Vincent Valdez: In Memory

wild and playful, full of surprises and gifts in every page.
i touch it, as a living animal.
let’s pray the deer will help us bring back the dance.

— Cecilia Vicuña

Inspired initially by Jerome Rothenberg’s translation Flower World Variations, which Cecilia Vicuña first encountered in 1985, Deer Book brings together nearly forty years of the artist’s poetry, “poethical” translations, and drawings related to cosmologies and mythologies surrounding the deer, and sacrificial dance in cultures around the world.

Woven like one of her quipu installations, Vicuña’s texts—which include original compositions in Spanish as well as English translations by Daniel Borzutzky—become meditations on translation, not just of the sacred nature of this animal but on how our understandings of ceremony and ritual are transformed, by this ongoing process. Taken as inspiration rather than conundrum, the impossibility of translation opens up poetic possibilities for Vicuña as she continues her lifelong exploration into the nature of communication across eras and distant lands, languages and shared symbols within Indigenous spiritualities.

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.

Printed on paper made from Japanese shrubs, this work of book art documents artist Ann Hamilton’s fascination with tactility, an exploration into the possibility of cultivating attention in a hyper-distracted world of information.

Throughout her practice, Ann Hamilton has used videos and still images as part of her larger installation works, though they have rarely been the singular focus of a project. This publication brings together vocabulary from four bodies of image-based work produced over the last five years and includes photographic portraits as well as lens-less contact scans of ornithological taxidermy, fabrics and garments, and objects from various personal and institutional collections. Hamilton believes that her projects can be considered not as artifacts or something to be documented, but as their own material object—in this case, a book. While Sense contains images that Hamilton has accumulated over many years, of people and of objects that conflate touch, light, and surface, the book also becomes an object in hand, a thing felt, an artwork in itself. 

Reprocessed through multiple printings on tissue Gampi and newsprint, the images emphasize the tactile nature of their substrate and Hamilton’s material hand. The work’s physical presence is reinforced by the textured surface of the book’s pages and scale shifts. This volume thus becomes an art object of its own; repetition, the atmospheric nature of the images’ shallow depths of field, and the intuitive connections made between different bodies of work create an almost film-like cadence that renders the felt qualities of touch.

Breaking the Binding provides the definitive volume on an influential yet under-studied artist and contributes to the growing field of scholarship on contemporary Latinx and Conceptual art.

Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding is the first major publication devoted to the career of this seminal Latinx artist, who was born in El Paso, TX, in 1937. Accompanying her first museum career retrospective (Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, March 16-August 13, 2023), this volume surveys the artist’s decades of colorful photo and text-based artworks, book projects, large-scale installations, public works, and unpublished, associated archival materials. Color images and scholarly texts illuminate the artist’s themes—childhood learning and perception, bicultural and bilingual experience, youthful slips of mind and tongue—and her often playful, first-person approach using conceptual tools. Resulting artworks are at once intimate and cerebral, analytical and joyful—reflecting the complexities of childhood, especially on a bicultural and bilingual border. Alongside images, the book features a conversation between Álvarez Muñoz and longtime interlocuter and friend Roberto Tejada, as well as essays by the exhibition co-curators Kate Green and Isabel Casso, and Josh Franco, Head of Collecting at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.