The first comprehensive overview of an influential American photographer and filmmaker whose work is known for its intimacy and social engagement Coming of age in the 1960s, the photographer Danny Lyon (b. 1942) distinguished himself with work that emphasized intimate social engagement. In 1962 Lyon traveled to the segregated South to photograph the civil rights movement. Subsequent projects on biker culture, the demolition and redevelopment of lower Manhattan, and the Texas prison system, and more recently on the Occupy movement and the vanishing culture in China's booming Shanxi Province, share Lyon's signature immersive approach and his commitment to social and political issues that concern those on the margins of society. Lyon's photography is paralleled by his work as a filmmaker and a writer. Danny Lyon: Message to the Future is the first in-depth examination of this leading figure in American photography and film, and the first publication to present his influential bodies of work in all media in their full context. Lead essayists Julian Cox and Elisabeth Sussman provide an account of Lyon's five-decade career. Alexander Nemerov writes about Lyon's work in Knoxville, Tennessee; Ed Halter assesses the artist's films; Danica Willard Sachs evaluates his photomontages; and Julian Cox interviews Alan Rinzler about his role in publishing Lyon's earliest works. With extensive back matter and illustrations, this publication will be the most comprehensive account of this influential artist's work.

Publisher Description

Starting in the early 1970s, this comprehensive catalogue of Nan Goldin's midcareer retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art covers the party years in Boston and New York night clubs, the wide-spread drug abuse, and the burgeoning AIDS crisis. Goldin's powerful color photographs recount a highly personal version of the last two decades, chronicling her sometimes desperate combat against death and loss, her search for intimacy, and her embrace of new friendships in Europe and Asia.

During her 60-year career, Jane Wilson (b. 1924) has become celebrated for her evocative paintings of landscape and weather. This first major monograph on Wilsons art and lifefrom her immersion in the vibrant New York art scene of the 1950s and 1960s, to her current approach to paintingis given new insight through previously unpublished photographs of the artist and her family and friends, and is lavishly illustrated with beautiful reproductions of her artworks.

Text by Elisabeth Sussman.

Published on the occasion of an exhibition celebrating the Wagners' promised gift of more than 850 works of art to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Musaee national d'art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, November 20, 2015-March 6, 2016, and at the Centre Pompidou, June 16, 2016-January 2017.

"The work of the sculptor Rachel Harrison is both the zeitgeist and the least digestible in contemporary art. It may also be the most important, owing to an originality that breaks a prevalent spell in an art world of recycled genres, styles, and ideas."--Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker In her sculptures, room-sized installations, drawings, photographs, and artist's books, Rachel Harrison (b. 1966) delves into themes of celebrity culture, pop psychology, history, and politics. This publication, created in close collaboration with the artist, explores twenty-five years of her practice and is the first comprehensive monograph on Harrison in nearly a decade. Its centerpiece is an in-depth plate section, which doubles as a chronology of Harrison's major works, series, and exhibitions. Objects are illustrated with multiple views and details, and accompanied by short texts. This thorough approach elucidates Harrison's complicated, eclectic oeuvre--in which she integrates found materials with handmade sculptural elements, upends traditions of museum display, and injects quotidian objects with a sense of strangeness. Six accompanying essays cover Harrison's earliest works to her most recent output. The book also includes a handful of photo-collages that the artist created specifically for this project. Published here for the first time, these pieces superimpose found images with reproductions of Harrison's own past work.

The American artist Florine Stettheimer. although little known today, is considered to have had a significant influence on the development of modernism in 20th-century American art. The paintings she produced after World War I and before her death in 1944, have been described by art historian Linda Nochlin as rococo subversive. In elegant, refined images, Stettheimer developed a vanguard approach not only to such traditional genres as portraiture, but to fundamental concepts of time-space continuity.

"I am always immensely grateful to people who do impossible things on my behalf and bring back the picture. It means I don't have to do it, but at least I know what it looks like." This is what Salman Rushdie wrote about artist Taryn Simon in his essay in this volume. And, in fact, in her famous series of works, which she finished in 2007, Simon (*1975) does indeed show the hidden, the forbidden and inaccessible within American borders. She reveals what lies concealed beneath the surface of America's mythology and daily functioning. After conducting painstaking negotiations, she uses her large-format camera to capture what is usually only reserved for the initiated: containers of radioactive nuclear waste, the CIA's art collection, the outdoor facility of a "body farm," or the inside of a hibernating bear's cave. The artist annotates each of her almost sixty pictures with descriptive texts highlighting the complexities of both her subjects and the relationship between text and image.