Thirty-five years of South African artist William Kentridge’s dynamic, cross-genre art, with essays by Ann McCoy, Zakes Mda, and Ed Schad, a conversation between the artist and Walter Murch, and an unpublished lecture by Kentridge. Published with The Broad. This far-reaching book presents Kentridge’s dynamic art practice, which originates in charcoal drawing and expands into intersections with film, sculpture, opera and theater performances, printmaking and many other mediums. The volume is organized chronologically and thematically, emphasizing Kentridge’s destabilizing of South African and global narratives through openness to uncertainty, the generative power of the artist’s studio and perpetual change, all as conditions for illuminating repressed and silenced voices in historical records. An essay by curator Ed Schad is presented along with studio photography, archival material and illuminating illustrations of Kentridge’s work, joining essays by globally recognized literary figures and thinkers Zakes Mda and Ann McCoy. Notably, the volume features a conversation between Kentridge and the famous film and sound editor Walter Murch, as well as a never-before-published lecture by the artist. The work of William Kentridge (born 1955) has been seen in museums and galleries around the world since the 1990s, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Musée du Louvre in Paris, Whitechapel Gallery in London, Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen, the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid, the Kunstmuseum in Basel and Zeitz MOCAA and the Norval Foundation in Cape Town. Opera productions include Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Shostakovich’s The Nose and Alban Berg’s operas Lulu and Wozzeck. In 2016 Kentridge founded the Centre for Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, a space for responsive thinking and making through experimental, collaborative and cross-disciplinary art practices. The center hosts an ongoing program of workshops, public performances and mentorship activities.

Serves as a generous introduction to Kentridge’s work and its concerns. -- Susan Tallman * New York Review of Books *
Few artists can match the passion and mastery, the productivity and inventiveness of Kentridge, the grand blur-er of genres. -- Jack Curtis * Art New England *
Perhaps this is exactly the work that white and white-adjacent America needs to see, over and over again, until it finally makes the connections between its present and a past that it too often refuses to claim as its own. -- Aruna D'Souza * 4Columns *
Under Kentridge’s hand, historical maps, as well as pages from the Oxford English Dictionary and former mining company ledgers, transform into politically charged examinations of colonial power. -- Anna Furman * New York Times: T Magazine *