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.

This publication presents Betye Saar's sketchbooks--which she has kept during her entire career--for the first time and offers insights into the artist's creative process. A child of the Great Depression and one of the only African American students in her UCLA art program, Betye Saar has, over the course of more than six decades, made work that exposes stereotypes and injustices based on race and gender. From early prints and watercolors to Joseph Cornell-inspired assemblages and full-scale sculptural tableaux, her work has inspired generations of artists. This ingeniously designed publication plays off the format of Saar's original sketchbooks. Made throughout her extraordinary career, Saar's sketches are an integral part of her creative process and offer a greater understanding of the themes woven into her finished works, which are also featured in the book. Saar's sources and influences range from Simon Rodia's Watts Towers and Haitian Vodou fetishes to Australian Aboriginal paintings, Native American leatherwork, and African American history, literature, and music. An original, intimate, and valuable resource for Saar's many fans, this book will also educate future generations about Saar's significant contributions to American art. Published with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Catalog of an exhibition held at De Domijnen in Sittard, the Netherlands, July 28 - November 15, 2015 and at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, Arizona, January 30 - May 1, 2016.

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.

Published to mark the artist's first solo US museum show, Paulo Nazareth: Melee presents an engaging and timely look at the artist's multifarious work. The exhibition, held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami in 2019, explored how Nazareth's work engages the complex colonial and racial histories of the Americas. An artist who works across mediums, Nazareth uses performance and sculpture to critique the colonial experience and its afterlives in Brazil and the Americas. His durational performances and installations draw from his joint African and Indigenous heritage to highlight marginalized historical legacies, progressive political figures, non-Western worldviews, and potential methods of nonexploitative living and relating. Nazareth's work assumes a new poignancy in light of the return of repressive political forces and the racial reckoning that our historical moment demands. This beautifully produced volume offers over one hundred color illustrations in addition to newly commissioned scholarship. Paulo Nazareth: Melee is the first exhaustive catalogue of Nazareth's work, solidifying his place as one of today's most important global artists.

"Encompassing some 100 works in painting, sculpture, video, and installation, The Everywhere Studio brings together over 50 artists from the past five decades to reveal the artist’s studio as a charged site that has both predicted and responded to broader social and economic changes of our time. The Everywhere Studio interprets the works of post-war artists and emerging practitioners through the lens of the social and historical conditions in which they were made. Organized chronologically, the exhibition examines the changing relationships that artists have had to their sites of production. From the studio as a site of labor, to one that blurs production, performance, and spectacle, to a concept that defines the artist’s own identity, the exhibition features artists who, in response, to changing socio-economic influences, represented new modes of working and living that would subsequently spread across society."--Back cover.

"Groundbreaking and provocative, Judy Chicago's iconic sculptures, paintings, and installations helped bridge the gap between feminism and art during the 1960s, 70s, and beyond. Using imagery inspired by the female body and references to historical female figures, Chicago forged a new, women-focused visual language that continues to influence the aesthetics of feminist art today. This book traces Chicago's career from her emergence on the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s through her mature work in the 1990s. Featuring illustrations of six distinct bodies of works, this book includes Chicago's masterpiece The Dinner Party as well as other lesser-known works. With informative essays that situate Chicago's oeuvre in the context of contemporary Southern Californian art and scholarship that reflects Chicago's current work, this comprehensive book provides a breathtaking look at one of the quintessential figures of American feminist art" --