Matt Magee: Works 2012–2018

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.

This debut monograph from painter Marcelyn McNeil places her work within a critical context and embodies the artist’s aesthetic principles and intuitive, considered practice. Resisting categorization, McNeil synthesizes different modes of abstraction while focusing on process. Her recent works celebrate the evocative power of color and simple, clear gestures. With an accompanying interview and essay that provide a framework for engaging with the work, this volume suggests new ways to view, question, and appreciate contemporary painting.

To see a wall drawing is to be surrounded by it and to feel oneself to be part of the work.

— Anne Ellegood, The Hammer Museum

linn meyers is best known for her intricate line-based paintings and drawings, and her large-scale installations. Her large projects require a great deal of endurance and involve drawing in a gallery space over the course of days, sometimes weeks or months, accumulating lines into dense and intricate compositions. The scale of these projects allows meyers to respond to the existing architectural features, magnifying the wholly committed performativity of her process. Contributor Anne Collins Goodyear notes, “The work encourages viewers to think about our relationship to place, space, and our imaginations.”

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.