Books by Dieter Roelstraete
The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now
by Naomi Beckwith, Dieter Roelstraete
On the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s, African American artists and musicians grappled with new language and forms inspired by the black nationalist turn in the Civil Rights movement. The Freedom Principle, which accompanies an exhibition on the topic at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, traces their history and shows how it continues to inform contemporary artists around the world.
The book coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a still-flourishing organization of Chicago musicians who challenge jazz’s boundaries. Combining archival materials such as brochures, photographs, sheet music, and record covers with contemporary art work that respond to the 1960s Black Arts Movement, The Freedom Principle explores this tradition of cultural expression from, as one AACM group used to put it, the “ancient to the future.” Essays by curators Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete, AACM member and historian George Lewis, art historian Rebecca Zorach, and gallerist John Corbett accompany beautiful reproductions of work by artists such as Muhal Richard Abrams, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Cauleen Smith, Rashid Johnson, Nick Cave, and many more. A roundtable conversation features Beckwith, Roelstraete, curator Hamza Walker, current AACM member and cellist Tomeka Reid, and scholar and curator Romi Crawford, with additional comments from poet and scholar Fred Moten. A chronology and curated playlist of AACM-related recordings are also included. The resulting book offers a rich sense of a global movement, with crucial roots in Chicago, driven by a commitment to experimentation, improvisation, collective action, and the pursuit of freedom.
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Apsáalooke Women and Warriors
by Dieter Roelstraete, Nina Sanders
The Apsáalooke people, often referred to as the Crow, are known for their bravery and artistry, and their rich culture has developed over centuries in the Northern Plains. The Apsáalooke Women and Warriors project is a multi-format undertaking that presents a rich narrative of the Apsáalooke cultural past, figures the present-day Apsáalooke identity, and presents a vision for the future. Through writing, images, and sound, contemporary Apsáalooke artists and intellectuals convey the worldview of the Apsáalooke people, with each contributor offering a unique perspective.
This book accompanies a multi-site exhibition at the Field Museum and the Neubauer Collegium. It combines images of contemporary and historic Apsáalooke cultural items and includes essays by Apsáalooke writers. While it works in concert with the exhibition, it also stands alone as a significant exploration of the iconography, lifeways, and cosmologies of the Apsáalooke people.
All proceeds from this book will benefit Little Big Horn College in Crow Agency, Montana.
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The Other Transatlantic: Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Museum Under Construction, 14)
by Dieter Roelstraete, Marta Dziewańska, Abigail Winograd
The Other Transatlantic is attuned to the brief but historically significant moment in the postwar period between 1950 and 1970 when the trajectories of the Eastern European art scenes on the one hand, and their Latin American counterparts on the other, converged in a shared enthusiasm for kinetic and op art.
As the axis connecting the established power centers of Paris, London, and New York became increasingly dominated by monolithic trends including pop, minimalism, and conceptualism—another web of ideas was being spun linking the hubs of Warsaw, Budapest, Zagreb, Buenos Aires, Caracas, and Sao Paulo. These artistic practices were dedicated to what appeared to be an entirely different set of aesthetic concerns: philosophies of art and culture dominated by notions of progress and science, the machine and engineering, construction and perception. This book presents a highly illustrated introduction to this significant transnational phenomenon in the visual arts.
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Kleine Welt
Published on the occasion of the Kleine Welt exhibition at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, this book offers a close-up look at the art and semantics of the book cover, focusing on the images of Caspar David Friedrich and Paul Klee and their enduring popularity in the academic publishing world. Turning an eye to the artworks that repeatedly adorn book covers, Kleine Welt includes a collection of covers that have used Friedrich’s iconic painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog in their designs along with photographs and annotations of covers that feature works by Klee. This volume brings together contributions from notable writers, artists, and philosophers including Dieter Roelstraete, Jonathan Lear, and Hans Haacke, among others, and original artwork by David Schutter, R. H. Quaytman, and Zachary Cahill.
