This timely issue of the Bulletin brings together fourteen voices from across curatorial departments and Met Trustees to consider how artists and cultures throughout history have explored the nature of leadership, interrogated the workings of society, and redefined the ideals of freedom and democracy. The essays in this issue center around one of three different themes: the ways societies are formed through collective collaboration, the symbols of leadership and civilization, and the images of leaders that commemorate, mythologize, or even obscure those who govern. By expanding worldviews and building bridges among disparate experiences, The Met plays a vital part in considering the definition of leadership and what it means to build a society. This volume asserts museums’ roles as keepers of histories and places of reflection and learning. As stewards of five thousand years of art from around the globe, The Met is privileged to preserve, share, and reevaluate the countless stories told by the objects in its collection while connecting them to the present day.

Petrit Halilaj’s immersive installations express the artist’s wish to alter the course of personal and collective histories, creating complex worlds that claim space for freedom, desire, intimacy, and identity. In his first major outdoor installation, the artist explores the intersection of reality and fantasy through the rich world of children’s drawings. This volume examines Halilaj’s inspiration for the work in found inscriptions, carvings, and scribbles collected from desks at his former primary school and other schools in Eastern Europe—a record of children’s fantasies, fears, and private messages conveyed in many languages. An interview with Halilaj connects his practice with those of artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Julio González, situates this project within his broader career, and considers how memory, identity, and history present in his work. This publication reveals his new installation to be at once a story of children in a time and place marked by social and political conflict and a universal reflection on youthful imagination, hopes, yearnings, anxieties, and dreams.

Beginning in the late 1970s, David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) created a body of work that spanned photography, painting, music, film, sculpture, writing, and activism. Largely self-taught, he came to prominence in New York in the 1980s, a period marked by creative energy, financial precariousness, and profound cultural changes. Intersecting movementsgraffiti, new and no wave music, conceptual photography, performance, and neo-expressionist paintingmade New York a laboratory for innovation. Wojnarowicz refused a signature style, adopting a wide variety of techniques with an attitude of radical possibility. Distrustful of inherited structuresa feeling amplified by the resurgence of conservative politicshe varied his repertoire to better infiltrate the prevailing culture. Wojnarowicz saw the outsider as his true subject. Queer and later diagnosed as HIV-positive, he became an impassioned advocate for people with AIDS when an inconceivable number of friends, lovers, and strangers were dying due to government inaction. Wojnarowiczs work documents and illuminates a desperate period of American history: that of the AIDS crisis and culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. But his rightful place is also among the raging and haunting iconoclastic voices, from Walt Whitman to William S. Burroughs, who explore American myths, their perpetuation, their repercussions, and their violence. Like theirs, his work deals directly with the timeless subjects of sex, spirituality, love, and loss. Wojnarowicz, who was thirty-seven when he died from AIDS-related complications, wrote: To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific ramifications.

One of the most significant artists to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s reduced formal vocabulary, conceptual rigor, and evocative use of everyday materials resonates with meaning that is at once specific and mutable, rigorous and generous, poetic and political. Featuring several key bodies of work from throughout the artist’s career, this publication showcases a series of distinct installations at David Zwirner in New York in 2017. The interplay with the specific architecture of the gallery and the way works are installed is highlighted throughout the catalogue, with images that explore the poetics of how space and work influence each other. Together, in their radical openness to interventions of site, audience, and context, the works on view challenge perceived notions of what constitutes an exhibition space, a public, an artwork itself. Despite the resolute abstraction of much of his work, Gonzalez-Torres worked with familiar materials, from his iconic candy spill works and his evocative light string pieces, but also including mirrors, clocks, and curtains. His work activates the architecture of the various spaces, the physicality of the viewer, the past and present, continuously maintaining its relevance. Opening with details of the exhibition and images of visitors in the spaces, the publication walks the reader through each piece. New text by David Breslin explores the variety of works included here while contextualizing Gonzalez-Torres’s contribution to art history.

"Published in conjunction with the exhibition 'The condition of being here: drawings by Jasper Johns', organized by the Menil Collection, Houston ... November 3, 2018-January 27, 2019"--Title page verso.

Rockabye provides a glimpse of post-Hurricane Sandy Queens--its damaged landscape and debris, as well as its residents.

The first comprehensive study of Picasso's mastery of line drawing and its centrality to his artistic process This beautiful new study provides an insightful reevaluation of the role of line in the work of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Picasso pursued drawing assiduously throughout his career, ranging across media such as pen and pencil, charcoal, and papier collé. This book brings together eighty extraordinary drawings spanning the most important phases of Picasso's career. Contributors discuss the artist's intensive exploration of line in relation to three-dimensional form, both in the context of the European artistic tradition and in analyses of selected works. Drawing emerges as central to the artist's process--a creative process that reveals another facet of Picasso's genius for making art out of the simplest of means. The first in-depth exploration of the artist's line drawings, Picasso The Line conveys how essential these powerful works are within the artist's oeuvre. As Picasso himself stated: "line drawings are the only ones that cannot be imitated." Distributed for The Menil Collection Exhibition Schedule: The Menil Collection (09/16/16-01/08/17)