Over the last 30 years, Martin Puryear has created a body of work that defies categorization, creating sculpture that looks at identity, culture & history. This book accompanies an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art that follows Puryear's development from his first solo show to works being presented for the first time.

Since 1970, Manitoba artist Don Proch has built an astonishing body of work evoking a semi-mythical Prairie past and an unsettled and unresolved modernity. In his complex sculptures and life-size masks, Proch combines intricate draftsmanship with natural and found materials in surprising and transformative ways. Proch grew up in the farmland of north-central Manitoba. Using the rolling hills and unique parkland vistas of the Asessippi valley he creates a complex personal iconography based on prairie life, landscape, geology and history. The result is what art critic Robert Enright called “inexplicable as a miracle.” Proch first came to the Canadian art world’s attention as part of a group of radical young artists in the 1970s, intent on shaking up the art establishment. His complex installations, masks, and silkscreen prints quickly established his reputation as an innovator with a unique vision. Today he is recognized as one of the most influential visual artists to come out of western Canada, and his work can be found in major public and corporate collections including Canada’s major art galleries. Richly illustrated with more than 80 plates, the book includes rare excerpts from Proch’s notebooks that reveal his intricate working process. Surveying the course of Proch’s career, curator and art historian Patricia Bovey discusses the themes and influences behind his work and their context within the history of Canadian art.

This book argues for the importance of bringing women and gender more directly into the dynamic field of exposition studies. Reclaiming women for the history of world fairs (1876-1937), it also seeks to introduce new voices into these studies, dialoguing across disciplinary and national historiographies. From the outset, women participated not only as spectators, but also as artists, writers, educators, artisans and workers, without figuring among the organizers of international exhibitions until the 20th century. Their presence became more pointedly acknowledged as feminist movements developed within the Western World and specific spaces dedicated to women’s achievements emerged. International exhibitions emerged as showcases of "modernity" and "progress," but also as windows onto the foreign, the different, the unexpected and the spectacular. As public rituals of celebration, they transposed national ceremonies and protests onto an international stage. For spectators, exhibitions brought the world home; for organizers, the entire world was a fair. Women were actors and writers of the fair narrative, although acknowledgment of their contribution was uneven and often ephemeral. Uncovering such silence highlights how gendered the triumphant history of modernity was, and reveals the ways women as a category engaged with modern life within that quintessential modern space—the world fair.

International journal of contemporary visual artists.