Overview

Vital Signs looks closely at how abstraction is often intimately tied with expansive, fluid ideas of the bodily. Vital Signs looks closely at how abstraction is often intimately tied with expansive, fluid ideas of the bodily. Bringing together seemingly unalike categories-masculine/feminine, figurative/abstract, self/other, exotic/banal-into newly fused configurations, the publication shows how artists have often conceived of these categories as inextricably intertwined. With a focus on artists working in the 1960s and 70s who, with a few exceptions, identified as women, the catalogue is divided into three thematic sections. 'Mirror' explores the ways artists have honed in on the forms of the face and head as a distorted mirror; 'Matter' looks at how artists draw on the metaphorical resonances of the body in ways that suggest mutable morphologies, especially in relation to socially constructed definitions of gender, race, and sexuality; and 'Metamorphosis' examines how artists have used abstraction as a means to transform the human body into different modes of being: new identities, other animals, and spiritual or cosmological entities. An introductory essay Lanka Tattersall maps the historical precedents from a feminist and queer art historical perspective, while a prologue by poet and artist Precious Okoyomon and a focused meditation by Lambda Literary Award finalist Cyrus Grace Dunham open up new forms of language for questions around gender and abstraction.

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9781633451650

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Lanka Tattersall is the Laurenz Foundation Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Precious Okoyomon is an artist and poet. Cyrus Dunham is a writer, actor, and activist. Dunham's debut book, A Year Without a Name: A Memoir (2021), was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Margarita Lizcano Hernandez is a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Drawings and Prints at MoMA. Sheldon Gooch is a Curatorial Assistant at MoMA PS1.

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