Mary Schneider Enriquez; with contributions by Doris Salcedo and Narayan Khandekar

Published in 2016

ISBN: 978-0-300-22251-7
196 pages; 9 x 10 ½ in.
100 color illustrations
Hardcover (cloth over board) with a paper jacket

Published by the Harvard Art Museums
Distributed by Yale University Press

Winner, 2017 Acknowledgment of Excellence, New England Book Show

Colombian sculptor and installation artist Doris Salcedo (b. 1958) creates works that address political violence and oppression. This pioneering book, which focuses on Salcedo’s works from the 1980s to the present, examines the development and evolution of her approach. These sculptures have pushed toward new extremes, incorporating organic materials—rose petals, grass, soil—in order to blur the line between the permanent and the ephemeral.

This insightful text illuminates the artist’s practice: exhaustive personal interviews and deep research joined with painstaking acts of making that both challenge limits and set new directions in materiality. Mary Schneider Enriquez convincingly argues for viewing Salcedo’s oeuvre not just through a particular theoretical lens, such as violence studies or trauma and memory studies, but for the profound way the artist engages with and expands the traditions of sculpture as a medium. 

The related exhibition, Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning, is on display at the Harvard Art Museums from November 4, 2016 through April 9, 2017.

Mary Schneider Enriquez, the curator of Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning, is the Houghton Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Harvard Art Museums; Narayan Khandekar is director of the Harvard Art Museums’ Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies; Doris Salcedo is an artist based in Bogotá, Colombia.

The exhibition is made possible by the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Family, the Charles O. Wood III and Miriam M. Wood Foundation, Marguerite Steed Hoffman and Thomas W. Lentz, Catherine Marcus Rose and William Rose, Bridgitt and Bruce Evans, Mark N. Diker and Deborah A. Colson, and Elaine Levin.

In addition, the following endowed funds have provided crucial support: the Agnes Gund Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art; the Alexander S., Robert L., and Bruce A. Beal Exhibition Fund; and the Harvard Art Museums Mellon Publication Funds, including the Henry P. McIlhenny Fund. Modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.

Purchase at Touchnet