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 an actress, inflatable vest, sculpture, exhibition, and now finally a book.
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, science fiction, romance, and self-help).