An investigation into Saar's lifelong interest in Black dolls, with new watercolors, historic assemblages, sketchbooks and a selection of Black dolls from the artist's collection This volume features new watercolor works on paper and assemblages by Betye Saar (born 1926) that incorporate the artist's personal collection of Black dolls. These watercolors showcase the artist's experimentation with vivid color and layered techniques, and her new interest in flat shapes. While Saar has previously used painting in her mixed-media collages, this is the first publication to focus on her watercolor works on paper. "Watercolor is something that children use, so I decided, maybe I'll paint something about children, maybe I'll paint the dolls," Saar says. Referencing the underrepresented history of Black dolls through Saar's artistic lens, this catalog distills several intersecting themes, imagery and objects in Saar's oeuvre, highlighting her prominent usage and reinvention of Black imagery. It contains 90 color images, including early assemblage works that feature Black dolls, such as Gris-Gris Box(1972) and Mti(1973), plus early sketchbooks and a curated selection of Saar's Black doll collection. It also includes original essays by Rachel Federman, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings at the Morgan Library & Museum, and Katherine Jentleson, Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the High Museum of Art, and an interview with the artist by her granddaughter, Maddy Inez Leeser.

Considered a premier assemblage artist, Betye Saar has been creating inspired pieces since the early 1960s. Her works are in the collections of notable museums like Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; Museum of Fine Art, Boston; The Studio Museum in Harlem; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She has taught at the University of California and at the Parsons-Otis Institute, both in Los Angeles, and has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Betye Saar is a comprehensive look at Saar's works, from the 1960 print Samsara to the powerful mixed-media assemblage Blackbird (2002), and a dynamic career.

An investigation into Saar's lifelong interest in Black dolls, with new watercolors, historic assemblages, sketchbooks and a selection of Black dolls from the artist's collection This volume features new watercolor works on paper and assemblages by Betye Saar (born 1926) that incorporate the artist's personal collection of Black dolls. These watercolors showcase the artist's experimentation with vivid color and layered techniques, and her new interest in flat shapes. While Saar has previously used painting in her mixed-media collages, this is the first publication to focus on her watercolor works on paper. "Watercolor is something that children use, so I decided, maybe I'll paint something about children, maybe I'll paint the dolls," Saar says. Referencing the underrepresented history of Black dolls through Saar's artistic lens, this catalog distills several intersecting themes, imagery and objects in Saar's oeuvre, highlighting her prominent usage and reinvention of Black imagery. It contains 90 color images, including early assemblage works that feature Black dolls, such as Gris-Gris Box(1972) and Mti(1973), plus early sketchbooks and a curated selection of Saar's Black doll collection. It also includes original essays by Rachel Federman, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings at the Morgan Library & Museum, and Katherine Jentleson, Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the High Museum of Art, and an interview with the artist by her granddaughter, Maddy Inez Leeser.

Rarely seen installation works that exemplify this pioneering artist's critical focus on Black identity and Black feminism Showcasing a lesser-known aspect of Saar's art, Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight provides new insights into her explorations of ritual, spirituality and cosmologies, as well as themes of the African diaspora. Featured here are significant installations created by Saar from 1980 to 1998, including Oasis (1984), a work that will be reconfigured at ICA Miami's Saar exhibition for the first time in more than 30 years. With compelling scholarship and rich illustration--combining new installation photography and archival material--the monograph provides a fresh look at this significant artist's critical and influential practice. Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight reinforces and celebrates Saar's standing as a visionary artist, storyteller and mythmaker, and the ongoing significance and relevance of her work to the most pressing issues in America today. Betye Saar (born 1926) is renowned for pioneering Black feminism and West Coast assemblage in her visionary artistic practice, through dense, complexly referential objects. For over six decades, Saar's work has led dialogues on race and gender, reflecting changing cultural and political contexts. Most recently, solo presentations have been hosted by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Saar's work was prominently featured in We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, and in Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern, London, which traveled to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Brooklyn Museum; The Broad, Los Angeles; and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

