Amy Sillman’s “Shapes”

Amy Sillman is a painter who has expanded and pushed the medium into many other genres—from drawing to video to zines, DIY publications usually made fast and printed on the fly. For MoMA, Sillman has created a new zine issue, “Shapes,” on the occasion of her exhibition Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman—The Shape of Shape, for which she selected more than 70 works from the Museum’s collection.

The zine takes off where the exhibition began: with shapes, those shifting, omnipresent entities that define who we are and what we see. As Sillman writes, “Basically everything in the world is a shape...every edge, corner, blob, form, silhouette, or negative space is something you have to navigate to get through a room.” She explores little-known histories of shape in modern art and gives us a raucous visual tour of all those artists who, she argues, don’t quite fit into the traditional canon—“oddballs” who explored shape without systems, dreams instead of rules, detours rather than grand plans. And yet all this seemingly blithe play with shape—with bodies, geographies, relationships—is at the core of art and even politics. As we read in the zine, “form registers protest.”

To see an EXCERPT of “Shapes”: The OG, Vol 14, SCROLL DOWN! OR, YOU CAN READ/SEE THE ENTIRE ZINE AT THE LINK BELOW.
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DOWNLOAD THE ENTIRE ZINE AS A PDF

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DOWNLOAD THE FULL ZINE NOW IN PDF FORMAT.
(Note for Firefox users: in order to view the PDF correctly, you may need to switch from “Automatic Zoom” to “Page Fit.” You’ll see these options in the center top of your browser window.)

Correction: On p. 13, "Robert Smithson" should be replaced with "Robert Morris."