Jim Isermann, Women Artists in Italy, 1500-1800

Episode No. 527 features artist Jim Isermann and curator Oliver Tostmann. Radius Books has just published the monograph "Jim Isermann." For forty years the California-based Isermann has joined sculpture and painting to design, examinations of domesticity and queerness. Last year the Palm Springs Art Museum presented a survey of Isermann's career. Isermann has fulfilled commissions for sites as unalike as football stadiums at the University of Houston and in Arlington, Texas, and for Stanford and Princeton Universities. His work is in many major art museum collections, including at the Museum of Modern Art and the Hammer Museum. "Isermann" was designed by David Chickey and Mat Patalano. It features an essay by Christopher Knight and a conversation between Isermann and John Burtle. The book is available from Radius, Indiebound and Amazon for $60-65. With Eve Straussman-Pflanzer, Tostmann is the co-curator of "By Her Hand: Artemisia Gentileschi and Women Artists in Italy, 1500-1800" at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. The exhibition explores how women artists succeeded even though many paths to professional development and patronage were closed to them. Among the artists whose work is included in the project are Gentileschi, Sofonisba Anguissola, Rosalba Carriera, Lavinia Fontana, and Virginia da Vezzo. "By Her Hand" is on view at the Wadsworth through January 9, when it will travel to the Detroit Institute of Arts. The exhibition catalogue was published by the DIA and is distributed by Yale University Press. Indiebound and Amazon offer it for about $40.