Ruth Duckworth

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?

… 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

As an artist, I give images form, making breath visible. While painting, writing, and working with glass, I pay attention to the possibly transformative gift of an image.

— Judy Tuwaletstiwa

Near White Sands, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, at 5:29:45 am Mountain War Time, a nuclear fireball sucked the white sand of the Jornada del Muerto desert high into a still dark sky. The melted sand returned to the earth as a rain of molten glass. Scientists named these glass shards Trinitite, after the site, Trinity. At the time, artist Judy Tuwaletstiwa was 4 years old. Haunted by the specter the United States released in detonating atomic bombs in New Mexico, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tuwaletstiwa turned to sand and fire to explore this primal creative/destructive act. 

The artist writes: “The raw material that becomes glass holds an interaction of wind, water, fire and earth, the organic creative process lived over geologic time. This transformative process continues to live in my studio through how I work with glass.” A follow-up book to her sold-out Mapping Water (2007), Glass weaves a story of her discoveries and explorations while working with glass over the past four years based on her work over the past 45 years in fiber, paint and writing. Tuwaletstiwa’s use of glass on canvas and paper is at once refined and surprising—a truly revolutionary response to a well-known medium. The highly personal combination of text and images in this book bridges fine art and craft, technology and nature, the political and the aesthetic, the conceptual and the material.

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.