Doug Ashford is a teacher, artist and writer. Ashford’s principle visual practice from 1982 to 1996 was the artists’ collaborative Group Material that produced over 40 exhibitions and public projects internationally. Group Material developed the exhibition form into an artistic medium using display design and curatorial juxtaposition as a critical location where audiences were invited to imagine democratic forms. Since 1996, Ashford has continued to make paintings, write, and produce museum and public projects. His book Who Cares (Creative Time, 2006) is a publication built from a series of conversations between Ashford and an assembly of other cultural practitioners on public expression, beauty, and ethics.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Tradition at Marres, Centre for Contemporary Culture, 16 March, 2013– 19 May, 2013 and Grazer Kunstverein, 7 June, 2013 –11 August, 2013.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “CARE” (1969) was a major intervention in feminist performance practices and public art. The proposal argued for an intimate relationship between creative production in the public sphere and domestic labor—a relationship whose intricacies Ukeles has been unraveling ever since. In 1977, she became the unsalaried Artist-in-Residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation, a position that enables her to introduce radical public art into an urban municipal infrastructure.

Through archival research, this monographic publication focuses on Ukeles’s work ballets—a series of seven grand-scale collaborative performances involving workers, trucks, barges, and hundreds of tons of recyclables and steel—which took place between 1983 and 2012 in New York, Pittsburgh, Givors, Rotterdam, and Tokamachi. Over the past four decades, Ukeles has pioneered how we perceive and ultimately engage in maintenance activities. The work ballets derive from her engagement in civic operations in order to reveal how they work though monumental coordination and cooperation. Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Seven Work Ballets is the first monograph on Ukeles’s seminal practice, and is as much an artist’s book as an art-historical publication.

Edited by Kari Conte. Contributions by Kari Conte, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Mierle Laderman Ukeles; conversation with Tom Finkelpearl, Shannon Jackson, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Designed by Marc Hollenstein.

Edited by Aileen Burns, Charlotte Day, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Johan Lundh. Texts by Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna (Latitudes), Helen Hughes, Ana Teixeira Pinto.

This publication accompanies Australian multidisciplinary artist Nicholas Mangan’s survey exhibition Limits to Growth. The exhibition and book bring together four of Mangan’s most significant works of the past seven years, alongside a new commission. The works in the show tackle narratives from his own geographical region—Asia Pacific, in which his home country of Australia plays a colonial role—and weaves them into a bigger picture to take into account the global economy, resource extraction, and the ultimate power of the sun. Featuring an in-depth series of conversations between the artist and the Barcelona-based curatorial collective Latitudes, and essays by Ana Teixeira Pinto and Helen Hughes, this publication is richly illustrated with documentation of Mangan’s artworks and historical source material.

Copublished with the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne. Design by Žiga Testen.