Cameron Welch: Mosaics

Since the time I left the Crow reservation, I have encountered my tribe’s material cultural in every city I have exhibited or occupied. It is incredible that so much of my community’s history and material culture is kept in the vaults of these institutions, hundreds of miles away from their source.

– Wendy Red Star

Wendy Red Star made her first big move off the Crow reservation to attend Montana State University in Bozeman. During one of her study sessions she discovered an image of Medicine Crow, an Apsáalooke chief, in a random book in the university library. Enamored by his image, she made a xerox copy and kept the chief’s image in her sketchbook. A decade later, in 2014, she revisited this image to create an exhibition at the Portland Art Museum titled Medicine Crow & the 1880 Crow Peace Delegation.

Bíilukaa builds upon this theme of researching historical photographs of Apsáalooke individuals and material culture, with the artist drawing on both her personal collection and works held in museums and archives across the country. The book features interviews with the artist and members of her extended family and scholars, alongside new works of primarily collaged photography. Red Star has chosen the title Bíilukaa in reference to what the Apsáalooke call themselves: Our Side. Bíilukaa is the book Red Star wishes she could have read when setting out as a young artist, a book that educates the public about collections and archives, while also honoring her family and community.

West's poignant commentary on the ever-accelerating culture of urban renewal feels urgent in this particular moment when city life as we once knew it is changing suddenly in the blink of an eye.

– Olivia Gauthier, The Brooklyn Rail

This debut monograph brings together nearly a decade of “analogital” experiments in film, sculpture, and installation by one of the most committed artists working on the West Coast today. Saturated in a history of avant-garde and Third World cinema (and HIV/AIDS activism and the incipient Riot Grrrl movement) since she was an undergraduate at Evergreen State College, West’s work today treads similar ground: challenging the utopianism of new media adoptees as well as the nostalgia of analog-only film adherents.

The eleven projects reproduced in the book, all produced between 2014 and 2020, fall under the heading of Media Archeology, and reveal the historical and material promiscuity of West’s experiments in film and art, often tied to the changing geography of Los Angeles and its surrounds. The monograph includes an interview with Stuart Comer, Curator of Media and Performance at MoMA, New York, and essays by Norman Klein, critic, novelist, and urban and media historian, Andy Campbell, art historian, critic and curator, and Chelsea Weathers, art historian and managing editor at Radius Books.

For information about the limited edition, please see the page HERE.

His extensive and diverse work, not only in sculpture but in photography, printmaking, and new media, points to his ongoing exploration of the possibilities—technical and metaphoric—that can be wrought from this medium.

— Lauren Tresp, THE Magazine

For nearly 50 years, Tom Joyce has employed hands on knowledge of diverse materials to produce cast, forged, and constructed sculpture, charred drawings, photographs, and mixed-media artworks that often incorporate industrial remnants from large scale manufacturing or iron fragments collected for their significance to a specific region or event. 

With recent commissions for the Museum of Arts and Design in New York (seven interactive sculptures forged from 19,500 pounds of salvaged stainless steel) and for the National September 11 Memorial Museum, (a 75-foot-long quote by Virgil forged from 8,000 pounds of iron retrieved from the collapsed World Trade Center towers), Joyce continues to examine, through the inheritance of prior use, the environmental, political, and historical implications of using iron in his work. This volume includes in-depth essays from MaLin Wilson-Powell and Ezra Shales.

McMillian’s elegiac works remind us that America’s current situation stems directly from unresolved original sins that go back generations, even to the country’s founding.

— Joseph R. Wolin, Glasstire

Spanning the past two decades, the book presents an index of Rodney McMillian’s performance-based work, as well as a fresh look at Against a Civic Death, a 2018 exhibition of McMillian’s at The Contemporary Austin. McMillian’s art is direct and unflinching. Works like his hand-sewn vinyl work The White House Painting, 2018, challenge viewers to confront societal and individual narratives—whether those narratives are personal, political, or institutional, whether they are “true” or fly in the face of truth. 

Designed and researched with the artist’s close participation, the book itself serves as both a testament to and a manifestation of McMillian’s disruptive, revealing art.