Lucy R. Lippard

Compiling works from nearly five decades, Headwaters (and Other Short Fictions) provides the first comprehensive overview of the narrative and experimental writing of Lucy R. Lippard. While she is best known for her pioneering work as an art writer and activist, Lippard’s fiction helps frame her broader impact on contemporary culture.

Headwaters anthologizes over fifty short works, many previously unpublished. These often experimental vignettes showcase the range of her literary voice while also challenging our understanding of her oeuvre. Sometimes speculative or fragmented, yet always compelling, these pieces range from short-form narrative stories and conceptual fiction to visual essays and political prose.

Included are excerpts from two never-released novels, as well as collaborations with artists Robert Barry, Sol LeWitt, and Jerry Kearns.

Lucy Lippard is author of thirty books on contemporary art and cultural criticism. She has curated some fifty exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.

Edited by Jeff Khonsary

I See / You Mean is an experimental novel about mirrors, maps, relationships, the ocean, elusive success, and possible happiness. Through a collage of verbal photographs, overheard dialogue, sexual encounters, found material, and self identi­fication devices (astrology, the I Ching, palmistry, Tarot), it charts from past to future the changing currents between two women and two men­: a writer, a model/stockbroker/maybe dictator, a photographer, and an actor. A lot happens between the lines. Art critic Lucy Lippard wrote this novel in 1970 and became a feminist in the process: “I started writing and realized I was ashamed to be a woman. Then I had to find out why. Then I got very angry. The fragmented visual form came out of contemporary art and the conflicting emotions of 1960s political confrontation; they suggested a new way to put things back together—an open-ended, female way that didn’t pretend conclusions.”

Lucy R. Lippard is a writer, activist, and curator. She is the author of twenty-five books on contemporary art and cultural criticism and has curated some fifty exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.

Afterword by Susana Torre
Edited by Jeff Khonsary

A rare, ever-relevant compendium of texts and manifestos from women artists on gender and race issues in cultural institutions

Originally published in 1971, A Documentary HerStory of Women Artists in Revolution documents the efforts of W.A.R., a loose group of women artists, filmmakers, writers and cultural workers organized around advancing the place of women in the art world. Members of W.A.R. included Juliette Gordon, Sara Saporta, Therese Schwartz, Muriel Castanis, Cindy Nemser, Dolores Holmes, Betsy Jones, Silvia Goldsmith, Jan McDevitt, Lucy Lippard, Grace Glueck, Poppy Johnson, Brenda Miller, Faith Ringgold, Emily Genauer, Agnes Denes, Doloris O'Kane and Jacqueline Skiles.

Active from 1969 to 1971, W.A.R. was founded as the women's caucus of the Art Workers' Coalition (AWC). AWC mobilized around anti-war protest and anti-racist action, also campaigning for artists' rights and wages, the decentralization of museums across NYC boroughs, more diverse exhibition programming and the restructuring of management within cultural institutions.  

This facsimile publication of A Documentary HerStory of Women Artists in Revolution gathers manifestos, statements and declarations by W.A.R. members; articles and reports about gendered and racialized discrimination in the arts; pro-abortion flyers and protest ephemera; and grant applications and reports detailing the founding of the Women's Interart Center in spring 1970, W.A.R.'s brick-and-mortar studio, workshop and exhibition space. It also reproduces documentation of key actions including the 1970 Art Strike Against Racism, Sexism, Repression and War, and correspondence with officials at the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art, among others.  

This publication takes as its source the second edition of the publication, which was published in 1973. The edition was chosen because it features a preface and addendum with retrospective reflections on the history and activities of W.A.R.

Originally self-released in 1976 through A.I.R. Gallery, New York, the five short unpublished manuscripts collected in 5 Prose Fictions offer an abbreviated introduction to curator Lucy R. Lippard’s largely under-examined fictional work.

The republication of these pieces follows the recent rerelease of I See / You Mean and provides further context for the released of Brimstone this Fall, an anthology compiling over 50 of Lippard’s experimental and narrative fiction works from the early 1950s through the 1980s.

Spanning more than three decades, In Part brings together a full spectrum of the New York-based artist, writer and activist Julie Ault's (born 1957) published texts through carefully selected extracts in a single volume.

Reprinted in chronological sequence alongside a selection of full-length texts, this series of excerpts offers a timeline of Ault's continuous artistic growth, longstanding political concerns and dynamic interpersonal affinities.

Beginning in the 1980s with texts written with her collaborators in Group Material, In Part highlights Ault's shift from exhibition making in the mid-1990s to include publishing and writing. Ault's dialogic practice extends to the present day through her sustained engagements and relationships with such artists as Corita Kent, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Nancy Spero, Martin Beck, David Wojnarowicz, Liberace and Martin Wong.

Lucy R. Lippard contributes an introduction.

Brush Fires in the Social Landscape began in collaboration with the artist before his death in 1992 and first published in 1994, engaged those who Wojnarowicz would refer to as his tribe or community.

Now, on the twentieth anniversary of Brush Fires, when interest in the artist's work has increased exponentially, Aperture has expanded and redesigned this seminal publication to be even more inclusive. It is the only book that features the breadth of Wojnarowicz's work with photography.

The contributors, from artist and writer friends to the lawyer who represented him in his case against Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association, to the next generation of artists who were influenced by Wojnarowicz's sensibility, together offer a compelling, provocative understanding of the artist and his work. 

Contributors include: Vince Aletti, Barry Blinderman, Cynthia Carr, David Cole, Shannon Ebner, Leonard Fink, Karen Finley, Nan Goldin, Félix Guattari, Wade Guyton, Melissa Harris, Elizabeth Hess, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Peter Hujar, Fran Lebowitz, Lucy R. Lippard (introduction), Sylvère Lotringer, Carlo McCormick, Henrik Olesen, Wendy Olsoff, Adam Putnam, Tom Rauffenbart, James Romberger, Emily Roysdon, Marion Scemama, Gary Schneider, Amy Scholder, Kiki Smith, Andreas Sterzing, Zoe Strauss, Marvin J. Taylor, Lynne Tillman, and Wolfgang Tillmans.