I thought that the following list of recent books from the MIT Press might
interest ARLIS readers. I've included a short description of each book, as
well as a link to the Press website where more information on each book can
be found.

Thanks!
David

New Material as New Media
Marion Boulton Stroud
foreword by Anne d'Harnoncourt
http://mitpress.mit.edu/promotions/books/SP20030262194899

Over the past twenty-five years The Fabric Workshop and Museum, an
experimental arts laboratory in Philadelphia, has evolved into an
influential contemporary art museum with a significant permanent
collection, collaborating with artists to redefine the boundaries of fabric
and other innovative materials including rubber, industrial felt,
fiberglass, horse hair, hog intestine, and plastic as artistic media. This
book, which accompanies a twenty-five-year retrospective exhibition from
the collection, highlights more than fifty artists' projects.

10 3/4 x 13, 328 pp., 270 illus., 268 color, cloth, ISBN 0-262-19489-9

Kara Walker
Narratives of a Negress
edited by Ian Berry, Darby English, Vivian Patterson, and Mark Reinhardt
with essays by Darby English, Mark Reinhardt, Anne M. Wagner, and Michele
Wallace
http://mitpress.mit.edu/promotions/books/SP2003026202540X

Kara Walker (b. 1969) has emerged as one of her generation's most important
artists. Best known for her provocative black paper cutout silhouettes, she
confronts stereotypes, sex, violence, and power relationships through Civil
War-era parodies, narratives, and a mastery of craft and installation. This
book, which accompanies an exhibition organized by the Tang Teaching Museum
and Art Gallery at Skidmore College and the Williams College Museum of Art,
presents a comprehensive overview of Walker's work, beginning with her
first cut-paper wall installation, Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil
War as It Occurred between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her
Heart (1994).

11 1/2 x 8 1/2, 208 pp., 122 illus., 94 color, cloth, ISBN 0-262-02540-X

Veil
Veiling, Representation, and Contemporary Art
edited by David A. Bailey and Gilane Tawadros
http://mitpress.mit.edu/promotions/books/SP20030262523485

No single item of clothing has had greater influence on Western images of
Middle Eastern and North African women than the veil. The fascination of
Western writers, artists, and photographers with the veil reflects the
voyeuristic nature of our interest in what is strange and "other." Veil,
which accompanies an exhibition organized by the Institute of International
Visual Arts in London, explores the representation of the veil in
contemporary visual arts.

8 3/4 x 8 3/4, 192 pp., 75 illus., 35 color, paper, ISBN 0-262-52348-5
Not for sale in Europe

Foul Perfection
Essays and Criticism
Mike Kelley
edited by John C. Welchman
http://mitpress.mit.edu/promotions/books/SP20030262112701

The work of artist Mike Kelley (b. 1954) embraces performance,
installation, drawing, painting, video, and sculpture. Drawing
distinctively on high art and vernacular traditions, including historical
research, popular culture, and psychology, Kelley came to prominence in the
1980s with a series of sculptures composed of craft materials. His recent
work offers dialogues with architecture and with repressed memory syndrome,
and a sustained inquiry into his own aesthetic and social history. This
book offers a diverse collection of Kelley's writings from the last
twenty-five years.

8 x 9, 272 pp., 34 illus., paper ISBN 0-262-61178-3, cloth ISBN 0-262-11270-1

Robert Smithson
Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere
Ann Reynolds
http://mitpress.mit.edu/promotions/books/SP20030262182270

Robert Smithson (1938-1973) produced his best-known work during the 1960s
and early 1970s, a period in which the boundaries of the art world and the
objectives of art-making were questioned perhaps more consistently and
thoroughly than any time before or since. In this book, Ann Reynolds
elucidates the complexity of Smithson's work and thought by placing them in
their historical context, a context greatly enhanced by the vast archival
materials that Smithson's widow, Nancy Holt, donated to the Archives of
American Art in 1987. The archive provides Reynolds with the remnants of
Smithson's working life--magazines, postcards from other artists,
notebooks, and perhaps most important, his library--from which she
reconstructs the physical and conceptual world that Smithson inhabited.
Reynolds explores the relation of Smithson's art-making, thinking about
art-making, writing, and interaction with other artists to the articulated
ideology and discreet assumptions that determined the parameters of
artistic practice of the time.

8 x 9, 328 pp., 91 illus., 10 color, cloth, ISBN 0-262-18227-0


David Weininger
Associate Publicist
MIT Press
5 Cambridge Center, 4th Floor
Cambridge, MA  02142
617.253.2079
617.253.1709 fax
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