Books by Eric Booker
Smokehouse Associates
by Eric Booker
A New York Times best art book of 2022
A groundbreaking study of the public art collective Smokehouse Associates, whose abstract works transformed New York’s Harlem community in the late 1960s
Between 1968 and 1970, the artist collective Smokehouse Associates transformed Harlem with vibrant, community-oriented abstract murals and sculptures. Established by William T. Williams and including Melvin Edwards, Guy Ciarcia, and Billy Rose, Smokehouse grew to encompass a range of creative practitioners united around the revolutionary potential of public art. Though relatively unknown today, Smokehouse was ambitious in its scale, community engagement, and interaction with the built environment.
Published over fifty years after the collective’s founding, Smokehouse Associates offers the first critical examination of the group’s work. Eric Booker provides a historical overview of the collective; Charles Davis II and James Trainor delve into contextual histories of public art, urban design, and architecture; and an artist roundtable moderated by Ashley James presents critical reflections. With previously unpublished images and ephemera and a rich chronology, Smokehouse Associates serves as a sourcebook that expands the narrative of public art and social practice in the United States to include the contributions of artists of African descent.
Distributed for The Studio Museum in Harlem
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$55.00
Arlene Shechet: Girl Group
by Eric Booker, Kate Nesin, Arlene Shechet, John P. Stern, Nora Lawrence
"Arlene Shechet: Girl Group brings together the artist’s recent work in wood, steel, ceramic, paper, and bronze with six new monumental sculptures created for Storm King Art Center. Through her signature emphasis on process and improvisation, Shechet (American, b. 1951) harnesses the expressive power of geometry, line, color, and form in works displayed across Storm King’s hills, fields, and galleries. The artist maintains a spirit of constant discovery as she mines the possibilities of multiple sculptural materials, experimenting with their capacity to hold color and light while creating form and volume. The exhibition centers on the translation of lyrical ceramic works from Shechet’s Together series, on view indoors, into robust, large-scale painted metal works outdoors. Shechet began her ceramic series during the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to convey a “strong sense of a life force that seemed to be gone during that time.” Each work is titled with a time of day or a moment in a season: a means by which to reflect upon existence amid the uncertainty of that period. Shechet calls the Together works the “generative seeds” of her outdoor sculptures. The new works expand the artist’s intuitive and handmade approach into towering constructions of welded metal. Over the course of three years, Shechet fluidly alternated between digital and analog methods of creation, extrapolating from elements of the Together works to invent new forms through an open-ended process of call-and-response. Outdoors, the hollow clay of Shechet’s ceramics transforms into open volumes of sheet metal, while the vibrant and textured glazes of her ceramics inspire an array of painted colors rarely seen in monumental sculpture. Shechet’s works incorporate nature as material, harnessing it through negative space and the use of matte and glossy surfaces to reflect and absorb light. Their shifting colors form a spectrum across Storm King, allowing visitors to identify a shared vocabulary over great distances. According to Shechet, “They’re all in relationship to the landscape and to each other.”
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