A timely and expansive survey of a groundbreaking American art movement that overturned aesthetic hierarchies in a riot of color and ornamentation The Pattern and Decoration movement emerged in the 1970s as an embrace of long-dismissed art forms associated with the decorative. Pioneering artists such as Miriam Schapiro (1923-2015), Joyce Kozloff (b. 1942), Robert Kushner (b. 1949), and others appropriated patterns, frequently from non-Western decorative arts, to produce intricate, often dizzying or gaudy designs in media ranging from painting, sculpture, and collage to ceramics, installation art, and performance. This dazzling book showcases an astonishing array of works by more than 40 artists from across the United States, examining the movement's defiant adoption of art forms traditionally viewed as feminine, craft-based, or otherwise inferior to fine art. In addition to offering an overview of the Pattern and Decoration movement as it is commonly recognized, this volume considers artists of the period who are not typically associated with the movement. Rethinking the significance of patterns and the decorative in postwar American art, this panoramic view provides new insights into abstraction, feminism, and installation art. Essays explore the movement's feminist methods and values, including Miriam Schapiro's "femmage" practice; its impact on contemporary abstract painting; and its relationship to postmodern architecture and design. Artist biographies, an exhibition history, and reprints of historically significant writings further establish With Pleasure as the most expansive publication on the subject.

Over the last five years, Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn has developed one of the most idiosyncratic and original sculptural vocabularies of his generation, establishing him as a major international artist. Hirschhorn forms his sculptures from the detritus of urban life, ranging from scraps of wood, tape, and plastic, to aluminum foil. The results are seemingly casual, chaotic, obsessive, and excessive environments reformed by the artist's unique sense of materials, wry wit, and profound commitment to issues of social justice. Presenting his most recent piece, "World Airport", as well as an entirely new installation, this book features essays by Okwui Enwezor, James Rondeau, and Hamza Walker that explore the conception and construction of these works and situate them in the artist's oeuvre and beyond. The Art Institute of Chicago and The Renaissance Society of Chicago are cooperating in presenting this catalogue and museum exhibition, Hirschhorn's first in the United States.

"Is a non-remote horizon always a concealment? If a portion of sky has been carved and set loose to rest upon land, is it the result of an illegal language spoken in the town?" Ben Marcus, from A Horizon Grammar A hybrid of artist's book and catalog, this unique publication, designed in collaboration with the artist, is divided into three separate books. One features photographs of Sky-wreck, Mirra's conceptually multi-layered, 2001 installation at the Renaissance Society, accompanied by an essay from Hamza Walker which explicates Sky-wreck'stangled mathematical, visual and poetic aspects, and how these interwoven forms of signification within the piece ultimately "question the ability for that which is unfathomable to assume representation." Another section contains reproductions of Mirra's earlier work, meditated on from a more personal standpoint by poet and friend of Mirra, Jen Bervin, with footnotes from Mirra herself. The third section is an intensely beautiful collaboration between Mirra and experimental fiction writer Ben Marcus, juxtaposing Mirra's exquisite working drawings for Sky-wreck with Marcus's surreal poetic response to them entitled A Horizon Grammar.

The collected exhibition essays of Hamza Walker, former director of education at the Renaissance Society. Hamza Walker was director of education at the Renaissance Society for twenty-one years, between 1994 and 2015. During that time, he wrote essays about almost every single exhibition, both those he curated and many others curated by Suzanne Ghez. These texts were published first in the Renaissance Society's newsletters and then eventually on the exhibition posters, which were distributed far more widely. In the course of this workman-like writing in the service of the institution, Walker developed not only his distinctive personal writing style and a keen eye but also a theory of what museum education could be and do. In his writing, Walker draws on his art's historical knowledge but looks equally to current events (both minutely local and international), insisting on the mutual relevance and related nature of the two. In Walker's own words, "If we're going to live up to the idea that art is for everybody, it needs a set of wider reference points," an emphasis that has arguably shaped the identity of the institution in turn. This book collects those essays together into a volume that celebrates Walker's brilliant, joyful, and generous writing. It also serves as a lively record of two decades of the Renaissance Society's exhibition programming and reflects the prevalent theories, issues, and fashions of the art world during that time, not to mention the events occurring in the wider world.

This major publication considers the Renaissance Society's first hundred years. The volume features contributions from Davarian L. Baldwin, Susan Bielstein, Bruce Jenkins, Pamela M. Lee, Nina Möntmann, Liesl Olson, R.H. Quaytman, Anne Rorimer, and Aoibheann Sweeney. It also includes an interview between Susanne Ghez, Solveig Øvstebø, and Hamza Walker, and a comprehensive timeline of the institution's programming over 100 years.

The first comprehensive monograph on one of today's most innovative and successful painters - made in close collaboration with the artist Defined by bold brushstrokes, a dynamic use of color and imaginative compositions, the paintings of Dana Schutz are panoramic expanses that offer visions of humanity in all its complex facets. Her deeply subjective approach, untethered from realism, translates into images that seem to exist in a place that transcends time while celebrating the intrinsic qualities of her medium of choice with freedom and intelligence. As the artist herself stated, 'I'm interested in painting as an affective place where the hierarchies of the world can be rearranged within the space of a painting.' This first comprehensive monograph on her work was created in close collaboration with the artist and features a number of never-before-seen paintings and drawings.

This catalogue contains full-page reproductions of the entire body of work presented in Gest's 2006 Renaissance Society exhibition. In this series, Gest captured his lone sitters at the chance interstices of deep reflection, when the self dwells in thought. The construction of the self as it happens before Gest's camera serves to question the construction of that self in reality. Gest uses digital photography to monumentalize photography's ability to capture such fleeting moments. Each photograph is seamlessly constructed from hundreds of digital images of the sitter and their surroundings. The photographs' initial straightforward appearance can only be maintained at a cursory glance. Gest's subtle and not so subtle exaggerations of proportion and perspective quickly betray the images as mannerist constructions. This makes Gest's work susceptible to the discourse of post-photography, which is dominated by the means rather than the ends of photography. Gest however is adamant that the means he employs should in no way be mistaken for their meaning, stating, "That the image is made and manipulated digitally is neither here nor there. Digital photography simply allows me to make the picture I want." In her essay, Catherine Sousloff, Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, analyzes Gest's work in relation to historical protraiture and the visual construction of modern subjectivities. The catalogue also includes the transcript of an interview between Ben Gest and Hamza Walker.