Books by Mignon Nixon

Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975

by Melissa Ho, Thomas Crow, Martha Rosler, Mignon Nixon, Erica Levin, Katherine Markoski

How the Vietnam War changed American art

By the late 1960s, the United States was in a pitched conflict in Vietnam, against a foreign enemy, and at home―between Americans for and against the war and the status quo. This powerful book showcases how American artists responded to the war, spanning the period from Lyndon B. Johnson’s fateful decision to deploy U.S. Marines to South Vietnam in 1965 to the fall of Saigon ten years later.

Artists Respond brings together works by many of the most visionary and provocative artists of the period, including Asco, Chris Burden, Judy Chicago, Corita Kent, Leon Golub, David Hammons, Yoko Ono, and Nancy Spero. It explores how the moral urgency of the Vietnam War galvanized American artists in unprecedented ways, challenging them to reimagine the purpose and uses of art and compelling them to become politically engaged on other fronts, such as feminism and civil rights. The book presents an era in which artists struggled to synthesize the turbulent times and participated in a process of free and open questioning inherent to American civic life.

Beautifully illustrated, Artists Respond features a broad range of art, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, performance and body art, installation, documentary cinema and photography, and conceptualism.

Published in association with the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Exhibition Schedule
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
March 15–August 18, 2019

Minneapolis Institute of Art
September 28, 2019–January 5, 2020

Mary Kelly (October Files)

by Mignon Nixon

Essays and interviews that span Mary Kelly's career highlight the artist's sustained engagement with feminism and feminist history.
When Mary Kelly's best-known work, Post-Partum Document (1973–1979), was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1976, it caused a sensation—an unexpected response to an intellectually demanding and aesthetically restrained installation of conceptual art. The reception signaled resistance to the work's interrogation of feminine identity and the cultural mythologizing of motherhood. This volume of essays and interviews begins with this foundational work, offering an early statement by the artist, a subsequent interview, and an essay situating the work within a broader broader discourse of art and social purpose in the early 1970s. Throughout, the collection addresses such themes as labor, war, trauma, and the politics of care, while emphasizing the artist's sustained engagement with histories of feminism and generations of feminists.
The contributions also consider such specific works as Kelly's Interim (1984–1989), the subject of a special issue of October; Gloria Patri (1992), an installation conceived in response to the first Gulf War; The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi (2001), an extensive project including a 200-foot narrative executed in the medium of compressed lint and the performance of a musical score by Michael Nyman; and two recent works, Love Songs (2005-2007), which explores the role of memory in feminist politics, and Mimus (2012), a triptych that parodies the House Un-American Activities Committee's 1962 investigation of the pacifist group, Women Strike for Peace.
Essays and Interviews by
Parveen Adams, Emily Apter, Rosalyn Deutsche, Hal Foster, Margaret Iversen, Mary Kelly, Helen Molesworth, Laura Mulvey, Mignon Nixon, Griselda Pollock, Paul Smith

Eva Hesse

by Mignon Nixon

A critical primer on the work of artist Eva Hesse.

Eva Hesse's distinctive process-based art exerted a powerful influence on minimalist artists of the 1960s and continues to inspire artists today. Using industrial materials such as latex and fiberglass, she exploited their flexibility to produce works with an unsettling psychic and corporeal resonance. Hesse, who was born in Germany in 1936 and raised in New York City, died of cancer in New York in 1970. Eva Hesse focuses on the body of criticism that has developed since the last major retrospective of Hesse's work, at the Yale University Art Gallery in 1992. The book's publication coincides with a major exhibition organized jointly by the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Wiesbaden Museum. Eva Hesse contains a 1970 interview by Cindy Nemser, a discussion between Mel Bochner and Joan Simon, and essays by Briony Fer, Rosalind Krauss, Mignon Nixon, and Anne M. Wagner.