“Western Dream” (1957) is from Helen Frankenthaler: Painting without Rules—published to accompany the critically acclaimed retrospective on view now at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. Featuring 150 color reproductions of artworks, ephemera, portraits and documentary photographs, this sweeping overview examines Frankenthaler’s work and life in context of her artistic influences and friendships—including Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Anne Truitt. “Friendship is pivotal to this project,” Douglas Dreishpoon writes. “It is another way to see and contextualize Frankenthaler’s own innovations. The painter chose her inner circle carefully, and those fortunate enough to be included were nurtured, feted, and sustained. As friends they visited one another’s studios, attended openings, celebrated successes, and kept up with life events. When tragedy struck, they came together to commiserate. Before fax machines, computers and email, Frankenthaler and her friends wrote to each other, sharing life’s ups and downs through chatty, at times serious, letters, postcards and notes.” These documents add depth to our understanding of Frankenthaler as an artist and a highly connected human being.

Thursday, December 5, from 6–8 PM, please join us to celebrate the opening of our December pop-up with Brooklyn home goods store of great intelligence and beauty, The Primary Essentials! Throughout the month, TPE will present a curated selection of more than 50 titles, with a focus on the study. Customers can receive complimentary book plates and in-person calligraphy for extra special holiday gifting. PLUS: on Sunday, December 8, painter JJ Manford will sign his new monograph from Derek Eller / Harper’s.

Spreads from Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s seminal 1977 conceptual photography book, Evidence—out now from D.A.P. in a new, unjacketed hardcover edition printed from gorgeous new scans, many of which are from the original negatives. Collecting 59 perplexingly deadpan black and white documentary photographs from a variety of government agencies, educational institutions and corporations, the original book was an uncaptioned, effortlessly fascinating cypher. Here, it returns to its most original form. “One major and especially pertinent figure for them, but for Mandel in particular, was Chris Burden,” Sandra S. Phillips writes. “Although probably not obvious, since its intent is poetic rather than specifically political, Evidence has a consistent theme and a kind of narrative. The work in the book is a sort of funny referendum on the new technology, burgeoning close by in the incipient Silicon Valley. Sensitive to the desensitizing implications of a technology gone out of control, Sultan and particularly Mandel found Burden’s work especially relevant. Burden was, for the most part, a performance artist, but his pieces emphasized the realness of the artist, the importance of the gesture of the individual, and the role and value of the creative, humane, and whimsical personality, and they illustrate how slight but heroic the mere body can be.”

Ever since the wild and wooly, experimental art and design program at Black Mountain College shuttered its doors in 1957, its legend has continued to grow. Nearly all of the books and exhibitions about it have focused on its “jaw-dropping band of famous and soon-to-be-famous artists, writers, thinkers and visionaries from the US, Europe and beyond, a veritable who’s who of mid-20th-century Western art and ideas.” In his enlightening new book from Atelier Éditions and Black Mountain College Museum, author David Silver proposes a welcome new take, examining the school through its utopian, self-made, and ultimately not-self-sustaining agriculture program. “The farm was of vital importance to the college,” Silver writes, “not only because it provided necessary food from organic farming, but because it served as a testing ground for self-sufficiency, communal living and collaboration—the most precious and precarious ingredient at the college. In these pages, the spotlight is on the extraordinary contributions of these folk, many of whose stories have seldom, if ever, been explored.” Spreads are from The Farm at Black Mountain.

“Texas Desert Interior with Noguchi Lantern” (2023) is from JJ Manford’s eponymous new (and first) monograph—a featured title at our December pop-up at dapper Brooklyn home emporium The Primary Essentials. Essayist Gilles Heno-Coe notes the way that Manford’s enigmatic interior tableaux “vibrate with animate intensity despite the characteristic absence of life, save for an occasional potted plant or loafing tabby cat.” The work inhabits a liminal space, “somewhere between invention and appropriation, painting and drawing, experimentation and design, inside and outside. … These are not paintings about life, per se, but they demonstrate that longing of wanting to give life to something. But that has long been the domain of artists—to bring inanimate matter to life. Manford succeeds in that regard, if only to remind us that sometimes even the most banal parts of life can still be both wonderful and strange.” Please join us for a book signing with Manford Sunday afternoon!

