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unmonumental, the book (and ebook!)

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

OCTOBER 13, 2013

The unmonumental book and e-book are now available on blurb

This small volume contains a selection of images from unmonumental, a project by Joy Garnett, with an essay by Tom McGlynn.

The e-book is a variation on the hard copy, and includes media: two 3-minute clips of unmonumental video. It is available in iPad and iPod touch (iBooks format).

 

unmonumental
2008-2013
By joy garnett, essay by tom mcglynn
Publish Date: October 13 2013, 07:11 PDT
Hardcover, Dust Jacket, Small Square (7×7in), 40 pgs.
Premium Paper, lustre finish.
US $38.00
ebook (iPad iBooks format), 43 pgs
US $5.99

 

unmonumental is an ongoing social media performance that generates and instantly shares photographs of ephemeral artifacts in the New York City streets. Five years running and comprising over 800 photographs, unmonumental has grown into a project of monumental proportions.

 

Joy Garnett is an interdisciplinary artist and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. Her paintings, based on images she gathers from the Internet, examine the apocalyptic sublime at the intersections of media, politics and culture. Her social media projects engage the crossroads of our digital and material worlds. She teaches a seminar in the MFA program at City College, and pens a regular column for Art21 Magazine. She is represented by Winkleman Gallery, NY.

Tom McGlynn is an artist, writer, and independent curator based in the N.Y.C. area. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Cooper- Hewitt National Design Museum of the Smithsonian. He is the director of Beautiful Fields, an organization dedicated to socially- engaged curatorial projects, and is also currently a visiting lecturer at Parsons/the New School. 

UPDATE Oct 17, 2013: The unmonumental e-book, which includes video, is now also available through the Apple iBookstore (iTunes):

• $5.99
• Available on iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.
• Category: Photography
• Published:Oct 03, 2013
• Publisher: Blurb Inc.
• Seller: Blurb, Inc.
• Print Length: 43 Pages
• Language: English

 

http://unmonumental.org

Interview in Arabic Lit: AZ Abushady: Revolutionary Egyptian Poet, Feminist, Beekeeper, and More

In Arabic Literature (in English): the excellent M. Lynx Qualey's interview with me about Abushady:

AZ Abushady: Revolutionary Egyptian Poet, Feminist, Beekeeper, and More

By mlynxqualey on August 26, 2013

Artist and writer Joy Garnett (@joygarnett) is working on a book about her grandfather, Ahmed Zaki Abushady, the Egyptian poet and bee scientist. She answered a few questions about AZ Abushady, his work, and her book project:

AZ Abushady as a young man. 1909.

 

ArabLit: When did you first become interested in your grandfather’s life and work (in a serious way)? What role did family stories play? Can you describe your current book-project and what it will encompass?

 

Joy Garnett: The book is a family memoir and an adventure story – a love story – that focuses on Abushady’s life, his work as a poet and bee scientist, and his premature death in relative obscurity in the US. It’s not a biography in the conventional sense. I have an inside story to offer, told through family members and Abushady’s own voice. My discovery of  an archive containing his letters and decades of correspondence was a pivotal moment. They reveal how his personal story is entangled with political and cultural conflicts played out from 1922 to 1946 in Egypt. Central to the story is the point of view of my aunt Safeya, the source of so much of this material. She is Abushady’s oldest daughter and the last living family link to that time. So, I am telling an idiosyncratic story partly through her, and in a way that I think anyone will relate to, whether or not they’re interested in Egypt. Specialists in Modern Arabic poetry and Egypt between the wars will, I hope, be interested as well.

I grew up hearing stories my mother told me about her childhood in Alexandria. Abushady loomed large, but his significance was related in broad strokes. It was all a bit vague and romantic. I was in college when I started to get a real sense of who my grandfather was. I started studying fusha at McGill’s Institute of Islamic studies and got into a conversation with an Egyptian classmate. She set me straight.

When I finally got to Egypt, it was on a student loan. I enrolled in the American University in Cairo’s summer language program. I was twenty. I made a point of looking for Abushady’s books and asking questions about him. I started to figure out who my family was. Once back at the Institute, I sought out critical articles about his poetry, but this was premature. The bulk of critical writing in English was still being written.

