Partial Recall: With Essays on Photographs of Native North Americans

by Lucy R. Lippard (Editor)

Explorations by 12 native American artists and writers into the images that have our ideas of Indianness, and the complex relationship of photography to identity.

Genres: Art

200 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1992

About the author

Since 1966, Lippard has published 20 books on feminism, art, politics and place and has received numerous awards and accolades from literary critics and art associations. A 2012 exhibition on her seminal book, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object at the Brooklyn Museum, titled "Six Years": Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art", cites Lippard's scholarship as its point of entry into a discussion about conceptual art during its era of emergence, demonstrating her crucial role in the contemporary understanding of this period of art production and criticism. Her research on the move toward dematerialization in art making has formed a cornerstone of contemporary art scholarship and discourse.

Co-founder of Printed matter (an art bookstore in New York City centered around artist's books), the Heresies Collective, Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D), Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, and other artists' organizations, she has also curated over 50 exhibitions, done performances, comics, guerrilla theater, and edited several independent publications the latest of which is the decidedly local La Puente de Galisteo in her home community in Galisteo, New Mexico. She has infused aesthetics with politics, and disdained disinterestedness for ethical activism.

Reviews

[Gina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting mix.

Lippard allows various people to choose a picture and write an essay on it. Some of them don't seem really fully-formed, like there is just the emotional reaction, where more time for reflection would have produced more interesting thoughts. (Except for Lippard herself, who may have done better with a little less time. Her piece is significantly longer than any of the others and vacillating.)

My two favorites were by writers I already like -- Joy Harjo and Leslie Marmon Silko -- so it may also be simply a matter of taste.

There are some great pictures and interesting things to think about. Of the writers previously unknown to me, I would be most likely to seek out Gail Tremblay for some interesting perspectves on art and art history.

[Betsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I also read this book as part of the cultural otherness seminar. It was a pretty interesting set of essays, each based on a photograph of a native north american.