How we love The Sleepers, Sophie Calle’s newest artist’s book with Siglio. So beautifully made, and so mysterious. Swiss-bound with a puffy, pillowy cloth cover, bright silver edges and exquisitely printed endpapers and interiors, this is a book that all Calle lovers will want for their libraries forever. Calle’s front cover copy explains the project perfectly: “I asked people to give me eight hours of their sleep. To come and sleep in my bed. For eight days, my room was to be a constantly occupied space. Twenty-seven people agreed. The occupation of the bed began on Sunday, April 1, 1979 at 5 p.m. and ended on Monday, April 9 at 10 a.m. Sleepers came and went. Some crossed paths. Everyone was offered breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Clean bedding was provided. To establish a neutral relationship, I asked a few questions. I took photographs every hour. I watched my guests sleep.” Featured here, a detail from “first and second sleepers, Gloria K. and Anne B.”

Featured spreads are from Sergio Leone by Himself, Sir Christopher Frayling’s highly anticipated compilation of writings and interviews from the influential Italian director of “spaghetti Westerns” like A Fistful of Dollars and Once Upon a Time in the West, among many others. “He was all cinema,” Frayling writes. “He once said ‘I was born in a cinema, almost. Both my parents worked there. My life, my reading, everything about me revolves around the cinema. So for me, cinema is life, and vice versa.’ The passionate experience of movie-going, the ideas and sensations it unleashed in him, informed all his work in film. And he had the photographic memory of a deep cinephiliac—not so much for the dialogue, but for the visuals. One critic even suggested that Sergio Leone should write in his passport ‘Nationality: Cinema.’ His films refreshed film language with elements gleaned from various cultures—among them Italian, Spanish, American and Japanese—not recognizing the borderlines of geography and time—and the result entered the global pop culture zeitgeist in unmistakable ways, competing on level terms in that arena with the instantly recognizable work of Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick. Modern genre cinema—which is to say much of mainstream cinema—and the modern action hero, begin here.”

As Americans begin their annual migration across the country to feast with families, friends and foes, what better inspiration than Neal Slavin’s classic 1976 photobook, When Two or More Are Gathered Together—out now in a new, expanded edition from Damiani. On June 5, 1973, Slavin initated the project with a Memo-to-self. His plan: to document stereotypes and clichés; to understand the relationship of the one to the many; to study peer groups, vanity, frailty and ego. “Possible outcome: When a group presents itself fully to the camera, revealing the totems and markings that make it unique and individual, then that group will simultaneously reveal the innate sensation of belonging. I envision a work that communicates the desire to belong in America in the mid-1970s and the conflicts caused by that wish. In short, I want to photograph groups—they are the American icon.” Featured here, Pugs, New York, New York (1991). See more holiday gift suggestions here!

Amy Sherald’s 2017 oil painting, The lesson of falling leaves, is reproduced from new release Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968, published to accompany the major survey opening this week at MOCA LA. Spanning from the 1960s to today, and including everyone from Robert Bechtle and Richard Estes to Joan Semmel and Marilyn Minter, this book proves that the genre is not just alive and well, but sometimes challenging, weird and confrontational. In her catalog essay, MOCA curator Anna Katz discusses Sherald. “The dichotomy between painting and photography, drawn along lines of racial exclusion and inclusion, is stark in the work of self-described ‘American Realist’ Amy Sherald, who was catapulted to national fame at the unveiling of her portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama in 2018. The lesson of falling leaves exemplifies her selection of Black sitters, often strangers, whom she chooses for their ‘quality of existing in the past, present, and future simultaneously.’ … Sherald’s signature is the depiction of the bodies (skin, hair, nails, eyes) of her portrait subjects in grayscale. She uses grayscale to invoke the nineteenth-century daguerreotype, which comprised some of the earliest portraits of African Americans. In the history of European and North American art, Black people rarely figured in painted portraits and enjoyed their first opportunities to be portrait subjects upon the dissemination of the relatively accessible means of photography. The photographic is thus doing heavy lifting here: whereas in [works by artists like Jesse Treviño and Robert Bechtle], the nonhierarchical distribution of details anchors the images to a specific time and place, in Sherald’s painting the photographic locates a historical origin of representation for Black subjects, while also pointing out a history of absence and pointing toward a future inclusion. The photographic is a corruption, an acknowledgment and an abrogation of painting’s racist foundations.”

