Barry Le Va: Fictional Excerpts, Notes, Interviews, Scrapbooks

Barry Le Va is back. After more than ten years without a major exhibition in the United States, a mini-blockbuster of a retrospective at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Contemporary Art in early 2005 rescattered Le Va's felt, reimbedded his cleavers in a wall and rebroke his sheets of plate glass--to extraordinary critical acclaim. Now, to complement that exhibition and for insight into a mind that has remained consistently true to a renegade vision for some 35 years, we have a collection of writings, studies, notes, drawings, sketches and more, from a cult artist who has influenced a younger generation that includes Jason Rhoades, Cady Noland, Karen Kilimnik and Rirkrit Tiravanija. The book brings together for the first time in one place three major early interviews, and adds a new one with Christophe Cherix.

Barry La Va was born in Long Beach, California, in 1941 and studied mathematics and architecture at California State University and art at Otis Art Institute, from which he graduated in 1967. Known primarily for his iscatteri pieces, which he called idistributions,i from the 60s and 70s, he became one of the most important artists to emerge during that time. Le Va has worked and lived in New York City for more than two decades.