Like a mixtape, a Steve Keene painting is meant to be passed hand to hand, with affection. He’s been giving them away, or selling them for a song, going on thirty years. Keene, an artist who estimates 300,000 works to his name, came up indie-rock adjacent, pals with Pavement. Like that band’s best albums, Keene’s art is poppy, bright, deliberately unkempt, slyly confrontational, and super “college.” His subjects include founding fathers, LPs, astronauts, and so much more, but who can keep up? He’s got theories about fast technique, and what it means to be so prolific and cheap, but he doesn’t want to bore you, get bogged down. Daniel Efram’s THE STEVE KEENE ART BOOK (Hat & Beard Press/Tractor Beam, $95) oozes love for its subject. Bestie blurbs from alt-radio royalty, an interview with artist Ryan McGinness, and awed essays by Shepard Fairey and Karen Loew (among others) encircle gorgeous color plates covering the full range of Keene’s ca-ree-ah. Play “Cut Your Hair” as you read: that’s a great song and this is a great book about a great artist. His paintings sell out, but he never has. Online, you can still buy “6 PAINTINGS (RANDOMLY SELECTED)” for seventy dollars. No catch. —DAVID O’NEILL
LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER: FLINT IS FAMILY IN THREE ACTS (The Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl, $85) is the culmination of a project begun in 2016, when the photographer went to Michigan to document the effects of the city’s poisonous water. She worked closely with residents to tell their story in intimate black-and-white photographs, supplemented by firsthand testimony and poetry by Frazier’s Flint collaborator Shea S. Cobb. Over the course of the next four or so years, the project grew: this new publication includes that first series along with an “Act II,” from 2017–19, in which Frazier, Cobb, and her family spend time at Shea’s father’s property in rural Mississippi; and “Act III,” 2019–20, which documents—in vibrant color prints—the joyous arrival of a water-generator that Frazier, Cobb, and Cobb’s friend and manager Amber N. Hasan arranged to be transported to Flint to provide free, clean water. Flint Is Family in Three Acts is a powerful counterargument to Susan Sontag’s contention that photography is necessarily estranging. Shot to shot and caption to caption, Frazier brings viewers ever closer to her subjects. As Hasan puts it, “I trusted LaToya with our images and with our story. LaToya saw something much bigger than just a singular snapshot of what was going on with the Flint water crisis.” —D. O.
It’s difficult to look at Manoucher Yektai’s paintings and not feel the effort involved in pushing gobs of oil paint across a canvas. By massing thick swirls that achieve sculptural density, Yektai evokes physical contestation more viscerally than the action painting of his 1950s peers. Describing this effect in 1961, John Ashbery wrote that Yektai “wants to render us conscious of our existence from second to second, of the joy of breathing, of the rapid changes of things.” This acutely embodied awareness of unpredictability marks nearly every work included in MANOUCHER YEKTAI (Karma, $75), a lush and comprehensive survey of the Iranian-born artist’s fifty-year career. After studying in Paris in the mid-1940s, Yektai returned to New York and became associated with Abstract Expressionism. Although he enjoyed some recognition owing to the connection (the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, and other prominent institutions acquired his work), he was uneasy with the category. Reflecting on that time in a 2012 interview, he hinted that aesthetic issues were not the only dividing point: “When I was young I got rid of styles and I refused to accept any style. When I saw that this group felt the same, I joined them. . . . I thought this would last forever and with these painters we would grow old together. But it wasn’t like that.”
Yektai certainly shares numerous affinities with gestural peers like Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, but many elements—not the least of which is a fondness for still lifes, landscapes, and portraits (he did one of the Shah of Iran)—situate his work in a more painterly tradition. The collisions between viscous swaths of paint are powerful yet enticingly precise, as if the abiding theme were the contrast between fervor and reflection. Yektai, who wrote verse in his native Persian and published an epic titled Falgoosh in Iran in 1970, might have had Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility” in mind as he visually illuminated this tension. Even as the abstract work of the ’50s and ’60s gives way to more representational imagery during the artist’s last three decades, the surfaces of his canvases are always vigorously alive with movement. The publication of this volume should spur more opportunities to view these paintings up close (a show at Karma gallery last fall offered a teasingly brief introduction), and reintroduce a painter overshadowed by his brand-name fellows—in part because of his own aversion to self-promotion. Yektai’s onetime dealer Alex Rosenberg is quoted in an introductory essay: “He was a great painter who did everything he could not to be one.” But great painter he is, despite the long delay of wide acclaim. —ALBERT MOBILIO
Since the 1990s and early 2000s, Gillian Wearing has been prefiguring two contemporary phenomena: wearing masks and baring our souls in public. GILLIAN WEARING: WEARING MASKS (Guggenheim Museum, $45), written to accompany her retrospective, explores an interest in both. The dissonance between how you see yourself and how others see you is captured in what is perhaps her best-known image: a stranger Wearing approached on the street—a well-dressed businessman—holds a handwritten sign reading, “I’m desperate.” Strangers telling secrets reappear in the 2018 video Wearing, Gillian, as they appear with an AI mask of Wearing and lend their features to a deepfake composite that serves as an advertisement for the artist.
