CCS BARD PUBLISHES TWO BOOKS Both of these books were launched at the opening of the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art on November 12, 2006.
WITNESS TO HER ART: ART AND WRITINGS BY ADRIAN PIPER, MONA HATOUM, CADY NOLAND, JENNY HOLZER, KARA WALKER, DANIELA ROSSELL AND EAU DE COLOGNE Edited by Rhea Anastas with Michael Brenson CCS Bard “Many of the best and most experimental works” in the Marieluise Hessel Collection are by women artists, Rhea Anastas writes in her introduction to Witness to Her Art, a book focusing on six artists whose works are represented in the collection—Mona Hatoum, Jenny Holzer, Cady Noland, Adrian Piper, Daniella Rossell, and Kara Walker—as well as Eau de Cologne, a magazine dedicated to women artists. Using critical writings, interviews, and artworks, the book contrasts artistic intentions with the ways sexism marks each artist’s reception. Each section of the book focuses on major projects by each artist, accompanied by essays by Norton Batkin, director of the CCS graduate program; Michael Brenson, Johanna Burton, Aruna D’Souza, Janet Kraynak, David Levi Strauss, Cuauhtémoc Medina, and Ann Reynolds, all of whom have taught at CCS; and Pamela Franks and Hamza Walker. At a panel at Blithewood to launch the book’s publication, Helen Molesworth, chief curator at the Wexner Center for the Arts, said the book
“makes an issue out of how things are connected,” and honors the modernist spirit of “experimentation, contestation, and doubt.” Anastas is a faculty member and the senior academic adviser for CCS programs; Michael Brenson, New York Times art critic from 1982 to 1991, is a CCS faculty member.
WRESTLE: MARIELUISE HESSEL COLLECTION Catalogue of exhibition curated by Tom Eccles and Trevor Smith; preface by Leon Botstein CCS Bard Wrestle, the opening exhibition of the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, encompasses the work of disparate artists from the Marieluise Hessel Collection, which has been the chief educational resource of the CCS since the curatorial program’s inception. This catalogue features artist and curator questions and statements, in visual and written form, about the nature of identity, subjectivity, and the art of being seen. In an interview with Hessel printed here, cocurator Trevor Smith writes that the collector “described how, as she grew up in postwar Germany, America represented the future.” Hessel’s collection, Smith says, “limns the cultural tensions articulated in attempting to secure the course of that future.” The main catalogue is accompanied by a fascicle (with the exhibition’s title printed backwards) featuring the Wrestle works shown in the CCS Galleries adjacent to the galleries of the museum.
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