Dorothy Fratt

Helen Frankenthaler: Late Works, 1988–2009 is the first book to explore the late period of Frankenthaler’s art and life.

Profusely illustrated with more than 95 plates and 40 archival images, the book features essays by Douglas Dreishpoon and Suzanne Boorsch; a roundtable discussion with Katharina Grosse, Pepe Karmel, and Mary Weatherford; an illustrated chronology and selected bibliography. Initiated by Dreishpoon, Director of the Helen Frankenthaler Catalogue Raisonné and Chief Curator Emeritus at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the book complements an exhibition of Frankenthaler’s late paintings on paper and canvas organized by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation and curated by Dreishpoon that premiered in 2021 at the New Britain Museum of American Art before traveling to the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Palm Springs Art Museum, and Artis—Naples/The Baker Museum.

Frankenthaler’s invention of the soak-stain technique expanded the possibilities of abstract painting with references to figuration and landscape. In later years, her practice continued to evolve through the use of diverse media and processes, as she shifted from painting canvas on the floor to using larger sheets of paper that were laid out on the floor or on table tops for easier accessibility. The continuity between the late work and what came before is striking, as the painter, graced with a vast art-historical image bank, and technical prowess, moved in whatever direction suited her mood and imagination. 

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.

… his masterpiece, the grandest exploration of pure color and form in a seven-decade career spent testing the boundaries of both.

— M. H. Miller, The New York Times

Envisioned by Ellsworth Kelly as a site for joy and contemplation, Austin is a cornerstone of the Blanton Museum of Art’s permanent collection and a new icon for the city in which it stands. This comprehensive book provides a thorough look at the project, from its inception to its current position as one of the artist’s most important and enduring works. Though mostly abstract, Kelly’s work is deeply rooted in his love of nature and his close observation of the world around him, and Austin’s design elements are no exception. 

An essay by Carter E. Foster, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Blanton Museum of Art, sheds light on how Austin fits with Kelly’s wider practice.

This book is now RARE | $150

Crossings + Accumulations brings together documentation of two recent exhibitions of Hammonds work, Crossings and Accumulations, at Alexander Gray Associates in New York City. Featuring large-scale, textured, surface-heavy canvases, both exhibitions further refine the artist’s interest in “material engagement” to expand and subvert the narrative of modernist abstraction. In these series, the artist imbues abstraction with bodily content, embodying her belief that materials and the ways they are manipulated can bring social and political content into formal abstraction. The book features Hammond’s own writings about Crossings, along with an essay on her overall practice by scholar Alex Bacon.

For years, Hammond has worked with found and repurposed materials and objects such as rags, straw, latex rubber, hair, linoleum, roofing tin, and burnt wood as well as buckets, gutters, and water troughs as a means of introducing content to the world of abstraction. Her near-monochrome paintings of the last two decades participate in the narrative of modernist abstraction and at the same time insist on an oppositional discourse of feminist and queer theory. Their focus on materiality and the indexical, suggesting topographies of body and place, derives from and remains in conversation with her feminist work of the 1970s.