State of Mind by Constance M. Lewallen, Karen Moss - Hardcover

About the Book

State of Mind, the lavishly illustrated companion book to the exhibition of the same name, investigates California’s vital contributions to Conceptual art—in particular, work that emerged in the late 1960s among scattered groups of young artists. The essays reveal connections between the northern and southern California Conceptual art scenes and argue that Conceptualism’s experimental practices and an array of then-new media—performance, site-specific installations, film and video, mail art, and artists’ publications—continue to exert an enormous influence on the artists working today.

Reviews

"A pleasure. . . . The curators have written short, elucidating comments for almost everything here, about 150 items. Not only do their words bring individual images to life; but they also add up to an absorbing narrative of a place and an era."
— New York Times

"Provocative. . . . Puts pressure on the category of idea-based art through a focus on the body, ritual, media and the social world."
— Art in America

"While showing a real breadth, and the consistency of various sorts of conceptual thinking, [State of Mind is] in fact very useful in terms of ways in which an artist could reinvent their congenial mediums to express social, political, as well as artistic concerns."
— Brooklyn Rail

“Will leave [locals] . . . wondering how they failed to notice so much provocative activity—a lot of it very public—when it occurred.”
— San Francisco Chronicle

“Informative and well written.”
— Orange County Register

“Gives a vivid overview of California artists’ contributions to conceptual art. Pairing primary images from then-emerging experimental media (site-specific installations, film/video, etc.) with critical essays, this book makes for conceptual art’s continued influence on contemporary art.”
— Public Art Review

"Constance Lewallen and Karen Moss take advantage of [the] outsider position, making use of art’s ability to conjure or invent new meanings and contexts."
— Gallerist NY

"There is not a trace of the provincial nor the apologetic in the tone of the State of Mind texts. Rather there is a justified claim for the sophisticated originality of this Californian art—sophisticated because the authors have convincingly argued that the artists, for the most part, had many conscious connections and familiarity with art from the rest of the country and Europe, yet were driven by a desire to be independent and different."

—Moira Roth, editor and contributor, The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America 1970-1980

"State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970 is an essential overview of the rich and complex moment when California assumed its role as a leading center for the making and exhibition of the kind of adventurous and progressive art that immediately fascinated the world, and over the years has come to define a generation and a region. An unmatched source of hard-to-find primary images combined with thought-provoking critical essays, this book can easily function as a standard text on this subject.”

—David Ross, former director of SFMOMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and currently Chairman of the MFA program in Art Practice at The School of Visual Arts

About the Book

About the Author

Reviews