By Scott Rothkopf and Laura Owens The exhibition Laura Owens on view at MOCA at the Geffen Contemporary, November 11, 2018–March 25, 2019. A richly illustrated, expansive mid-career survey of the stand-out American artist’s pioneering and influential work, with each copy featuring a unique silk-screen cover printed in Owens' studio. Since the early 1990s, Laura Owens (b. 1970) has challenged traditional assumptions about figuration and abstraction in her pioneering approach to painting. Created in close collaboration with the artist on the occasion of her mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, this inventive and comprehensive book features an incisive introduction by Scott Rothkopf, critical essays, literary texts, and short commentaries on a variety of subjects related to Owens’s broad interests, which range from folk art and needlework to comics and wallpaper. Reflections by more than twenty of Owens’s fellow artists, collaborators, assistants, dealers, family members, and friends offer an array of perspectives on her work at different periods in her life, beginning with her high school years in Ohio and ending with her current exhibition. A rich trove of more than a thousand images, drawn from the artist’s personal archive and largely unpublished before now, includes personal correspondence, journals, academic transcripts, handwritten notes, source material, exhibition announcements, clippings, and installation photographs. Whitney Museum & Yale University Press, 2017 Softcover with unique design*, 664 pages 10 x 8 inches *Each copy features a unique silk-screen cover printed in Owens' studio. There is no way of picking a cover. It will be a surprise!
