fierce pussy

Salvation is a previously-unpublished artist book by Jimmy DeSana that he conceptualized shortly before his death in 1990. The publication contains 44 of the artist’s late photographic abstractions that quietly and poetically meditate on loss, death, and nothingness. Depicted within the works are images of relics, body parts, flowers, and fruits that DeSana altered using collage and darkroom manipulations to create pictures that are both intimate and other-worldly. Salvation provides a nuanced and sophisticated counterpoint to the prevailing work around HIV/AIDS at the time, which tended to favor bold political statements.

Variations of many of the works in this book were first presented at DeSana’s last show with Pat Hearn Gallery in 1988. Shortly thereafter, the artist began assembling a maquette of Salvation, using black and white images as place holders for the color works that he intended to comprise the final layout of the publication. Sadly, he was unable to fully realize Salvation in his lifetime, but on his deathbed, he dictated instructions to his longtime friend Laurie Simmons for completing the work; instructions which she noted on each page of the single-copy maquette. With these notes, Simmons was able to match extant slides  and sequencing. Simmons’ studio chose color gels from DeSana’s archive for each corresponding black and white image in the assembly of the publication. Thankfully, due to this recuperative work, Salvation—long-considered to be DeSana’s last major work—is now available for the first time, with every step taken to honor and embody DeSana’s original vision.

Jimmy DeSana (1949-1990) grew up in Atlanta, GA, and received his bachelor’s degree from the Georgia State University in 1972 before relocating to New York’s East Village in the early 1970s. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include The Sodomite Invasion: Experimentation, Politics and Sexuality in the work of Jimmy DeSana and Marlon T. Riggs, Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver, Canada, 2020, and Remainders, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY, 2016. DeSana’s work can be found in numerous public collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. A major retrospective of DeSana’s work was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 2022, accompanied by a catalogue co-published by the Brooklyn Museum and DelMonico Books.

Stay away from nothing shines a spotlight on the deep relationship between Paul Thek and Peter Hujar through the artists’ letters and photographs. Beginning in 1956 and spanning two decades, the publication opens a window into their intimate, complex, and beautiful lives, starting with a sequence of images by Hujar that showcases the two of them in innocent moments of pensive and haunting play in Coral Gables and beyond.

These early portraits of their budding relationship are followed by several playful postcards from Thek in 1960 and his first letter to Hujar in 1962, written while the artist is in the Philadelphia harbor aboard a containership bound for Europe. In the letter, Thek is brimming with joy and new discoveries and exclaims that the world “seems bigger and more gloriously strange than ever before in my entire life.” The two eventually meet in Rome, where they both begin to evolve into the icons we know them as today, and the remaining letters trace Thek’s travels and adventures, romantic dalliances, work, and financial ups and downs through 1975. More than fifty letters and postcards, along with drawings and other ephemera, are reproduced in Stay away from nothing and their poetic, quotidian, and melancholic tone provide a rare glimpse into Thek and Hujar’s relationship as it wavers with seduction, glamor, tumult, and mischievousness.

Throughout this period, Hujar was photographing Thek in his now-iconic style, capturing him in Italy, in various studios, and on the beaches of Fire Island. Included are the artist’s classic images of Thek in the catacombs in Palermo, as well as his studio portraits of the artist creating The Tomb. Among these well-known works are dozens of other photographs, many unpublished until now, including candid portraits of Thek, as well as images of the two artists goofing around or posing for passport photos. Collectively, these images demonstrate not only the complex emotional interiority of Thek but the tender, dark, and hopeful connection between the two artists, lovers, and friends.

An afterword is provided by Andrew Durbin, author of The Wonderful World That Almost Was, a biography of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek. Edited by Francis Schichtel.

Paul Thek is among the most legendary and elusive artists of the post-1960s generation. He burst onto the New York scene with his Technological Reliquaries series, then known as “meat pieces,” which challenged Pop and Minimalism with an idiosyncratic approach that merged earnest posthuman embodiment and a critique of contemporary art trends. In Europe in the 1970s, he created new modes of exhibition-making that involved the creation of elaborate, ephemeral installations composed of sand, candles, newspaper, chicken-wire, Polaroids, and discarded furniture. Upon returning to New York in the later years of his career, he produced his deliberately “bad paintings” while continuing his longest-running series of paintings executed on newspaper, works that poignantly underscore his sustained engagement with themes of ephemerality and the passage of time. Thek died of AIDS in 1988.

Peter Hujar died of AIDS in 1987, leaving behind a complex and profound body of photographs. Hujar was a leading figure in the group of artists, musicians, writers, and performers at the forefront of the cultural scene in downtown New York in the 1970s and early 80s, and he was enormously admired for his completely uncompromising attitude towards work and life. He was a consummate technician, and his portraits of people, animals, and landscapes, with their exquisite black-and-white tonalities, were extremely influential. Highly emotional yet stripped of excess, Hujar’s photographs are always beautiful, although rarely in a conventional way. His extraordinary first book, Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Susan Sontag, was published in 1976, but his “difficult” personality and refusal to pander to the marketplace ensured that it was one of the last publications during his lifetime.

