Selected Writings is a landmark two-volume set of writings by the transformational art curator Okwui Enwezor that demonstrates his tireless efforts to decolonize the global contemporary art world.

Focusing on major recent sculpture and works in almost every media, this book provides an overview of the five decades of practice that have made El Anatsui one of Africa's most prominent living artists. Most famous for his magnificent installations created using bottle caps and other repurposed materials, El Anatsui has established himself as one of the most exalted and accomplished artists of his generation. This volume explores the physical as well as thematic enormity of Anatsui's works. It spans every period of the artist's career, from wooden and ceramic sculptures dating from the 1970s to newly commissioned sculptures. While his most famous sculptures are enormous and formidable, they manage to seem ethereal and light. Anatsui draws upon African art and culture in order to confront the legacies of colonialism and poverty, and responds to the formal Western artistic tradition under which he was trained. Essays by Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu discuss Anatsui's ability to straddle form and genre. This book reveals the artist's unique understanding of the dialectical relationship between the physical presence of sculpture and its ability to convey new historical meaning.

Selected Writings is a landmark two-volume set of writings by the transformational art curator Okwui Enwezor that demonstrates his tireless efforts to decolonize the global contemporary art world.

A timely and urgent exploration into the ways artists have grappled with race and grief in modern America, conceived by the great curator Okwui Enwezor Featuring works by more than 30 artists and writings by leading scholars and art historians, this book - and its accompanying exhibition, both conceived by the late, legendary curator Okwui Enwezor - gives voice to artists addressing concepts of mourning, commemoration, and loss and considers their engagement with the social movements, from Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter, that black grief has galvanized. Artists included: Terry Adkins, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kevin Beasley, Dawoud Bey, Mark Bradford, Garrett Bradley, Melvin Edwards, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Charles Gaines, Theaster Gates, Ellen Gallagher, Arthur Jafa, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Rashid Johnson, Jennie C. Jones, Kahlil Joseph, Deana Lawson, Simone Leigh, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Okwui Okpokwasili, Adam Pendleton, Julia Phillips, Howardena Pindell, Cameron Rowland, Lorna Simpson, Sable Elyse Smith, Tyshawn Sorey, Diamond Stingily, Henry Taylor, Hank Willis Thomas, Kara Walker, Nari Ward, Carrie Mae Weems, and Jack Whitten. Essays by Elizabeth Alexander, Naomi Beckwith, Judith Butler, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Massimiliano Gioni, Saidiya Hartman, Juliet Hooker, Glenn Ligon, Mark Nash, Claudia Rankine, and Christina Sharpe.

Zwelethu Mthethwa's large scale portraits often portray rural immigrants on the margins of South African cities, revealing the efforts his subjects make to maintain their cultural identities through their choices in clothing, and the decoration of their dwellings and places of worship. Mthethwa also addresses the economic and political reality of present day South Africa.

Organized and written by renowned scholar and ICP Adjunct Curator Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever presents works by leading contemporary artists who use archival documents to rethink the meaning of identity, history, memory, and loss. Over the past thirty years, successive generations have taken wide-ranging approaches to the photographic and filmic archive. The works presented here take many forms, including physical archives arranged by peculiar cataloguing methods, imagined biographies of fictitious persons, collections of found and anonymous photographs, film versions of photographic albums, and photomontages composed of historical photographs. These images have a wide-ranging subject matter yet are linked by the artists shared meditation on photography and film as the quintessential media of the archive. Artists in the exhibition include Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Zoe Leonard, Ilán Lieberman, Walid Raad, Thomas Ruff, Anri Sala, Fazal Sheikh, Eyal Sivan, Lorna Simpson, and Vivan Sundaram, among others.

Written by two acclaimed scholars Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, El Anatsui, is the most comprehensive, incisive and authoritative account yet on the work of El Anatsui, the world-renowned, Ghanaian-born sculptor. The product of more than three decades of research, scholarship and close collaboration with the artist, this book shows why his early wood reliefs and terracottas, and the later monumental metal sculptures, exemplify an innovative critical search for alternative models of art making.The authors argue that the pervasiveness of fragmentation as a compositional device in Anatsui's oeuvre invites meditation on the impact of colonization and postcolonial global forces on African cultures. At the same time, the simultaneous invocation of resilience and fragility across his media invests his abstract sculptures with iconic power. Insisting on the intimate connection between form and idea in Anatsui's work, the authors show how, in his critically acclaimed metal works, the manual work of flattening, cutting, twisting, and crushing bottle caps and using copper wires to suture and stitch the elements into one dazzling, reconfigurable epic piece serves as a powerful metaphor for the constitution of human society. This book presents Anatsui as a visionary of incomparable imagination. Yet, it places his work within a broader historical context, specifically the postcolonial modernism of mid-twentieth-century African artists and writers, the cultural ferment of post-independence Ghana, as well as within the intellectual environment of the 1970's Nsukka School. By recovering these histories, and subjecting his work to vigorous analysis, the authors show how and why Anatsui became one of the most formidable sculptors of our time.

This exhibition catalogue presents ten African artists who are no longer bound by old affiliations of geography and race but whose work inevitably embodies a common claim to their home continent. Curated by Olu Oguibe, Cross/ing includes sculpture, painting, drawing, video, electronic art, installation, and photography that is likely to challenge the Western viewer's expectations of African art. Essays by Okwui Enwezor and Olu Oguibe.

A new chapter in the history of African and world photography.

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.