 

In my twenties, I stopped studying Arabic and Abushady altogether. I decided to pursue an art career instead. There was a point when I realized it was either him or me, and I had to make a choice. Many years passed where I barely thought about him, and then a few years ago I felt the pull. Even dead, Abushady is a force of Nature.

When my mother, aunt, and uncle started to grow old and sick, I was jolted back into thinking about this project. I taped interviews with them.  I had a day job in a museum library that gave me free access to things like JSTOR and interlibrary loans. And of course, this time around I have the Internet.

I’ve spent the past couple of years traveling to different archives and doing research independently to try to piece together the many parts of Abushady’s life, which is not easy. As a physician, bacteriologist, beekeeper, agricultural and social reformer, poet and publisher, he defies categorization. I want to bring together what I’ve discovered about his main achievements in a single narrative. I would like to show the extent of his influence on Modern Arabic poetry as well as his impact on bee husbandry in England and Egypt. For him, poetry and bees were deeply interconnected. But of course, no one in Arabic literature circles knows much about his bee science contributions and vice versa. The connections are interesting.

Read full interview......

 

 

Joy Garnett: Unmonumental @ Memphis Social, May 2013

Joy Garnett, unmonumental book (2013)

 

Video and objects from my Unmonumental project ~ http://unmonumental.org ~ will be included in Memphis Social in May 2013. I will produce an unmonumental book, available to print on demand, as well as unmomunental multiples to coincide with the exhibition. More information to come.

"Memphis Social"

an apexart franchise exhibition, 2013
curated by Tom McGlynn (Beautiful Fields collective)

May 10-18, 2013
 
Memphis Social is an exhibition and performance event that hopes to broaden the definitions of a socially engaged art happening. Memphis is a place that becomes universal in its specifics. The wider world knows the importance of Memphis as the birthplace of the Blues, yet, locally the blues still live there. It's being the location of Martin Luther King's assassination is important to the wider public, but, locally, the struggle for racial and class equality still continues. Such specifics of time and tide that comprise a place like Memphis get freighted downriver and into common knowledge, until the city itself becomes a larger, more universal metaphor, like Woodstock or Gettysburg, Waterloo or Bethlehem.

Memphis Social is not ostensibly about Memphis, but the city as a determined social environment plays a big part in providing a rich ground for some of the social/aesthetic directions in the exhibition. Through specifically oriented performances and artwork, Memphis Social will not attempt to recreate "the city" or re-enact "the social" but will deeply consider the idea that different interpretations of society still exist, in both specific and universal ways.

On view through May 18th at multiple sites in Memphis, Tennessee: The Hyde Gallery at the Memphis College of Art, The Cotton Museum, Marshall Arts, Crosstown Arts, and Caritas Village Community Center.
 
Featuring work and projects by over 50 artists including:

Kara Walker, Doug Ashford, Greely Myatt, Virginia Overton, Tracey Moffatt, Chris Miner, William Pope L, Joe Fyfe, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Aviva Rahmani, David Sanchez- Burr, Tim Rollins, Kara Rooney, Jack Robinson, Mark Tribe and Chelsea Knight, Lester Merriweather, Stewart Home, Alex Dipple, Dwayne Butcher, Haley Morris-Cafiero, David Sandlin, Bullet Space NYC, U-Dig Dance Company, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, William Eggleston, Joshua Azzarella, Laura Napier, Merry Alpern, Elizabeth Dorbad, Richard Kern, Andrew Castrucci, Susan Brueghel, Alexandra Rojas, Terri Jones, Rob Van der Schoor, Eric Knoote, Jelle Kampen, Alexandra Kostrubula, Closet Gallery Stockholm, Bachrun LoMele, Jessica Lund, Matthew Garrison, Erin Jennings, Babette Shaw, Brendan Carroll, Michelle Doll, Terri Phillips, Joy Garnett, Lisa Dahl, Glen Garver, Mitch Epstein, Sheila Ross, Laura Ten Eyck, Norma Markely, Taylor Martin, Walter Sipser, Anton van Dalen, Quimetta Perle, Scott Lawrence, Gunars Prande, Martynka Wawrzyniak, Leo Fitzpatrick, Will Boone, John Farris, Mike Cockrill, Melvin Way, Rev. Howard Finster, Earnestine Jenkins, Max (Buck) Henri….


