Sourcebook and exhibition catalogue function together as a two-volume set that comprises the project laid out in the exhibition James Lee Byars: 1/2 an Autobiography, presented collaboratively by Museo Jumex in Mexico City and at MoMA PS1 in New York. The publications will add significantly to the existing scholarship on the life and work of the artist James Lee Byars, as both contain central and previously unpublished material.

The Sourcebook is intended as a reference guide filled with primary source material, featuring documents and photographs drawn from a variety of archival sources and Byars's own papers. This volume also includes a series of previously unseen interviews that, artist and art historian David Sewell, conducted with Byars in the late 1970's in preparation for a book that was never published. These discussions cover a number of Byars's major projects.

The second volume serves as the exhibition's catalogue, including images of works well beyond the scope of the show. Through a selection of more than 125 sculptures, costumes, performable paper works, films, ink paintings, correspondence, ephemera, live performances, and documents, the catalogue represents the full scope of the artist's work. It focuses on revealing the ephemeral and intangible nature of much of Byars's art, and features several critical texts, including curatorial texts about Byars's early performances and a text focusing on his "costume" and performable fabric works.