Out of Bounds: The Collected Writings of Marcia Tucker

Edited by Lisa Phillips, Johanna Burton, and Alicia Ritson, with Kate Wiener

These influential, hard-to-obtain texts—many of which have never before been published— by Marcia Tucker, founding director of New York’s New Museum, showcase her lifelong commitment to pushing the boundaries of curatorial practice and writing while rethinking inherited structures of power within and outside the museum. The volume brings together the only comprehensive bibliography of Tucker’s writing and highlights her critical attention to art’s relationship to broader culture and politics.

The book is divided into three sections: monographic texts on a selection of the visionary artists whom Tucker championed, among them Bruce Nauman, Joan Mitchell, Richard Tuttle, and Andres Serrano; exhibition essays from some of the formative group shows she organized, such as Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials (1969) and Bad Girls (1994), which expanded the canons of curating and art history; and other critical works, including lectures, that interrogated museum practice, inequities of the art world, and institutional responsibility. These texts attest to Tucker’s tireless pursuit of questions related to difference, marginalization, access, and ethics, illuminating her significant impact on contemporary art discourse in her own time and demonstrating her lasting contributions to the field.

Lisa Phillips is the Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum. Johanna Burton is the Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement at the New Museum and editor for the museum’s Critical Anthologies in Art and Culture series. Alicia Ritson is a curator and was a Marcia Tucker Senior Research Fellow at the New Museum. Kate Wiener is a curatorial assistant at the New Museum.

“What we need is arts leaders like Tucker who recognise that the paradigm of equality, ‘can’t just be a matter of programming but has to be somehow inscribed in the heart of an organization’ (p.198). Otherwise the status quo will remain exactly where it is.”
—Rebecca Sykes, Burlington Contemporary

“Publishing Out of Bounds was clearly a labor of love on the editors’ part, and the result is a testament to Tucker’s contributions to contemporary art and the museums in which they reside.”
—ARLIS/NA

“At a time when there is renewed interest in the role of the museum, the critic, and the artistic activist, Tucker’s writing offers a much needed push to radical change.”
—Hyperallergic

“It’s no secret that Marcia Tucker, the late founder of New York’s New Museum, was brilliant, so it’s no surprise that Out of Bounds is extraordinary.”
—Artnews

“Terrific.”
—The Modern Art Notes Podcast

288 pages
6 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches
41 color and 10 b/w illustrations
ISBN 978-1-60606-596-9
paperback 

Getty Publications
Imprint: Getty Research Institute/New Museum

2019