6.7 × 9 inches, 68 pages, softcover
ISBN 978-1-941753-60-6

Edited by Tyler Blackwell
Design by IN-FO.CO
Co-published by Inventory Press & Blaffer Art Museum

ON SALE for $10 through July 12!!

Monira Al Qadiri (b. 1983) is one of the most important artists to emerge from the Persian Gulf region in recent years. Now based in Berlin, Al Qadiri’s work examines “petrocultures”: societies associated with and informed by the practice and discourse around the consumption of, and dependence on, oil. Published on the occasion of the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, Refined Vision features recent and newly commissioned work that ranges from the surreal to the melancholic, reflecting the intense and often astonishing scenes that make up the artist’s real (and imagined) memories of her formative years in the Middle East. Al Qadiri’s inspiration for this exhibition was the parallel between the Gulf Coast of Texas and the Persian Gulf region. She poignantly invokes images and tableaux familiar to both locales, in the hopes that themes will resonate and overlap. Refined Vision includes a newly commissioned text by curator and educator Amin Alsaden and a conversation between the artist and exhibition curator Tyler Blackwell.

ISBN 978-1-941753-39-2

Design by IN-FO.CO
Edited by Erina Duganne and Abigail Satinsky
Co-published by Inventory Press and Tufts University Art Galleries

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Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities illuminates the formative 1980s activ­ist campaign, Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America. Published on the occasion of a pathbreaking exhibition of the same name at the Tufts University Art Galleries, this bilingual English-Spanish catalogue surveys Artists Call’s mobilization of writers, artists, activists, and artist organizations and looks at the group’s legacy today.

Art for the Future features critical essays that reflect on the campaign’s influence and place its art and activism within a wider visual, historical, and socio-political context. Contributors include exhibition curators Erina Duganne and Abigail Satinsky as well as Kency Cornejo, Lucy Lippard, Yansi Pérez, and Josh Rios. The catalogue highlights interviews with Artists Call participants, including Doug Ashford, Fatima Bercht, Josely Carvalho, Daniel Flores y Ascencio, Kimiko Hahn, Jerry Kearns, Sabra Moore, and Juan Sánchez.

The catalogue also includes contributions by a dynamic selection of artists and activists—Antena Aire and Tierra Narrative, Jerri Allyn, Maria Thereza Alves, and Hans Haacke as well as newly commissioned work by Beatriz Cortez, Muriel Hasbun, Josh MacPhee, Naeem Mohaiemen, and Antonio Serna. Art for the Future is at once an archive, historical document, and critical text that fills a gap in the examination of political and aesthetic actions across the Americas, both then and now.

Support for this publication was provided by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).

9 × 8 inches, 216 pages, softcover
ISBN 978-1-941753-52-1

Design by IN-FO.CO
Co-published by Inventory Press and
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts

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Accompanying the 2022 exhibition at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, Drum Listens to Heart reflects on the many ways that percussion reaches far beyond the drum. It relates to music and rhythm, but it also speaks to a wide range of aesthetic, expressive, and political forms more broadly. The exhibition weaves different forms of percussion together—physical and socio-political, literal and metaphorical. It juxtaposes instances of impact and vibration with forms of control, emancipation, spirituality, and community-building. It offers a framework and a vocabulary that binds art and politics to each other in percussive ways.

Alongside documentation of works in the exhibition are essays by Wattis Institute Director Anthony Huberman and Diego Villalobos as well as a unique glossary of terms associated with percussion, with contributions by Hannah Black, Geeta Dayal, JJJJJerome Ellis, Anthony Elms and Hamza Walker, Natasha Ginwala, Will Holder, Lê Quan Ninh, and Hypatia Vourloumis.

Artists in the exhibition include Francis Alÿs, Luke Anguhadluq, Marcos Ávila Forero, Raven Chacon, Trisha Donnelly, Em’kal Eyongakpa, Theaster Gates, Milford Graves, David Hammons, Susan Howe & David Grubbs, NIC Kay, Barry Le Va, Rose Lowder, Lee Lozano, Guadalupe Maravilla, Harold Mendez, Rie Nakajima, The Otolith Group, Lucy Raven, Davina Semo, Michael E. Smith, Consuelo Tupper Hernández, Haegue Yang, and David Zink Yi.

