Spring has arrived, and to celebrate we want to offer our online followers a great deal on signed copies of Carrie Mae Weems: Social Studies. Usually $75, the book is now just $50 (a savings of 33%!). If you order now, we will also give you a FREE Contact Sheet Subscription (a value of $40!). Order in the next two weeks to take advantage of this offer.

About the book:

Carrie Mae Weems: Social Studies represents a comprehensive look at the artist’s career over the past thirty years. As Carrie Mae Weems describes, “During the past twenty-five years, I have worked toward developing a complex body of art that has at various times employed photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and, most recently, video. My work has led me to investigate family relationships, gender roles, the histories of racism, sexism, class, and various political systems. Despite the variety of my explorations, throughout it all it has been my contention that my responsibility as an artist is to work, to sing for my supper, to make art, beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world, to heal the sick and feed the helpless; to shout bravely from the roof-tops and storm barricaded doors and voice the specifics of our historic moment.” The book includes essays by Elvira Dyangani Ose, Annie E. Coombes, and Greg Tate.

Visit the Light Work website to place your order.

We’re happy to unveil our brand new Facebook Timeline this week!

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This month The Museum of Modern Art will be opening what is likely to be one of the most talked about exhibitions of the year, a large Cindy Sherman retrospective.

Bringing together more than 170 photographs, this retrospective survey traces the artist’s career from the mid 1970s to the present. Highlighted in the exhibition are in-depth presentations of her key series, including the groundbreaking series “Untitled Film Stills” (1977–80), the black-and-white pictures that feature the artist in stereotypical female roles inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, and European art-house films; her ornate history portraits (1989–90), in which the artist poses as aristocrats, clergymen, and milkmaids in the manner of old master paintings; and her larger-than-life society portraits (2008) that address the experience and representation of aging in the context of contemporary obsessions with youth and status. The exhibition will explore dominant themes throughout Sherman’s career, including artifice and fiction; cinema and performance; horror and the grotesque; myth, carnival, and fairy tale; and gender and class identity. Also included are Sherman’s recent photographic murals (2010), which will have their American premiere at MoMA.

Sherman, now regarded one of the most important and influential artists, was in fact a Light Work Artist-in-Residence in 1981, featured in a Light Work Gallery exhibition in 1985, published in Contact Sheet, and has a few of her pieces included in the Light Work Collection!

Those of you in New York City, mark your calendars:

Cindy Sherman
February 26 – June 11, 2012
The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Exhibition Gallery, sixth floor
Museum of Modern Art
New York, NY

More info about the exhibition here.

Here’s a visual overview of Sherman’s iconic film stills:

On the topic of the lovely wet-plate collodion process, don’t miss past AIR Joni Sternbach‘s “SurfLand” exhibition, opening this Friday at the Southeast Museum of Photography!

SurfLand
Joni Sternbach
January 27 – April 22, 2012
Southeast Museum of Photography
Daytona Beach, FL

Opening reception with artist talk and book signing: January 27 from 6-8pm