Helen Molesworth Books

Celebrating the work of Kerry James Marshall, this comprehensive volume accompanies a major retrospective of the acclaimed African American painter. It delves into Marshall's exploration of African American history through striking large-scale interiors, landscapes, and portraits that highlight powerful black figures. The book features over 100 illustrations of his work, thematic essays by curators and the artist, and examines diverse subjects including beauty, religion, and black nationalism, all while showcasing Marshall's rich use of color and intricate detail.

Catherine Opie's monograph offers an in-depth exploration of her impactful contributions to contemporary fine art photography over nearly four decades. Featuring over 300 stunning illustrations, the book pairs images from various bodies of work to reveal her artistic vision and psychological insight into American cultural and geographic identity. Created in close collaboration with the artist, it represents a significant milestone in understanding Opie's oeuvre and highlights the evolution of her unique narrative style.

Joan Mitchell (1926-1992) was a pre-eminent painter of the Abstract Expressionist generation, and, along with Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, one of the few female painters of her era to gain critical and public acclaim. She came to attention in the early 1950s but only recently has her work won the recognition it truly merits. Her large-scale gestural paintings register a great acuity of feeling and tremendous vitality. Leaving America documents Joan Mitchell's exhibition at Hauser and Wirth Gallery, London, which featured works made between 1960 and 1965, after she had relocated from New York to France. In the paintings of this period Mitchell moved away from the all-over style and bright palette of earlier compositions, instead deploying more sombre hues and dense central masses of color. The brushwork in these paintings is nonetheless full of zest, the paint flung and squeezed on to the canvases, spilling and spluttering across surfaces and smeared on by hand.

Josiah McElheny (*1966 in Boston) explores the representation of time and space through the medium of glass, one of the oldest forms of object making in human history. Inspired by the design objects of daily life, such as glassware or chandeliers, he develops abstract sculptures and complex installations. This publication features examples of his work from the past fifteen years, and in particular it traces the artist’s investigation of the concept of infinity, which he links to thinking about utopia. For instance, infinity is used as a constant in mathematical equations that allow scientists to speculate about things and phenomena unseen, just as utopia is a historical construct that permits unrealized yet aspirational activities. McElheny unfolds this intellectual matrix by pairing the futuristic ideas of theorist R. Buckminster Fuller with the mid-century sensuality of artist Isamu Noguchi, or by working with scientists to make accurate representations of the Big Bang. Exhibition schedule: Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, June 22–October 14, 2012

Examines the proliferation of new ways of making "art" in the 1960s by focusing on the changed organization of work in society at the time. Co-published with The Baltimore Museum of Art in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name.

Exploring history through the lens of jewelry, this book offers a unique perspective on cultural and artistic evolution. The insights are provided by the V&A's Senior Jewellery Curator, highlighting the significance of adornments across time. Accompanied by 16 pages of vibrant color photography, it showcases some of the world's most spectacular pieces, making it a visual and informative journey through the art of jewelry.

The first monograph on a rising star who is one of contemporary art's most celebrated painters Los Angeles-based artist Jonas Wood creates vivid images, where space and everyday life are rendered with compressed perspective in bold graphic hues. This monograph - the first on the artist's work - brings together his most significant paintings and drawings. In doing so, it offers a unique insight into the vast array of his sources, which include family photographs, found imagery, baseball cards, and other people's art, including the ceramics of his wife, the artist Shio Kusaka. With contributions by curator and writer Helen Molesworth, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York Ian Alteveer, and a conversation between Wood and fellow Los Angeles-based artist Mark Grotjahn.

'A gem of a book' - Tracy Borman When Helen Molesworth joined the gem and jewellery industry she began her own love affair with one of humanity's oldest and richest fascinations. For as long as people have known about gemstones they have treasured them. Born of violent geological events and the chance meetings of minerals, their stories are an extraordinary journey through time, and are significant to the human narrative in as many ways as they boast sparkling facets. Selecting ten of nature's most dazzling jewels, Helen Molesworth makes journeys across the world to trace stones from their discovery to the moment a glimmering cut and polished masterpiece is traded, and then fought over, adorns emperors and kings, falls out of favour, and then raises eye-watering sums in another age. Touching on history and politics, archaeology and engineering, geography and geology, chemistry and physics, psychology and romance, fine art and high finance, her book is rich with great stories and has something for everyone.

An illustrated reader featuring a collection of essays from trailblazing curator and writer Helen Molesworth - the first book of her collected writings Over the past three decades, Helen Molesworth's singular voice and lively curatorial vision has established her as one of the most dynamic and influential voices in the art world. This generously illustrated reader - the first ever collection of her writings - presents 24 essays from the past 30 years, gathered from exhibition catalogs and art publications such as Artforum, Documents, frieze, and October. The volume opens with a new essay that lays out Molesworth's belief in art's unique capacity for merging knowledge and feeling. It also includes new critical and reflective commentary on her past writing, an innovative approach that will position Open Questions as an indispensable volume for viewing and thinking about contemporary art for generations to come.

"The first art-historical compendium on the dynamics of the line in drawing and dance. Dance and the visual arts have long since entered a relationship, yet an authoritative portrayal of the points at which they intersect has yet to be compiled. This publication assembles works by ca. forty different artists in an attempt to find a place in art history for the multilayered affinities between contemporary dance and the modern visual arts of the past forty years. The line is used to trace this history."--Gallery website