Art and Gender

Sadie Benning is not only among the country's most respected and influential video artists, she also broke cultural ground as a founding member of the multimedia feminist band Le Tigre. Suspended Animation, the first monograph on the artist and the catalogue of her first U.S. museum exhibition, introduces Benning's paintings and Play Pause, an ambitious new two-channel video installation. Benning's videos, which she began to make in the late 1980s with a Fisher-Price Pixelvision 2000 "toy camera," are known for their explorations of loneliness, alienation, gender ambiguity and her own developing lesbian identity. Benning's recent paintings--flat, illustrative, exuberant--are playful, imaginary portraits that address similar themes. Play Pause, created entirely from hundreds of Benning's drawings, offers a rhythmic and affectionate view of contemporary life in a city's streets, parks and gay bars. Includes written contributions by Eileen Myles and Aleksandar Hemon, and a conversation with the New York painter Amy Sillman.

A compilation of Sadie Benning's video works produced between 1989 and 1998. Sadie Benning is a lesbian videomaker who began making videos when she was 15 years old using a Fisher-Price Pixelvision toy camera. Benning's early works were made in the privacy of her childhood bedroom, using scrawled and handwritten text from diary entries to record the thoughts and images that reveal the longings and complexities of a developing identity. Evoking in turn playful seduction and painful honesty, Benning's floating, close-up camera functions as a witness to her intimate diaristic revelations and as an accomplice in defining her evocative experimental form. Her work emerges from a place half-innocent and half-adult, with all the honesty, humor, and real desperation of a personality trapped and uncomfortable, just coming to self-awareness. Her more recent work moves beyond the Pixelvision camera into animation and film

Portraits and texts recover lost queer history- the lives of people who didn't conform to gender norms, from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries."A serious-and seriously successful-queer history recovery project." -Publishers WeeklyKatherina Hetzeldorfer, tried "for a crime that didn't have a name" (same sex sexual relations) and sentenced to death by drowning in 1477; Charles aka Mary Hamilton, publicly whipped for impersonating a man in eighteenth-century England; Clara, aka "Big Ben," over whom two jealous women fought in 1926 New York- these are just three of the lives that the artist Ria Brodell has reclaimed for queer history in Butch Heroes. Brodell offers a series of twenty-eight portraits of forgotten but heroic figures, each accompanied by a brief biographical note. They are individuals who were assigned female at birth but whose gender presentation was more masculine than feminine, who did not want to enter into heterosexual marriage, and who often faced dire punishment for being themselves. Brodell's detailed and witty paintings are modeled on Catholic holy cards, slyly subverting a religious template. The portraits and the texts offer intriguing hints of lost lives- cats lounge in the background of domestic settings; one of the figures is said to have been employed variously as "a prophet, a soldier, or a textile worker"; another casually holds a lit cigarette. Brodell did extensive research for each portrait, piecing together a life from historical accounts, maps, journals, paintings, drawings, and photographs, finding the heroic in the forgotten.

This long-awaited comprehensive monograph on James Nares brings together his paintings and films. Upon his arrival in New York in 1974, British-born James Nares became a central member of the city's vibrant No Wave art scene, making experimental Super 8 films, playing in downtown bands, and staging live performances. The following decade, he turned to painting, using handmade brushes to create monumental strokes that are almost three-dimensional in their detail and depth. Today, Nares continues to employ the mediums of film and paint to explore physicality, motion, and the unfolding of time, as seen in his 2011 video "Street, " exhibited to great acclaim at such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This definitive monograph, produced in close collaboration with the artist, surveys the entirety of Nares's career. Lushly illustrated, including paintings, photographs, and stills that have never before been published, the book features essays by leading film critic Amy Taubin, cultural writer Glenn O'Brien, and innovative film curator Ed Halter in addition to an illuminating conversation between Nares and longtime friend and fellow artist Christopher Wool.