Book Releases July 2024

‘Glenn Ligon: Distinguishing Piss from Rain; Writings and Interviews’

An expansive and generously illustrated volume featuring incisive reflections on race, art and contemporary culture by one of the greatest artists working today.
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​To be released on 30 July 2024 ​

‘Glenn Ligon: Distinguishing Piss from Rain; Writings and Interviews’ brings together key writings by and interviews with Glenn Ligon in one volume for the first time since his sold-out 2011 anthology ‘Yourself in the World’. This publication, the latest from Hauser & Wirth Publishers, presents a collection of both polemical and personal writings and interviews in an accessible paperback volume, with 100 illustrations. Over 400 pages, this book provides the fullest picture yet of the artist and his ongoing evaluation of the art and politics of our time.

Best known for his landmark text-based paintings, Ligon draws on the influential words of leading 20th-century cultural figures, including James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein and Richard Pryor, constructing work that centers Blackness within the historically white backdrop of the art world and culture at large. Ligon’s work has been examining race, history, sexuality and culture in America since his emergence as an artist in the late 1980s. Early in his career, Ligon started to incorporate text into his paintings, using the stenciled words that would become a hallmark of his oeuvre.

‘Nicole Eisenman: Maker’s Muck’

Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ new artist’s book focuses on Nicole Eisenman’s installation ‘Maker’s Muck’ and features new texts from 17 key contemporary writers responding to the work.

To be released on 22 July

Nicole Eisenman’s dynamic installation ‘Maker’s Muck’ is the focus of a new publication by Hauser & Wirth Publishers. The mixed-media, kinetic installation was the heart of the artist’s first solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in 2022 in New York and recently featured in the major UK retrospective ‘Nicole Eisenman: What Happened’ at Whitechapel Gallery in 2023. Depicting an artist at work, ‘Makers’ Muck’ places an outsized plaster figure hunched over a potter’s wheel at its center, on which a mound of ersatz clay interminably spins. ​

For the new publication ‘Nicole Eisenman: Maker’s Muck’, the artist has invited 17 contributors to follow the trajectories of the various objects in ‘Maker’s Muck’ through essays, metafictional reflections and other experiments in writing. ​ Selected by Eisenman in collaboration with editor Sarah Nicole Prickett, who also contributed a text, the writers in the book embody a cross-section of important voices in contemporary literature and art: hannah baer, Caren Beilin, Hannah Black, Durga Chew-Bose, Cyrus Dunham, Sheila Heti, Shiv Kotecha, Matt Longabucco, Sam McKinniss, Ryan McNamara, Alhena Katsof, Tess Pollok, Sam Roeck, Jasmine Sanders, Lynne Tillman, Janique Vigier. In addition to photography of the full installation, the book features new, individual documentation of the work’s individual components, allowing for an independent dialogue with some of the contributing texts. ​