Observed: Milagros de la Torre
February 8 - April 14, 2012

The publication Observed: Milagros de la Torre was a collaborative project between Americas Society and Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI), which hosted the concurrent exhibition Indicios: Milagros de la Torre from March 6 - July 1, 2012. Featuring nearly 40 photographic works from the 1990s to the present, Observed was the artist’s first monographic show in New York. Focused on stark, object-based images, the catalogue examines contemporary issues related to violence, memory, and the socio-political construction of identity. As the exhibition’s curator Edward Sullivan has suggested, the notion of pain also plays a prevalent role throughout de la Torre’s work. Never displayed in an active or aggressive manner, physical or emotional trauma manifests itself through quiet allusion. Several of her series develop out of her own experiences in countries that have experienced waves of crippling violence, such as Mexico and Peru, or that have had extended periods of censorship.

De la Torre begins each series with an in-depth investigative process in libraries and archives. Research has served as a fundamental basis for her images, many of which are examinations of criminality and surveillance. The Lost Steps (1996) is a seminal project deeply informed by nineteenth-century photographic techniques. De la Torre employed these techniques to focus on images of incriminating evidence taken from the archive of the Palace of Justice in Lima, Peru during the violent years of the Shining Path. The seemingly everyday objects, shown in an isolated manner, convey stories of acts of terrorism, passion, and other crimes. In Censored (2001), using pages from seventeenth and eighteenth-century manuscripts from the collection of the University of Salamanca, de la Torre depicts passages inked-out by officials during the Spanish Inquisition. The series is encompassed by abstract images capturing the stroke and stain of each censored text.

This fully illustrated, bilingual publication features essays by Edward J. Sullivan, Miguel López, and an interview between Anne Wilkes Tucker and Milagros de la Torre. This catalogue is part of the Visual Arts of the Americas Modern and Contemporary Publication Series.

• Learn more about the exhibition.

Price: $20. To purchase this catalogue, please contact: artgallery@as-coa.org

In addition to essays by Michael Asbury, Claudia Calirman, Gabriela Rangel, and Judith Rodenbeck, Antonio Manuel: I Want to Act, Not Represent! also includes an interview with the artist conducted by Beverly Adams and a text by the artist exploring his serial work Urnas quentes (Hot Ballot Boxes). Finally, the publication contains a facsimile reproduction of A arma fálica (A Phallic Weapon), Antonio Manuel’s fotonovela starring Hélio Oiticica, Tineca, and Paulo, with texts written in collaboration with Lygia Pape, photographs by Kiko (Marcos Lins Andrade) and graphic design by Luciano Figueiredo.

• Learn more about the exhibition.

Price: $34. To purchase this catalogue, please contact: artgallery@as-coa.org

This fully illustrated publication accompanied the exhibition Arturo Herrera: Les Noces (The Wedding), organized by the Americas Society, which explored the intricate relationship between abstraction, animation, modern dance, and music. The exhibition introduced Herrera’s groundbreaking installation Les Noces, the artist’s first work to incorporate music and moving images to New York audiences. Internationally renowned for his explorations of a variety media, including collage, photography, prints, sculpture, and video, Herrera’s practice is deeply informed by the history of modernist abstraction. Les Noces is a two-channel digital projection based on the 1923 ballet performed by Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russes and scored by Igor Stravinsky. The artist digitally reworked fragments of his artwork to create a dance of abstract black and white images set to Stravinsky's music.

Arturo Herrera: Les Noces (The Wedding) features essays by Nuit Banai (Visual and Critical Studies Professor at Tufts University); Lynn Garafalo (Professor of History of Dance, Columbia University); and Gabriela Rangel (Director of Visual Arts and Chief Curator at Americas Society); as well as an interview with Arturo Herrera, Christopher Newton (Dancer, Royal Ballet), and Dame Monica Mason (Director, London Royal Ballet).

Distributed by ARTBOOK | D.A.P.

Price: $20. To purchase this catalogue, please contact: artgallery@as-coa.org

This bilingual publication includes essays by guest curators Bertha Aguilar, Alejandra Olvera and Sandra Zetina. It is also fully illustrated and presents over 75 color images, including all the pieces exhibited as well as many others.

Shattered Glass is the result of a joint project between Americas Society Art Gallery in New York, the Graduate Program in Art History at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil. The purpose of this collaboration is to enable graduate students to structure and intervene a Mexican Museum public art collection. The objective was to find links within a group of works that span from different time periods, which refer to the contemporary experience of violence. Amongst the 39 pieces included in the exhibition are works by David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, León Ferrari, Gunther Gerzo, Daniel Joseph Martínez, Mireia Sallarés, Pablo Vargas Lugo, Helen Escobedo and many others.

Price: $35. To purchase this catalogue, please contact: artgallery@as-coa.org

Art and Myth in Ancient Peru: The History of the Jequetepeque Valley is an exhibition that showcases Pre-Columbian art from the north coast of Peru. The show presents 3,000 years of the region’s cultural history, illustrating the diverse artistic styles employed by the various societies that occupied the Valley. The comprehensive selection includes striking examples of the Cupisnique, Moche, Chimu, and Inca ceramic traditions among others, in addition to textile and metal objects.

This publication includes essays by Cecilia Pardo Grau (Curator of Collections and Pre-Columbian Art at Museo de Arte Lima), Luis Jaime Castillo (Archeology Professor, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú) and brief descriptive texts by the leading scholars and archeologists of the field including: Christopher B. Donnan, Carlos G. Elera, Carol Mackey, Jeffrey Quilter, and Julio Rucabado.

