{"title":"Dennis Adams","description":"\u003cp\u003eDennis Adams (born 1948) is an American artist whose practice since the late 1970s has centred on the intersection of public space, mass media imagery and institutional architecture. Working primarily through site-specific bus shelter installations and lightbox structures inserted into urban environments, Adams appropriates documentary and press photographs — many drawn from the history of political violence, civil rights and Cold War imagery — and reframes them within the functional infrastructure of the city. His \u003cem\u003eBus Shelter\u003c\/em\u003e works, beginning in the early 1980s, place photographic images into the advertising panels of transit shelters, where they circulate alongside commercial imagery in public space. Adams has exhibited internationally and his work is held in major public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"power-of-the-city-whitney-isp-papers-1-1992","title":"THE POWER OF THE CITY \/ THE CITY OF POWER, Whitney ISP Papers No. 1, 1992","description":"\u003cp\u003eSoftcover, 15 × 23 cm, 75 pp, offset printed throughout in black-and-white. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992. ISP Papers, No. 1. Organized by Christel Hollevoet, Karen Jones and Timothy Nye as Helena Rubinstein Fellows in the 1991–92 Whitney Independent Study Program. $5 retail sticker retained to front wrapper.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAn unusually dense publication from one of the Whitney Independent Study Program’s strongest early-1990s moments. \u003cem\u003eThe Power of the City \/ The City of Power\u003c\/em\u003e was the first issue of ISP Papers, preceding a sequence that would shortly include \u003cem\u003eDirt and Domesticity: Constructions of the Feminine\u003c\/em\u003e and the now much better-known \u003cem\u003eAbject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art\u003c\/em\u003e (ISP Papers No. 3, 1993).\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe exhibition treats the city less as scenery than as an operating system: streets, advertising, homelessness, commodities, architecture, graffiti and public space become structures through which power is exercised and resisted. Three essays anchor the argument — Timothy Nye’s “Conceptual Art: A Spatial Perspective,” Christel Hollevoet’s “Wandering in the City, ‘Flânerie’ to ‘Dérive’ and After: The Cognitive Mapping of Urban Space,” and Karen Jones’s “The Urban Event: Spectacle, Resistance, and Hegemony.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe cast assembled around that proposition is extraordinary: Vito Acconci, Dennis Adams, Michael Banicki, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Stanley Brouwn, Daniel Buren, André Cadere, Sophie Calle, Henry Chalfant, Guy Debord, Öyvind Fahlström, Théodore Fraenkel, Spider, Kies, Rammellzee, Joey, TDS Crew, Lady Pink, Ilona Granet, Hans Haacke, David Hammons, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Tehching Hsieh, Douglas Huebler, Candy Jernigan, Allan Kaprow, Marta Minjuín, Wolf Vostell, On Kawara, Barbara Kruger, George Maciunas, Lois Nesbitt, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Alain Paiement, Benjamin Patterson, RepoHistory, Aldo Rossi, Edward Ruscha, Gary Simmons, Francesc Torres, Andy Warhol, Dan Wiley, Krzysztof Wodiczko, David Wojnarowicz, Tony Cokes and Matt Mullican.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat full roster is part of the point. Conceptual Art, Fluxus, Situationism, institutional critique, graffiti, activist practice, performance and downtown New York culture are placed within the same argument about who gets to occupy, image, regulate and rewrite the city.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOne spread places Dennis Adams’s \u003cem\u003eBus Shelter II\u003c\/em\u003e opposite David Hammons’s \u003cem\u003eBliz-aard Ball Sale\u003c\/em\u003e: one artist inserting an image into the machinery of street advertising, the other setting up on a Manhattan pavement to sell carefully arranged snowballs as commodities. Elsewhere, Wojnarowicz’s \u003cem\u003eArthur Rimbaud in New York\u003c\/em\u003e is read through alienation, homelessness, memory and the Situationist dérive. The catalogue continually shifts between the city seen from above — as map, property and system — and the individual body moving through it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe exhibition was presented not at the Whitney’s main museum but at its Downtown branch at Federal Reserve Plaza in Lower Manhattan’s Financial District. The Whitney archive dates that branch 1988–1992, placing this exhibition in its final year of operation. A show concerned with capital, public space, commodification, homelessness and resistance was therefore staged inside a museum satellite embedded in the city’s financial infrastructure.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe exhibition ended. The branch ended. ISP Papers No. 1 remained.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere is something particularly good about the surviving $5.00 sticker sitting on the aerial photograph of Manhattan. Seventy-five pages of Hammons, Debord, Kruger, Haacke, Basquiat, Wojnarowicz and Warhol, at some point reduced again to a five-dollar retail object. The sticker stays.