5.25 × 8 inches, 272 pages, softcover
ISBN 978-1-941753-38-5

Design by IN-FO.CO
Co-published by Inventory Press and neugerriemschneider

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Conversations brings together a broad range of dialogues between author Jan Tumlir and artist Jorge Pardo, which span a period of 20 years, beginning in 1999. They encompass contemporary art, design, publishing, and music, and connect the varied contexts of Los Angeles and Mérida, Mexico, where they took place. The result is a story of a unique intellectual friendship that has defined both of their thinking and practice.

Describing his work as “shaping space” Jorge Pardo has made work that moves freely across the notional disciplines of art, architecture, and design throughout his over thirty-year career. His constructions range from a single light sculpture, to paintings, rooms or an assembly of buildings that combine all the individual elements of his artistic creation in the mode of the Gesamtkunstwerk or “total work of art.” His work contends with distinctions of private and public space, while calling to mind references as diverse as the Light and Space movement, Land art, modernist design and the color, flora and fauna of his home in Mérida, Mexico.

Jan Tumlir is an art writer and teacher, who lives and works in Los Angeles. He is a contributing editor for the art journal X-TRA, and his writing has appeared in Artforum, Aperture, Flash Art, Art Review, and Frieze. Tumlir is a member of the humanities and sciences faculty at Art Center College of Design.

6 × 9 inches, 128 pages, hardcover
ISBN 978-1-941753-27-9

Design by IN-FO.CO

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"Art history without a philosophy of history—'there is no script,' as Nesbit says—is also art history without a tragic dimension. With the pragmatists and, for that matter, with Deleuze, she shares a fundamental optimism and a forward- looking gaze. But like Focillon and Schapiro, Nesbit also has high aspirations for her discipline. She throws art history a lifeline." —Christopher Wood, Artforum

The pragmatism of Charles Peirce and William James and John Dewey exists as it moved, absorbing and absorbed. Conclusions remain provisions, time riding on, perpetually unsettled, nocturnal, opaque. Many questions and conditions remain. They will recur. The future has not eased. In our own lifetime there have been stakes, some old, some new, in continuing to write about the time and place and point of art. It is important to mark them. Pragmatism is above all a way of working, it starts from the present

First published in 2013 and quickly going out of print, The Pragmatism in the History of Art traces the questions that modern art history has used to make sense of the changes overtaking both art and life. A genealogy emerges naturally, elliptically. Several generations cross back and forth over the Atlantic. The questions combine with case studies as a story unfolds: the work of Meyer Schapiro, Henri Focillon, Alexander Dorner, George Kubler, Robert Herbert, T. J. Clark and Linda Nochlin is scrutinized; the philosophy of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze and the films of Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard show distinctly pragmatic effects; artists discussed include Vincent Van Gogh, Isamu Noguchi, Lawrence Weiner and Gordon Matta-Clark. The relevance of this material for the art and art-writing of our own time becomes increasingly clear.

Molly Nesbit is Professor in the Department of Art at Vassar College and a contributing editor of Artforum. This is the first book in her Pre-Occupations series, preceding Midnight: the Tempest Essays.

8.5 × 13.5 inches, 112 pages, softcover
ISBN 978-1-941753-32-3

Design by Chad Kloepfer
Co-published by Inventory Press and Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University

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Published on the occasion of her first solo show in the United States in twenty years, Anna Oppermann: Drawings surveys the early drawings of this underrecognized German artist. Co-published with the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, this book is the first on Oppermann produced in the United States and features a number of new texts on her work by Connie Butler, Chief Curator, Hammer Museum, UCLA; Meta Marina Beeck, Assistant Curator, Kunsthalle Bielefeld; and a conversation between Carpenter Center director Dan Byers and Ute Vorkoeper, Curator, Anna Oppermann Estate.

Beginning in the mid-1960s through the early ‘70s, Oppermann (1940–1993), best known for her immersive installations, created an astonishing series of surreal drawings that uniquely explode the private space of the home, a traditionally feminine sphere.

These early drawings contribute to a feminist re-centering of such spaces associated with women, casting everyday objects as symbolic, consequential protagonists: houseplants sprawl to take over the picture plane, windows and mirrors provide views into other worlds, and tables display drawings that open out into new domestic scenes.

By placing her own body—her knees, arms, the back of her head—as reference points in the work, Oppermann coaxes the viewer to take on her subjectivity and perspective, emphasizing the gendered realms of the home and the relationships that we form both within and to our private spaces.

