Ed McGowin, Name Change: One Artist, Twelve Personas, Thirty-Five Years

This overview of creations from the many identities of one artist:
*Provides a retrospective on a prominent and groundbreaking conceptual artist
*Features full-color reproductions of McGowin's work from every stage of his forty-year career
*Includes essays by art historians/curators J. Richard Gruber, Anders Härm, and Thomas Sokolowski and a foreword by Paul Richelson, the assistant director and chief curator of the Mobile Museum of Art

Ed McGowin (b. 1938) has, under a variety of names and guises, created an expansive body of art that ultimately falls outside of traditional categories. His paintings, sculptures, conceptual art projects, films, writings, and public art installations have in common a southern sensibility, one rooted in his early experiences in Mississippi and Alabama.

Ed McGowin, Name Change is a retrospective of a project started in 1970 to explore a theory he conceived about the way art history would evolve. As a metaphor for this theory, he had his name changed legally twelve times over the course of eighteen months and made works of art for each name, a practice he continued for thirty-five years. This catalog includes full-color reproductions of paintings, sculptures, mixed-media installations, and site-specific art, along with the official applications and confirmations of his name changes.