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCondition: Good to very good. Rubbing and light edge and corner wear to wrappers, with minor handling consistent with age. $5 retail sticker retained to front cover. Internally clean from inspection.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Whitney Museum of American Art","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54547360645458,"sku":"TNR-2026-0644","price":125.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/WhitneymuseumofmodernArt.Thepowerofthecity_thecityofpower.1995.jpg?v=1788582280"},{"product_id":"julia-ballerini-sequence-consequence-aperture-bard-college-1989","title":"JULIA BALLERINI, ed., Sequence (con)Sequence: (sub)versions of photography in the 80s, Aperture, 1989","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eEdited by Julia Ballerini\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSequence (con)Sequence: (sub)versions of photography in the 80s\u003cbr\u003eAperture \/ Edith C. Blum Art Institute, Bard College, New York, 1989\u003cbr\u003eSoftcover\u003cbr\u003e16.5 × 22 cm · 115 pp.\u003cbr\u003eIllustrated throughout in colour\u003cbr\u003eEnglish language\u003cbr\u003eISBN 0-89381-358-3\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublished in conjunction with the 1989 exhibition at the Edith C. Blum Art Institute, Bard College, \u003cem\u003eSequence (con)Sequence\u003c\/em\u003e catches photography at the end of a decade in which the single, authoritative image had become increasingly difficult to believe in.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eInstead, Julia Ballerini assembled nineteen artists working through multiples, repetitions, montage, appropriation and interrupted narrative: Dennis Adams, Mac Adams, Vikky Alexander, John Baldessari, Gretchen Bender, Jean-Charles Blanc, Dorit Cypis, Nancy Goldring, William Larson, John Maggiotto, Lorie Novak, Robert Rauschenberg, Hope Sandrow, John Schlesinger, Klaus Schnitzer, Robert Sennhauser, Eve Sonneman, Silvia Taccani and Brian Wood. The accompanying essays are by Ballerini, William S. Wilson and Lori Zippay.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe exhibition ran at Bard from February to April 1989, and the catalogue feels very precisely positioned at that point: after a decade of Pictures Generation strategies, appropriation, television, advertising and increasingly accelerated image circulation, but before the internet gave that condition a permanent technological form.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBallerini’s proposition is not simply that these photographers made sequences. It is that sequence itself had changed. The photographic series no longer necessarily built toward a stable story. Images could contradict one another, repeat, break apart, behave like television channels, magazine pages or fragments of memory. Her own description of the work stresses its refusal of traditional linear narrative and its response to the visual overload of contemporary information culture.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat makes the book particularly interesting now. What reads in 1989 as a subversion of photographic narrative — fragmentation, repetition, rapid shifts between unrelated images, the collision of private and mass-media imagery — looks remarkably close to the ordinary conditions under which images circulate today.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe title is excellent too: sequence \/ consequence \/ con sequence. A small linguistic disruption that describes what is happening to the photographs inside. One image follows another, but cause and effect are no longer guaranteed.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe artist list places canonical figures such as Baldessari and Rauschenberg beside artists more closely associated with media critique and constructed photography, including Gretchen Bender and Vikky Alexander. Rather than presenting a neat survey of “1980s photography,” the catalogue records a moment when photography was actively contaminating itself with advertising, television, installation, text and other images.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe cover makes the argument visually: a dense grid of tiny photographs functioning simultaneously as individual pictures and as raw information — less a window onto the world than a screen of competing signals.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA very good period document of postmodern photography while postmodernism was still present tense, rather than something being reconstructed retrospectively.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003chr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCondition:\u003c\/strong\u003e Very good vintage condition. Light rubbing and edge wear to covers, with minor handling and surface marks consistent with age. Interior clean. Please refer to photographs.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/thenewrare.com\/blogs\/journal\/the-new-rare-at-glue-book-fair-2026\"\u003eRead our journal: The New Rare at GLUE Book Fair 2026 →\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Aperture","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54708806091090,"sku":null,"price":55.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/Ballerini_Julia.Sequence_con_sequence._sub_versionsofphotographyinthe80s.1989.jpg?v=1789289587"}],"url":"https:\/\/thenewrare.com\/collections\/dennis-adams.oembed","provider":"The New Rare","version":"1.0","type":"link"}