Tag Archive for biography

Happy Birthday to Mary Rogers Williams!

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book cover and author photo

Today, September 30th, 2020, would have been Mary Rogers Williams’ 163rd birthday. The obscure, often forgotten American tonalist and Impressionist artist was most well known for her stunning pastel and oil portraits and landscapes. Born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, as a baker’s daughter, Williams travelled widely throughout Europe when she wasn’t teaching in the art department at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. An incredibly active woman, she hiked and biked across Europe, while chafing against art world rules that favored men, and writing thousands of pages that record her travels and work. Her paintings offer remarkable horizon views of ancient ruins, medieval towns, country meadows, and calm waters. Her work was exhibited at various venues in the United States and France while she was still living. Much of her work has stayed in Connecticut and the Northeast, held by institutions including the Smith College Museum of Art, Connecticut Landmarks, and the Connecticut Historical Society.

Forever Seeing New Beauties: The Forgotten Impressionist Mary Rogers Williams, 1857–1907, by Eve Kahn is a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award. The book is up for the Bruce Fraser “Spirit of Connecticut” Award. Bruce Fraser, director of Connecticut Humanities for 28 years, was a proponent of Connecticut’s sense of place. He was interested in how places evoke memory and emotions from people, how people have such ferocious identification and loyalty to their surroundings and how the very landscape influences people. Mary Rogers Williams’ life and legacy embody the values of this award—Williams was deeply tied to, influenced by, and involved with her roots in Connecticut.

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Green Landscape—Hills in the Distance (probably Connecticut
River Valley), 1903 pastel, 12 ½ x 22 in. Smith College Museum of Art,
Northampton, MA, gift of the sisters of Mary Rogers
Williams

Until recently, little was known or remembered about Williams. But in 2012, the artist’s confessional letters as well as hundreds of her paintings and sketches turned up in storage at a Connecticut family’s home. The resulting book reveals her as strong, funny, self-deprecating, caustically critical of mainstream art, and observant of everything from soldiers’ epaulettes to colorful produce layered on delivery trucks. She was determined to paint portraits and landscapes in her distinctive style—and so she did. The book reproduces her unpublished artworks that capture pensive gowned women, Norwegian slopes reflected in icy waters, saw-tooth rooflines on French chateaus, and incense hazes in Italian chapels. Forever Seeing New Beauties offers a vivid portrayal of an adventurer, defying her era’s expectations on a tight budget. Today we remember Mary Rogers Williams for her standout style, adventurous personality, and bold wit.

The author, Eve Kahn, will be lecturing on the book for Boston Design Week, on October 14th, in remote event. Learn more and register here. 

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Some of Mary Rogers Williams’ letters and papers. Photo by Eve Kahn.

 

 

Happy National Dance Day!

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September 19th is National Dance Day. Celebrate by checking out some recent titles from Wesleyan University Press!

Our newest dance publication is The Grand Union: Accidental Anarchists of Downtown Dance, 1970–1976 by Wendy Perron. The book explores the legacy of The Grand Union, a leaderless improvisation group in SoHo in the 1970s that included people who became some of the biggest names in postmodern dance: Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, Barbara Dilley, David Gordon, and Douglas Dunn. Together they unleashed a range of improvised forms from peaceful movement explorations to wildly imaginative collective fantasies. The book delves into the “collective genius” of The Grand Union and explores their process of deep play. Drawing on hours of archival videotapes, Wendy Perron seeks to understand the ebb and flow of the performances.

Other titles are listed below. Check them out!

 

A Day with Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings at Mass MoCA

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Wall Drawing 793B by Sol LeWitt
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Wall Drawing 579 by Sol LeWitt
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Wall Drawings 439 and 527 by Sol LeWitt

Wesleyan University Press is pleased to announce that Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas by Lary Bloom has been named a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award in the nonfiction category. Check out Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas by Lary Bloom, available from HFSbooks.com.

In spring of 2019, Wesleyan University Press published the first ever LeWitt biography entitled Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas by Lary Bloom. Bloom’s biography of LeWitt draws on personal recollections of LeWitt, whom he knew in the last years of the artist’s life, as well as LeWitt’s letters and papers and over one hundred original interviews with his friends and colleagues, including Chuck Close, Ingrid Sischy, Philip Glass, Adrian Piper, Jan Dibbets, and Carl Andre. The absorbing chronicle brings new information to our understanding of this important artist, linking the extraordinary arc of his life to his iconic work. Plus, it includes 28 beautiful illustrations of the artist’s work. Pick up this title to read more about Sol LWwitt and his “ideas.”

Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (commonly known as Mass MoCA) draws visitors both near and far to the city of North Adams in the Berkshire Hills. A mill town for much of its history, North Adams stands out for its industrial brick architecture all along the small but mighty Hoosic River. Mass MoCA’s campus finds its home in one of these old mill buildings—collections, exhibits, offices, event venues, and commercially rented space now occupy the converted Arnold Print Works factory building complex. The Sprague Electric Company occupied the building most recently, prior to Mass MoCA’s arrival.

Mass MoCA’s industrial roots shine during any visit. The space is immense and allows for large works—particularly sculpture and installation pieces—to be viewed in their incredible totality. Light shines from floor to ceiling windows that line all external walls. Bridges and ramps bring separate buildings together in a maze of levels. Situated in one of these buildings, occupying three floors, we find “Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective.” The bright colors, precise lines and angles, and massive scale that define Sol LeWitt’s most famous pieces suit the space perfectly. See the pictures included at the end of this post for a look at some of the works featured in the exhibit!

