Patrick Dougherty | James Florio: Sticks

from $70.00

One of today’s most admired living sculptors, Patrick Dougherty wields sticks and saplings to build monumental structures that echo, play, and tussle with the land. James Florio is a Montana-based photographer focused on the built environment and the life surrounding it. He works slowly, visiting a place repeatedly to gain a greater understanding of it, ultimately delivering a thoughtful and profound interpretation. Sticks was inspired by both artists’ connections to Tippet Rise Art Center in Fishtail, MT, where Dougherty has crafted work from local willows and where Florio has photographed the art and wild lands for several years.

Daydreams, Dougherty’s first commission at Tippet Rise, was completed in 2015; he subsequently returned to the center in 2022 to make a companion piece. At the heart of both sculptures is a reproduction of a nineteenth-century schoolhouse. The 2022 work, Cursive Takes a Holiday, adds an installation of intertwining branches to the structure’s exterior, creating a series of circular spaces that visitors can enter and explore.

Sticks features sixteen of Dougherty’s projects from across the US, all exquisitely photographed in black and white by Florio. This volume includes an essay by poet Kate Farrell and a conversation between Florio and Dougherty, moderated by Jean McLaughlin, that delves into some of the questions at the heart of the book: What does it mean to be a site-specific sculptor whose work is experienced most often through images? As a photographer, how does one think about documenting the work of another artist, particularly when the work is ephemeral and the images made will be the lasting record of its existence?

Type:

One of today’s most admired living sculptors, Patrick Dougherty wields sticks and saplings to build monumental structures that echo, play, and tussle with the land. James Florio is a Montana-based photographer focused on the built environment and the life surrounding it. He works slowly, visiting a place repeatedly to gain a greater understanding of it, ultimately delivering a thoughtful and profound interpretation. Sticks was inspired by both artists’ connections to Tippet Rise Art Center in Fishtail, MT, where Dougherty has crafted work from local willows and where Florio has photographed the art and wild lands for several years.

Daydreams, Dougherty’s first commission at Tippet Rise, was completed in 2015; he subsequently returned to the center in 2022 to make a companion piece. At the heart of both sculptures is a reproduction of a nineteenth-century schoolhouse. The 2022 work, Cursive Takes a Holiday, adds an installation of intertwining branches to the structure’s exterior, creating a series of circular spaces that visitors can enter and explore.

Sticks features sixteen of Dougherty’s projects from across the US, all exquisitely photographed in black and white by Florio. This volume includes an essay by poet Kate Farrell and a conversation between Florio and Dougherty, moderated by Jean McLaughlin, that delves into some of the questions at the heart of the book: What does it mean to be a site-specific sculptor whose work is experienced most often through images? As a photographer, how does one think about documenting the work of another artist, particularly when the work is ephemeral and the images made will be the lasting record of its existence?

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

Featured
Wendy Red Star: Bíilukaa Rare
Sold out
Wendy Red Star: Bíilukaa Rare
$150.00

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.

Read more →
Land Art / New Mexico
Land Art / New Mexico
$45.00

Featuring the work of over forty artists including Michael Berman, Erika Blumenfeld, David Taylor, Basia Irland, Patrick Dougherty, Catalina Delgado Trunk, and Shelley Niro.

Introduction by Bill Gilbert
Essays by Lucy Lippard, William L. Fox, Nancy Marie Mithlo, and MaLin Wilson-Powell

Hardbound
11.5 x 10.5 inches
170 pages / 110 four-color illustrations
ISBN: 9781934435175

Read more →
Drowned River: The Death and Rebirth of Glen Canyon on the Colorado
Drowned River: The Death and Rebirth of Glen Canyon on the Colorado
from $65.00

…the madness of the past and the terror of the future, amid the epiphanies of beautiful light and majestic space and the contradiction of the present.

— Rebecca Solnit


In 1963 the waters began rising behind Glen Canyon Dam and 170 miles of the Colorado River slowly disappeared as the riverbed and surrounding canyons filled with water. Those who supported and those who opposed the dam considered it a long-term transformation; environmentalists mourned Glen Canyon as dead and gone forever. But it’s coming back, in a victory that is also the pervasive disaster of climate change.

Byron Wolfe, Mark Klett, and Rebecca Solnit spent half a decade exploring Glen Canyon as expectations and possibilities changed and the river reemerged at the upper end of the reservoir. Their starting point was Eliot Porter’s landmark book of color photography, The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon the Colorado, published by the Sierra Club in 1963 as a political statement about what had been lost under the dam’s waters and why it should never happen again. Their ending point is the reemergence of the river and the rise of questions about climate, the fate of the southwest, the folly of human endeavors to control nature, and the possibility of seeing these places and problems in new ways. 

Drowned River is a book about climate change, but also about how photography can describe beauty and trouble simultaneously, about depth and shallowness, about what it takes to understand a place and to come to terms with the enormous scale of the changes we have set in motion.

Read more →
Barbara Bosworth + Margot Anne Kelley: The Meadow
Sold out
Barbara Bosworth + Margot Anne Kelley: The Meadow
$500.00

“This beautifully produced book, which examines a small plot of meadow, is a real gem. From misty autumnal landscapes to spring flowers, all seasons are celebrated. These images are supplemented with a fine text, assorted inventories and thorough appendixes of things like what birds were spotted with their dates. It is very re-assuring that one small plot can be so lovingly explored and it is the thoroughness of this that makes this book so compelling."

—Martin Parr, TIME Magazine

Photography by Barbara Bosworth
Poetry by Margot Anne Kelley

Hardcover with jacket

10.25 x 12.75 Inches

200 pages / 60 images

Text on short trim inserts
Booklet in back pocket

ISBN: 9781934435960 — $55

This item is out of print.

Read more →

  • Artwork by Patrick Dougherty
    Photography by James Florio
    Text by Kate Farrell
    Conversation with Jean McLaughlin

    Hardcover
    10.2 x 13.6 inches
    244 pages / 98 images
    Trade ISBN: 9798890181015
    Signed ISBN: 9798890181022 (signed by both Dougherty and Florio)

    Co-published with Tippet Rise Art Center

  • Patrick Dougherty (b. 1945, Oklahoma) was raised in North Carolina, where he lives and works today. He earned a B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina in 1967 and an M.A. in Hospital and Health Administration from the University of Iowa in 1969. Later, he returned to the University of North Carolina to study art history and sculpture. Combining his carpentry skills with his love of nature, Patrick began to learn more about primitive techniques of building and to experiment with tree saplings as construction material. His work quickly evolved from single pieces on conventional pedestals to monumental scale environmental works, which required saplings by the truckloads. Over the last thirty-some years, he has built over 300 of these works, and become internationally acclaimed. His sculpture has been seen worldwide—from Scotland to Japan to Brussels, and all over the United States. The artist has received numerous awards, including the Factor Prize for Southern Art, North Carolina Artist Fellowship Award, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Henry Moore Foundation Fellowship, Japan-US Creative Arts Fellowship, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

    James Florio is a Montana-based photographer focused on the built environment and the life surrounding it. Using the camera as a means to investigate, understand, and document, he works primarily with large format film for its depth and deliberation. In 2022 he was awarded the Julius Shulman Institute Excellence in Photography Award.