Events:
Friday, May 10
12--8pm: South Main and Union Avenue art installations on view
5-8 pm: Grand Opening, Hyde Gallery at Nesin Graduate School, Memphis College of Art

Saturday, May 11
5-7 pm: Exhibition and reception at Marshall Arts
8-10 pm: U-Dig Dance Company Jookin' dance off and reception at Caritas Village

Sunday, May 12
4-6 pm: Drumline and band presentation at Crosstown Arts

More info: Beautiful Fields; Memphis Social page on Facebook.

A Franchise Program winning exhibition. Learn more about the Franchise.

Convergence: The Art Collection of the National Academy of Sciences

NAS Releases Publication of Its Art Collection

July 12, 2012

The National Academy of Sciences has been collecting and exhibiting diverse works of art since 1924, when its landmark building opened on the National Mall in Washington. Convergence: The Art Collection of the National Academy of Sciences presents for the first time a significant portion of that collection, including historic pieces by John James Audubon, Harry Bertoia, Hildreth Meière, and J.P. Wilson as well as contemporary works by Mia Brownell, Joy Garnett, Jill Greenberg, David Maisel, Vik Muniz, and many others.

Convergence is the first publication to present the Academy's historic and prescient holdings. No other force has had greater impact on contemporary culture than advancements in science and technology, providing rich terrain for artists to explore and investigate. The Academy's growing collection encompasses painting, prints, sculpture, photography, and architecture (in the form of its newly restored historic building). Convergence includes essays by E. O. Wilson, Roald Hoffmann, Anne Collins Goodyear, Andrew Solomon, and Lucy Lippard, who help to connect the dots between the emerging and increasingly influential intersections of visual culture and science.

More info

Amazon

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“Canceled”: Art, Censorship and the Possibility in Failure at The Center for Book Arts

View of “Canceled: Alternative Manifestations and Productive Failures,” 2012

via Artforum Critics' Picks:

“Canceled: Alternative Manifestations and Productive Failures”

THE CENTER FOR BOOK ARTS
28 W 27th Street, 3rd Floor
April 18–June 30

06.04.12

Author: Zachary Sachs

04.18.12-06.30.12 The Center for Book Arts

Richard Prince v. Patrick Cariou, a fair-use case currently in appeals, threatens to set a dangerous precedent for the legality of appropriation. The initial ruling against Prince in 2011 included—in a surprisingly draconian injunction—an order that the works be destroyed or never displayed publicly. Cases like this can make an artwork seem considerably less interesting than the machinery of art and institutions that revolve around it. Greg Allen’s YES RASTA, 2011, a deadpan bound volume that reproduces depositions in the case, is one of the sixteen quasi-documentary, quasi-performative works on display in “Canceled.” The exhibition courses through several decades of art’s challenges to censorship, from the Los Angeles Police Department’s late-1950s persecution of Wallace Berman’s work and exhibition (“pornography”), to the imploding of Manifesta 6 in 2006 (Cypriot politics), to David Wojnarowicz’s recent expulsion from the Smithsonian’s “Hide/Seek” exhibition (an “assault on the sensibilities of Christians”).

Some remarkable artifacts come to the surface in this extensive trawling: a one-of-a-kind collaged mailer from the artist Cameron to Berman; Hans Haacke’s personal copy of his monograph Werkmonographie, which documents his inspired struggle with the Guggenheim in 1971. (The muscular neutrality of Haacke’s work made him seem a particularly stylish David wielding nothing more than Concept against Goliath’s vested interests. Here you can find the best joke, from the Guggenheim’s rejection letter to Haacke: “The trustees have established policies that exclude active engagement toward political and social ends.”)

At times the curatorial conceit can be a bit baggy: Seth Siegelaub’s books-as-exhibitions from the 1960s are a form of rejecting the gallery’s physical space, but they have little rapport with the conflict that animates most of the other selections. The curator, Lauren van Haaften-Schick, suggests in an accompanying essay that that the exclusion of contested artworks from exhibitions represents “ultimately productive failure,” which reminded me of the chestnut “fail better” from Samuel Beckett’s last novel, Worstward Ho (1983). Beckett was fairly black about about one’s prospects in the end (hence that title)—“Canceled” leaves one with a much more generous feeling about the possibility of failure.