Started in 1989 by designer and writer Robert Ford, THING magazine was the voice of the Queer Black music and art scene in the early 1990s. Ford and his editors were part of the burgeoning House music scene, which originated in Chicago’s Queer underground, and some of the top DJs and musicians from that time were featured in the magazine, including Frankie Knuckles, Gemini, Larry Heard, Rupaul, and Deee-Lite. THING published ten issues from 1989-1993, before it was cut short by Ford’s death from AIDS-related illness. All ten issues of THING are collected and published here for the first time.

As House music thrived, THING captured the multidisciplinary nature of the scene, opening its pages to a wide range of subjects: poetry and gossip, fiction and art, interviews and polemics. The HIV/AIDS crisis loomed large in its contents, particularly in the personal reflections and vital treatment resources that it published. An essay by poet Essex Hemphill was published alongside the gossip columnist Michael Musto and Rupaul dished wisdom alongside a diary from the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. Joan Jett Blakk’s revolutionary presidential campaign is contained in these pages, as are some of the most underground, influential literary voices of the time, such as Dennis Cooper, Vaginal Davis, Gary Indiana, Marlon Riggs, David Wojnarowicz, and even David Sedaris.

THING was very much in dialogue with the club kids in New York and other Queer publishing ventures, but in many ways, it fostered an entirely unique perspective—one with more serious ambitions. In a moment when the gay community was besieged by the HIV/AIDS crisis and a wantonly cruel government, the influence and significance of this cheaply-produced newsprint magazine vastly exceeded its humble means, presenting a beautiful portrait of the ball and club culture that existed in Chicago with deep intellectual reflections. THING was a publication by and for its community and understood the fleetingness of its moment. To reencounter this work today, is to reinstate the Black voices who were so central to the history of HIV/AIDS activism and Queer and club culture, but which were often sidelined by white Queer discourse. In many ways, THING offered a blueprint for the fundamental role a magazine plays in bringing together a community, its tagline summing up the bold stakes of this important venture: “She Knows Who She Is.”

The magazine included contributions from Trent D. Adkins, Joey Arias, Aaron Avant Garde, Ed Bailey, Freddie Bain, Basscut, Belasco, Joan Jett Blakk, Simone Bouyer, Lady Bunny, Bunny & Pussy, Derrick Carter, Fire Chick, Chicklet, Stephanie Coleman, Bill Coleman, Lee Collins, Gregory Conerly, Mark Contratto, Dennis Cooper, Dorian Corey, Ed Crosby, The Darva, Vaginal Davis, Deee-Lite, Tor Dettwiler, Riley Evans, Evil, The Fabulous Pop Tarts, Mark Farina, Larry Flick, Robert Ford, Scott Free, David Gandy, Gemini, Gabriel Gomez, Roy Gonsalves, Chuck Gonzales, Tony Greene, André Halmon, Lyle Ashton Harris, Larry Heard, Essex Hemphill, Kathryn Hixson, Sterling Houston, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Gary Indiana, Candy J, Jamoo, Jazzmun, Gant Johnson, Owen Keehnen, Lady Miss Kier, Spencer Kincy, Iris Kit, Erin Krystle, Steve LaFreniere, Larvetta Larvon, Marc Loveless, Lypsinka, Malone, Marjorie Marginal, Terry A. Martin, Rodney McCoy Jr., Alan Miller, Bobby Miller, Michael Musto, Ultra Naté, Willi Ninja, Scott “Spunk” O’Hara, DeAundra Peek, Earl Pleasure, Marlon Riggs, Robert Rodi, Todd Roulette, RuPaul, Chantay Savage, David Sedaris, Rosser Shymanski, Larry Tee, Voice Farm, Lawrence D. Warren, Martha Wash, LeRoy Whitfield, Stephen Winter, David Wojnarowicz, and Hector Xtravaganza.

An expansive anthology focused on concrete poetry written by women in the groundbreaking movement’s early history. It features 50 writers and artists from Europe, Japan, Latin America, and the United States selected by editors Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre.

Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 takes as its point of departure Materializzazione del linguaggio—the groundbreaking exhibition of visual and concrete poetry by women curated by Italian feminist artist Mirella Bentivoglio for the Venice Biennale in 1978. Through this exhibition and others she curated, Bentivoglio traced constellations of women artists working at the intersection of the verbal and visual who sought to “reactivate the atrophied tools of communication” and liberate words from the conventions of genre, gender, and the strictures of the patriarchy and normative syntax.