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The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago: Exhibition Catalogues)
Contemporary art is often obsessed with the new, but it has recently begun to turn to projects centering on research and delving into archives, all in the name of seeking and questioning historical truth. From filmmakers to sculptors to conceptualists, artists of all stripes are digging into the rubble of the past. In this catalog that accompanies an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in the fall of 2013, Dieter Roelstraete brings together a diverse range of international artists to explore the theme of melding archival and experiential modes of storytelling—what he calls “the archaeological imaginary”—particularly in the wake of 9/11.
The Way of the Shovel offers a well-constructed balance among excursions into the situation of contemporary art, broad philosophical arguments around the subjects of history and the archive, and cultural analysis. Opening up the discussion of the archaeological imaginary in art to adjacent fields, the book includes several essays that create an overarching narrative for the exhibition and introduce readers to the workings of history in art. Roelstraete’s opening essay maps the critical terrain, while Ian Alden Russell explores the roots of archaeology and its manifestations in twentieth-century art, Bill Brown examines artistic practices that involve historical artifacts and archival material, Sophie Berrebi offers a critique of the “document” as seen in art after the 1960s, and Diedrich Diederichsen writes on the monumentalization of history in European art. The book features work by both established and young artists, and thoughtful entries by Roelstraete accompany the exhibition catalog, along with statements from artists Moyra Davey, Rebecca Keller, Joachim Koester, Hito Steyerl, and Zin Taylor.
The first exhibition to showcase this innovative approach to some of the most intriguing art of the past decade, The Way of the Shovel is indispensable for anyone seeking to understand the forces driving contemporary art.
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Kerry James Marshall: Mastry
by Dieter Roelstraete, Ian Alteveer, Helen Molesworth, Abigail Winograd
The definitive monograph on contemporary African American painter Kerry James Marshall, accompanying a major traveling retrospective. This long-awaited volume celebrates the work of Kerry James Marshall, one of America’s greatest living painters. Born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in Birmingham, Alabama, and witness to the Watts riots in 1965, Marshall has long been an inspired and imaginative chronicler of the African American experience. Best known for large-scale interiors, landscapes, and portraits featuring powerful black figures, Marshall explores narratives of African American history from slave ships to the present and draws upon his deep knowledge of art history from the Renaissance to twentieth-century abstraction, as well as other sources such as the comic book and the muralist tradition. With luscious color and brushstrokes and highly detailed patterning, his direct and intimate scenes of black middle-class life conjure a wide range of emotions, resulting in powerful paintings that confront the position of African Americans throughout American history. Richly illustrated, this monumental book features essays by noted curators as well as the artist, and more than 100 paintings from throughout the artist’s career arranged thematically by subject: history painting; beauty, as expressed through the nude, portraiture, and self-portraiture; landscape; religion; and the politics of black nationalism.
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Richard Long: A Line Made by Walking (AFTERALL)
In 1967, Richard Long, then twenty-two years old and a student at Saint Martin'sSchool of Art in London, walked back and forth along a straight line in the grass in the Englishcountryside, leaving a track that he then photographed in black and white. The resulting work, ALine Made by Walking, was not only the starting point for Long's career as an artist but also alandmark for a new kind of art emerging in Europe and the Americas. The formal simplicity of Long'sartwork suggested a relation to minimalism, but its location outside the gallery context and itssuggestion of bodily actions also connected it to a new generation of artists whose work combinedthe organic, the temporary, the nonmaterial, and the performative to offer a critique of the artsystem and its language, forms, and values. Long's work bridged the concerns of his North Americanand European counterparts, connecting the industrial scale of Robert Smithson to the modesty ofGilberto Zorio, the exercises in dematerialization of Robert Morris with the organic forms ofAlighiero e Boetti, and the performance of Yvonne Rainer with that of Joseph Beuys.Although A LineMade by Walking is an instantly recognizable work, no detailed analysis of this foundational piecehas yet been published. At a time when Richard Long's career is being celebrated and reassessed,this study by writer and curator Dieter Roelstraete could not be more timely.
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