Building on the Art and Materiality Symposium held on the occasion of the Smart Museum's exhibition The Allure of Matter, this publication considers the important but often overlooked role materials have played in the history of Chinese art and inclu...

Claudia Wieser's artistic practice draws from history, architecture, and design, often playing with time and space. Influenced by artists who embraced spirituality – such as Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee – she considers abstraction...

From the 1980s, many Chinese artists have experimented with a range of unconventional materials. Their works–in plastic, paper, silk, ash, and tobacco–form a major trend in Chinese art. "The Allure of Matter" offers the first serious consideration of...

Accompanying an exhibition at the University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art, this book is the definitive introduction to Chicago's first artistic movement, the Monster Roster. The volume includes an overview of the artists involved, such as Leon Go...

The companion to a one-of-a-kind exhibition at the University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art, "Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art" explores the role of the meal in contemporary art. Feast offers the first survey of the artist-orchestrat...

Founded in 1989, the influential Delhi-based artists' organization Sahmat has offered a platform for artists, writers, poets, musicians, and actors to create and present works that promote artistic freedom and secular, egalitarian values. A companion...

Throughout the vast interior of the United States, contemporary artists are responding to the world around them and reshaping it in unexpected ways. Published to coincide with an exhibition of the same name that first appeared last year in the Nether...

When it is completed in 2009 the Three Gorges Dam, a hydroelectric dam which spans the Yangzi River in China, will generate enough electricity to power four cities the size of Los Angeles. Despite the fact that it will drastically reduce coal consump...

Since the 1960s, many artists have incorporated ecological concerns into their work, an endeavor that has required new strategies in art-making. To explore recent American manifestations of these interests, the David and Alfred Smart Museum commissio...

In his new book, Wu Hung raises timely questions about artistic freedom and censorship. Here, as in the Smart Museum's exhibition "Canceled: Exhibiting Experimental Art in China", Wu uses the government's cancellation of the exhibition It's Me (Beiji...