Exhibition Catalogue

Catalogue to accompany the exhibition, To Be Thirteen: Photographs and Videos By Besty Schneider on view at Phoenix Art Museum May 4, 2018 - October 14, 2018.

In 2011, photographer Betsy Schneider, herself the mother of a thirteen-year-old daughter, embarked on a project to explore the experience of being thirteen: “With this work I am interested in provoking thought about simple dichotomies to which adolescence is so often reduced. I am motivated by the intensity, the complexity and the beauty of that point in life. I wonder not only about the experience of early adolescence, but also about how we as adults retain that experience and how it shapes us for the rest of our lives.” Traveling around the United States, the Guggenheim grant recipient spent 2012 chronicling 250 thirteen-year-olds, creating still portraits and video documentation of each. The resulting body of work creates a rich collective portrait of a group of Americans whose lives began at the turn of the millennium and who are coming of age now. To Be Thirteen depicts all 250 portraits, and includes an interview by Center for Creative Photography Chief Curator Rebecca Senf with Schneider, unpacking details about the artist’s process, insights about the experience, and how the project changed her, as well as excerpts from the thirteen-year-olds’ own words. This publication captures and conveys the experience of meeting with the artist and looking through a stack of prints with her, and will complement an exhibition of the project debuting at the Phoenix Art Museum in May of 2018.

• Hardcover
• 250 portraits
• Phoenix Art Museum & Radius Books• 2018.

This gloriously illustrated volume is the first in-depth presentation of some 300 treasures from Phoenix Art Museum boasting splendid American and Western American, European, Modern and Contemporary, Latin American, Asian and Fashion Design collections. Monet's Flowering Arches, Giverny (an intimate view of the artist's favorite spot in his gardens for sitting and reflecting); Frida Kahlo's Suicide of Dorothy Hale; Shen Quan's Album of Birds and Animals; and Louise Nevelson's Royal Tide V are among the works featured. All are illuminated by new scholarship, and most have been specially photographed for this volume. 

• Softcover 352 pages
• Harry N. Abrams, Inc., in association with Phoenix Art Museum, 2002.

Exhibition Catalogue for: PAST/FUTURE/PRESENT: Contemporary Brazilian Art From the Museum of Modern Art, Sᾶo Paulo

PAST/FUTURE/PRESENT presents a rare panorama of the most innovative art produced in Brazil from the 1990s to the 2010s.  The exhibition is the first major presentation of artworks from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Sᾶo Paulo (MAM-SP) in the United States.  The Exhibition features 70 artworks created by 59 artists in diverse media, including painting, sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance. 

The exhibition is organized around five disparate but interconnected themes: The Body/The Social Body; Shifting Identities; The Reinvention of the Monochrome; Landscape, Reimagined; and Impossible Objects.   

The title Past/Future/Present alludes to the creative dialogues they maintain with past Brazilian artistic traditions while also looking toward the future with a wider, global perspective.  This exhibition is a singular opportunity for American audiences to experience an in-depth look at the practice of Brazilian artists now recognized as the pioneers of their generation. The diversity of their proposal’s illustrate that contemporary Brazilian art cannot be defined by a single “ism” or contained within any one category. These artists enter into dialogues with the traditions of the past at the same time that they participate in current global artistic discussions. Their simultaneous engagement with the past and the future speaks to a singular creative present, and has made Brazil a serious contender on the international stage of contemporary art.

Because the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art houses one of the most important collections of Brazilian art in the world, this exhibition represents only one constellation of artworks among many others that could be imagined. It is not intended as a definitive survey of contemporary artistic production in Brazil, but rather to contribute to the ongoing conversation about what Brazilian art is and can be.

• Paperback
• 207 pages
• Phoenix Art Museum|Museu de Arte Moderna de Sao Paulo, 2017

Exhibition catalogue for "Hollywood Costume" shown at Phoenix Art Museum, March 2014 - July 2014. Featuring the most beloved costume designs from the past 100 years of Hollywood films, "Hollywood Costume" celebrates, for the very first time, the costume designer’s contribution to the telling of the cinematic story. Published in conjunction with an exhibition launched at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the book showcases the talents of renowned designers such as Adrian, Edith Head, and Sandy Powell, among many others, whose work spans the silent era to the Golden Age of Hollywood to the present day. Essays by a wide variety of leading scholars, archivists, and private collectors, as well as contributions by contemporary costume designers, actors, and directors, take a close look at the conventions of what is considered "costume" and the role of the designer in creating a film’s characters and helping to shape its narrative. With memorable wardrobe classics from The Tramp, Ben-Hur, Cleopatra, The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Pirates of the Caribbean, Ocean’s Eleven, Sherlock Holmes, Avatar, and many more, Hollywood Costume is the ultimate volume for fashionistas and film lovers alike.

