City Lights in conjunction with the Gallery Wendi Norris and Reaktion Books present
Amy Lyford and Jennifer L. Shaw discuss the life and work of Dorothea Tanning
Celebrating the publication of
Exquisite Dreams: The Art and Life of Dorothea Tanning
by Amy Lyford
published by Reaktion Books
at Gallery Wendi Norris, 436 Jackson St, San Francisco, CA 94111
Free to the Public. Registration is required. Limited seating.
Exquisite Dreams is the first full account of Dorothea Tanning’s surrealist art, sculptures, abstract paintings and films.
Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) has for decades been known primarily as a Surrealist, but Exquisite Dreams shows how the work of this passionate, dynamic, and voraciously curious artist is impossible to categorize. Tanning’s lesser-known but equally powerful sculptures, abstract paintings, and films are explored here, and her writings, biography, and art are examined in the contexts of twentieth-century developments in advertising, fashion, popular culture, and art in New York and Paris.
Using new archival sources and analyses of Tanning’s work in a variety of media, Amy Lyford broadens our understanding of the artist and illuminates her stunning diversity and achievement. This richly illustrated book is an important contribution to the history of women artists, gender, and sexuality studies, as well as the history of Surrealism.
Amy Lyford is Arthur G. Coons Professor in the History of Ideas at Occidental College in Los Angeles. She is the author of Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France (2007) and Isamu Noguchi’s Modernism: Negotiating Race, Labor, and Nation, 1930–1950 (2013, 2018). Her current research and teaching interests include the history of photography; modern sculpture and architecture; the visual cultures of California and Hawaii; and issues of race, gender, national identity, and politics in modernist practice.
Jennifer L. Shaw is a writer, educator, and art historian. She served as Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at Sonoma State University. She is author of three books of art history and two novels. She is the author of Exist Otherwise: The Life and Works of CLAUDE CAHUN; Dream States: Puvis de Chavannes, Modernism and the Fantasy of France; Paris and the Countryside: Modern Life in Late-19th-Century France; and the novels The Butterfly Artist and Myths and Migrations.
Gallery Wendi Norris is a leading international art gallery with headquarters in San Francisco, California. The gallery holds decades-long relationships with 20th century luminaries such as Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Wolfgang Paalen, Remedios Varo, and Alice Rahon, artists whose nomadic and visionary practices interrogated the aesthetic, scientific, and philosophical movements of their times. The gallery also represents María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Chitra Ganesh, Julio César Morales, Ranu Mukherjee, Eva Schlegel, Peter Young, and other contemporaries, artists whose work similarly flows across disciplines, continents, and generations as they speculate on the present moment.
This event is made possible by the support of the City Lights Foundation.