Marcia Tucker Libros

This engrossing memoir brings to vivid life the behind-the-scenes struggles of Marcia Tucker, the first woman to be hired as a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the founder of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. Tucker came of age in the 1960s, and this spirited account of her life draws the reader directly into the burgeoning feminist movement and the excitement of the New York art world during that time. Her own new ways of thinking led her to take principled stands that have changed the way art museums consider contemporary art. As curator of painting and sculpture at the Whitney, she organized major exhibitions of the work of Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Tuttle, among others. As founder of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, she organized and curated groundbreaking exhibitions that often focused on the nexus of art and politics. The book highlights Tucker's commitment to forging a new system when the prevailing one proved too narrow for her expansive vision.

The waning of the century-old modernist movement in the arts has called forth an astonishing array of artistic and critical responses. The twenty-five essays in Art After Modernism provide a comprehensive survey of the most provocative directions taken by recent art and criticism, exploring such topics as the decline of the ideology of modernism in the arts and the emergence of a wide range of postmodern practices; recent directions in painting, film, video, and photography; visual artists' investigations of mass-media systems and imagery; and the dynamics of the social network in which art is produced and disseminated. This major collection is an indispensable guide to the ideas and issues animating this decade's art—the far-reaching cultural reorientation known as postmodernism.

Catalog of exhibitions held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, Jan. 14-Feb. 27 and Mar. 5-April 10, 1994. With essays by Marcia Tucker, Marcia Tanner, Linda Goode Bryant, and Cheryl Dunye "Bad Girls is a serious exhibition about the plurality of contemporary feminist art. . . . Tucker should be congratulated for staking her territory smack in the middle of current feminist debates." -- "The Village Voice" "Bad Girls' satirical sendup of feminism is refreshing . . . excess and outrageousness is the rule." -- "The New York Observer"Unconventional and distinctly "unladylike, " Bad Girls considers many issues and controversies raised by the recent exhibitions "Bad Girls" and "Bad Girls West, " mounted in New York and Los Angeles respectively. But the central issues it examines are humor, transgression, and the critical and constructive potential of laughter in the work of a new generation of Bad Girls. Humor is the connecting force between the 45 artists in "Bad Girls, " and it is clear that they express themselves in ways that their mothers probably would not have approved of. But they don't care.