Vital signs : artists and the body /

"Behind this mask, another mask; I will never be done with removing all these faces," wrote the artist and poet Claude Cahun in 1930. Throughout the twentieth century, artists like Cahun have harnessed abstract notions of the body in nuanced engagements with aesthetics, politics, and ident...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tattersall, Lanka (Author), Lizcano Hernandez, Margarita (Author)
Other Authors: Okoyomon, Precious (Contributor), Gooch, Sheldon (Contributor), Dunham, Cyrus Grace, 1992- (Contributor)
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: New York, NY : The Museum of Modern Art, [2024]
Subjects:
Description
Summary:"Behind this mask, another mask; I will never be done with removing all these faces," wrote the artist and poet Claude Cahun in 1930. Throughout the twentieth century, artists like Cahun have harnessed abstract notions of the body in nuanced engagements with aesthetics, politics, and identity. And now, at a moment when the body has become a heightened subject of governance and debate in the United States and abroad--from the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade to more recent legislation restricting gender-affirming medical care--Vital Signs: Artists and the Body explores this multifaceted history and the new contexts in which it might be understood. Published to accompany a major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Vital Signs takes MoMA's celebrated collection as a starting point for a consideration of abstract art in the twentieth century, exploring its intimate ties to the complex, ecstatic, and contradictory experience of having a body. An introductory essay by Lanka Tattersall, the exhibition's curator, explores the intertwining of abstraction and figuration in modern art as it converges with feminist, queer, and Black studies; contributions by the poet and artist Precious Okoyomon and the writer Cyrus Dunham bring new language to bear on the relationship between our outer forms and inner lives--back cover.
Item Description:Catalog of an exhibition held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 3, 2024-February 22, 2025.
Physical Description:148 pages : illustrations (chiefly color, some folded) ; 28 cm
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references (pages 137-141).
ISBN:9781633451650
1633451658