Essays by Ingrid Schaffner, Elyse Gonzales, Eileen Neff and Rob Nixon. Foreword by Claudia Gould.

Polly Apfelbaum creates what she calls "fallen paintings," hybrid works of rare beauty that exist in a contentious, ambivalent space between painting, sculpture and installation. These works transform the colors of mass culture into wild oscillating spectra bordering on the organic. This volume accompanies the first large museum survey of her work, and features new and recent installations as well as a range of work from the past 15 years.

This is the first major American presentation of Barry Le Va's art in over 15 years, and one that brings together not only the artist's well-known, large-scale sculptures and drawings, but also his works in other media for which he is less known--text, photography, sound and books. Le Va's approach has been ubiquitous to Postmodern practice in art and architecture, and this fully illustrated book, featuring 300 images and four scholarly essays, his illustrated exhibition history and a bibliography, is the definitive survey of his work's development and implicit themes of violence. It accompanies the exhibition Accumulated Vision at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania.

A comprehensive new survey of Crowner's multimedia explorations of abstraction and material culture New York-based artist Sarah Crowner (born 1974) makes paintings, ceramics, sculptures, installations and theater sets. Her large-scale sewn canvases display a fluency in mid-20th-century art, artists and architecture, with a particular regard for geometric abstraction and Color Field compositions. Crowner's rigorous practice has long engaged thematic research with an abiding interest in materials, craft, and their related histories and processes. This beautifully produced, comprehensive publication spans over a decade of the artist's wide-ranging practice, documenting all of her major works to date, including her most recent exhibitions in Mexico and Brazil. Essays by Nikki Columbus, Diego Matos and Ingrid Schaffner discuss Crowner's tileworks, paintings and designs for the stage in depth, showing how she has drawn inspiration from Mexican culture across disciplines and throughout the history of modernism as a whole. A portfolio of images is featured alongside Quinn Latimer's lyrical narrative poem "Score for Three Snakes."

Work by contemporary artists from the U.S. and the U.K. that evokes a Victorian sensibility. The essays look at parallels between the two periods: turn-of-the-century anxiety, intellectual curiosity, consumerism, a preoccupation with sex and morality, an infatuation with new technology.

Life Magazine wrote that one funhouse at the 1939 World's Fair stood out among the others: "Dal's Dream of Venus, the creation of famed Surrealist painter Salvador Dal, is the most recent addition to the still-growing list of amusement-area girl shows and easily the most amazing. Weird building contains a dry tank and a wet tank. In the wet tank girls swim under water, milk a bandaged-up cow, tap typewriter keys which float like seaweed. Keyboard of piano is painted on the recumbent female figure made of rubber. In dry tank...a sleeping Venus reclines in 36-foot bed, covered with white and red satin, flowers, and leaves. Scattered about the bed are lobsters frying on beds of hot coals and bottles of champagne....All this is most amusing and interesting." The building's modern, expressionistic exterior, with an entrance framed by a woman's legs, and shocking interior, including the bare-breasted "living liquid ladies" who occupied the tanks, caused quite a stir. The funhouse was so successful that it reopened for a second season, but once torn down it faded from memory and its outlandishness became the stuff of urban myth. Now, more than 60 years later, a collection of photographs of the Dream of Venus by Eric Schaal has been discovered. In stunning black-and-white and early Kodachrome, they show both the construction and the completion of the funhouse-from Dal painting a melting clock to showgirls parading for their audience. Salvador Dal's Dream of Venus reveals not only an eccentric work of architecture, but also a one-of-a-kind creation by one of the most fertile imaginations of the 20th century.

Conceptions of "nothing" are one of the driving themes of twentieth-century art. One thinks of Piet Mondrian's reductivist approach to abstraction, Marcel Duchamp's contention that art resides in ideas, not objects, Mark Rothko's painterly reach for the sublime, Andy Warhol's affirmations of the vacuity of Pop culture. The Big Nothing will focus on themes of nothing, nothingness and negation in contemporary art and culture, surveying the legacy of these and other manifestations of absence made manifest in contemporary art. Artist include Gareth James, Jutta Koether, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, Yves Klein, Bernadette Corporation, John Miller and James Welling, among others. Given its broad connotations, "nothing" provides general audiences with immediate access to looking at and thinking about the art of today. Part of a pan-Philadelphia cultural event initiated by the ICA, in which the city gives itself over to the art of nothing.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition organized by Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, Washington, D.C. Hannelore Baron was an artist whose work has become known for the highly personal, book-sized, abstract collages and box constructions that she began exhibiting in the late 1960s.--Publisher's website.