Recommended Databases
SMFA Print Periodicals
- CraftsSMFA, Tisch, and online
- Journal of modern craftPrint issues available at the SMFA Library
- MetalsmithPrint issues available at the SMFA Library
- SculpturePrint issues available at the SMFA Library
- Sculpture reviewPrint issues available at the SMFA Library
SMFA Online Periodicals
- Journal of modern craftOnline issues
- MetalsmithOnline issues
- SculptureOnline issues
- Sculpture reviewOnline issues
Featured Sculpture & Installation Art Titles
Adaline Kent by
The first major monograph in sixty years on the San Francisco modernist sculptor who developed a unique abstract style rooted in surrealism and inspired by nature. This beautifully produced volume celebrates the life and career of Adaline Kent (1900-1957), a member of one of the Bay Area's most productive and innovative midcentury artistic groups. Kent is linked to modernist artists Ruth Asawa, Mark Rothko, Isamu Noguchi, and Clyfford Still. Texts by a diverse range of scholars cover such subjects as infinity and movement in Kent's work; the influence of nature; and the diverse artistic milieu at the San Francisco Art Institute and beyond that surrounded Kent and her husband, artist Robert Howard. With an extensive chronology and a wide selection of sculptures, photographs, and rarely seen works on paper and paintings on Hydrocal, the book substantiates Kent's achievement as one of midcentury America's most innovative sculptors, re-excavating her work for younger generations.
Call Number: SMFA: NB237.K45 A4 2023
Allison Katz by
A richly illustrated volume-and the first exhibition catalog-of the work of the artist Allison Katz, whose multilayered paintings, ceramics, and posters are both embodied and enigmatic. London-based Canadian artist Allison Katz has been exploring painting's relationship to questions of identity and expression, selfhood and voice, for more than a decade. Animated by a restless sense of humor, her works articulate what the artist has called a "genuine ambiguity." Artery-a book that situates itself somewhere between a monograph, exhibition catalog, and an artist's book-is an exploration of what is within and below, and of the infrastructural arteries that connect all of us. It is published on the occasion of Katz's first institutional exhibition in the United Kingdom, presented at Nottingham Contemporary (2021) and Camden Art Centre, London (2022). Gathering together essays from Sam Thorne, director of Nottingham Contemporary, and Martin Clark, director of Camden Art Centre, as well as a text by the artist, Artery features 50 full-color image plates of the artist's work that are supplemented by 150 reference images compiled by Katz herself.
Call Number: SMFA: N6549.K38 A4 2023
Barbara Chase-Riboud Monumentale by
A new retrospective of the work of trailblazing artist Barbara Chase-Riboud Barbara Chase-Riboud is a bestselling novelist, an award-winning poet, and a renowned visual artist whose sculpture and drawings are in museum collections around the world. Among her best-known sculptural work is the Malcolm X series of flowing cast bronze forms combined with braided fiber elements. Barbara Chase-Riboud Monumentale traces this pioneering artist's remarkable career from the 1950s to the present, providing the most comprehensive account of her important body of work to date. The book features both celebrated and never-before-seen artworks that highlight Chase-Riboud's groundbreaking contributions to contemporary sculpture. In addition to some forty sculptures, the book presents nearly twenty works on paper, a selection of Chase-Riboud's poetry, and excerpts from an interview with the artist. Exploring the many different aspects of Chase-Riboud's artistic practice, Barbara Chase-Riboud Monumentale provides unprecedented insights into her meditations on form, memory, and monument, while revealing the rich array of inspiration she has drawn from global art history and literature. Published in association with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation Exhibition Schedule Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis September 16, 2022-February 5, 2023
Call Number: SMFA: NX512.C483 A4 2023
Carol Bove: Collage Sculptures by
Carol Bove: Collage Sculptures presents an extensive look into the contemporary artist's work over the past five years and her ongoing exploration of scale, color, material, and artistic traditions of the twentieth century. Bove's recent work engages the conceptual concerns of mid-century sculpture, such as spontaneity, industrial materials, and the potential of painted sculpture. However, within this space of familiar sculptural traditions, Bove has discovered new approaches that lead to places previously unknown. Bove's "collage sculptures" are created from scrap metal and stainless steel that has been carefully worked into sinuous forms and are frequently painted. Considering the hard rigidity of the steel, the works possess an appearance of almost impossible softness, as if steel could become as pliable as clay. Such works range from small pedestal sculptures to large, imposing compositions. Bove's interest in scale and how a viewer's understanding of an artwork shifts depending on its context are explored through a selection of small works from the collection of the Nasher Sculpture Sculpture. Published by the Nasher Sculpture Center, the catalogue features beautiful reproductions of Bove's work and an introduction as well as an essay by curator Catherine Craft on the development of the collage sculptures and their relationship to other artists and traditions of modern sculpture. Also included is an essay by Lisa Le Feuvre that explores Bove's complex work by means of a thematic alphabet related to the artist's interests.
