July | 2024 | University of Washington Press Blog

The University of Washington Press is proud to publish important books in art history and to distribute exhibition catalogs for museums in the Pacific Northwest, United States, and around the world. These books provide rich context to the exhibitions they accompany through high-quality reproductions and illuminating essays by curators, artists, and scholars. Whether or not you have the chance to see some of these exhibitions in person, we invite you to explore the generously illustrated publications below.

Our Summer Reading Sale is underway! Enjoy 40% off and free domestic shipping when you order on our website through July 31, 2024. Enter promo code WARM24 at checkout.

Nordic Utopia? African Americans in the Twentieth Century

During the twentieth century, Black Americans visited and lived in Nordic countries, performing, studying, working, and seeking adventure, love, freedom to explore sexuality, and distance from Jim Crow segregation. Drawing from film, photographs, paintings, music, textiles, and dance, Nordic Utopia captures these journeys and ultimately reflects on how some African Americans have called and continue to call Nordic countries home.

Gathering voices from hip-hop artist Jason Diakité to novelist and essayist James Baldwin, this book, edited by the National Nordic Museum Director of Collections Leslie Anne Anderson, tells how African Americans were transformed through their Nordic encounters. The authors examine how “hip-hop ethics” illuminate the dynamic meaning of material culture in contemporary Afro-Nordic lifeworlds. Documented experiences by migrant and visiting artists probe the peculiarity of being a Black person in a remote “white” place while also using these experiences to reflect on and critique American racism. The book considers what specific Nordic artifacts and materials reveal about the complexities of place-making for Black people in a region where notions of innocence, isolation, and distance from the issues of the wider world also abound.

The exhibition is on view at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle through July 21, 2024 and at the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, WI, August 10–November 10, 2024.

Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract

The first solo exhibition of the Dakota Sioux artist, Mary Sully: Native Modern opens at The Met on July 18. Although she attempted to enter the patronized artworld during her lifetime, Mary Sully completed her stunning portfolio in near obscurity. Born on the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota in 1896, she was largely self-taught. Steeped in the visual traditions of beadwork, quilling, and hide painting, she also engaged with the experiments in time, space, symbolism, and representation characteristic of early twentieth-century modernist art.

Sully’s position on the margins of the art world meant that her work was exhibited only a handful of times during her life. In Becoming Mary Sully, Philip J. Deloria reclaims that work from obscurity, exploring Sully’s portfolio through the lenses of modernism, industrial design, Dakota women’s aesthetics, mental health, ethnography and anthropology, primitivism, and the American Indian politics of the 1930s. Working in a complex territory oscillating between representation, symbolism, and abstraction, Sully evoked multiple and simultaneous perspectives of time and space. With an intimate yet sweeping style, Deloria recovers in Sully’s work a move toward an anti-colonial aesthetic that claimed a critical role for Indigenous women in American Indian futures—within and distinct from American modernity and modernism.

The exhibition is on view at The Met in New York City from July 18, 2024 through January 12, 2025.

Calder: In Motion
The Shirley Family Collection

In spring 2023, the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) announced that patrons Jon and Kim Shirley had generously gifted the Shirley Family Collection to the museum. The collection—one of the most important private holdings of Alexander Calder’s art—is the result of thirty-five years of thoughtful acquisitions and features many significant examples from his production.

Calder: In Motion accompanies SAM’s inaugural exhibition of works from the collection, demonstrating Calder’s unique vision, which has had a profound influence on contemporary culture. It features a curatorial foreword by José Carlos Diaz; short essays by Jon Shirley tracing his evolution as a passionate and informed collector of Calder’s work and discussing the importance of scale in the artist’s sculpture, which ranges from the miniature to the monumental; and an essay by art historian Elizabeth Hutton Turner that expands on the artist’s life and his extraordinary impact on twentieth-century art. Short contributions by Alexander S. C. Rower, president of the Calder Foundation and grandson of the artist, focus on ten of the collection’s artworks, situating them within Calder’s oeuvre.

The exhibition is on view at the Seattle Art Museum through August 4, 2024.

Out of Site: Survey Science and the Hidden West

Out of Site explores the invisible landscapes of the American West through the interwoven forces of art and technology over the past 170 years. This interdisciplinary project features an array of visual media, including historical, modern, and contemporary photography, that punctuate a series of essays by art scholars alongside first-person perspectives from artists working “in the field” today.