How artists' magazines, in all their ephemerality, materiality, and temporary intensity, challenged mainstream art criticism and the gallery system. During the 1960s and 1970s, magazines became an important new site of artistic practice, functioning as an alternative exhibition space for the dematerialized practices of conceptual art. Artists created works expressly for these mass-produced, hand-editioned pages, using the ephemerality and the materiality of the magazine to challenge the conventions of both artistic medium and gallery. In Artists' Magazines, Gwen Allen looks at the most important of these magazines in their heyday (the 1960s to the 1980s) and compiles a comprehensive, illustrated directory of hundreds of others. Among the magazines Allen examines are Aspen (1965–1971), a multimedia magazine in a box—issues included Super-8 films, flexi-disc records, critical writings, artists' postage stamps, and collectible chapbooks; Avalanche (1970-1976), which expressed the countercultural character of the emerging SoHo art community through its interviews and artist-designed contributions; and Real Life (1979-1994), published by Thomas Lawson and Susan Morgan as a forum for the Pictures generation. These and the other magazines Allen examines expressed their differences from mainstream media in both form and content: they cast their homemade, do-it-yourself quality against the slickness of an Artforum, and they created work that defied the formalist orthodoxy of the day. Artists' Magazines, featuring abundant color illustrations of magazine covers and content, offers an essential guide to a little-explored medium.

"Richard Schur offers a provocative view of contemporary African American cultural politics and the relationship between African American cultural production and intellectual property law." ---Mark Anthony Neal, Duke University "Whites used to own blacks. Now, they accomplish much the same thing by insisting that they 'own' ownership. Blacks shouldn't let them. A culture that makes all artists play by its rules will end up controlling new ideas and stifling change. Richard Schur's fine book explains why." ---Richard Delgado, Seattle University What is the relationship between hip-hop and African American culture in the post--Civil Rights era? Does hip-hop share a criticism of American culture or stand as an isolated and unique phenomenon? How have African American texts responded to the increasing role intellectual property law plays in regulating images, sounds, words, and logos? Parodies of Ownership examines how contemporary African American writers, artists, and musicians have developed an artistic form that Schur terms "hip-hop aesthetics." This book offers an in-depth examination of a wide range of contemporary African American painters and writers, including Anna Deavere Smith, Toni Morrison, Adrian Piper, Colson Whitehead, Michael Ray Charles, Alice Randall, and Fred Wilson. Their absence from conversations about African American culture has caused a misunderstanding about the nature of contemporary cultural issues and resulted in neglect of their innovative responses to the post--Civil Rights era. By considering their work as a cross-disciplinary and specifically African American cultural movement, Schur shows how a new paradigm for artistic creation has developed. Parodies of Ownership offers a broad analysis of post--Civil Rights era culture and provides the necessary context for understanding contemporary debates within American studies, African American studies, intellectual property law, African American literature, art history, and hip-hop studies. Weaving together law, literature, art, and music, Schur deftly clarifies the conceptual issues that unify contemporary African American culture, empowering this generation of artists, writers, and musicians to criticize how racism continues to affect our country. Richard L. Schur is Director, Interdisciplinary Studies Center, and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Drury University. Visit the author's website: http://www2.drury.edu/rschur/index.htm. Cover illustration: Atlas, by Fred Wilson. © Fred Wilson, courtesy Pace Wildenstein, New York.

Although contemporary art may sometimes shock us, more alarming are recent attempts to regulate its display. Drawing upon extensive interviews, a broad sampling of media accounts, legal documents and his own observations of important events, sociologist Steven Dubin surveys the recent trend in censorship of the visual arts, photography and film, as well as artistic upstarts such as video and performance art. He examines the dual meaning of arresting images--both the nature of art work which disarms its viewers and the social reaction to it. Arresting Images examines the battles which erupt when artists address such controversial issues as racial polarization, AIDS, gay-bashing and sexual inequality in their work.