Katie Anania, Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln in the School of Art, Art History, and Design, is launching her first book, Out of Paper: Drawing, Environment, and the Body in 1960s America (Yale University Press) on Saturday, October 12, from 6-7 p.m. at the Baader-Meinhof Gallery, located at 2001 Vinton Street in Omaha. The book will be officially released on October 15.
Widely published on twentieth-century drawing, Katie Anania specializes in modern and contemporary art of the Americas, with a focus on environmental art history, feminism, and queer theory. Out of Paper is a dynamic look at how U.S. artists used paper to radically redefine the relationship between the body and its surroundings, and to propose new conceptions of ecology in the decades following World War II. In narrating several artists’ drawing projects in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Puerto Rico - some public, some private – the book shows how women artists, Black artists, and artists from U.S. colonies used works on paper to imagine new environments and spaces for themselves, using techniques like shredding, cutting, erasing, recording, and rapid prototyping.
The event will feature a short reading, followed by an open dialogue on ecology, U.S. colonial relations, contemporary art, design, race and gender in public culture, and more.