There is so much to see in new release Matisse: Invitation to the Voyage. Published to accompany the major retrospective at Fondation Beyeler, on view through January 2025, it features the artist’s work across all movements, from early Fauvist landscapes and interiors to the radical, monochromatic nude cutouts of the 1950s. The book’s design is also notably pleasing and unique, with two heavy gatefolded covers bound in to the one beautifully produced paperback volume. Pictured here: Grand nu couché/Nu rose (1935). Excerpted in the headline: an excerpt from Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 poem “Invitation to the Voyage,” which inspired Matisse throughout his life.

Science, technology, artistic freedom! Ah, the optimism and unfettered exploration of the Belle Époque. Then: the First World War, followed by the devastation of the 1918 influenza epidemic. In November 2024, the Guggenheim Museum opens Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930, the first in-depth examination of this avant-garde movement whose name, borrowed from the Greek poet-hero Orpheus, was coined in 1912 by French literary giant Guillaume Apollinaire. “‘Orphism’ referred to the kaleidoscopic and dynamic paintings produced by a constellation of transnational artists exploring the boundaries of representation to convey their experiences of modern life,” Guggenheim senior curator Tracey Bashkoff writes. “Artists connected to Orphism engaged with ideas of simultaneity—which they equated with modernity—creating compositions that often capture motion, encompass disks of vibrant color, and evoke multisensory responses. Situated among vanguard movements of the period such as Cubism and Futurism, Orphism pushed further into modes of abstract expression, whereas these other idioms remained invested in figurative content. … To invoke [František] Kupka, Orphism is an amorphous concept. Apollinaire invented the term to describe an abstracted pictorial idiom, but he did so by specifically conjuring the ultimate bard, the mythological Orpheus. In doing so, he productively allied painting, poetry and music with one another—and with modernity itself.” Featured spreads show work by František Kupka, Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Gino Severini and Mainie Jellett.

Out now from Damiani, the new, expanded edition of Neal Slavin’s classic 1976 photobook, When Two or More Are Gathered Together, collecting more than 100 photos of groups big and small, scientific, artistic, gastronomic, athletic, etc, etc, etc. … from the 1970s to the present. Pictured here, “Yogis, Los Angeles, California” (1974). Kevin Moore writes, “Certainly, over the last fifty years, the nature of groups has changed—how they organize, how they meet, where they meet, and what they meet for. Much of this activity now happens online, on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. But in many cases, the online realm is a parallel space, a portal of introduction and information that interfaces with in-person assembly. No matter how they form, the reasons for groups have not changed much over time. Groups exist to express common identity, to provide companionship, offer support, and a sense of belonging. Groups also form to preserve, share, agitate, entertain, or simply to escape. In the fractured and often divisive times in which we live, exacerbated by politics, technology, and propaganda, groups have come to provide the social sustenance often missing from traditional outlets, such as jobs and families. Groups, with their processes of arguing, consensus building, and voting, are our common experience of working democracy.”

Never have we been so aware of propaganda, so overwhelmed or overexposed. Here to save the day and to put things into perspective is FUEL’s highly researched, graphically fascinating Propagandopolis, collecting a trove of twentieth- and twenty-first century media manipulations from around the world—from Afghan anti-Soviet posters to Zimbabwe guerilla graphics. Pictured here, from the United States, a rather appealing pro-choice poster from 1981. “The design was first published by Heresies, a New York-based feminist art collective founded in 1979,” Bradley Davies writes. “It originally featured in a 1981 issue of the group’s magazine Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics and was quickly reproduced on posters, leaflets, adverts and T-shirts by feminist organizations both in America and internationally.”

Yemeni-Egyptian American photographer and filmmaker Yumna Al-Arashi still remembers, with longing, the unique, faded, but still highly emblematic tattoos that marked her beloved great-grandmother Aisha’s face below her lips. Now imbued with mystery, these marks were once traditional among Yemeni women. Today, as that country continues to contend with years of ongoing war and conflict, the tradition itself has also faded, along with the possibility of understanding its true meaning—both personally to the women who have partaken, and to the culture in general. In this stunning 392-page first monograph, published and beautifully designed and printed by Edition Patrick Frey, Al-Arashi presents more than 300 photographs, made in homage to Aisha, on her own journey through Northern Africa, where many women of Aisha’s generation, identifying both as Amazigh and Arab, still bear the traces of this ancient practice.

