This artist’s book interprets From her wooden sleep . . . (2013), artist-curator Ydessa Hendeles’s multilayered meditation on difference, diversity, and group dynamics.

Central to a work inspired by and subsequently mounted at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in March 2015 is a unique community of 150 wooden artists’ manikins, dating from 1520 to 1930 and in scale from palm-size to life-size. Posed around a lone figure exposed to their collective gaze, they are an arresting extension of Hendeles’s work with psychologically charged cultural artefacts. Renowned for her large-scale, site-specific curatorial compositions, Hendeles explores the “total work of art” in this assembly of artworks, artefacts, found objects, and audio. This book of images, curated by Hendeles and presented with her Notes, showcases an artist who has fashioned a distinctive space in contemporary art.

+ CD: Debussy plays “Golliwogg’s Cakewalk”—audio track for the show.