Sol LeWitt came to fame in the 1960s for his wall drawings and structures, though he was accomplished with many other artistic forms too (including drawing, printmaking, photography, and artist’s books). While Mass MoCA’s LeWitt exhibit is focused mainly on wall drawings, it is organized chronologically, so if you work your way up from the first floor to the third, you will see how his work developed throughout his career. From subtle pencil drawings to complex colored illustrations, Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings offer a great scope of the artist’s influence, theory, and practice. LeWitt is regarded as a founder of both Minimal and Conceptual art. His work is defined by three-dimensional qualities whether those are physical or representative. From his “structure” sculptures made from wood, metal, and cinder blocks, to his wall drawings of graphite, crayon, colored pencil, India ink, or and/or acrylic paint, LeWitt’s artwork masters the strategic, systematic organization of lines and shapes.

According to LeWitt’s artistic and conceptual principles, his wall drawings were not usually assembled by the artist personally. LeWitt sold the instructions and the rights to individual works, allowing for distinct teams to interpret and execute his plans. In 1971 LeWitt explained that “each person draws a line differently and each person understands words differently”– his certificates of authenticity, along with his instructions (which vary in length, specificity, and use of text and design), LeWitt believed that art can have both a conceptual creator and  a collective, experiential maker. His wall drawings are constructed on site and can be taken down, moved, or re-constructed at any time; in this way, LeWitt incorporates a transient dynamic directly into the physical forms taken on by his art.

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Wall Drawing 289 by Sol Lewitt
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Sol Lewitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective at Mass MoCA
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Wall Drawings 1247 and 1260 by Sol Lewitt
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Wall Drawings 821, 852, and 853 by Sol LeWitt
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Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas by Lary Bloom in the Mass MoCA Gift Shop
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Wall Drawing 915 by Sol LeWitt

 

Announcing “Letters from Amherst”

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Entertaining and informative letters written from 1984 to 1991

In these personal and pointed letters written between 1984 and 1991, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning writer Samuel Delany comments on literature, art, politics, aging, academia, his family’s history in Harlem, and black and white social life in another century. He details a visit from science fiction writer and critic Judith Merrill and reflects on his colleague and former student Octavia E. Butler.

Samuel R. Delany is a science fiction author and a retired professor at Temple University. After winning four Nebula Awards and two Hugo Awards, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002. Visit samueldelany.com for more author news.

Nalo Hopkinson was born in Jamaica. She is the author of six novels and numerous short stories. She has received the Campbell and Locus Awards, the World Fantasy Award, and the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Award for her contributions to science fiction and fantasy. Currently she teaches creative writing at the University of California at Riverside.

“Letters from Amherst gives readers insight into the personal and professional life and aesthetic assessments of the author, Samuel R. Delany, one of the most important literary figures of our time.”—Nisi Shawl, author of the Nebula Award Finalist novel Everfair, and the James Tiptree Jr. Award-winning story collection Filter House

“Letters from Amherst is significant and important…Delany provides unseen glimpses into his important familial lineages, personal friendship and partnership, his assessment of universities and their politics, and a general joy in anything that has to do with intellectual culture.” —L.H. Stallings, author of Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures

June 4, 2019
160 pp., 9 x 6″
Paperback, $17.95 9780819578518
Cloth, $45.00 9780819578204

Announcing “Sol LeWitt”

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An intimate portrait of a renowned conceptual artist

“One of the interesting things about living through a period is you know where the recorded history and the happenstance of the moment diverge. Consequently, having known Sol LeWitt since my days as an art student in New York in the 1960s, I appreciate the clear and concise manner that Lary Bloom has scrupulously chronicled not only Sol’s artistic development, but also his personal life and his ever-changing social milieu. The results are an insightful and intimate portrait of the artist, the man and his times.”
— Saul Ostrow, Founder of Critical Practices, Inc.

 

Sol LeWitt (1928−2007), one of the most influential and important artists of the twentieth century, upended how art is made and marketed. As a key figure in minimalism and conceptualism, he proclaimed that for the artist the work of the mind is more important than that of the hand. (He argued, “The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.”) But even as his wall drawings and sculpture were admired around the world (installed, over time, by thousands of young artists, and marketed not as objects but as concepts), and even as he championed the work of hundreds of colleagues including many women whose efforts were spurned by the bullies of a male-dominated profession, he remained an enigmatic figure, refusing to participate in the culture of celebrity. Lary Bloom’s biography Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas links the extraordinary arc of his life to his iconic work. The author draws on personal recollections of LeWitt, whom he knew during the last two decades of the artist’s life, as well as letters and papers and over one hundred original interviews, including those with Chuck Close, Ingrid Sischy, Adrian Piper, Philip Glass, and Carl Andre. The result is a full and absorbing portrait of a man who, following the flashy and self-aggrandizing period of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, stripped art down to its basics and, with a band of rebellious colleagues, started over again.

Lary Bloom has authored or co-authored ten books including The Writer Within, The Test of Our Times, with Tom Ridge, and Letters from Nuremberg, with Christopher Dodd. He has taught writing at Yale University, Fairfield University, Trinity College, and Wesleyan University. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

May 7, 2019
356 pp. 28 illus., 6 x 9”
Jacketed Cloth, $35.00 978-0-8195-7868-6