Katie Anania, assistant professor of art history in the School of Art, Art History and Design, has published her first book, “Out of Paper: Drawing, Environment, and the Body in 1960s America.” The book was released Oct. 15 by Yale University Press.
Anania will have a launch event for the book at First Friday, 5:30-7:30 p.m. Nov. 1 at Francie and Finch Bookstore, 130 S. 13th St. in Lincoln.
“Out of Paper” is a dynamic look at how American 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 United States colonies used works on paper to imagine new environments and spaces for themselves, using techniques like shredding cutting, erasing, recording and rapid prototyping.
“I’ve always been interested in drawings, first drafts, rehearsals and other remnants of the creative process,” Anania said. “While I was in graduate school and studying contemporary art history, it felt exciting to engage and to research how artists were understanding this part of the process, what they were, what they thought they were making with their drawings, and maybe what they were actually making almost accidentally with their drawings. And it turns out there is a world that can start on a page, and it’s a world that reflects possibility that sometimes isn’t present in a finished work of art.”
The book features artists Carolee Schneemann, William Anastasi, Richard Tuttle, Robert Morris, Rafael Ferrer and Charles White.
“All of the artists featured in the book are connected in some way to the American art world of the 1960s that was growing more global and internationalized, but was also very parochial,” Anania said. “Robert Morris had great success in the New York gallery scene and sold his drawings and sketches for a lot of money, whereas his collaborator Carolee Schneemann had to have a fire sale of her drawings and sketches in her apartment just to pay the bills. Drawings were becoming a currency, but the value of that currency really varied. By studying artists who were connected as part of the same community, but whose fate and critical fortunes varied so widely, I was also able to discover that drawings can tell us a lot about value systems—the way they’re treated, the way they are archived and recovered and preserved.”
Another layer of her research involved direct conversations with several artists, including Anastasi, Schneemann, Tuttle, Ferrer, Dove Bradshaw, Dorothea Rockburne, Robert Barry and Adrian Piper, among many others.
The book’s research and writing took more than 10 years. During that time, Anania was a Tyson Scholar in American Art during the spring 2022 semester at the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, where she finished the book and got feedback from her fellow Tyson scholars.
Anania hopes readers of her book begin to understand how even the most seemingly insignificant creations and materials in our lives are deeply intertwined with industrial processes and social systems.
“Even the things that we make that never go anywhere are a central part or a driving force of our intellectual, physical and material lives,” she said. “The things that we notate to ourselves, like as asides or out of boredom, are structurally so important. And that the same thing that I think these artists were discovering in the moment is that even something like a piece of paper comes from a specific supply chain. It’s connected to an industrial matrix. It’s cut, it’s dyed, it’s bleached usually using the same forces and mechanisms that we’re making bombs for the Vietnam War. It’s inseparable from these operations of industry and the state.”