Just as others masquerade as Wearing, she sometimes pretends to be someone else. In her 1995 video Homage to the Woman with the bandaged face who I saw yesterday down Walworth Road, Wearing puts on a full facial mask and films herself walking down a busy London street; in the series “Spiritual Family” (2008–), she pays homage to her artistic inspirations by photographing herself as Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Claude Cahun. Other works turn the camera on her undisguised self, including a series of constructed self-portraits that recall the work of Cindy Sherman and Tomoko Sawada, although Wearing’s portraits blur gender instead of exploring female archetypes. The obligatory “Lockdown” series (2020) features less-interesting, realistically painted depictions of herself, demonstrating that Wearing’s work is strongest when her explorations of identity are capacious enough to include the voices of other people. —FRAN BIGMAN
South London–born photographer Campbell Addy spotlights Black creatives with reverence. His work was part of the swiftly indispensable book The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion, published in 2019, which also toured as an exhibition from Australia to Qatar to France. His portraits are at once sensitive and strong, softened and empowered. As a queer Black man who was cast out of his household as an adolescent, Addy has a gift for discerning fragility in others. This idea also contextualizes the validating title FEELING SEEN: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF CAMPBELL ADDY (Prestel, $55). In the book, Addy describes how, as a student at Central Saint Martins in London, references to his Ghanaian heritage were not understood. The effect was hurtful but ultimately galvanizing: Addy launched his own biannual arts publication and a modeling and casting agency dedicated to diverse representation.
The cover of Feeling Seen is a showstopper: model Fadhi Mohamed is sheathed in a modest yet ultrasleek shimmering red dress and lavender headscarf. While there are photographs of famous personae—Tyler, the Creator, Naomi Campbell, FKA twigs, Edward Enninful—Addy’s portraiture of less-recognizable models, photographed for magazines like i-D, LOVE, and Luncheon, are the most spectacular: lean men in bright trousers, profiles of women with minimalist makeup and cool stares. Toward the book’s conclusion, Addy pays homage to Ghanaian photographer James Barnor, writing him a fan letter and publishing four of his images, including a sitter in Barnor’s Studio X23 with a beautiful geometrical coif. With this inclusion, Addy highlights the legacy of great Black photographers who connect African art to the English creative scene and affirms its future-forward continuity. —SARAH MOROZ
It’s a welcome choice when artists allot equal aesthetic attention to urban landscapes and efflorescent idylls. Hilary Pecis does just that, representing the beauty of car dealerships and cacti under the California sun. In a new survey of her work, HILARY PECIS (Gregory R. Miller/Rachel Uffner Gallery, $50), she showcases patio plants and liquor-store signage, John Ashbery books and riotously floral tablecloths, glass carafes and chessboards, shucked oysters and tea lights. Pecis paints festive dinner parties mid-meal; wax drippings cascading down wine-bottles-turned-candleholders; a dog below a table of crudités and snacks; flowers in a wasabi-peas-can-cum-vase set atop a pedestal of stacked art books. Johanna Fateman characterizes these vistas and decors as “regionalist wildcards, which bridge or blur genres and highlight the iPhone camera’s role as an aggregator of proclivities and a documenter of daily life.” Pecis’s own artistic heritage is equated with that of the Fauvists and Nabis; her visuals channel a West Coast–inflected Édouard Vuillard. “Color is blunt and wild in her work,” writes Fateman. “The space is topsy-turvy, flattish but warped.” In another essay, painter Lily Stockman describes the scenes Pecis focuses on as “experienced, not just viewed.” Her vibe, Stockman scrupulously distinguishes, “is more Eve Babitz territory than Joan Didion.” —S. M.
