Books by Naomi Beckwith

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.

member: Pope.L, 1978–2001

by Naomi Beckwith, Danielle Jackson, Adrian Heathfield, Adrienne Edwards, André Lepecki, Malik Gaines, Martha Wilson, Thomas Lax, Mark Bessire, C. Carr, EJ Hill, Martine Syms

An absurdist provocateur and brilliant interventionist, Pope.L is a seditious force in contemporary American art
Pope.L is a consummate thinker and provocateur whose practice across multiple mediums―including painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, theater and video―utilizes abjection, humor, endurance, language and absurdity to confront and undermine rigid systems of belief. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that will feature a combination of videos, photographs, sculptural elements, ephemera and live actions, member: Pope.L, 1978–2001 presents a detailed study of 13 early works that helped define Pope.L’s career. Essays by curators, artists, filmmakers and art historians, plus an interview and artistic interventions by the artist, establish key details for each work and articulate how the artist continues to think about the legacy of these ephemeral projects unfolding in time.

Among the works included are performances rooted in experimental theater, such as Egg Eating Contest (1990), Aunt Jenny Chronicles (1991) and Eracism (2000), as well as street interventions such as Thunderbird Immolation a.k.a. Meditation Square Piece (1978), ATM Piece (1997) and The Great White Way: 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street (2001–09), among others. Together these works highlight the role that performance has played within a seditious, emphatically interdisciplinary career that has established Pope.L as an influential force in contemporary art.

Pope.L (born 1955) is an acclaimed and prolific interdisciplinary artist best known for his provocative performances, such as ATM Piece (1997) and his decades-long Crawl series―most notably Times Square Crawl (1978), Tompkins Square Crawl (1991) and The Great White Way: 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street (2001–09)―in which the artist drags his body across New York City. Pope.L received his MFA from the Mason Gross School of Arts at Rutgers University and has exhibited internationally. He lives and works in Chicago.

Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen

by Naomi Beckwith, Valerie Cassel Oliver

This retrospective volume celebrates five decades of Howardena Pindell's art, including works on paper, collage, photography, film, and video.

Born in middle-class Philadelphia in the 1940s, Howardena Pindell came of age during the Civil Rights movement. As an African-American woman artist, making her way in the world provided Pindell with source material to inspire her work. This book examines every facet of Pindell's impressive career to date. Since the 1960s, she has used materials such as glitter, talcum powder, and perfume to stretch the boundaries of traditional canvas painting. She has also infused her work with traces of her labor, such as obsessively affixing dots of pigment and circles made with an ordinary hole punch tool. After a car crash in 1979 left her with short-term amnesia, Pindell's work looked beyond the painting studio to explore a wide range of subjects, including the personal and diaristic as well as the social and political. This monograph also highlights Pindell's work with photography, film, and performance. Excerpts from the artist's writing, in particular her critique of the art world and her responses to feminism and racial politics, provide prescient commentary in light of conversations around equality and inclusion today.
Published in association with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Lorna Simpson

by Naomi Beckwith, Thelma Golden, Kellie Jones, Chrissie Iles

The most comprehensive and up-to-date monograph available on the work of celebrated artist Lorna Simpson, a trailblazer who continues to influence and inspire

Lorna Simpson is a multimedia artist known for her pioneering approach to conceptual photography. In 1993 Simpson was the first African-American woman ever to show in the Venice Biennale and to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

This landmark book documents Simpson's career in its entirety, up to her most recent work - Simpson's portrait of Rihanna for the January 2021 cover of Essence has been deemed as one of the most iconic fashion images ever made by a panel of experts in The New York Magazine.

In doing so, it sheds light on the remarkable path that Simpson paved to global critical acclaim and art-world stardom. The first edition of this sell-out volume has been thoroughly revised and updated, including a new essay by Guggenheim Deputy Director Naomi Beckwith.

Rashid Johnson A Poem for Deep Thinkers

by Naomi Beckwith, Andrea Karnes

From his early self-portraits to his site-specific installations, this volume underscores Rashid Johnson's fearless engagement with the central themes, questions and aesthetics of the contemporary era

Co-organized by the Guggenheim New York and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, A Poem for Deep Thinkers is a three-decade survey of Rashid Johnson's artistic career. It situates the artist within three interconnected spheres: as a scholar of art history; as a mediator of Black popular culture and its widespread commodification; and as an artist engaged with the globalization of contemporary art. The exhibition and accompanying catalog feature nearly 90 artworks, including early photographs, Cosmic Slops, spray-painted text works, collage paintings, Broken Men mosaics, film projects, and key sculptures and installations that incorporate materials such as shea butter, black soap, plants, ceramic vessels and wax. These explorations demonstrate Johnson's uncommon fluency with multiple materials and forms as well as a nuanced ability to synthesize the condition of the human psyche.
Lavishly produced with gold block edges and illustrated with more than 200 images, the publication offers creative meditations on excerpts by literary icons Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jean Genet, Paul Beatty and Amiri Baraka, interspersed among insightful essays and an interview that further illuminate Johnson's work.
Born and raised in Chicago, Rashid Johnson (born 1977) received fine arts degrees from Columbia College Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. At the age of 24, his work was included in Thelma Golden's 2001 exhibition Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Johnson made his directorial debut with his 2019 adaptation of Richard Wright's Native Son.