Susan York + Arthur Sze: The Unfolding Center

Drawings by Susan York
Poem by Arthur Sze

Hardcover with jacket
12 × 15 inches
120 pages / 36 images
Trade ISBN: 9781934435694 ($50)
Signed ISBN: 9798890180568 ($55)

Limited edition of this book is sold out.

Susan York’s work explores the relationships between form, space, and elemental material. Rooted in a minimalist sensibility, this practice spans sculpture, drawing, prints, and site responsive installation. She is most known for reductive work in graphite and porcelain. Her cast and drawn forms engage with the particularities of architectural space, combining precise geometry with asymmetry and tension. 

York’s site-sensitive installations engage the existing architecture of a chosen site: a room, a wall, or a piece of paper. Her studies in graphite are a homage to subtlety, with irregularities interrupting otherwise austere geometric forms and producing results that are more felt than seen. Lucy Lippard describes, “This nuanced fusion of the intellect and sensual experience is precisely what York achieves. In doing so, she takes Minimalism past the post, and into a realm of her own.”

York’s influences stem from a number of sources, including her friendship with mentor Agnes Martin, the Dutch De Stijl movement, and the effects of working in the expansive desert landscape of the American Southwest. Her primary questions are rooted in the transitions between two and three dimensions. She explores what happens when one state becomes another, asking how solid form can be taken apart and rendered flat, and investigating how a flat shape can be made three dimensional. Her work initiates an immersive experience, allowing objects to dematerialize into the space that surrounds them, challenging unconscious perceptions of form and space.

A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, York’s work can be found in numerous public and private collections in the US and abroad, including: British Museum, London, UK; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt, Germany; New Mexico Museum of Art; The Panza Collection, Switzerland; and Kunst Museum Winterthur, Switzerland. She is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship and an Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award.

Arthur Sze is a poet, a translator, and an editor. He is the author of 11 books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021); Sight Lines (2019), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; Compass Rose (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Ginkgo Light (2009), selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 (1998), selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian American Literary Award; and Archipelago (1995), selected for an American Book Award. Sze has also published one book of Chinese poetry translations, The Silk Dragon (2001), selected for the Western States Book Award, and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010). 

Sze is a recipient of the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. He was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico. From 2012 to 2017, he was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and, in 2017, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Sze’s poems have been published in the American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Harper’s, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry and in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. His work has been translated into 14 languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.