“Because revenge is a dish best served cold.” So reads the text on the curtain that covers Sophie Calle’s “Mother-Father” (2018), reproduced here from Overshare, the catalogue to Calle’s traveling retrospective, on view now at the Walker Art Center. Death and mortality have been a running theme in Calle’s work, including this series, begun in the 1990s, in which she photographed headstones that read “Mother” or “Father” without any other identifiers. In other series, she famously spied on people in the street, invited them to sleep in her bed, or snooped through their belongings while working as a hotel maid. She traced the dissolution of her romantic relationship. She collated personal ads. She documented people seeing the ocean for the first time. “Calle has centered the personal, the intimate, and the emotional while refusing to cede judgment to anyone else on what’s too much or what goes too far,” Henriette Huldisch writes. “There is nothing accidental or involuntary in Calle’s way of oversharing—a word she would certainly never use. Calle is always in full control of which stories she chooses to tell. She shows us better than anyone that perhaps oversharers know what they’re doing.”

Featured spreads are from Omen: Phantasmagoria at the Farm Security Administration Archive. Drawing from approximately 40,000 works of the FSA Photographic Archive (1935–42) at the New York Public Library, and gorgeously printed in the deepest of black inks, this oversized paperback tells the darker version of the American story under the stark terms of injustice. “It is an uncovering of a more or less literal grave, a grave made out of light, to borrow a phrase from the poet Alice Notley. And it is a reanimation of the bodies found there, who are also figures of brightness and shadow. … The horror of Omen is not that this is happening to someone over there. The horror of Omen is that this is happening to me. This picture was already inside me. I can’t get it out.” Photographs are by Russell Lee, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein and Gordon Parks.

“She knows more about rare books than any other American. She has spent $42,000 for a single volume and outwitted a rich duke at an auction. Her opinion on Caxton editions is sought by the greatest scholars. She is chic, vivacious and interesting, in fact, a ‘dandy, wholesome American girl.’ … She wears her hair long and does not use glasses, runs to Europe on secret missions and is the terror of continental collectors’ agents. Her name is Belle Green [sic].” So wrote the Chicago Tribune on August 11, 1912. A visionary Black woman who passed as white while rising to become the world’s most respected collector of rare books, Greene was the subject of the bestselling 2021 historical novel The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray. Here, the notoriously stylish, sophisticated and secretive Morgan librarian is pictured in a 1911 portrait by Clarence H. White. Both the photograph and the quotation above are reproduced from our own 2024 blockbuster, Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy, published to accompany the exhibition on view now at the Morgan Library & Museum. Featuring 175 reproductions of Greene, the library, her travels and the items she collected, this 304-page hardcover offers a panoramic, scholarly portrait of Greene as collector, library executive and woman of the world.

Horror fans, rejoice. Jordan Peele’s Us: The Complete Annotated Screenplay is out now from Inventory Press. The companion to Peele’s complete annotated screenplay for Get Out, this indispensable guide to Us adds alternate endings, deleted scenes, stills from the film and annotations by hannah baer, Theaster Gates, Jamieson Webster, Jared Sexton, Mary Ping, Shana Redmond and Leila Taylor. Annotating a scene featuring Lupita Nyong’o as Red, Webster digs into Freud and his concept of the uncanny. In part: “Looking at the word uncanny or unheimlich etymologically, Freud sees that it is created from heim (which means home or familiarity), but not in the sense of opposites of feeling at home/not feeling at home, but rather as one derived from the other, meaning that what is uncanny was once familiar, what we felt at home with, which has now become its Other, alien. … Importantly, there is new interest in the uncanny which seems to follow on renewed interest in the intergenerational transmission of trauma, in unconscious omnipotence, forms of radical alienation, questions about the limits of knowledge, and new forms of unconscious guilt and masochism. This has, of course, been important in colonial histories and the transmission of historical violence and omnipotent fantasies of generations past, and how these keep reappearing again and again. Stopping this intergenerational repetition of violence might mean having to confront what is the most uncanny in day-to-day life, hiding in plain sight.”