Beginning with the survey era, the publication mines the use of wet-plate photography to penetrate the visible surface of the land to visualize the geological processes, mineral resources, and human histories that formed the foundation of the American empire. With the turn of the century, the relationship between sight and site grew increasingly remote, revealing patterns of large-scale industrial transformation, including the rise of nuclear technology and the American military-industrial complex. And with the modern use of long-range drones, satellites, and other adapted photographic technologies in the postwar years, new matrices of power and surveillance are revealed alongside the human and environmental fallout they often leave behind.

The exhibition is on view at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles through January 5, 2025.

Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum

Published on the occasion of the expansive Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum initiative at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), this lavishly illustrated catalog centers Native artist voices and challenges collective understandings of Native peoples’ pivotal role in North American history.

The written and visual contributions address and refute the oppressive and pervasive hierarchies of colonialism upon which museums are based. The book features essays by heather ahtone (Chickasaw / Choctaw), Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche), and John Lukavic; newly commissioned poetry by Heid E. Erdrich (Ojibwe); a comic conceived, written, and illustrated by Weyodi Old Bear (Comanche), Dale Deforest (Diné), and Lee Francis IV (Pueblo of Laguna); and transcripts of roundtable discussions with contemporary Native artists.

Fifty plates spanning a range of media from monographic and thematic exhibitions showcase both historically significant works from the BMA’s collection and the works of living artists—many of whom offer their perspectives in the catalog—to offer an important contribution to current global conversations around the decolonization of museums.

Associated exhibitions are on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art through February 16, 2025.

Books on Past Exhibitions

Books on Upcoming Exhibitions

The following is an adapted excerpt from Unrecognized in California: Federal Acknowledgment and the San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians by Olivia M. Chilcote.

One September afternoon in 2016, I sat on a bench in front of the National Archives in Washington after a long day of research. As I scrolled through social media to pass the time before my ride arrived, a news release shared by a colleague caught my attention. In just two days, the National Museum of the American Indian would unveil, for the first time, one of the treaties the California Indian Nations had negotiated with the United States.

“The Treaty of Temecula is one of 18 treaties negotiated between the United States and American Indian Nations in California and submitted to the United States Senate on June 1, 1852, by President Millard Fillmore,” the announcement read. “Unbeknownst to the American Indian signatories, the U.S. Senate rejected the treaties and ordered them to be held in secrecy for over fifty years,” leaving the tribes “homeless without any local, state or federal legal recourse” and leading “to an ethnic cleansing in which the American Indian population in California plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000 between 1846 and 1870.”

My heart skipped a beat. The museum planned to unveil the treaty that a captain of my tribe, San Diego County’s San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians, had signed more than a century and a half ago to no avail.

The Treaty of Temecula, negotiated within Pechanga territory, served as a physical reminder that the California Indian experience is just as valid as any Native American experience.
Olivia M. Chilcote

The news release went on to say that tribal representatives from four nations affected by the treaty would be present. I called my mom and asked whether she had heard about it through any tribal council communications. She confirmed that no one from my tribe was aware of the unveiling, even though our captain, Pedro Ka-wa-wish, was among the signatories. My mom cried on the other end of the line.

“Olivia,” she said, “you have to be there . . . You need to represent San Luis Rey because no one else will.”

After unsuccessful attempts to communicate with museum officials, I arrived on the morning of the unveiling as an uninvited guest. I walked around the deserted sidewalks in front of the building for a few minutes until I saw some people enter through the glass doors. I followed.

An employee who took me for a tourist informed me that the museum was not yet open.

**Olivia M. Chilcote** (Luiseño, San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians) is assistant professor of American Indian studies at San Diego State University.

“I’m here for the treaty event,” I said confidently. She took out a list of invitees and asked for my affiliation, but she could not locate my tribe on the list. After I told her the San Luis Rey Band’s captain had signed the Treaty of Temecula, she decided to let me wait there as members of the invited tribal delegations viewed the treaty in private before its installation.

Once it was installed, I joined the invitees in the dimly lit exhibit space. We gathered around the treaty, which looked small compared with the glass case in which it rested, illuminated from above by a single light. The museum director delivered opening remarks before offering the floor to representatives of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians and the Ramona Band of Cahuilla.

The tribal leaders spoke powerfully about how the failure to ratify the treaties had affected California tribes. Mark Macarro, chairman of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, recollected fellow Native Americans insisting that “Mission Indians” are not like other Indians because they don’t have treaties with the United States. As he spoke, the Treaty of Temecula, negotiated within Pechanga territory, served as a physical reminder that the California Indian experience is just as valid as any Native American experience.

Continue Reading at the Los Angeles Times