality Bites investigates the effect of that historical context, identifying the new kinds of work that have grown out of it, full of strategies and materials borrowed from and referring back to one kind of recent German reality or another, aesthetic exploration of experience in which the themes of reality and history take on increased meaning. This representative selection of about 70 pieces created since 1989 includes work from Franz Ackermann, Kutlug Ataman, Cosima von Bonin, Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean, Thomas Demand, Bernhard Garbert, Isa Genzken, Beate Gütschow, Rudolf Herz, Sabine Hornig, Christian Jankowski, André Korpys & Markus Löffler, Ulrike Kuschel, Eva Leitolf, Via Lewandowsky, Michel Majerus, Mariele Neudecker, Olaf Nicolai, Marcel Odenbach, Manfred Pernice, Daniel Pflumm, rude_architecture (Friedrich von Borries, Gesa Glück, Tobias Neumann), Silke Schatz, Gregor Schneider, Collier Schorr, Renata Stih & Frieder Schnock, and Wolfgang Tillmans.
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[Grid < > Matrix]
Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick
with contributions by Gwyneth Cliver and Patience Graybill
Paper $15.00 2006 ISBN: 0-936316-20-9
Distributed by University of Chicago Press
[Grid < > Matrix] traces two different but closely related modes of organizing the visible world and its aesthetic representations. In analog cultures, the notion of the grid empowers the production of images that claim universal authority. Most often static in nature, grid-like structures, spaces, and images approach the viewer as immediately recognizable and hence devoid of unwanted surprises. Digitally-based matrices, by way of contrast, set the modernist grid into motion. They have the ability to catalyze visual expressions and experiences that, in spite of their algorithmic foundations, aim at open-ended and often unpredictable transformation. Grid and matrix, as presented in this exhibition, form a central dialectic of modernist and postmodernist culture. Featuring two essays, one by each of the exhibition curators, the publication's aim is not to tell a story of linear historical progress, but to explore continuities and ruptures between the analog and the digital, between the organizational principles of older and newer media.
Models and Prototypes
Catharina Manchanda
Paper: $15.00 2006 ISBN: 0-936316-19-5
Distributed by University of Chicago Press
As a preparatory step, models have always occupied a special place in the context of artistic production. This changed in the twentieth century when many artists set out to redefine the parameters of art and artistic production. With new artistic objectives, structural and conceptual models emerged as complete and viable works of art in and of themselves. Beginning in the 1910s, the model--conceived as a system defined by a set of rules--became increasingly important, as did boxes, model-scale display cases, and architectural maquettes. Marcel Duchamp and many Conceptual artists of the 1960s radically challenged existing definitions of the artwork with the help of structural and conceptual models and the emergence of an emphasis on multiples. The centrality of models for contemporary artists, many of whom are also interested in social and historical issues, presses the question of why they became and remain such a compelling subject and tool. Models and Prototypes includes artwork by Mark Bennett, Joseph Beuys, Daniel Buren, Thomas Demand, Marcel Duchamp, Isa Genzken, Jenny Holzer, Wassily Kandinsky, Claus Oldenburg, Edward Ruscha, and Katrin Sigurdadottir, among others.
Inside Out Loud: Visualizing Women's Health in Contemporary Art
Janine Mileaf
with contributions by Barbara Baumgartner, Isabelle Graw, Jodi Kovach, Zoe Leonard, Catherine Lord, Claire Ruud, and Claire Vancik
Paper $25.00 2004 ISBN: 0-936316-18-7
H. W. Janson and the Legacy of Modern Art at Washington University in St. Louis
Sabine Eckmann
with contributions by Bradley Fratello, George V. Speer, and H.W. Janson
Cloth $35 2002 ISBN: 1-58821-106-1
Co-published with Salander-O'Reilly Galleries
A Gallery of Modern Art at Washington University in St. Louis
Joseph Ketner
with essays by contributing authors
Cloth $50.00 1994 ISBN: 0-936316-16-0
Paper $40.00 1994 ISBN: 0-936316-16-0