This 1926 advertisement for Levi Strauss’ original copper riveted waist overalls is reproduced from Reel Art Press new-release Denim: The Fabric That Built America, 1935–1944—a pure fashion history resource collecting more than 200 photographs of unself-conscious Americans living and working in their well-worn Depression-era denim. Culled from FDR’s Farm Security Administration archive of more than 170,000 photographs by such notable documentarians as Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein, Jack Delano and Russell Lee, alongside many unknown names and anonymous contributions, this is a true denim deep dive. The story of Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis, “the godfathers of denim workwear,” is covered, alongside photographs of farmers, share croppers, train conductors, factory workers, mechanics and much more. “This book was an exciting—and enormous—undertaking, searching through hundreds of thousands of images into the hidden depths of the archive to unearth priceless denim gems,” Tony Nourmand writes. “The photographs were taken by some of America’s foremost photographers and each portrait, expression and movement is framed with the eye of a master. In this context, the detail of the denim—heft of the weave; fraying chore jacket layered over chambray shirt; patched overalls; white stitching contrasting against blue; metal rivets on rolled up jeans above steel-capped boots—is seen as startlingly modern.”

Featured spreads are from new release Yoshitomo Nara, published by La Fábrica to accompany the acclaimed retrospective on view now at Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, en route to the Hayward Gallery in June 2025. Here, you can see a selection of the artist’s sweet yet sinister paintings and the book’s clean, inviting design. Also of note: the beautiful baby blue cover with strong title graphics and one of Nara’s adorable, yet ever-so menacing children seemingly spotlit in white, her arm oozing just a little bit of blood. “Nara’s gravitation toward the figure of a child is to give voice to those who are universally disenfranchised but also against systems and exploitations of power,” Mika Yoshitake writes. “They are powerful narratives to embolden ‘the weak’ with which the artist himself identifies in his past.”

“To see yourself, and for others to see you, is a form of validation. I’m interested in that very mysterious and mystical way we relate to each other in the world.” So Mickalene Thomas is quoted in All About Love, the catalog to the celebrated American artist’s major touring exhibition on view at the Barnes Foundation now. We are proud to have published this vibrant yet scholarly, seductive yet serious book, whose clothbound, image-only cover comes wrapped in a clear vinyl jacket with Thomas’s name printed front and back in gold—the remarkable cover figure’s eyes making direct contact with the beholder. Touching on all aspects of the artist’s work, including painting, collage, print, photography, video and installation, and featuring an interview by Rachel Thomas and essays by a luminary cast including Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Darnell L. Moore, Claudia Rankine, Ed Schad, Renée Mussai and Christine Y. Kim, this is a show-stopping book for any serious art lover’s shelf.

Spanning four centuries of art and scholarship thoughtfully interwoven by guest curators from various territories and Indigenous groups in Australia, North America, South America and Scandinavia, Indigenous Histories is a staff favorite not only because of its enlightening content but also its stellar design—which includes alternating papers, black edges, a lovely ribbon and sharp interpretations of traditional patterns throughout. Nuestros dioses antiguos (Our Ancient Gods, 1916)—by Mexican painter Saturnino Herrán—is from Abraham Cruzvillegas chapter on the Zapatistas and “The Construction of the ‘Self’” in Mexican Indigenous art. He writes of a collective self that is “many at once, ubiquitous, unstable, standing on belonging and will, subjective and arbitrary, opposed to any paradigm, to race and class statutory determinisms, that includes all possible worlds, is essential for a shift in the comprehension and construction of community, art, nature, and finally the universe, in parallel to the hegemonic Western world.” On the other hand, he writes, one single body—like his own—“can also stand for a plethora of diversity and contradictory simultaneous identities and values, including gender, genealogies, and cultures, as an act of resistance, against any kind of essentialism, nationalism or indigenism.” He concludes with the Zapatista phrase: “Para todos, todo. Para nosostros, nada (For everyone, everything. For us, nothing.)”

“We are living in our imagined future,” Academy Museum curator Doris Berger writes in her Introduction to Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures through Cinema. “The current debates about artificial general intelligence and cybersecurity, the fear of sentient machines harming humanity, and the destruction of our environment due to climate change connect our lived reality with cyber¬punk narratives. These bleak scenarios—stable ingredients of futurist cinema since the late 1970s—feel so familiar now, as many of those imaginations have become real. Cyberpunk narratives combine cybernetics and digital culture with a punk attitude. They explore and reflect on topics such as new tech¬nologies, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, cyborgs, hacking culture, capitalism, colonialism, and race, gender, and class relations as well as climate change, often through a defiant approach toward established hierarchies. As these stories present visions of the future on our planet rather than in faraway galaxies, they also comment on our earthly past and present. … As digital media theorist Jason Edward Lewis once stated, “We’re all immigrants in cyberspace.’” Pictured here, Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Cameron during production of The Terminator (1984).

