As the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio halted production and faced possible closure, displacing its workers, artist LaToya Ruby Frazier joined with these workers, their families, and their local union leaders to tell the story of the plant in its final days. After more than fifty years of automobile production and a commitment to manufacture the Chevrolet Cruze until 2021, the facility was recently "unallocated" by GM, as the company shifts its focus toward overseas manufacturing and the production of electric and autonomous vehicles. For many, this meant uprooting their families and giving up the support of a close-knit community. Those who turned down transfers to GM plants in other states lost their income, pensions, and benefits. The Last Cruze, which sets out to amplify the voices of the auto workers in Lordstown, introduces a new chapter to Frazier's work in investigating labor, family, community, and the working class. Exhibited at the Renaissance Society in 2019, this body of work includes over sixty photographs, alongside the written stories of the workers, and was staged within an installation that echoes the structure of the plant's assembly line. This substantial catalogue includes extensive documentation of the work and introduces new essays and dialogues by contributors including Coco Fusco, David Harvey, Werner Lange, Lynn Nottage, Julia Reichert, Benjamin Young, and members of the local chapter of the United Auto Workers.

This major publication considers the Renaissance Society's first hundred years. The volume features contributions from Davarian L. Baldwin, Susan Bielstein, Bruce Jenkins, Pamela M. Lee, Nina Möntmann, Liesl Olson, R.H. Quaytman, Anne Rorimer, and Aoibheann Sweeney. It also includes an interview between Susanne Ghez, Solveig Øvstebø, and Hamza Walker, and a comprehensive timeline of the institution's programming over 100 years.

In this informative and lively volume, Margaret L. King synthesizes a large body of literature on the condition of western European women in the Renaissance centuries (1350-1650), crafting a much-needed and unified overview of women's experience in Renaissance society. Utilizing the perspectives of social, church, and intellectual history, King looks at women of all classes, in both usual and unusual settings. She first describes the familial roles filled by most women of the day—as mothers, daughters, wives, widows, and workers. She turns then to that significant fraction of women in, and acted upon, by the church: nuns, uncloistered holy women, saints, heretics, reformers,and witches, devoting special attention to the social and economic independence monastic life afforded them. The lives of exceptional women, those warriors, queens, patronesses, scholars, and visionaries who found some other place in society for their energies and strivings, are explored, with consideration given to the works and writings of those first protesting female subordination: the French Christine de Pizan, the Italian Modesta da Pozzo, the English Mary Astell. Of interest to students of European history and women's studies, King's volume will also appeal to general readers seeking an informative, engaging entrance into the Renaissance period.

Alejandro Cesarco: Song, published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at the Renaissance Society, brings together both new commissions and existing works. In the exhibition, Cesarco creates rhythm by incorporating silences and withholdings. The works form an installation drawing on the poetics of duration, refusal, repetition, and affective forms. This presentation, as in the artist's broader practice, represents a sustained investigation into time, memory, and how meaning is perceived. Centering on two related video works, the exhibition engaged deeply with histories of conceptual art. This catalog features an introduction by Solveig Øvstebø, a conversation between Alejandro Cesarco and Lynne Tillman, an essay by Julie Ault, and new short fiction by Wayne Koestenbaum in response to the exhibition.

The silhouetted images in Kara Walker's artwork confront America's legacy of racial exploitation with unmistakable clarity. Whether depicting acts of psychosexual violence set against an antebellum plantation backdrop of hanging moss, or cleverly revealing the depth of hatred behind racial stereotypes, Walker's art uses history as its foil. This splendidly designed book presents the artist's work and writings with vivid detail, and offers a valuable introduction to Walker's compelling art.

In 2019, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University co-organized an exhibition of a newly commissioned body of work by the Canadian artist Liz Magor. The accompanying publication, Liz Magor: BLOWOUT, is the artist's first US catalog in ten years, and it features thorough photographic documentation of the new work, commissioned texts by Sheila Heti and Mitch Speed, and a conversation between the artist and curators Solveig vsteb and Dan Byers. For more than four decades, Liz Magor's practice has quietly dramatized the relationships that develop among objects, and she describes this body of work as "a collection of tiny and intense narratives." Each written contribution responds in its own way to Magor's new installations, which feature altered stuffed toys, bits of paper, and rat skins--sculptural "agents," in the artist's words--suspended in transparent Mylar box forms, and thirty-two pairs of secondhand shoes, each displayed within its own box amidst elaborate embellishments.