Publications

• Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect

  $30 (Spring 2021) / or $10 courtesy of the Field Foundation via inquiry

  The Wall of Respect, a work of public art created in 1967 at the corner of Forty-third Street and Langley Avenue on Chicago’s South Side, depicted Black leaders in music, art, literature, politics, theater, and sports. The Wall sparked a nationwide mural movement, provided a platform for community engagement, and was a foundational work of the Black Arts Movement. There is no longer any physical indication of its existence, but it still needs to be remembered. Romi Crawford proposes the concept of “fleeting monuments,” asking a range of artists and writers to realize antiheroic, non static, and impermanent strategies for commemoration. Featuring contributions from Miguel Aguilar, Abdul Akalimat and the Amus Mor Project, Wisdom Baty, Lauren Berlant, Mark Blanchard, Bethany Collins, Darryl Cowherd, D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem, Julio Finn, Maria Gaspar, Theaster Gates, Wills Glasspiegel, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Stephanie Koch, Kelly Lloyd, Damon Locks, Haki Madhubuti, Faheem Majeed, Nicole Mitchell Gantt, Naeem Mohaiemen, K. Kofi Moyo, Robert E. Paige, Kamau Patton, Jefferson Pinder, Cauleen Smith, Rohan Ayinde, solYchaski, Norman Teague, Jan Tichy, Visiting Val Gray Ward, Mechtild Widrich, and Bernard Williams. Distributed by the University of Minnesota Press.

  Advance Praise: “Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect is stunning, revelatory, and moving—a magical accomplishment. It is history, art, witnessing come alive through all the senses. It is deeply important. Read it, read it again, gift it, consult it, quote it, and remember.” —Yo-Yo Ma

  “These ‘Fleeting Monuments’ are rich, generous gifts grounded in this Black nationalist geography that continues to offer reflection, hope, and joy.” —Dr. Kymberly Pinder

  “The Wall of Respect is in all of us, and this book is an ideally heartwarming story of how Chicago has created a culture of resistance, resilience, and revolution. A must-read.” —Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky.

  “This book is a clarion call for us all to reimagine how we remember both the dreams deferred and the joys of history. Once you step into its pages, you realize it is also a portal to a dazzling world away from the dreariness of debates about monuments and memorials to a free world where our radical imaginations are unleashed to create something truly beautiful and new.” —Dr. Lisa Yun Lee

  This project is partially supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art through the foundation’s initiative Art Design Chicago. Additional support comes from the Field Foundation of Illinois and the Graham Foundation or Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

   

• Candida Alvarez / HERE: A Visual Reader

  $30 (available for purchase through our distributor SPD)

  Featuring contributions from Elizabeth Alexander, Dawoud Bey, Coco Fusco, Kellie Jones, Elizabeth Murray, Terry R. Myers, Daniel R. Quiles, Kay Rosen, Daniel Schulman, Lowery Stokes Sims, and Rebecca Walker. Introduction by editors Fulla Abdul-Jabbar and Caroline Picard; book design by Sonnenzimmer.

  Candida Alvarez. Here was the artist’s first major institutional exhibition, taking place at the Chicago Cultural Center and reflecting forty years of her painting. Embracing and further contextualizing her work, Candida Alvarez: Here. A Visual Reader features full-color reproductions of individual artworks and views of the exhibition as well as images from her Fall/Winter 2017 menswear collaboration with Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons. Edited by Fulla Abdul-Jabbar and Caroline Picard, this book presents a selection of articles from 1983 to the present; conversations between Alvarez and Dawoud Bey, Kay Rosen, Daniel Schulman, and Rebecca Walker; and newly commissioned texts including a prose response by Elizabeth Alexander as well as essays by the exhibition’s curator, Terry R. Myers, and art historians Kellie Jones and Daniel R. Quiles. Candida Alvarez: Here. A Visual Reader thus captures Alvarez’s work in print to spark further conversations about her legacy.

  About the artist: Candida Alvarez is an artist who responds through intuition and imagination to intimate moments in life. Her paintings, drawings, and collages blur the boundaries between the conceptual, the intuitive and the abstract. Alvarez received a MFA from the Yale School of Art in Painting and Printmaking in 1997. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in the summer of 1981 and received her BA from Fordham University, Lincoln Center, in 1977. Her work is currently in the public collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Alvarez holds the distinguished F. H. Sellers Professorship in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. During 2010–12, she was interim Graduate Dean at SAIC. She is represented by Gavlak, Los Angeles/Palm Beach, and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago. Alvarez is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation 2019 Painters & Sculptors Grant.

• Holy Shit / Novo en el Mictlán

  Luis Felipe Fabre
  Translated by John Pluecker

  $15 (Summer 2020)

  Mexico City poet, Luis Felipe Fabre’s new book about Salvador Novo (1904-1974), Escribir con caca  was originally published by Sexto Piso in 2017. Novo is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic figures of contemporary Mexican literature, garnering critical attention from the likes of Octavio Paz, Carlos Monsiváis, and Guillermo Sheridan. However, due to the broad spectrum of genres and registers that Novo embraced, his own suspicion of his poetry (or poetry in general), his extroverted homosexuality in an openly intolerant era, or his controversial political positions, Novo remains peripheral to mainstream literature. Fabre’s provocative poetic essay attends to those questions and the resulting book is sure to occupy a prominent place in Novo’s bibliography.

  Luis Felipe Fabre was born in Mexico City in 1974. He has been awarded grants from the National Fund for Culture and the Arts in the category of Young Artists in the periods 2004–5 and 2007–8, and is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte. He has published a volume of essays, Leyendo agujeros. Ensayos sobre (des)escritura, antiescritura y no escritura (2005), and the poetry collections  Cabaret Provenza (2007) and La sodomía en la Nueva España (2010), and is the editor of the anthology Divino Tesoro. Muestra de nueva poesía mexicana (2008).