Featured spreads are from An Indigenous Present, a superb 448-page compendium gathering more than 60 Native North American contemporary artists, musicians, poets, choreographers, designers, filmmakers, performance artists, architects, collectives and writers, published by DelMonico Books and Big NDN Press. Edited by American Mississippi Chocktaw/Cherokee painter and sculptor Jeffrey Gibson and designed by Montreal-based Cree/Nêhiýaw graphic design studio OTAMI-, this book is created from the inside out. In his introduction, Gibson writes, “It’s no secret that, at various points in my life, I’ve considered quitting being a professional artist. I’ve spoken about this publicly, and I’ve done so because I wanted to be transparent about the challenges of identifying as a Native/Indigenous artist. The historically pervasive racism of institutions and the market left me feeling like I had to do everything on my own. It was too difficult, too often, for too many reasons, but what really rattled me was the ways I’d come to accept — or perhaps ‘metabolize’ is a better word — the racism in the art world. It has taken me two decades to recognize racism’s edges, the way it feels and looks, its pervasive reach. In the art world, it is typically subtle, superficially well intentioned, and extremely polite in its delivery. In response, I have often felt a responsibility to assume the role of mediator and educator, which I’ve done as gracefully as I could in any given context. An Indigenous Present has emerged as much out of my dissatisfaction with the circumstances I have navigated during my own career as it has from witnessing artists who proudly identify as Indigenous carve out their own creative spaces and, collectively, manifest both local and international contexts for their artworks.”

ABOVE: Spreads featuring work by Dana Claxton, Nicholas Galanin and Beau Dick.

At 90, Nebraska-born, Paris-based textile artist and sculptor Sheila Hicks is a living legend and an international treasure. Her new book, Radical Vertical Inquiries—fittingly sized at 5.5 x 12-inches—is at last on American shores, published by DelMonico Books and Galerie Frank Elbaz. Featured image is “Gabriel Reaching for Heaven” in the 2022 Hepworth Wakefield exhibition, Off Grid. “At The Hepworth the exhibition spills out into the garden,” Hicks is quoted. “I knew it was going to be a challenge: with architecture you can make friends, accommodate and negotiate, but in the garden, nature is going to do its own thing and take over no matter what. You think you can speak to flowers in a friendly way, but whatever you’re going to introduce into their domain, nature will confront. And so I was reluctant, but in the end I proposed a 5-meter-tall [16-foot-tall] tower that shoots upwards. . . . But you could see it out of one of the windows, you go to one of the corners and you say, ‘How did that get out there, what in the world is that? Who trucked this strange thing in, this tower, and put it in the garden?’”

From time to time we get a book that has it all. All! Published to accompany the pleasingly incendiary PST ART exhibition on view now at USC Fisher Museum of Art, hardcover with gold stamping, gilded edges, a pull-out poster, and exquisitely produced with black-and-white, duotone and tritone printing, Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-nation is such a book. Not only because it’s an object of fascinating materials, and not only because the design—by Omnivore, Inc. and publishers Inventory Press and ONE Archives at the USC Libraries—is so right, but because the subject matter is so perfectly of this moment. The poster alone is a treasure, folding out to index the range of Southern California’s weird-heyday queer, occult and science-fiction communities of the 1930s through the 1960s—from the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society and the Los Angeles Scottish Rite Freemasonry to artists, writers, occultists and filmmakers including Cameron, Forrest J. Ackerman, Jack Parsons and Kenneth Anger. Editor, author, fantasy-fiction fan and lesbian publisher and musician Tigrina (aka Edythe D. Eyde / Lisa Ben) is quoted, from 1946:
Weary of our dreary world and bored with life, our fancies call us
To imaginary realms. ‘Tis then we turn to you for solace,
You, who with artful skill construct us alien worlds in distant spaces,
Transporting us by space ships and by rockets to weird, wondrous places.
New concepts, customs and traditions styled for life on other spheres
Make us question those that we have followed blindly through the years.
Your skillful pens paint future scenes, or glimpses of a bygone age.
Cold words are changed to living entities across a printed page.
What mighty citadels you build with pen and ink your only tools,
Creating havens for the dreamers, making refuges for fools.
Atomic power, robots, rockets, futuristic innovations,
All these fabulous ideas evolved from your imaginations
May be ridiculed and mocked and deemed impossible by some,
And yet they may be fact, not fiction, in progressive years to come.

