“Containing, restraining, reforming, hurting, compressing, binding, transforming a lumpy shape into a clean smooth line,” is how American artist Christina Ramberg once described the drawings of corsets in her sketchbooks. Ramberg was one of the most intriguing painters to emerge within a generation of Chicago Imagists. She left a significant body of comic, formally elegant, erotically sinister paintings.

Produced on the occasion of The Making of Husbands: Christina Ramberg in Dialogue at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 14 September, 2019–5 January 2020. Christina Ramberg’s work was shown alongside of other artistic positions such as Alexandra Bircken, Sara Deraedt, Gaylen Gerber, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Konrad Klapheck, Ghislaine Leung, Hans-Christian Lotz, Senga Nengudi, Ana Pellicer, Richard Rezac, Diane Simpson, Terre Thaemlitz, Kathleen White.

With texts from Dodie Bellamy, Kathrin Bentele, Jen George, Larne Abse Gogarty, Anna Gritz, Judith Russi Kirshner & Léon Kruijswijk.

For almost fifty years, Senga Nengudi (b. 1943, USA) has shaped an œuvre that inhabits a specific and unique place between sculpture, dance and performance. The publication accompanies the first solo exhibition of Nengudi in Germany at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Among the bodies of work presented in the book are the Water Compositions (1969–70), interactive vinyl and water sculptures that Nengudi understood as an organic rebuttal to the reign of Minimalism; early fabric works that Nengudi strung up in the back alleys of Harlem, New York and the suggestive R.S.V.P. sculptures - performative objects made from pantyhose and materials such as sand and stone – (1976–today). With newly commissioned essays by Kellie Jones, Catherine Wood, and Malik Gaines.

A landmark exhibition on display at the Brooklyn Museum from April 21 through September 17, 2017, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 examines the political, social, cultural, and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second-wave feminism. It showcases the work of black women artists such as Emma Amos, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O’Grady, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, and Betye Saar, making it one of the first major exhibitions to highlight the voices and experiences of women of color. In so doing, it reorients conversations around race, feminism, political action, art production, and art history in this significant historical period.

The accompanying Sourcebook republishes an array of rare and little-known documents from the period by artists, writers, cultural critics, and art historians such as Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, bell hooks, Lucy R. Lippard, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Lowery Stokes Sims, Alice Walker, and Michelle Wallace. These documents include articles, manifestos, and letters from significant publications as well as interviews, some of which are reproduced in facsimile form. The Sourcebook also includes archival materials, rare ephemera, and an art-historical overview essay.

In South of Pico, Kellie Jones (curator of Now Dig This, 2011) explores how the artists in Los Angeles's black communities during the 1960s and 1970s created a vibrant, productive, and engaged activist arts scene in the face of structural racism. Emphasizing the importance of African American migration, as well as L.A.'s housing and employment politics, Jones shows how the work of black Angeleno artists such as David Hammons, Melvin Edwards, Betye Saar, Charles White, Noah Purifoy, and Senga Nengudi spoke to the dislocation of migration, L.A.'s urban renewal, and restrictions on black mobility. Jones characterizes their works as modern migration narratives that look to the past to consider real and imagined futures. She also attends to these artists' relationships with gallery and museum culture and the establishment of black-owned arts spaces.