Books by Roxana Marcoci

Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness

by Matthew S. Witkovsky, Mark Godfrey, Roxana Marcoci, Christopher Williams

A handsome volume charting the thirty-year career of a widely celebrated, American-born conceptual artist

Representing Christopher Williams’s first publication with a major American museum, this illuminating and unusual volume is equal parts artist’s book and exhibition catalogue. Over the course of his thirty-year career, Williams (b. 1956) has crafted photographs that engage—often through uncanny mimicry—the conventions of photojournalism, picture archives, and commercial imagery, as well as their sociopolitical contexts and implications. The book includes a trio of essays by curators Mark Godfrey, Roxana Marcoci, and Matthew S. Witkovsky, which explore Williams’s engagement with his artistic peers and predecessors, with cinema (particularly the film-essay), and with the methods and modes of display and publicity in the art world, in addition to a transcript of a talk Williams delivered on the work of John Chamberlain. These more conventional contributions are “interrupted” by additional historical and contemporary textual and visual materials that were selected by the artist himself and are occasionally presented in facsimile form. An exhibition history, bibliography, and illustrated list of works round out the publication.

Photography at MoMA: 1920 to 1960

by Quentin Bajac, Roxana Marcoci, Sarah Hermanson Meister, Lucy Gallun

An epic dive into modernist photography by the museum that helped shape its history
The history of photography has been told many times, but never before through the incomparable collection of photographs at The Museum of Modern Art. As the second volume in a set of three books that together present a new and comprehensive history of photography through works from MoMA’s collection, this publication charts the medium during the height of the modernist period, from 1920 to 1960.
Only one other volume--Looking at Photographs, published in 1973--highlights the photographic treasures of MoMA’s collection; neither Beaumont Newhall’s classic History of Photography nor John Szarkowski’s Photography Until Now used the Museum collection as a springboard to approach photography’s distinctive history. The Museum’s significant role in the development of this history, and in the construction of a canon that championed photography as an art form (but also eclipsed certain alternative or unfamiliar practices) requires a reconsidered history for the 21st century. This publication offers a fresh critical lens through which to appreciate works of exceptional significance, surprise and influence, encouraging creative new readings.
The book begins with an in-depth introduction followed by eight chapters of full-color plates, each introduced by a short essay. Masterworks by photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothea Lange, Man Ray and Aleksander Rodchenko appear alongside lesser-known gems, and diverse notions of modernism enrich classic interpretations, so that the beautiful fictions and messy realities of photography are complicated, refreshed and, above all, enjoyed.

LaToya Ruby Frazier Monuments of Solidarity

by Roxana Marcoci, LaToya Ruby Frazier

Frazier's personalized arrangements of her compelling photographs recognize the myriad social and political struggles of Black working-class communities

For more than two decades, artist-activist LaToya Ruby Frazier has used photography, text, moving images and performance to revive and preserve forgotten narratives of labor, gender and race in the postindustrial era. Frazier has cultivated a practice that builds on the legacy of the social documentary tradition of the 1930s, the photo-conceptual forays of the 1960s and 1970s, and the work of socially conscious writers such as Upton Sinclair, James Baldwin and bell hooks. Monuments of Solidarity celebrates the creativity and collaboration that persist in the face of industrialization and deindustrialization, racial and environmental injustice, gender disparities, unequal access to health care and clean water, and the denial of fundamental human rights. A form of Black feminist world-building, Frazier's nontraditional "monuments for workers' thoughts" demand recognition of the crucial role that women and people of color have played, and continue to play, in histories of labor and the working class.
Published in conjunction with the first comprehensive museum survey dedicated to the artist, Monuments of Solidarity presents the full range of her practice and includes both rarely seen and brand-new bodies of work. An illuminating overview essay by the exhibition's curator, Roxana Marcoci, is accompanied by a manifesto by the artist and a suite of focused essays by other curators and scholars.
LaToya Ruby Frazier was born in 1982 in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Her artistic practice spans a range of mediums, including photography, video, performance, installation art and books, and centers on the nexus of social justice, cultural change and commentary on the American experience. Frazier is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2015 MacArthur Fellowship.