Call Number: SMFA: NB853.B69 A4 2022
Charles Ray by
Between Minimalism and craft: a comprehensive appraisal of Los Angeles sculptor Charles Ray This catalog accompanies the 2022 double exhibition of Charles Ray's work at the Centre Pompidou and the Bourse de Commerce (Pinault Foundation). With approximately 30 pieces that depict humans, plants and vehicles in his favored materials of wood and metal, this publication explores the artist's critical relationship with Minimalism and the uncompromising perfectionism apparent in his work. Whether recreating fallen trees down to every nook and cranny or conjuring a certain vulnerability in his life-size steel figures, Ray's pieces are characterized by a formal intricacy that lends an almost uncanny realism to his sculptures in spite of their sometimes unusual scale. In his meticulous attention to detail, Ray invites viewers to examine his sculptures with similar intensity. Ray's work, which clearly draws from a minimalist-formalist focus on material as it explores the possibilities of three-dimensional representation, resists classification and must be experienced on an individual level. Based in Los Angeles, American artist Charles Ray (born 1953) has worked for decades across mediums and materials to create photography series, performance pieces and sculptures. Ray has been the subject of solo exhibitions around the world, and his work has been featured in Venice Biennales in 1993, 2003 and 2014, and in five Whitney Biennials. He is currently represented by Matthew Marks Gallery in New York.
Call Number: SMFA Library: NB237.R35 A4 2022
El Anatsui: the Reinvention of Sculpture by
Written by two acclaimed scholars Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, El Anatsui, is the most comprehensive, incisive and authoritative account yet on the work of El Anatsui, the world-renowned, Ghanaian-born sculptor. The product of more than three decades of research, scholarship and close collaboration with the artist, this book shows why his early wood reliefs and terracottas, and the later monumental metal sculptures, exemplify an innovative critical search for alternative models of art making.The authors argue that the pervasiveness of fragmentation as a compositional device in Anatsui's oeuvre invites meditation on the impact of colonization and postcolonial global forces on African cultures. At the same time, the simultaneous invocation of resilience and fragility across his media invests his abstract sculptures with iconic power. Insisting on the intimate connection between form and idea in Anatsui's work, the authors show how, in his critically acclaimed metal works, the manual work of flattening, cutting, twisting, and crushing bottle caps and using copper wires to suture and stitch the elements into one dazzling, reconfigurable epic piece serves as a powerful metaphor for the constitution of human society. This book presents Anatsui as a visionary of incomparable imagination. Yet, it places his work within a broader historical context, specifically the postcolonial modernism of mid-twentieth-century African artists and writers, the cultural ferment of post-independence Ghana, as well as within the intellectual environment of the 1970's Nsukka School. By recovering these histories, and subjecting his work to vigorous analysis, the authors show how and why Anatsui became one of the most formidable sculptors of our time.
Call Number: SMFA Library: NB23.A37 E43 2022
Funk You Too! Humor and Irreverence in Ceramic Sculpture by
The first book to connect the history of Funk Art to contemporary ceramic practice. Funk You Too! arrives at a moment when clay has unprecedented currency in the art world as a sculptural medium. It is the first book to connect the history of Funk Art to contemporary ceramic practice through an exploration of the enduring role of humor in clay image-making. The founding generation of Funk artists used forms of subversion to deflate the power of the aesthetic hierarchy that dismissed ceramics as hobby art. Today, in the hands of a younger, more diverse cohort, the irreverent approach is a powerful tool of critique and personal expression and the "spoonful of sugar" to help discuss sociopolitical concerns of our time. Showcasing over 50 works from a 2023 exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, this catalog addresses the historical context for the emergence of ceramic sculpture in 1960s Funk Art and applies a critical lens to work by its contemporary successors. The exhibition's curator, Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, conceptually frames the exhibition's emphasis on humor as a tool for tackling personal and political themes. Garth Johnson contributes an essay on the impulse for humor in American ceramics that lead to Funk ceramics. The catalog also features biographies of the artists, color images, and a select bibliography.
Call Number: SMFA: NK4008 .F86 2023
Josh Kline by
A deep look at a contemporary artist whose work highlights how the rise of technology and corporate capitalism have disrupted our lives and polarized society One of the most thought-provoking artists of his generation, Josh Kline (b. 1979) creates installations, sculptures, videos, and photographs that address the ways new technologies affect how people live and work. Engaging with a range of concerns that impact the entire labor force, from essential workers to the creative class, Kline demonstrates how climate change, automation, disease, and politics have shaped our identities. At a time when so many aspects of life are under threat, Kline takes an unflinching look at how we got here and boldly imagines a more equitable and empathetic future. Kline's art demonstrates the ways technology has widened and reinforced the gap of inequity in America, while also carrying the potential to make a fairer world. "As an artist who's thinking about the consequences of technological innovation," Kline has said, "I think there's an obligation to raise questions about who benefits." His ongoing cycle of installations (Freedom, 2014-16; Unemployment, 2015-16, Civil War, 2016-19; Climate Change, 2019- ) that imagine the next hundred years of society are featured in this book, along with his earlier bodies of work, Creative Labor (2009- ) and Blue Collars (2014- ) and production images and concept sketches for his newest works that are published here for the first time. Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American Art Exhibition Schedule: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (April 19-August 13, 2023)
Call Number: SMFA: N6537.K5735 A4 2023
Karyn Olivier: Everything That's Alive Moves by
This publication documents the first solo museum exhibition of Philadelphia-based sculptor Karyn Olivier (born 1968), focusing on recent trajectories of her investigation into scale and public memory, particularly as activated for monuments and memorials. After several years developing a number of public commissions, and a year's study in Rome, Olivier revisited a handful of recent works alongside her first forays into video and sound, to consider the conflicted histories and unresolved spaces monuments too often shadow. Organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, the exhibition traveled to the University at Buffalo Art Galleries. Exhibition images from the venues are accompanied by the full narrative text for Oliver's first video; an overview essay from ICA Daniel and Brett Sundheim Chief Curator Anthony Elms; UB Art Galleries curator Liz Park's in-depth consideration of Moving the Obelisk; and a critical assessment by art historian Andrianna Campbell-LaFleur.
