Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow
Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi
Published by Prospect New Orleans and Rizzoli Electa, 2021
Designed by Content Object
Edited by Pickman Editorial
In the 2021 iteration of this major triennial exhibition, artistic directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi bring together 51 artists to engage New Orleans as context as they reconsider the concept of history, both global and local. Through many artistic strategies, architectural interventions, and public activations, the exhibition explores current social and political conditions that ask for a reconsideration of the past.
The accompanying catalog—a rich collection of contributions from curators, poets, artists, and cultural critics—considers several key themes that animate the ambitious artist projects: history and haunting; landscape and the natural world; performance, ritual, and the public sphere; and intimacy, life, and death. The remarkable group of voices contributing to the catalogue includes:
Essayists: Jeffery U. Darensbourg, Amber Rose Johnson and Meg Onli, Naima J. Keith, Thomas J. Lax, Diana Nawi, Kristina Kay Robinson. Photo Essayist: L. Kasimu Harris. Poet: Robin Coste Lewis. Contributors: Carlos Agredano, Taylor Renee Aldridge, Jordan Amirkhani, Bryan Barcena, Andrew Blackley, Jessica Bell Brown, Olivia Butera, Taylor Bythewood-Porter, Grace Deveney, Faye Gleisser, Ann Hackett, Essence Harden, Ryan Inouye, Andy Johnson, Bana Kattan, Dana Kopel, Simone Krug, Christy LeMaster, Nancy Lim, Lucia Olubunmi Momoh, fari nzinga, Ade J. Omotosho, Georgie Payne, Jared Quinton, Jared C. B. Richardson, Nicole Smythe-Johnson, Charlie Tatum, Susan Thompson, Emily Wilkerson, Allison Young
Diana Nawi with contributions by Grace Deveney, Michael Stone Richards and an interview by Franklin Sirmans
Published by Lehmann Maupin, Massimo De Carlo, and DelMonico 2021
Designed by Purtill Family Business
Edited by Pickman Editorial
Chicago-based painter McArthur Binion combines collage, drawing and painting to create autobiographical abstractions. He paints minimalist grids and patterns over copies of his personal documents and photographs, including pages from his handwritten address book and his birth certificate, as well as images of his childhood home and photographs of his hands. This book explores Binion’s DNA series and includes reproductions of more than 80 of his paintings and works on paper, as well as essays investigating this series through the lens of art history, labor, music and writing.
Offering in-depth formal analysis and contextualizing his trajectory within the interdisciplinary cultural scenes of New York and Chicago, McArthur Binion: DNA provides insight into the rigorous and experimental spirit that has defined the artist’s larger practice and illuminates his place within a critical history of abstraction in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Press and reviews
Diana Nawi
Published by Long Museum and Hauser & Wirth, 2019
Designed by Matsumoto Incorporated
Edited by Pickman Editorial
Published on the occasion of Mark Bradford’s exhibition Los Angeles, at the Long Museum in Shanghai, China. Large-scale installation and detail photography guide the reader through the exhibition of this L.A.-based-artist’s dense, multilayered paintings and sculptures. The cover has a die-cut, tipped-on image of one element of a large sculptural installation.
Diana Nawi with David Boxer, Olive Senior, Nicole Smythe-Johnson
Published by Pérez Art Museum Miami and DelMonico Books-Prestel, 2017
Designed by Beverly Joel, pulp, ink.
Edited by Pickman Editorial
This monograph of the Jamaican self-taught artist John Dunkley offers a generously illustrated overview of his powerful work. Reproducing the intricate details and somber palette that characterize John Dunkley’s paintings, this book thoughtfully situates the artist’s oeuvre within its historical context. Working in a period that laid the foundation for Jamaica’s nationalist movement, Dunkley was a part of a generation of West Indian men who traveled abroad to work and returned home to contribute to the formation of an independent nation, Marcus Garvey being the most critical of such figures. Essays from David Boxer, the leading authority on Dunkley, and Olive Senior, a historian of West Indian culture, focus on the social importance of Dunkley’s paintings and sculptures. Paying tribute to an extraordinary artist, this book showcases his vivid and mysterious work.
Published by Gregory R. Miller & Co., Pérez Art Museum Miami, and Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, 2016
Diana Nawi and Claudia Schmuckli with Alexis Vaillant
Designed by Anjali Pala, Miko McGinty Inc.
Edited by Lucy Flint
The handcrafted and vibrantly colorful works of Brooklyn-based sculptor Matthew Ronay (born 1976) evoke biological processes and organic forms as much as they draw on spiritual and mythological narratives. Influences ranging from science fiction, chemistry, Surrealism and mycology emerge in his psychedelic reliefs and installations.
This book documents the artist's first major museum presentations in the United States, with an eponymous exhibition at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, as well as a newly commissioned project, When Two Are in One, at the Pérez Art Museum, Miami. Collected here are Ronay's most significant sculptures and installations from the last four years alongside major new texts that elucidate the artist's singular vision.
Diana Nawi with Naomi Beckwith, Erica Moiah James, Ralph Lemon, and Philippe Vergne
Published by Pérez Art Museum Miami and DelMonico Books-Prestel, 2015
Designed by STUDIO LHOOQ, Mylinh Trieu Nguyen
Edited by Pickman Editorial
This book accompanies the largest exhibition to date of Nari Ward’s groundbreaking sculptures, videos, works on paper, and installations, which tackle themes of African-American history and culture, the dynamics of power and politics, and the Caribbean diaspora.Featuring work from the 1990s to today, this mid-career survey of Nari Ward explores the artist’s best-known work in assemblage and installation, as well as his multimedia investigations. Employing the detritus of modern life, Ward creates arresting narratives about migration, social justice, and cultural identity. His enormous pieces have tested the boundaries of installation art, often creating immersive experiences for the viewer. The book features essays that approach Ward’s work through the lenses of site-specificity and Caribbean art history, a reflection by Ralph Lemon on his collaborations with Ward, and an interview with Philippe Vergne that focuses on some of the artist’s major projects. The result is a visually and intellectually stimulating in-depth look at an artist whose deft use of found objects and persistent questioning of social structures, constructions of identity, and notions of place and belonging has earned him international accolades.
Diana Nawi with Ryan Inouye
Published by Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2015
Designed by STUDIO LHOOQ, Mylinh Trieu Nguyen
Edited by Pickman Editorial
This book accompanies the exhibition Iman Issa: Heritage Studies, which marks the US debut of Issa’s newest body of work. Interested in exploring the way in which historical objects resonate with (and are deployed by) the present, Issa’s exhibition reinterprets various objects from the past as newly imagined forms. These re-envisioned works are accompanied by interpretative texts that reference the language of institutions as well as historical record. Embodying the cool and seductive minimalist aesthetic for which she is known, these sculptures represent a shift in scale for the artist and an expansion of her material vocabulary. They offer a formal means of exploring the cultural, social, and historical implications of objects and their reverberations across time.
Diana Nawi with Huey Copeland and Rebecca Zorach
Published by Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2014
Designed by STUDIO LHOOQ, Mylinh Trieu Nguyen
Edited by Pickman Editorial
This catalogue accompanies the exhibition, Adler Guerrier: Formulating a Plot at Pérez Art Museum Miami. It features an essay by Diana Nawi, the curator of the exhibition, charting the course of Guerrier’s practice, a text by Huey Copeland, Associate Professor of Art History at Northwestern University, “Sinuous Coordination: On the Photography of Adler Guerrier,” and an interview between the artist and Rebecca Zorach, Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago.
