A sweeping history of the New York art scene during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s reveals a powerful "alternative" art culture that profoundly influenced the mainstream. Simultaneous. (Fine Arts)

This enlightening and thought-provoking look at New York City’s postwar art scene focuses on the galleries and the artists that helped transform American art. While the achievements of New York City’s most renowned postwar artists—de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, Franz Kline— have been studied in depth, a large cadre of lesser-known but influential artists came of age between 1952 and 1965. Also understudied are the early, experimental works by more well- known figures such as Mark di Suvero, Jim Dine, Dan Flavin, and Claes Oldenburg. Focusing on innovative artist-run galleries, this book invites readers to reevaluate the period—uncovering its diversity, creativity, and nuances, and tracing the spaces’ influence during the decades that followed. Inventing Downtown charts the development of artist-run galleries in Lower Manhattan from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s, showing how the area’s multicultural spirit played a major role in shaping the artworks exhibited there. The book explores 14 key spaces in which styles such as Pop, Minimalism, and performance and installation art thrived. Excerpts from 33 revealing interviews with artists, critics, and dealers, conducted by Billy Klu&̈ver and Julie Martin, offer unique personal insight into the era’s creative milieu. Taken together, the book’s essays and interviews provide a distinctly new assessment of how downtown New York’s fertile environment nurtured an innovative art scene.

The first book to chart Scott Burton’s performance art and sculpture of the 1970s. Scott Burton (1939–89) created performance art and sculpture that drew on queer experience and the sexual cultures that flourished in New York City in the 1970s. David J. Getsy argues that Burton looked to body language and queer behavior in public space—most importantly, street cruising—as foundations for rethinking the audiences and possibilities of art. This first book on the artist examines Burton’s underacknowledged contributions to performance art and how he made queer life central in them. Extending his performances about cruising, sexual signaling, and power dynamics throughout the decade, Burton also came to create functional sculptures that covertly signaled queerness by hiding in plain sight as furniture waiting to be used. With research drawing from multiple archives and numerous interviews, Getsy charts Burton’s deep engagements with postminimalism, performance, feminism, behavioral psychology, design history, and queer culture. A restless and expansive artist, Burton transformed his commitment to gay liberation into a unique practice of performance, sculpture, and public art that aspired to be antielitist, embracing of differences, and open to all. Filled with stories of Burton’s life in New York’s art communities, Queer Behavior makes a case for Burton as one of the most significant out queer artists to emerge in the wake of the Stonewall uprising and offers rich accounts of queer art and performance art in the 1970s.

A Companion to Contemporary Art is a major survey covering the major works and movements, the most important theoretical developments, and the historical, social, political, and aesthetic issues in contemporary art since 1945, primarily in the Euro-American context. Collects 27 original essays by expert scholars describing the current state of scholarship in art history and visual studies, and pointing to future directions in the field. Contains dual chronological and thematic coverage of the major themes in the art of our time: politics, culture wars, public space, diaspora, the artist, identity politics, the body, and visual culture. Offers synthetic analysis, as well as new approaches to, debates central to the visual arts since 1945 such as those addressing formalism, the avant-garde, the role of the artist, technology and art, and the society of the spectacle.

Taking place examines feminist and queer alternative art spaces across Canada and the United States from the late-1960s to the present. It looks at how queer and feminist artists working in the present day engage with, respond to and challenge the institutions they have inherited. Through a series of regional case studies, the book interrogates different understandings of ‘alternative’ space and the possibilities the term affords for queer and feminist artistic imaginaries.

Artists: John Baldessari, Ericka Beckman, Dara Birnbaum, Barbara Bloom, Eric Bogosian, Glenn Branca, Tony Brauntuch, James Casebere, Sarah Charlesworth, Charles Clough, Nancy Dwyer, Jack Goldstein, Barbara Kruger, Jouise Lawler, Thomas Lawson, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo Allan McCollum, Paul McMahon, MICA-TV (Carole Ann Klonarides and Michael Owen), Matt Mullican, Tom Otterness, Richard Prince, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Michael Smith, James Welling, Michael Zwack.

In the 1990s, a new wave of globalization changed the field of cultural production in many African countries and paved the way for major new cultural events. In particular, during the last two decades, an ever growing series of art and cultural centers were and still are being established - often against the background of broader national (art) histories and the historic prominence of the state as the primary patron of the arts. In considering the historical genealogy of these 'new spaces, ' this book examines: the infrastructures and public spaces they create, the theoretical discourses they tap into and explore, the aesthetic and (cultural) political debates they stir, the role they play in the field of cultural institutions and cultural activism, and their relations with state and municipal institutions. (Series: African Art and Visual Cultures - Vol. 2) [Subject: African Studies, Cultural Studies, Art