• 320 Pages
• V&A Publishing, 2012

Exhibition catalogue for: Horacia Zabala: Mapping the Monocrome.

Horacio Zabala (Argentina, b.1943) is recognized as one of the most important conceptual artists to emerge in Argentina during the latter part of the 20th century. Educated as an architect but active as an artist since the late 1960s, he has long been fascinated by the means by which space is defined, be it architectural, cartographic, or narrative.

In the early 1970s, Zabala produced a series of maps of Latin America that he graphically modified to reflect Argentina’s socio-political turmoil under repressive military dictatorships. He began this experimentation by obscuring maps of the region with monochromatic rectangles of black, blue, or red paint. He also made maps invisible by the proliferation of the word “CENSORED” rubber-stamped across their surfaces; maps with absences created by burning gaping holes through the paper; and hand-drawn maps of Latin American land masses crumbling into the sea from inside out.

To escape persecution, Zabala moved his family to Europe in 1976. He returned to Argentina in 1998 and took up where he left off, with the idea of mapping space, but now through a different idiom: monochromatic paintings arranged in sequences accompanied by mathematical signs or punctuation marks. The monochrome seen in his early maps has now become untethered from geography. Zabala titles these punctuated monochromesHypotheses, suggesting that they constitute only one possible solution among many others: these works present viewers with an invitation to visualize painting as inextricably linked to other systems of logic and reason, even beyond math and language.

Featuring maps, monochromes, and sculptures, the exhibition Horacio Zabala: Mapping the Monochrome presents a cross-section of Zabala’s work, both historical and contemporary. It illustrates his continuous exploration of innovative ways to engage viewers with art objects that are immediately accessible because they are familiar to us, but altered to reflect deeper socio-political undercurrents or references to art historical traditions on an international scale.

• Paperback
• 205 pages
• Phoenix Art Museum, 2016

The publication of Fabulous at 50: Phoenix Art Museum commemorates and celebrates fifty years of art, education, and the strength of its people who make it all possible - volunteers, trustees, donors, and staff. The debut of this collectible book took place at the Golden Anniversary Gala, the pARTy on November 7, 2009.

• Hardcover
• 348 pages
• Phoenix Art Museum, 2009

Catalogue accompanying the exhibition: Seeing is Believing: Rebecca Campbell and Angela Ellsworth Phoenix Art Museum September 3, 2011 - January 22, 2012.

Rebecca Campbell and Angela Ellsworth both spent their childhoods in Utah and within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Their different experiences and individual reactions to this specific context have inspired much of their mature work as artists. Multilayered and complex, their works touch on memory and nostalgia but are grounded in the present and the reinterpretation of their experiences as well as Mormon traditions and practices. This exhibition will include painting, sculpture and installations.

Rebecca Campbell (b. 1970) is known for her startling figurative paintings of children and individuals but her 2009 solo show Poltergeist included a number of large scale installations that directly drew on her childhood. She received her BFA in 1994 from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, and her MFA in painting from UCLA in 2001. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Angela Ellsworth (b. 1964) is an interdisciplinary artist who created compelling objects and performances. The 2010 Biennale of Sydney included the installation - Seer Bonnets: A Continuing Offense, nine bonnets pierced through with pearl-tipped corsage pins and representing the nine wives of her great-great-grandfather, who was the fifth prophet of the Mormon Church. She lives and works in Phoenix. - Softcover - Phoenix Art Museum, 2011.

• 80 pages
• Catalogue reverses to reveal two different front covers (pictured) in which both artists are jointly represented.

Exhibition catalog for Xul Solar and Jorge Luis Borges: The Art of Friendship on view at Phoenix Art Museum October 2, 2013 - December 31, 2013. Xul Solar and Jorge Luis Borges:The Art of Friendship explores the multiple facets of Solar's friendship and dynamic intellectual exchange with acclaimed writer and fellow Argentine, Jorge Luis Borges. Through paintings, publications, objects and artistic interventions, the exhibition touches on their influence on one another's individual and collaborative work. 

