Gray Center Publications
Several artists and scholars have collaborated on books that are a result of their work at the Gray Center. These document and expand upon ideas first explored during their fellowships and other projects.
Art in Pursuit of Common Cause (Delmonico Books, 2024)
Edited with text by Abigail Winograd and Jill Sterrett. Introduction by Marlies Carruth. Text by Don Meyer and Michael Christiano.
This publication examines the development and reception of Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40. This project included the work of 29 artists installed at 19 venues throughout Chicago and was curated by Gray Center Fellow Abigail Winograd (2020–2021).
The volume commemorates the widely discussed exhibition, which sought to underscore art’s power to catalyze change and to unleash the imagination on pressing social challenges, including environmental justice, public health crises, economic inequality, and others.
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Azbuka Strikes Back: An Anti-Colonial ABCS (Buchhandlung Walther König, 2024)
By Slavs and Tatars and Leah Feldman. Illustrations by Amine Boulkroun.
Azbuka Strikes Back is a mordant look at the constantly changing alphabets of 25 million people in the time of the Soviet Union. This interactive book offers a whirlwind tour of ABCs and anticolonialism in the former Soviet sphere. An artist book for children and adults alike, it takes the universal idea of an alphabet and unpacks it in fun, incisive, and informative ways. The book helps us better understand where letters come from and why they make certain sounds, not to mention their baggage when it comes to gender, race, labor, and empire. With interactive buttons for unusual sounds, it explores areas of pronunciation not commonly found in English. Available in two languages: English and Kazakh.
Leah Feldman and Slavs and Tatars were Gray Center Fellows from 2021 to 2023.
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Cauleen Smith: Breaking Cinema. Experimental Film 2010–2023 (Mousse Publishing, 2024)
With an essay by Romi Crawford.
Operating in multiple materials and arenas, interdisciplinary artist Cauleen Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, moving images, and science fiction, she makes things that deploy the tactics of these disciplines while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants. The book Breaking Cinema. Experimental Film 2010–2023, adds to the growing scholarship on Smith’s work, as art historian Romi Crawford elucidates a critical phase of the artist’s career and how Smith recasts film history in the context of the artistic and cultural ferment of Chicago’s South Side.
Cauleen Smith (with Robert Bird) was a Gray Center Fellow from 2018 to 2020.
Romi Crawford (with Theaster Gates) was a Gray Center Fellow in 2020–2021.
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Portable Gray, Vol.7, No.2
The United States of Criticism
(The University of Chicago Press, 2024)
Contributors: Meralis Alvarez-Morales; William Ayers; Michael B.; Ted Barrow; Adrienne Brown; Adam Bush; Rikki Byrd; Stephanie Cristello; Alireza Doostdar; Zaria El-Fil; Ghenwa Hayek; Thomas Hirschhorn; Britt Julious; Paula Kamps; Sam Korman; Joel Kuennen; Lisa Yun Lee; Thomas Love; Peter Margasak; Matthew Metzger; Fred Moten; Lauren O’Neill-Butler; Our Literal Speed; Dieter Roelstraete; Saroop Singh; Jennifer Smart; Ashlyn Sparrow; Ian F. Svenonius; Regina Victor; Erik Wenzel
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Pope.L: Campaign (Mousse Publishing, 2019)
Edited by Dieter Roelstraete. Text by Zachary Cahill, Klea Charitou, Iris Colburn, Tianyu Guo, Jeffrey Hsu, Leon Hösl, Vidura Jang Bahadur, Michal Koszycki, Chichan Kwong, Cristen Leifheit, Jasmin Liang, Brock Lownes, Elizabeth McClafferty, Adrienne Meyers, Pope.L, Monika Szewczyk, and Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt.
This book is a three-part report on a collaboration between artist Pope.L and curator Dieter Roelstraete, who were Gray Center Fellows from 2017 to 2019. It explores issues of connectedness, home, migration, and art’s relationship to knowledge.
The book began in the spring of 2016 with an invitation to the artist to participate in the 14th edition of Documenta, a recurring art exhibition in Kassel, Germany. Pope.L’s contribution was the immersive sound installation, Whispering Campaign, consisting of thousands of hours of whispered content addressing nationhood and borders, and broadcast throughout Athens and Kassel using both speakers and live “whisperers.”
The second chapter of the campaign was inaugurated at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts, curated by Yesomi Umolu, revolving around the Brown People Are the Wrens in the Parking Lot project. The third and final chapter of the artist’s campaign unfolded as a course co-taught at the University of Chicago by Pope.L and Roelstraete, titled Art and Knowledge.
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Photos: Tom Van Eynde