Making Race: Modernism and "Racial Art" in America
University of Washington Press, 2011
Paperback, 256 pages, $40

Jacqueline Francis (Visual and Critical Studies and Painting/Drawing faculty) explores the flowering of racial art rhetoric in criticism and history published in the 1920s and 1930s, and analyzes its underlying presence in contemporary discussions of artists of color. She specifically looks at the cases of Malvin Gray Johnson, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Max Weber, three New York artists whose work was popularly assigned to the category of "racial art" in the interwar years of the 20th century. The term was widely used by critics and the public at the time, and was an unexamined, unquestioned category for the work of non-whites (such as Johnson, an African American), non-Westerners (such as Kuniyoshi, a Japanese-born American), and ethnicized non-Christians (such as Weber, a Russian-born Jewish American). The discourse on racial art is a troubling chapter in the history of early American modernism that has not, until now, been sufficiently documented. Francis juxtaposes the work of these three artists in order to consider their understanding of the category and their stylistic responses to the expectations created by it, in the process revealing much about the nature of modernist art practices.

2010 SECA Art Award Exhibition Catalogue
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2011
Paperback, 36 pages, $9.95

The most recent SECA Art Award exhibition showcases four Bay Area artists whose innovative works, while diverse in form and subject matter, reflect overlapping affinities. Representing CCA is Ruth Laskey (Painting/Drawing 1999, MFA 2005), who employs weaving, using a traditional floor loom, to expand on the painterly tradition of geometric abstraction. The other three featured artists are Colter Jacobsen, whose meticulous drawings, watercolors, and installations often incorporate found ephemera to explore reflection and longing; Mauricio Ancalmo, who combines various found mechanical instruments in a film-based installation to form a structural dialogue that is both poetically and philosophically inspired; and Kamau Amu Patton, who synthesizes works in a range of media to investigate the inter-zone of sound, materiality, and perceptual experience.

Modeling the Universe
Nevada Museum of Art, 2011
Paperback, 88 pages, $20

This publication surveys nearly 80 maquettes produced by Sculpture Program chair Linda Fleming over the past 30 years. Fleming has drawn upon an extensive web of influences to create a body of sculptural works that suggest the coexistence of the mundane, the cosmological, and the scientific. In addition to numerous full-page color illustrations, the book also includes reference images that reveal her natural, scientific, and architectural influences. It includes text contributions by the artist and CCA Sculpture, Fine Arts, and Visual and Critical Studies faculty member Maria Porges.

Marci Washington: Selected Works 2005-Present
Leeds College of Art, 2011
Hardcover, 96 pages, $100

Published for the Marci Washington (Painting/Drawing 2002, MFA 2008) exhibition at Leeds College of Art in November 2011, this book shows most of Washington's output since 2005 in full color along with photographs of her studio, an interview, and a short essay. "Drawing from literature, film, fashion photography, and historical events," the artist writes, "I am building a disjointed fictional narrative with connections to the past as well as to the present. Like illustrations from a novel that doesn't exist, or stills from a film that was never made –- a story which functions as social commentary as well as a haunting multigenerational epic shrouded in supernatural mystery and romanticism."