• Hardcover
• 152 pages
• Americas Society, 2013

Autographed by both photographers (Mark Klett/Byron Wolfe) and both essayists (Rebecca A. Senf/Stephen J. Pyne)! Using landscape photography to reflect on broader notions of culture, the passage of time, and the construction of perception, photographers Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe spent five years exploring the Grand Canyon for their most recent project, Reconstructing the View. The team’s landscape photographs are based on the practice of rephotography, in which they identify sites of historic photographs and make new photographs of those precise locations. Klett and Wolfe referenced a wealth of images of the canyon, ranging from historical photographs and drawings by William Bell and William Henry Holmes, to well-known artworks by Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, and from souvenir postcards to contemporary digital images drawn from Flickr. The pair then employed digital postproduction methods to bring the original images into dialogue with their own. The result is this stunning volume, illustrated with a wealth of full-color illustrations that attest to the role photographers-both anonymous and great-have played in picturing American places. Rebecca Senf’s compelling essay traces the photographers’ process and methodology, conveying the complexity of their collaboration. Stephen J. Pyne provides a conceptual framework for understanding the history of the canyon, offering an overview of its discovery by Europeans and its subsequent treatment in writing, photography, and graphic arts.

• Hardcover
• 208 pages
• Phoenix Art Museum, 2012

In April 2007, Phoenix Art Museum presented 22 streamlined American and European automobiles that demonstrated the intersection of style and aerodynamics in 20th century automobile design. The updated, second edition of that landmark exhibition tracks the evolution of the streamlined shape from the 1930s through the 1990s. Edited and co-written by historian Jonathan A. Stein, it includes essays from many of the world's great automotive writers including Beverly Rae Kimes, Ken Gross, Phil Patton, Richard Adatto and Diana Meredith. Each car is presented with historical images and elegant, modern photographs by Michael Furman.

• Hardcover
• 192 Pages
• Coachbuilt Press, 2009

Don Coen: The Migrant Series brings a remarkable series of large portraits to Phoenix Art Museum. Created by Colorado-based artist Don Coen, these 15 large-scale photo-realist portraits tell the visual story of migrant farmers in today’s United States, a group of our population rarely considered in fine art. The works take a human-centric approach, highlighting the unique personalities of each subject and acknowledging both their personhood and work ethic.

Each piece in the Migrant Series suggests the intimacy of a traditional portrait, but they are presented on a captivating scale, coercing careful consideration of their presence. Painted between 2001 and 2010, the series comes from hundreds of hours spent in fields making studies and taking photos in California, Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Texas and Florida.

The full-color catalog contains essays by Lewis Sharp, Denver Art Museum Director Emeritus, and Jerry N. Smith, Ph.D., Curator of American and Western American Art, Phoenix Art Museum.

• Softcover
• 60 pages
• Phoenix Art Museum, 2014

Paulo Bruscky: Art Is Our Last Hope is the first survey exhibition of Brazilian artist Paulo Bruscky’s career in the United States.

  The catalogue accompanying the exhibition offers English-speaking audiences a window onto Bruscky’s pioneering production for the first time. The volume features two major essays interpreting the various facets of Bruscky’s work. Dr. Bessa contextualizes Bruscky’s practice within the broader international scene by tracing a parallel between the artist’s strategies and the various theoretical and philosophical ideas current since the late 1960s. Dr. Davidson, who defended a doctoral dissertation on Bruscky’s work, contributes an essay exploring what he called “communication art” in all its iterations: mail art, telegram art, fax art, xerox art, and newspaper classifieds, all linked by the artist’s subversion and simultaneous transformation of ready-made communication systems into unorthodox channels for art. The book also includes an interview with Paulo Bruscky conducted at the artist’s studio in April, 2013, by Dr. Bessa, and a chronology spanning the artist’s career, including an overview of the socio-historical context in Brazil throughout the 1960s and 70s, organized by Dr. Davidson.

• Hardcover
• 120 pages
• The Bronx Museum of Art/Phoenix Art Museum, 2014

Catalogue for the exhibition, "Ahmed Alsoudani: Redacted" on view at Phoenix Art Museum, March 13, 2013 - July 7, 2013. Iraqi-American painter Ahmed Alsoudani is known for his vibrant, large-scale fragmented compositions that combine charcoal drawing with acrylic paint to articulate the artist’s compelling vocabulary of violence and its repercussions. His work is rooted in his turbulent personal experiences but speaks to something larger. Look closely and we find no traces of culture or society. The anonymity of his images highlights the universality of his issues. At turns dark and funny, his painting is a powerful testament to his desire to create eloquent artworks that ask vital questions about our place in the world amid ever changing international circumstances.

• Hardcover
• 120 pages
• Phoenix Art Museum & Portland Museum of Art, 2013

In black and white, William W. Fuller compresses urban buildings into graphic and layered compositions. Having done extensive travel across the United States, he has explored several city's structures. Fuller's pictures are explorations of shape, line, form, negative space, light and shadow, in high contrast. This modernist way of approaching the landscape results in a collection of photographs that are universally appealing in their clean, crisp and cool elegance.

• 14" x 14" x 2"