Bøger udgivet af ICA UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA

Descent animates alternative modes of inheritance across generations of families, artists and artworks: used or surplus possessions, intergenerational collaborations, maternal memories and transatlantic journeys. Artists include Virginia Overton, Lisa Tan, Runo Lagomarsino, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky and Matriarch.

Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere (both born 1970) have been working collaboratively for more than 14 years, 7 of them under the collective name neuroTransmitter. Often incorporating popular music and visual forms, their projects traverse the cultural contradictions at play in public spaces. This catalogue accompanies their first US survey.

Focusing on Los Angeles and Philadelphia, First Among Equals considers the various modes that contemporary artists have developed to work with each other and reach across generations through negotiation and dialogue. Among the artists included are Kathryn Andrews, Bodega, Alex Da Corte, Extra Extra, Machete Group, Marginal Utility, P&Co., Mateo Tannatt and Wu Tsang.

Anne Tyng (born 1920) explores the potentials of geometry through her architectural and teaching practices. Since the 1950s, when she worked closely with Louis Kahn and independently pioneered space-frame construction, Tyng has applied natural and numeric systems to built forms on all scales, from urban plans to domestic spaces. She believes that geometry is a metaphor for thought and the creative process--as a spatial demonstration of how the mind generates associations through the combination of pattern and chance. This volume documents a new project by the visionary architect and theorist. Commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, Tyng has created an installation-scale model that realizes the ambition of all of her work: to inhabit geometry. Exploring her life-long fascination with the Platonic solids, the book also features related models and documentation of past projects, including Tyng and Kahn's never-built design for City Tower in Philadelphia (1952-1956).

An artist's attempts at achieving personal happiness, from meditation to pharmaceuticalsAustrian-born, New York-based graphic designer, typographer and artist Stefan Sagmeister (born 1962) often tests and transgresses the boundary between art and design, through his imaginative implementation of typography. The Happy Film Pitch Book both documents Sagmeister's touring exhibition, The Happy Show, and anticipates his ongoing feature length film, The Happy Film. In both projects, Sagmeister undergoes a series of self-experiments (each experiment lasting three months)--with meditation, cognitive therapy, and mood-altering pharmaceuticals--attempting to improve his personal happiness. I am usually rather bored with definitions," Sagmeister says. "Happiness, however, is just such a big subject that it might be worth a try to pin it down." The Happy Show, Sagmeister's first museum show in the United States, documents his adventures in video, print, infographics, sculpture and interactive installations, most of which were custom-made for this exhibition. Here, Sagmeister offers his own witty and poignant thoughts and reasons for his ten-year exploration of happiness. Throughout the book, Sagmeister's trademark maxims serve as access points to a larger exploration of happiness, its cultural significance, our constant pursuit of it and its notoriously ephemeral nature.

Philadelphia is home to two major art institutions, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art. Philadelphia artist Virgil Marti (born 1962) recently curated a show for the ICA of objects chosen from the Philadelphia Museum of Art's collection; "Set Pieces" brings these objects together, shedding light both on the Museum's outstanding collection of objects and on the roots of Marti's own opulent, design-based aesthetic. Texts by I.C.A. Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner, Philadelphia Museum curator Joseph Risehl, gallerist Lia Gangitano (Participant Inc.) and Philadelphia-based poet Thomas Devaney round out the volume.

This first book on the Philadelphia-based artist features work from his 2009 ICA exhibition--an installation composed of a six-minute, animated, high-definition projected video and five bronze sculptures. "Dread" was premiered at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2008, where it received critical acclaim.

Douglas Blau, who originally emerged as a critic and curator in tandem with the Pictures Generation, offers up a series of picture epics and episodes from uniformly framed collages of printed matter like postcards, film stills, images of paintings and photographs. Pictures of all kinds are cut and pasted into individual collage elements.

Edited by Ingrid Schaffner and Carin Kuoni. Text by Ingrid Schaffner, Carin Kuoni, Michael Taylor, et al. Acknowledgements by Claudia Gould.

Edited by Jenelle Porter. Foreword by Claudia Gould. Text by Laurie Olin, Cynthia Davidson, Julia Czerniak, Peter Eisenman.

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.

Documenting this American artist's first solo museum exhibition, Charles LeDray will focus on his obsessively crafted miniature sculptures in a variety of media, including textiles, ceramics, seashells, and bone, that reflect on childhood, gender, sexuality, and autobiography.