Rita McBride

Rita McBride is a prominent American artist based in Düsseldorf, whose sculptures and installations deal with fiction and public space and often provide a set for performances and lectures. She has edited a series of books for which she invited other artists and writers to write short stories involving constraints and a relationship to the art world. Each of the books corresponds to a sub literary genre (crime novels, SF, soft-eroticism, and so on). * * Westways is the fifth in Rita McBride's continuing „Ways“ series of collaborative novels, this time with writer and climber Matthew Licht. We follow Mae West from her childhood in 19th-century Brooklyn through her adventures with W. C. Fields at the 1931 Oktoberfest to a Sapphic encounter with Leni Riefenstahl on a safari in the 1970s, picking up a fighter pilot, Salvador Dalí, and Billy Wilder for the ride. Published to coincide with the completion of McBride's 52-meter-high „Mae West“ public commission at Munich's Effnerplatz, the artist's Mae West is actress, inflatable vest, sculpture, exhibition, and now finally a book. * * The publication is part of the series of artists' projects edited by Christoph Keller. *