If you think you don’t like film books, guess again. And if you do love movies or collect books on the history of cinema, be advised. This one is just stunning. Published to accompany the exhibition opening October 6 at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema is a sensual, visual explosion surrounded by stealth scholarship on the evolution and significance of color in film—going all the way back to the silent era, and spanning to the current day. Particular attention is paid to early color productions made primarily through the labor of women, as in these stills from two tinted films from the 1920s: Venus of the South Seas (New Zealand, 1924, dir. James R. Sullivan, at top) and L’Atlantide (France, 1921, dir. Jacques Feyder, below).

Featured image is from Orange Blossom Trail, a hybrid book weaving together photographs by Joshua Lutz and stories by noted American writer George Saunders. Addressing labor conditions along a stretch of big-box highway running between Georgia and Miami, it’s a poetic meditation on industrialization, inequity and humanity. “High shutter speeds hide road workers’ faces in shadow,” Walker Mimms writes in The New York Times. “Corporate storefronts and commercial vans appear without ceremony, as if snapped from a camera phone. Commuters wait for a bus, reduced and sad, while a sign for ‘Mighty Wings’ floats mockingly above them.⁠ Though not without dignity—see Lutz’s portraits of fruit inspectors, as they glance up from a conveyor belt of tumbling oranges—his photos lack any social agenda. They find an unlikely manifesto in the three previously published texts by George Saunders, our Chekhov of suburban realism, threaded through the book.…”⁠

We are delighted to announce Hunters Point Press' new release Is Art History?—perhaps the best-titled critical reader of this season (or any season)—by noted American art historian Svetlana Alpers. Collecting six decades of Alpers’ probing and sometimes excitingly confrontational writings, including foundational essays, recent work and previously unpublished lectures, this whopping 420-page clothbound text (complete with ribbon bookmark) is beautifully printed on creamy matte paper with a generous illustrations section at back that is itself printed on an appropriately bright, coated stock better suited to the act of looking. Spanning from 1426 to the 2000s, this is a book of remarkable confidence and vision. “Her voice as a writer is so distinct and direct, one would not want it diluted by anyone else,” Richard Meyer writes in his Introduction. “Nor would it behoove any editor to try to correct her. Recall: ‘If I am wrong, let the reader see I am wrong.’ … When I read an essay or review by Alpers, it is as though she is speaking aloud—and to me. To read one of her texts ‘is to feel that it is being done for you, or right before your eyes, as the phrase has it.’”

“All I wanted was to be without responsibilities for a while and live the life of an artist. I wanted to be able to go out every day and do whatever I’d please. If I wanted to go right, I’d go right. If I wanted to go left, I’d go left. Chance would do the rest.” So photographer Joel Meyerowitz is quoted in his new La Fábrica monograph, Europa 1966–1967, documenting his yearlong journey across the continent, from the UK and Ireland to Spain, France, Germany, Eastern Europe, Turkey and Greece. “When something totally unexpected reveals itself in front of you, it happens precisely because you are there, and because you are ready to recognize it. I think my year in Europe also offered me the opportunity to realize how important it is, in photography, to be present.” Pictured here, a photograph from his time in Malaga, Spain.

"Mickey Mouse Circus Jar with Minnie Mouse Finial" (2008) is from Magdalena Suarez Frimkess: The Finest Disregard—published to accompany the first-ever museum exhibition the of 95-year-old, L.A.-based, Venezuelan-born artist—on view now at LACMA. “When assembled together, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess’s ceramics offer the tantalizing feeling of stepping inside a funky and cluttered curio storefront and being transported back in time,” essayist Jenni Sorkin writes. “Produced in a variety of clay bodies, colors, shapes and sizes, her figurines of funny animals and characters are hand-rendered, appropriated from mid-twentieth-century comic strips, cartoons and animated films, and grouped together alongside tiles, cups, vases, plates and teapots. A combination of crockery and decorative objects, Suarez Frimkess’ ceramics are imbued with a pervasive melancholy, like stepping into an antique shop on a forgotten street and encountering castoffs from another time and place. With the past still twinkling in her peripheral vision, Suarez Frimkess is a nonagenarian who … still sustains an artistic practice, living each day as a version of now.”

