Agnes Martin: Independence of Mind

Georgia O’Keeffe’s early watercolor paintings: vivid, free-wheeling and full of surprise.

– Karen Wada, Los Angeles Times

Georgia O'Keeffe: Watercolors catalogs the first major exhibition in 2016 of the nearly 50 watercolors created by O’Keeffe between 1916 and 1918, while she lived in Canyon, Texas. These years mark a period of radical innovation for the artist, during which she firmly established her commitment to abstraction. While her work in Texas is often understood as merely a prelude to her career in New York City, these watercolors and drawings mark a seminal stage in O’Keeffe’s artistic formation, representing the pivotal intersection of her disciplined art practice and her allegiance to the revolutionary techniques of her mentor, Arthur Wesley Dow. 

O’Keeffe’s watercolors explore the texture and landscape of the Texas desert and the artist’s own body in an exceptionally fragile and sensitive medium, representing a substantial achievement in their own right. These early works also relate to O’Keeffe’s large-scale oil paintings, which in their handling of color and texture in some ways seem to aspire to the condition of watercolor.

I always say [the art is] active even when there’s no sound in the room; they are affecting the subtlest of sounds in the space—dampening and absorbing even the human voice.

— Jennie C. Jones

A Free and Shifting Tonal Center is Jennie C. Jones’s first monograph, exploring her interdisciplinary practice that moves viewers through both visual and auditory engagement. Aurally altering the spaces in which her paintings, sculptures, and installations are on view, Jones’s work encourages viewers to anticipate sound even in the quietest of environments.

Conceptually, Jones’s practice reflects on the legacies of modernism and minimalism while underscoring the connection between minimalism and music, illuminating the influence of the Black avant-garde. Bringing this multi-sensory experience to book form, A Free and Shifting Tonal Center unites documentation of recent exhibitions—including Dynamics, her expansive show at the Guggenheim Museum (2022)—with excerpts of text, poetry, and conversations to create a “score” that reveals the layers of Jones’s artwork. Part artist’s book and part primer, this lyrical volume unfolds in movements, like a printed and bound evening of poetry, prose, and music.

LeWitt’s work calls our attention to the disparity between the world of language and that of objects and actions. By focusing on the disjunction between these terms, LeWitt bridged the gap between Minimalism and Conceptual art.

— Saul Ostrow, BOMB

Sol LeWitt: Not to Be Sold for More Than $100 explores the little-known but fascinating body of conceptualist pioneer Sol LeWitt’s folded, torn, and cut paper works, which he created from approximately 1971 to 1980. LeWitt referred to these works as the “R” drawings (for rip) and also as “hundred dollar drawings,” since he wanted them to be sold for $100 in perpetuity. “His wall drawings were already selling for thousands of dollars, so he wanted to have some artwork that everybody could buy,” notes Jason Rulnick. Thanks to extensive research throughout various private and public collections around the world, this volume includes over 100 color plates. In the high-flying commerciality of the contemporary art world, LeWitt’s intention and foresight for this body of work resonates more than ever.

York’s sculpture, drawings, and installations are the product of an assiduous erasure of everything but the experience at hand.

– Lucy Lippard

Poet Arthur Sze and artist Susan York collaborated in this singular publication where drawings and poetry enrich each other. Eleven diptychs comprised of twenty-two densely layered graphite works on paper by York are interleaved with an extended, multi-voiced poem by Sze. Together they explore, embody, and enact shifting points of tension.