Cecilia Vicuña: Deer Book/Libro Venado

James Drake: Tongue-Cut Sparrows presents a body of work inspired by the artist’s ongoing interest in the social dynamics of borderlands, offering a meditation on love, loss, and a desperate need to communicate. James Drake’s multi-disciplinary art practice centers around the human condition and systems of language to investigate temporal-spatial relations and the cyclical nature of history. During his time living in El Paso, Texas, issues related to the USA/Mexico border became a focal point in his work and the broader universal context he explores.

The project began in the mid-’90s when Drake observed women standing on a sidewalk outside the El Paso County Jail using a system of sign language to communicate with incarcerated family members and loved ones. Fascinated by this inventive form of gestural communication, Drake became curious if the women could integrate quotes from literature and poetry into their sign language. They agreed to let Drake record their visits on video and worked with him in selecting texts to sign from the writings of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, Chicano-Apache American poet Jimmy Santiago Baca, Cormac McCarthy, as well as William Blake, William Shakespeare, and Dante Alighieri. The series evolved into a multi-channel video work and spans decades of poems, photographs, printmaking and large-scale charcoal drawings.

Works from the Tongue-Cut Sparrows series have been shown internationally in major institutions, including the Blanton Museum of Art, Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery), Denver Art Museum, High Museum of Art, SITE Santa Fe, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

My aim is to incite public remembrance and to impede distorted realities that I witness, like the social amnesia that surrounds us all.

– Vincent Valdez

Vincent Valdez blends large, representational paintings—the scale of which recall Western traditions of history painting as well as mural painting and cinema—with contemporary subject matter. In Memory is the first book-length study of the artist’s work, which focuses on subjects that explore his observations and experience of life in the twenty-first century. The results are powerful images of American identity that confront injustice and inequity while imbuing his subjects with empathy and humanity. Recognized for his monumental portrayal of the contemporary figure, his drawn and painted subjects remark on a universal struggle within various socio-political arenas and eras.

Indigenous artists worldwide respond to environmental destruction.

Documenting international Indigenous artists’ responses to the impacts of nuclear testing, nuclear accidents and uranium mining on Native peoples and the environment, Exposure gives artists a voice to address the long-term effects of these manmade disasters on Indigenous communities in the United States and around the world. Indigenous artists from Australia, Canada, Greenland, Japan, the Pacific Islands and the US utilize local and tribal knowledge, as well as Indigenous and contemporary art forms as visual strategies for their works.

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.