Art Books
Kimowan Metchewais: A Kind of Prayer
By Maymanah FarhatKimowan Metchewais: A Kind of Prayer is edited and designed to honor the poetics that distinguished the artist’s multi-disciplinary practice. Color reproductions in the monograph do not appear in chronological order but instead are placed in relation to one another, highlighting how Metchewais tended to carry ideas over space and time, regularly bridging different experiences and periods of his life.
Elisabeth Smolarz’s The Encyclopedia of Things
By Sarah Moroz“This is a book of portraits absent of the people they represent,” states Michelle Levy, who edited the tome, regarding the still life ensembles that fill the pages. Dreamed up by Polish-born New York-based artist Elisabeth Smolarz, the project began in 2014 and focuses on “opening the channels of communication to the inanimate and the subconscious” in conjunction with people she encounters.
Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index
By Jenny WuIn March 2019, designer and researcher Mindy Seu tweeted, “I’m creating a cyberfeminist index,” and shared a link to a spreadsheet she hoped would become a site of collaboration. As the spreadsheet grew to nearly seven hundred rows—at a time when info-activism and open-access libraries proved crucial to consciousness-raising in the context of global exigencies like the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests—Seu used the data to create an easy-to-search website, cyberfeminismindex.com. In January 2023, Seu again repackaged the data as a book, Cyberfeminism Index, this time hacking the strictures of academia by challenging the perceived primacy of printed matter over identical open-source content.
Barbara T. Smith’s The Way to Be
By Megan N. LibertyIn lieu of an exhibition catalog, Smith’s memoir serves as the show's accompanying publication, foregrounding the personal nature of her practice, which places her own body and lived experience as material, even at times to her own detriment.
Brian Dillon’s Affinities: On Art and Fascination
By Mary Ann CawsBrian Dillon’s involvement with the word and meaning of “affinities” is in itself worth any time spent perusing these pages.
