In 2021, the press announced a new series born from a gift awarded by the Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation. This series, the Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Collection, features an exciting range of creative and critical works on under-represented subjects in the arts and on the role of art in society and culture. This month, we’re shining the spotlight on the nine books in the series so far, including recently published and forthcoming titles.

Abakanowicz books have taken us from Algeria to New Zealand to Paris and beyond, collectively offering a global view of art from across a range of times, cultures, and places. Through these volumes, we meet outstanding artists, gallerists, and writers, and dive into underexplored histories.

Take a look at books in the series so far and be sure to stay tuned for exciting additions in the seasons to come. For more information, check out the series page on our website.

Pow! Right in the Eye! Thirty Years behind the Scenes of Modern French Painting

Berthe Weill, edited by Lynn Gumpert, translated by William Rodarmor

Berthe Weill, a formidable Parisian dealer and one of the first female gallerists in the business, was born to a Jewish family of modest means and went on to hold numerous exhibitions and promote more than three hundred artists—including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Diego Rivera, and Suzanne Valadon—throughout her lifetime. Long written out of art history, this translation brings her provocative 1933 memoir to English readers for the first time. 

Lateness and Longing: On the Afterlife of Photography

George Baker

Lateness and Longing presents the first account of a generation of artists—focused on the work of Zoe Leonard, Tacita Dean, Sharon Lockhart, and Moyra Davey—who have transformed the practice of photography, using analogue technologies in a dissident way and radicalizing signifiers of older models of feminist art. George Baker looks at how and why these artists returned to more historical methods of making photographs, even as the world of technology moved into the digital age. He shows how the work of these artists announces that photography has become—not obsolete—but “late,” opened up by the potentially critical forces of anachronism.

Seeing Baya: Portrait of an Algerian Artist in Paris

Alice Kaplan

On a flower farm in colonial Algeria, a servant and field worker known as Baya escaped the drudgery of her labor by coloring the skirts in fashion magazines. Three years later, in 1947, her paintings and fanciful clay beasts were featured in a solo exhibition, and she went on to become a celebrated artist in mid-twentieth-century Paris. In this first biography of the Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, Alice Kaplan brings Baya’s story into the present, allowing us to see her in a fresh light.

Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies

Maggie M. Cao

Maggie M. Cao crafts a nuanced portrait of nineteenth-century US painters’ complicity with and resistance to ascendant US imperialism, offering eye-opening readings of canonical works, landscapes of polar expeditions and tropical tourism, still lifes of imported goods, genre paintings, and ethnographic portraiture. She reveals how US empire was “hidden in plain sight” in art of the period and addresses important contemporary questions around representation, colonialism, and indigeneity.

Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art

Deidre Brown and Ngarino Ellis, with Jonathan Mane-Wheoki

This massive book—six hundred pages and with over five hundred illustrations—presents a landmark account of Māori art presented by Māori art historians, taking us on a vast journey from Polynesian voyaging waka to contemporary Māori artists. Through this groundbreaking and award-winning project, Deidre Brown, Ngarino Ellis, and Jonathan Mane-Wheoki explore a wide field of art practices, including raranga (plaiting), whatu (weaving), moko (tattooing), whakairo (carving), rākai (jewelry), kākahu (textiles), whare (architecture), toi whenua (rock art), painting, photography, sculpture, ceramics, installation art, digital media, and film.

Interstices: Negotiations at Contemporary Art’s Boundaries

Alexander Alberro

Interstices explores the worlds of innovative art practices flourishing at the margins of Western art. Alexander Alberro engages decolonial theory to explore the dynamic exchanges that occur where the ideals and values of different artistic frameworks meet, resisting the notion of a singular art world and global contemporary art. He considers a range of artists and collectives from around the world, showing how the tensions at the edges of the Western art framework are pushing it toward its discursive limits.

In-action: Viennese Actionism and the Passivities of Performance Art

Caroline Lillian Schopp

Caroline Lillian Schopp offers a vital corrective to the narrative surrounding Viennese Actionism, looking beyond the group’s graphic violence to find how many of their performances explore passivity, vulnerability, and dependence in gestures of “in-action.” Decentering the traditional focus on the male protagonists of Viennese Actionism, Schopp draws attention to women who performed with them, including Anna Brus, Hanel Koeck, and Ingrid Wiener, revealing how the group’s performances scrutinize intimate relationships and conventions of traditional artistic media.

Criticism Without Authority: Gene Swenson’s and Jill Johnston’s Queer Practices

Jennifer Sichel

In the early 1960s, Gene Swenson and Jill Johnston began to imagine art criticism as something unruly and expansive, rejecting modernist appeals to purity and coherence that had overtaken the field. These critics were deeply enmeshed in New York’s avant-garde art scene, and both were explicitly and unapologetically queer. Jennifer Sichel reframes this era of art history, centering on the genre-bending practices of Swenson and Johnston.

Beyond Individualism: Portraying Collective Selfhood in Latin American Literature and Art

Lois Parkinson Zamora

Beyond Individualism examines the portrayal of collective identities over two centuries in Latin American literature and visual art. Considering characters in fiction by Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende​, Jorge Luis Borges, and more, alongside the art of Diego Rivera, Remedios Varo, and Xul Solar, Lois Parkinson Zamora reveals a modernity based not on Enlightenment conceptions of selfhood but on community, collectivity, and kinship.