Jack Pierson

The sixth edition in American photographer Jack Pierson’s (born 1960) celebrated artist’s book series, Tomorrow’s Man—titled after the infamous bodybuilding series of the 1950s and '60s—features work from some of Pierson’s favorite contemporary artists, both established and emerging. As in the previous editions, the book comes in four different covers.
This installment showcases a diverse collection of work, such as Cameron Jamie’s ceramics, Clément PJ Schneider’s nude studies and Danny McDonald’s pop-inspired sculptures, alongside images from Matthew Bede Murphy, Michael Bilsborough, Agustin Bruno, Jeremy Deprez, Eliza Douglas, Robert Escalera, Mark Flood, Quinn Gorbutt, Mended Veil, Nathan Morgan, Nehama, Kembra Pfahler and Niv Shank. Rounding out this volume are Pierson’s own images and assorted ephemera as well as a screenplay by Chico Kramer.

This volume celebrates and documents the career of pioneering New York–based artist Jack Pierson (born 1960). Published on the occasion of Pierson’s tenth solo presentation with Regen Projects, Los Angeles, this full-color publication illustrates works produced over 35 years of the artist’s multidisciplinary practice. The publication follows the design of the exhibition, creating a personal sojourn through the artist’s career. Featuring a new contribution by Evan Moffitt that surveys the artist’s body of work in relation to queer cultural zeitgeists of the 1990s, a conversation between the artist and Andy Campbell, and an essay by Bruce Benderson, Less and more shines new light on Pierson’s oeuvre.

Jack Pierson’s (born 1960) latest book, New Pieces, features new assemblage works that the artist started making during quarantine in his Ridgewood, Queens, studio. Assemblage has long played a role in Pierson’s career, from his early verité installation pieces to his iconic “word pieces.” These new works consist mainly of items found in and around his studio building, which were then pinned directly to the wall.

As Bonnie Morrison writes, “These are things that Pierson has accumulated as well as the things that have no doubt accumulated around him. To be fabricated in the year everything took on different meaning is also to take every fabricated thing’s meaning different(ly).”

The fifth volume in Jack Pierson’s celebrated Tomorrow’s Man artist’s book series mixes imagery from all spectrums of the visual landscape into a single meditation on the world around us.

Combining archival material together with contributions by emerging and established artists, Tomorrow's Man 5 continues on where the earlier volumes left off. In this edition, the diverse body of art includes Dietmar Busse's enigmatic, almost occult drawings on photography, David Dupuis' delicate, colorful abstractions and Richard Tinkler's bright geometric abstractions, as well as work by Janet Stein, David Carrino, Jeff Davis, Clement Schneider, Paul Stuttman and Jordan Wolfson (now infamous for his shocking work at the 2017 Whitney Biennial Real Violence) is included alongside Pierson's own images.

The fourth volume in Jack Pierson’s (born 1960) celebrated Tomorrow’s Man artist’s-book series mixes imagery from all spectrums of the visual landscape into a single meditation on the world around us. Combining archival material with contributions by emerging and established artists, Tomorrow’s Man 4 continues on where the earlier volumes left off. This installment showcases historical pen and ink sketches by John Tottenham, hummingbird portraits by Brian Calvin, glazed ceramic constructions by Liz Larner and deadpan street shots by Trevor Hernandez (better known to many by his Instagram handle Gang Culture), plus contributions by Cali Dewitt, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Lily Stockman, Richard Tinkler and Evan Whale.

The Hungry Years collects the early photographs of Jack Pierson, taken throughout the 1980s—photographs that have increasingly captured the attention of the art world since they were first editioned in 1990.

Informed in part by his artistic emergence in the era of AIDS, Pierson’s work is moored by melancholy and introspection, yet his images are often buoyed by a celebratory aura of homoeroticism, seduction and glamour. Sometimes infused with a sly sense of humor, Pierson’s work is inherently autobiographical; often using his friends as his models and referencing traditional Americana motifs, his bright yet distanced imagery reveals the undercurrents of the uncanny in the quotidian.

Fueled by the poignancy of emotional experience and by the sensations of memory, obsession and absence, Pierson’s subject is ultimately, as he states, “hope.”

For more than two decades, New York–based artist Jack Pierson (born 1960) has been using the visual languages of photography, painting, sculpture and drawing to examine intimate and emotional aspects of everyday life. Gaining recognition alongside a group of photographers known as the Boston School, Pierson explores the cultural construction of identity, including how we see and how others see us. Pierson has had numerous recent solo exhibitions and his work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among other museums worldwide.

Published in a limited edition of 30 copies, this deluxe publication includes a signed and numbered print of Pierson’s “Pink Road.”

The Hungry Years collects the early photographs of Jack Pierson, taken throughout the 1980s.

“In the interstices between film and photography, ad stereotypes and clichés of a Californian paradise, Jack Pierson (born 1960) produces pictures that are deliberately sensual and sentimental. Through a subtle hybridization of genres they raise the central question of autobiographical sincerity as the work’s theme and site. By arresting intimate moments, they compose a familiar, private world, happy and nostalgic. By disclosing (or pretending to disclose) something of the artist, they acquire a natural quality that turns them into secret confessions. We are simultaneously in the artist’s studio and in the middle of his life, and, I’d be tempted to add, in the idealizing and loving grace of his gaze.” —Henry-Claude Cousseau