The works in this volume evolved from previous manifestations of concrete poetry as defined in foundational manifestos by Öyvind Fahlström, Eugen Gomringer, and the Brazilian Noigandres Group. While some works are easily recognized as concrete poetry, as documented in canonical anthologies edited by Mary Ellen Solt and Emmett Williams in the late ’60s, it also features expansive, serial works that are overtly feminist and often trouble legibility. Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 revisits the figures in Bentivoglio’s orbit and includes works by women practicing in other milieus in the United States, Eastern Europe, and South America who were similarly concerned with activating the visual and sonic properties of language and experimenting with poetry’s spatial syntax.

Artists and writers include Lenora de Barros, Ana Bella Geiger, and Mira Schendel from Brazil; Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga, Liliana Landi, Anna Oberto, and Giovanna Sandri from Italy; Amanda Berenguer from Uruguay; Suzanne Bernard and Ilse Garnier from France; Blanca Calparsoro from Spain; Paula Claire and Jennifer Pike from the UK; Betty Danon from Turkey; Mirtha Dermisache from Argentina; Bohumila Grögerová from the Czech Republic; Ana Hatherly and Salette Tavares from Portugal; Madeline Gins, Mary Ellen Solt, Susan Howe, Liliane Lijn, and Rosmarie Waldrop from the US; Irma Blank and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt from Germany; Chima Sunada from Japan; and Katalin Ladik and Bogdanka Poznanović from the former Yugoslavia.

Otherhow brings together four decades of writings, lectures, interviews, and documentation of work by the artist Joseph Grigely. Deaf since the age of ten, his art and writing have long questioned and made use of various modes of communication—photographs, handwritten notes, lipreading, newspaper headlines, paintings, and TV captions—to examine and scrutinize the ableism embedded in cultural and media production. From his brilliant series of postcards addressed to Sophie Calle, where he began to formulate a theory on the intersection of disability and art, to his epic lecture “On Failure,” which brings together the poet Keats, “the first woman of fly tying” Helen Shaw, and the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky to the same table for a conversation on beauty, Grigely’s writing is erudite, but clear; righteous with fury, but dryly humorous.

An underlying theme throughout are modes of access and how issues of accessibility and their resolution provide a benefit to everyone, not just the disabled. Chapters devoted to art, access, and advocacy underpin the interconnected nature of these issues in a maddening, but ultimately enlightening manner. Letters of complaint, faxes and emails, unpublished op-eds, exhibition proposals, statements on equality and access; each provide a glimpse into how Grigely’s work has been shaped by—or constructed from—the “tangled process” of opening access.

Joseph Grigely, artist, educator, and activist, is currently a Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He holds a Doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford in English literature and has taught at Gallaudet University, Stanford University, and the University of Michigan. Exhibiting widely in the US and Europe, his most recent show In What Way Wham? was presented at MASS MoCA in 2023–24. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tate Modern, and the Stedelijk Museum, among others.

The first thing a traveller has to learn in Palestine is to wait: the Palestinians have been doing it for more than 50 years. In the refugee camps in the Gaza Strip and on the West Bank, they have been waiting for permission to return ever since the Nabka, the catastrophe of 1948, when they were driven out of their houses and away from their land.

In November 2002, the Brussels-based authors of Time Suspended went on a ten-day visit to Palestine. Like most, everything they knew of the country came from media. They discovered a complex and intricate society that could not be summed up in a soundbite. The many full-bleed images of Palestine presented here (many of them depict a somewhat deserted, laid-back, sleepy, place) challenge years of media-tainted observation and truly give insight into the daily lives of its inhabitants.

Drawing has long been foundational to American painter Carroll Dunham's (born 1949) practice. In this collection of recent, never-before-shown works, we witness Dunham thinking about sculpture through a series of drawings produced over the course of a year. A sampling of his drawings across time offers a chart of his artistic evolution; the 80 drawings presented here are distinctive to a new page within that history. Spurred by a desire to explore the saggy, open-frame cubic boxes that he found himself doodling along the edges of a new series of paintings, Dunham began drawing fantasies of sculpture as a respite whenever he needed a break from working on the paintings. This turned into an ongoing practice that lasted until it unexpectedly segued into a material investigation with the making of sculpture in real space. Offering intimate access to Dunham's process, this book is the first to document his thinking about spatial relationships, presentation and materials for sculptures that don't exist.

Carroll Dunham has developed an extensive oeuvre since the late 1970s in painting, drawing, and printmaking. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, most recently a drawing retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago (2026), and presented in group exhibitions at institutions in the United States and abroad. He lives and works in Connecticut.

For the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine a group of people/ performers memorize a book of their choice. Together they form a library collection consisting of living books. After years of learning by heart and reciting for readers, some of the books have now been written down from memory to create new editions, versions resulting from this process. This book is one of those books, chosen by one person, learned by heart and recited many times, and now written down again from memory. This edition is not a re-edition of the original text. It is a re-writing of the text after the process of reading, memorizing and reciting, with all the alterations that might have occured in the course of this process.

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