Michael in Black by Nicole Miller and forthcoming book releases
Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) is an arts nonprofit, research center, and publisher opening in October 2022. CARA aims to expand public discourses and historical records to reflect art’s abundant pasts, presents, and futures—deepening our inquiries through diverse initiatives including publications, public programs, fellowships, and exhibitions.
CARA has already established itself as a publisher under the working title New York Consolidated, with 1996, Ed. Matt Keegan, co-published with Inventory Press (2020), Alice Mackler, co-published with Gregory R. Miller & Co. (2021), and An Oral History of Sara Penn’s Knobkerry, Ed. Svetlana Kitto, co-published with SculptureCenter (2021).
CARA’s focus as a publisher has been on elder and mid-career practitioners, artists’ estates, and not-resourced cultural histories and scholarship. CARA’s inaugural years will see us publish and support books across undefinable disciplines; facilitating new collaborations between visual practitioners, writers, scholars and collectives, honoring long-standing expertise, and inviting projects that expand and unravel historically dominant understandings of authorship, inscription, or legibility.
New release
Michael in Black by Nicole Miller
Published by CARA/Public Fiction; edited by Nicole Miller and Lauren Mackler; designed by Public Fiction. Now available.
Michael in Black by Nicole Miller (2022) focuses on a single sculptural work by artist and filmmaker Nicole Miller. The publication coalesces images of Miller’s work alongside newly commissioned texts and visual artworks by a cast of other artists and writers, as well as republished texts and existing artwork recontextualized through the publication’s subject.
The original sculpture Michael in Black is a bronze cast of Michael Jackson’s kneeling figure, poured from a mold made directly from his body circa 1987. This charged object comprises myriad aspects of performance, celebrity, and image: the objecthood of the performer, the potency and perversity of objects, death, grief, and editing. This sculpture is an outlier in Nicole Miller’s largely video and installation-centered work, though it excavates some concerns she has similarly articulated in moving image: her recurring interest in the self performance of her film subjects; the dehumanizing effects of the mass gaze; the celebrity as a host object for contemporary projections; the tactility of film; the sculptural qualities of editing; and the potential for self storytelling to reconstitute an individual’s wholeness.
Michael in Black by Nicole Miller features new texts by Negar Azimi, Hannah Black, Jared Sexton, and Greg Tate; republished texts by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Anna Deavere Smith, and Ocean Vuong; interviews with Dr. Yvonne Cagle, Alonzo King, Nicole Miller, and Bradford Young; artworks by Nikita Gale, Kazu Hiro, Ligia Lewis, and Jasper Marsalis; as well as additional plates by Lutz Bacher, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Todd Gray, Lyle Ashton Harris, Arthur Jafa, Deana Lawson, Herman Makkink, A. Michael Noll, Heji Shin, and others.
Michael in Black by Nicole Miller is co-published by the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) and Public Fiction and edited by Nicole Miller and Lauren Mackler. The publication acts as both a monograph for Miller’s work and as the new, 11th issue of the Public Fiction journal, utilizing Miller’s work as a springboard for an anthology of cultural criticism. Part reader, part art book, Michael in Black by Nicole Miller unpacks an artist’s oeuvre as well as the ecosystem that informs and feeds it. Each contribution stands in dialogue with Miller’s work and also independently, this book experiments with the monograph as a form and the book as a physical space and object.
Forthcoming CARA publications
Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos
Published by CARA/Fourthwall Books. Edited by Oluremi C. Onabanjo. Design by Carla Saunders. This publication is supported in part by a grant from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund. Release date: October 2022.
The Tahoma Mall by Dianna Molzan
Published by CARA, designed by Conny Purtill/Purtill Family Business, essay by Sarah Lehrer-Grawer, Release date: Winter 2022.
