A deep look at Christina Ramberg’s life and work, the origins of her influential investigations of form and femininity, and the evolution of her artistic vision.

Christina Ramberg (1946–1995) first gained renown for her acrylic-on-board paintings from the 1960s and 1970s that feature stylized fragments of female figures. Often associated with Chicago Imagism, Ramberg’s distinct linear approach was informed by a wide range of popular and art-historical sources, resulting in works that are both highly polished and grippingly enigmatic. Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective is the first comprehensive consideration of the artist since her death, this study considers the full scope of her practice—from her intimate early scrapbooks and drawings to her late-career geometric abstractions—and includes the first substantive discussion of her often-overlooked quilt making.

Essays from both scholars and artists situate Ramberg within her Chicago-based network of colleagues and approach her work from a variety of perspectives, such as gender and sexual identity, the body and disability studies, artistic craft, canon formation, and pedagogical practice. Featuring never-before-published diaries, sketchbooks, slides, and ephemera, this lavishly illustrated volume provides an unprecedentedly full picture of Ramberg’s lifelong fascination with patterns and formal variation and her impact on the art of the twentieth century.

This catalogue offers a unique binding, known as Swiss binding, where the book block is glued directly to the inside of the hardcover so that the stitching is exposed when you open it. The design of the book is to evoke both Ramberg's interest in sewing and the way many of her images reveal hidden interiors—to offer an object that is itself polished but exposed.

Edited by Thea Liberty Nichols and Mark Pascale with contributions by Anna Katz, Judith Russi Kirshner, Riva Lehrer, Thea Liberty Nichols, Mark Pascale, Ricky Swallow, and Lorri Gunn Wirsum