Publications

• Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect

  $12 (Fall 2019)

  The Wall of Respect, a 1967 public artwork, depicted black heroes and heroines in the areas of music, art, literature, politics, and sports. No sign indicates its existence today, but the wall sparked a nationwide mural movement, platformed community engagement, and was a seminal work of the black arts movement. While the wall needs to be marked, this new publication, Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect, argues against making a monument of the original site. Instead, editor Romi Crawford asked a range of artists, designers, and architects—each with differing degrees of proximity to the wall’s legacy—to realize antiheroic and unstatic strategies for commemoration. The result is a collection of “fleeting monuments” that invite readers to enact these gestures, either in mind or real time. Using the intimate and portable book format, Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect commemorates the wall while proposing new strategies for embodied public memory.

  Artist contributors include: Miguel Aguilar, Wisdom Baty, Mark Blanchard, Bethany Collins, D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem, Julio Finn, Maria Gaspar, Wills Glasspiegel, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Kelly Lloyd, Faheem Majeed, Nicole Mitchell, Naeem Mohaiemen, Amus Mor, Karega Kofi Moyo, Robert E. Paige, Kamau Amu Patton, Jefferson Pinder, Cauleen Smith, Rohan Ayinde Smith, solYchaski, Norman Teague, Jan Tichy, Mechtild Widrich, Bernard Williams, and Lauren Berlant.

  About the editor: Romi Crawford, is professor in the Visual and Critical Studies and Liberal Arts Departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research revolves primarily around formations of racial and gendered identity and the relation to American visual arts, film, and popular culture. She makes regular contributions to publications on African American art and culture including, Theaster Gates, Black Archive (Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2017); “Do For Self: The AACM and the Chicago Style” in Support Networks (University of Chicago Press, 2014); and “Ebony and Jet On Our Minds…In Our Homes. On the Wall” in Speaking of People: Ebony, Jet and Contemporary Art (Studio Museum in Harlem, 2014). She is coauthor (with Abdul Alkalimat and Rebecca Zorach) of The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (Northwestern University Press, 2017). Crawford was cocurator (with Lisa Lee) of the 2017 Open Engagement Conference, themed “Justice.”

  This publication is graciously funded with support from the Graham Foundation.

• Candida Alvarez / HERE: A Visual Reader

  $30 (Fall 2019)

  Featuring contributions from Elizabeth Alexander, Dawoud Bey, Coco Fusco, Kellie Jones, Elizabeth Murray, Terry R. Myers, Kay Rosen, Daniel Quiles, and others; (edited by Fulla Abdul-Jabbar and Caroline Picard).

  “Alvarez’s syncretic process belongs to a strategy of cultural fusion and hybridity that allows passage between different contexts and histories,” wrote art critic Susan Snodgrass. HERE: A Visual Reader aims to capture Alvarez’s work in print, amplifying the artist’s 2017 Chicago Cultural Center exhibition to further develop the conversation around her legacy. Combining the voices of scholars, critics, and artists, HERE: A Visual Reader demonstrates how Alvarez emerges from an intricate constellation of influence that is at once grounded in Chicago while reflecting her own New York and Puerto Rican background, feminist attunement, and an overarching interest in conceptual and formal technique. This book is produced with support from the Chicago Community Trust and the Effata Foundation.

  Candida Alvarez was born to Puerto Rican parents in New York City. She received an MFA from the Yale School of Art and moved to Chicago shortly thereafter. Her work is included in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and El Museo del Barrio, NYC. Reviews of her work have appeared in various publications, including Art Forum, Art in America, Art News, and The New York Times. She is a Professor in the Department of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

  This book is produced with support from the Chicago Community Trust and the Effata Foundation.

• 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).