Call Number: SMFA Library: NB237.O435 A4 2021
Liquid Sculpture: the Public Art of Cristina Iglesias by
Can a sculpture be a river? Can contemporary art unite conflicting systems of belief? Do other species appreciate culture? And can public art revive communities and ecosystems? Cristina Iglesias' horizontal fountains, submerged rooms and tropical mazes bring together language, architecture and botany to create immersive spaces of contemplation. In this publication an international roster of curators, art critics, philosophers, architects and scientists discuss the social and ecological potential of art in urban and rural space. Spanish artist CRISTINA IGLESIAS (*1956) creates profound spaces of the imagination. Renowned for her sculptures woven, cast or constructed from metal, wood and alabaster, Iglesias also creates outdoor structures and installations using water. Her work can be found in inner cities or remote islands, as a site of pilgrimage for humans or as a habitat for animals.
Call Number: NB813.I35 A4 2021
Nick Hornby - Zygotes and Confessions by
Zygotes and Confessions is a new publication devoted to the work of London-based artist Nick Hornby, and has been produced to accompany his first solo exhibition in a public gallery. Hornby is known for his monumental site-specific works that combine digital software with traditional materials such as bronze, steel, granite and marble. In this publication he presents a substantial new body of smaller, more intimate work comprising three discrete yet interrelated series of works inspired by the history of sculptural busts, modernist abstractions and mantelpiece ceramic dogs. United by glossy photographic surfaces created by means of an industrial process in which his marble and resin composite sculptures are dipped into liquid photographs, these new works explore themes of portraiture, the body, identity, sexuality and intimacy in the digital era. A number of the works have been made in collaboration with fashion photographer Louie Banks. Exhibition: MOSTYN, Wales, UK (14.11.2020-18.04.2021).
Call Number: SMFA Library: NB497.H67 A4 2021
Wangechi Mutu by
A comprehensive survey of the work of the influential Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu Wangechi Mutu's multidisciplinary practice grapples with contemporary realities while proffering new models for a radically changed future informed by feminism, Afrofuturism, and interspecies symbiosis. Her work addresses some of today's most critical questions concerning historical violence and its impact on women, together with our inextricable ties toward one another, our ecosystems, and other life forms. Accompanying a major solo exhibition at the New Museum opening in February 2023, this expansive survey will trace the entirety of Mutu's influential career chronologically, from early sculptural works of the late 1990s to her collage works of the early 2000s and more recent video works, large-scale sculptures, and site-specific interventions. This monograph provides the opportunity to see thematic through-lines and progressions across the entire arc of Mutu's career to date. Her sculptures inaugurated the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Façade Project, and her work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate Modern, London, among other major institutions.
Call Number: SMFA: N6537.W2564 A4 2023
Yayoi Kusama Cosmic Nature by
"KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature is the accompanying catalogue to the first comprehensive exploration of the artist's enduring fascination with the natural world, exhibited across the 250-acre landscape of The New York Botanical Garden. The exhibition examines her lifelong awareness and attunement to nature, which serves not merely as a source of inspiration, but is an integral source of power for her artistic language. This profound life force pervades all of Kusama's work, from studies of the molecular to contemplations of the universal, resulting in a transcendent, cosmic nature. Exhibition guest curator Mika Yoshitake, an independent scholar specializing in postwar Japanese art, and Joanna L. Groarke, NYBG exhibitions curator, catalogue co-editors, bring together essays by art historians, curators, and a scientist, who each present unique interpretations of Kusama's engagement with the natural world"--Publisher description.
Call Number: SMFA Library: N7359.K87 A4 2021
SMFA Library
Want to browse the stacks? Look at these call numbers
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N6494.E27 |
Earthworks |
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N6494.I56 |
Installation exhibitions |
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N6512.I56 |
Installation and performance |
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N8700 – 8846 |
Public art |
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NA2515 |
Installation and architecture |
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NB60 – 198 |
History of sculpture |
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NB198 |
Installation and sculpture |
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NB205 – 1080 |
Sculpture by country/region |
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NB198 – 198.7 |
20th and 21st century sculpture |
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NB1170 – 1180 |
Sculpture technique |
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NB1202 – 1271 |
Sculpture by material |
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NB1930 |
Figure sculpture |