An expansive collection catalogue that offers a multiplicity of fresh perspectives on recent modern and contemporary art acquisitions in The Phillips Collection

In Latinx Art Arlene Dávila draws on numerous interviews with artists, dealers, and curators to explore the problem of visualizing Latinx art and artists. Providing an inside and critical look of the global contemporary art market, Dávila's book is at once an introduction to contemporary Latinx art and a call to decolonize the art worlds and practices that erase and whitewash Latinx artists. Dávila shows the importance of race, class, and nationalism in shaping contemporary art markets while providing a path for scrutinizing art and culture institutions and for diversifying the art world.

"Published on the occasion of the exhibition Van Gogh Repetitions, organized by The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., and the Cleveland Museum of Art."

"Laszlo Moholy-Nagy is the first monograph on Moholy to attend to the fraught but central role painting played in shaping his aesthetic project. His reputation has been that of an artist far more interested in exploring the possibilities offered by photography, film, and other new media than in working with what he once called the 'anachronistic' medium of painting. And yet, with the exception of the period between 1928 and 1930, Moholy painted throughout his career. Joyce Tsai argues that his investment in painting, especially after 1930, emerged not only out of pragmatic and aesthetic considerations, but also out of a growing recognition of the economic, political, and ethical compromises required by his large-scale, technologically mediated projects aimed at reforming human vision. Without abandoning his commitment to fostering what he called New Vision, Moholy came to understand painting as a particularly plastic field in which the progressive possibilities of photography, film and other emergent media could find provisional expression."--Provided by publisher.

In 1941, Jacob Lawrence, then just twenty-three years old, completed a series of sixty small tempera paintings with text captions about the Great Migration. Within months of its making, Lawrence's Migration series was divided between The Museum of Modern Art (even numbered panels) and the Phillips Memorial Gallery (odd numbered panels). The work has since become a landmark in the history of African-American art, a monument in the collections of both institutions, and a crucial example of the way in which history painting was radically reimagined in the modern era. In 2015 and 2016, marking the centenary of the Great Migration's start (1915-16), the panels will be reunited in exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art and then The Phillips Collection. Published to accompany the exhibition, this publication both grounds Lawrence's Migration series in the cultural and political debates that shaped the young artist's work and highlights the series' continued resonance for artists and writers working today. An essay by Leah Dickerman situates the series in relation to heady contemporary discussions of the artist's role as a social agent; a growing imperative to write - and give image to - black history in the late 1930s and early 1940s; and an emergent sense of activist politics. Elsa Smithgall traces the exhibition history of the Migration panels from their display at the Downtown Gallery in New York in 1941 to their acquisition by MoMA and the Phillips Collection a year later. Short commentaries on each panel explore Lawrence's career and painting technique and aspects of the social history of the Migration portrayed in his images. The catalogue also debuts ten poems newly commissioned from acclaimed poets written in response to the Migration series. Elizabeth Alexander (honoured as the poet at President Obama's first inauguration) introduces the poetry project with a discussion of the poetic quality of Lawrence's work, as well as the impact and legacy of the poets in his orbit including Claude McKay and Langston Hughes.