Price: $15. To purchase this catalogue, please contact: artgallery@as-coa.org

Dias & Riedweg …and it becomes something else was the first solo exhibition in the United States of Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg. A duo of artists that have worked together since 1993 testing the critical potential of the moving image, using video to delve into the relationship between ethics and aesthetics and art and politics. This publication examines their work and analyzes how their pieces examine global issues associated with immigration, hybrid identities, and the tensions between group and individual interactions.

Price: $15. To purchase this catalogue, please contact: artgallery@as-coa.org

This fully illustrated catalogue includes essays by exhibition curator Maria Iovino; photographic historian Sagrario Berti; testimony by Fernell Franco; and a personal note by Graciela Iturbide.

The exhibition Fernell Franco: Amarrados [Bound] focused on the homonymous series comprising large-scale black and white photographs developed by Franco in the early 1980s. Fernell Franco (Cali, 1942-2006) is considered one of the few photographers who developed a distinct lyrical view of the shift towards modernity in Latin America.

Price: $15. To purchase this catalogue, please contact: artgallery@as-coa.org

Coproduced with the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Quebec.

This fully illustrated book contains essays by Gwendolyn Owens and Saul Ostrow; and an interview between Yasmeen Siddiqui and Melvin Charney.

Melvin Charney has worked extensively on the frontier of art and architecture, making photographs, sculptures, installations, constructions, and gardens that take the city itself as a measure of our urban condition. A keen observer of the built world we inhabit, his work is informed by a comprehensive knowledge of architecture—its theory, history, and current practice—as well as his overall understanding of cities themselves. Through his art, he plays the role of both observer and intervener.

Among Charney’s most compelling works are his painted photographs, the subject of this book and of an accompanying exhibition held at Americas Society in spring 2008. In his series PARABLES, IN FLIGHT, THE AMERICAN CITY, CITIES ON THE RUN, ONE FIT SIZES ALL, and BODYWORKS, Charney uses a single image as a starting point: a found photograph, a front-page picture of a building, or, more recently, seedier images culled from the back sections of newspapers and magazines. Set free from their original contexts and introduced afresh into Charney’s work, these buildings take on an entirely different life. Through this unique artistic process, Melvin Charney makes us more aware of the triumphs, tragedies, and absurdities of the modern city, and compels us to see the city and its buildings in a completely new way.

ISBN 978-1-879128-73-6

Price: $25. To purchase this catalogue, please contact: artgallery@as-coa.org

Moon Tears: Mapuche Art and Cosmology from the Domeyko Cassel Collection examines an indigenous group barely known outside of South America. Gathering a number of important artifacts and curated Thomas Dillehay, the exhibition catalogue showcases Mapuche silverware, drums, textiles, and masks as means to explore the Mapuche social and religious worldview.
 
Bringing the Domeyko Cassel Collection to the United States for the first time, the exhibition uses a visual narrative to provoke deeper understanding of the Mapuche, descendents of the Araucanians. The Mapuche are the largest indigenous group in southern South America, known for successfully resisting European intrusion longer than any indigenous society in American history, until the Chilean army defeated them in the mid-1890s. The survival of the Mapuche today is strongly tied to their religion, ancestral knowledge, healing practices, and sacred places. Key to their religious views is the idea of a continuous relationship between ancestors and the living.
 
The objects reveal the sophisticated cosmology and social organization of the Mapuche from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. More than just static objects of a bygone day, they are the material and artistic representation of the Mapuche conceptions of resistance, public ceremony, gender, shamanism, and their social and historical landscapes.
 
Thomas Dillehay’s essay is divided into three themes exploring the links between the Mapuche’s traditions and present day life: Empires, resistance, and historic landscapes; late pre-Hispanic times; memorial landscapes; religion and cosmology; symbols, oral traditions and AdMapu; and today’s world. The essay is accompanied by an interview between Jacqueline Domeyko, director of the Colección Domeyko Cassel, and the Visual Arts staff of the Americas Society, which took place in the fall of 2008.

Price: $20. To purchase this catalogue, please contact: artgallery@as-coa.org

Edited by Gabriela Rangel. Texts by Alexander Alberro, Nuit Banai, Mariela Brazón Hernández, Estrellita Brodsky, Ariel Jiménez, Isabela Villanueva.

One of the finest exponents of Latin American Kinetic and Op art, the Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez (born in 1923) is a legend among contemporaries such as Jesus Soto and Alejandro Otero—and across Latin America and Europe—but has been woefully little exhibited in North America. Those who caught the groundbreaking 2007 traveling exhibition The Geometry of Hope will recall Cruz-Diez's standout contributions, which had viewers bumping into one another as they negotiated the color shifts and sensations of motion that his sculptural constructions induced. A pioneer in color theory and color perception, Cruz-Diez solicits physical participation in his audience. In late 2008, the Americas Society, known for its leading role in presenting innovative site installations by artists such as Gego, Lygia Pape and Pedro Reyes, orchestrated Cruz-Diez's first solo exhibition in the United States, for which Carlos Cruz Diez: InFormed by Color is the exhibition catalogue—the first comprehensive publication in English devoted to the artist.

FORMAT: Pbk, 9 x 9 in. / 150 pgs / 50 color / 30 b&w. ISBN: 9781879128088

This catalogue is no longer available.