9 × 7.25 inches, 88 pages, softcover
ISBN 978-1-941753-23-1
Foreword by Luis A. Croquer. Text by John Gordon, Jennifer Wulffson Bedford, Jennie C. Jones

Design by IN-FO.CO
Co-published by the Rose Art Museum

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In 1967, for her first museum retrospective, Louise Nevelson (1899—1988) was given carte blanche to transform the Rose Art Museum into an all-encompassing, theatrical environment for her sculpture. Nevelson installed her show across the whole museum, draping the walls of the permanent collection with the colors that reflected the black, white, gold, and navy palette of her works. Louise Nevelson: I Must Recompose the Environment includes never before published exhibition layouts (annotated by Nevelson), installation photographs and texts that place this show in context of Nevelson’s career and the museum’s early history. This publication accompanies now out-of-print catalogue of the 1967 show organized in collaboration with the Whitney Museum and serves as a document both of the then-nascent museum and the solidifying legacy of an artistic icon.

6 × 9 inches, 296 pages, hardcover
ISBN 978-1-941753-149
Design by Project Projects

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“'What Was An Author?' Right from the opening words of these Tempest Essays, we see the great Molly Nesbit at work undoing and radically repositioning the time codes for the artist. She creates a living archive of critical debates, politics and philosophies. She paints a vivid picture of the many junctions between people, objects, quasi-objects and non-objects throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. This is a true protest against forgetting as well as a toolbox for contemporary art criticism. Call it a guidebook to the labyrinth of reality.” —Hans Ulrich Obrist

Midnight: The Tempest Essays returns the question of pragmatism to the everyday critical practice of the art historian. Illustrated case studies on Eugène Atget, Marcel Duchamp, Jean-Luc Godard, Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Rachel Whiteread, Gabriel Orozco, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Lawrence Weiner, Nancy Spero, Rem Koolhaas, Martha Rosler, Gerhard Richter, Matthew Barney and Richard Serra, among others, build to form new book-length lines of continuity and investigation.

Molly Nesbit is Professor in the Department of Art at Vassar College and a contributing editor of Artforum. This is the second book in her Pre-Occupations series, following The Pragmatism in the History of Art (2013). Her other books include Atget's Seven Albums (1992) and Their Common Sense (2000).

5 × 6.75 inches, 738 pages, softcover
ISBN 978-1-941753-20-0

Design by IN-FO.CO

ON SALE for $10 through July 12!!

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi is an artist, poet, and theorist. Her work in film, video, performance, text, photography, drawing, and sound explores the interplay between aesthetic and political valences in the public domain. Bio is a hybrid work that reconfigures canceled text and the World Wide Web. It captures a span of 365 days during which the artist updated the 160-character “bio” section of her Twitter account each day. While tweets are regularly captured by corporate data storage centers this “bio” section remains the only untraceable and non-archived part of the software’s superstructure.

Bio, immersively created via a proprietary app, ultimately left no record of itself, complicating the normative binaries of online/offline and digital/print. An experiment in erasure, self-deletion, and visibility in the expanded sphere of the net, Bio anchors itself in the wider lineage of artists’ canceled texts, but in the age of new data as “soft” power.

Gharavi has exhibited or participated in residencies or projects at Townhouse Gallery, MFA Boston, Pacific Film Archive, Triple Canopy, Pioneer Works, Serpentine Cinema, New Museum, Delfina Foundation, Nottingham Contemporary, among others. Recent publications include a translation of Waly Salomão’s Algaravias: Echo Chamber (Ugly Duckling Presse), The Distancing Effect (BlazeVOX), and Apparent Horizon 2 (Bonington Gallery). She completed an M.F.A. at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and a Ph.D. at Harvard University.

Edited by Elizabeth Thomas

6.75 × 9 inches, 208 pages, softcover
ISBN 978-1-941753-02-6

Design by Project Projects

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Established in 2007 by Marc Fischer, and featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Public Collectors encourages collectors of material culture—the kind that most museums won’t exhibit—to ‘open’ their collections to the public. Extending the popular website of the same name, this book presents a wide array of collections—some featured on the website, most newly assembled for publication—interspersed with commentary and essays exploring the problems and politics of collecting materials that may lack conventional monetary or cultural value. Marc Fischer is a Chicago-based artist and a member of Temporary Services, a group that has produced over 100 publications and organized and participated in dozens of exhibitions, projects, and events. Fischer and Brett Bloom of Temporary Services also run the publishing imprint Half Letter Press.