On the fascination scale, it’s hard to beat new release Chess Players: From Charlie Chaplin to Wu-Tang Clan from London-based photobook phenomenon, FUEL publishing. Collecting exactly what it purports to—photographs of chess obsessives either famous in the chess world, famous in the real world, or totally, gloriously unknown—it is rich with captions and contexts that allow the reader to tap in to that notoriously intellectual gamesmanship that has crossed both centuries and continents. “This photograph, taken on 25 November 1969, shows Donna Gaines, who later rose to international super stardom as Donna Summer (‘Queen of Disco’), playing chess with her colleague and companion at the time, Ron Williams. She had just been offered a recording contract after finishing a stint in the German production of the musical Hair. She achieved global success almost exactly seven years later with the release of the single ‘Love to Love You Baby’ (1975).”

Featured photograph, by Bernard Gotfryd of Nina Simone with James Baldwin (1965), is from new release This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance, edited by Hilton Als and Rhea L. Combs and published to accompany the critically acclaimed exhibition currently on view at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. “The musician Nina Simone met James Baldwin through their mutual friend Lorraine Hansberry. Following the success of her groundbreaking play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Hansberry had committed herself to educating others she felt could contribute to raising awareness about the cause of equal rights. By introducing Simone to Baldwin and the poet Langston Hughes, Hansberry ensured her close friend would be embraced by other queer writers who understood something about difference. … Baldwin and Simone shared a great bond: the desire to marry anger to lyricism while refusing to separate the personal from the political.”

Featured spreads are from Letterform Archive Books’ gorgeous and galvanizing new release, Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.: Citizen Printer, on the legendary Detroit-based letterpress master whose type-driven messages of social justice and Black power have been stating truth and spreading inspiration for the last four decades. “Understand that, for me, printing is commerce, not capitalism,” Kennedy, Jr. writes. “It is a trade between one who practices a skill and another who values it. This trade directly empowers the skilled worker, not the capitalist who profits off that worker.
Understand that my very existence is protest.
The existence of Black people in America is an act of protest, of survival.
Everything I do is a manifestation of that protest.
Understand that my connection with the universe is most present in the printshop—that my deep love of printing for the masses has led me to a deep connection with ALL.
With time, I have realized that my people are actually ALL peoples.
Some folks have told me that my story has changed their lives—that my decision to leave a life as a business bureaucrat in favor of one as a letterpress printer gave them permission to leave the path they happened to be traveling for the path they truly wanted to travel. ‘I must go forth,’ they said.
I feel it is my duty to continue to make these cracks in our inhumane society so that others will have space to live their lives.
And the spaces that they make will expand the cracks for others, just as the space I make expands the cracks made by my ancestors.
One day our growth will rumble down the walls that separate our humanity.
I try to print a world into existence that is as welcoming and nurturing as the universe is to me, and I urge others to agitate, agitate, agitate for a world that is welcoming and nurturing to them.
I print for the glory of my peoples.”

This weekend, we are all-in to celebrate the universally awesome feeling of a non-denominational, unpoliticized, last-hurrah-style, extra day off before our official work year begins. Let us hope that those of us who must still labor are earning king-size tips or getting overtime. To mark the occasion, we pulled a poster from Reel Art Press’s expertly curated and beautifully produced 640-page labor of love, 1001 Movie Posters: Designs of the Times. Featured here is French master graphic artist René Péron’s 1953 two-panel poster for Fred Zinnemann’s iconic, multi-Oscar-winning, Hollywood-goes-to-Hawaii wartime melodrama, From Here to Eternity, starring Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed, among other supporting stars. Happy Labor Day, one and all!

Made from recycled leather, seashells, sand dollars, acrylic paint, PVC pipe, galvanized steel, muslin, and recycled poly fibers, Mutasis Moon (2021) is reproduced from new release Tau Lewis, published to accompany the exhibition opening this week at ICA Boston. Book collectors take note: this is the first monograph on the thirty-year-old Jamaican-Canadian artist whose sculptural assemblage addresses Afro-Atlantic diasporic traditions. Of this particular work, ICA Boston curator Jeffrey De Blois writes, “Mutasis Moon stands tenderly with arms outstretched as if waiting for an embrace, a figure of hope and transcendence. Made from found fabric remains, it is as if this being traveled through a portal and arrived, alive and listening. It is infused with spirit, and in its presence, we remember our own smallness, our own vulnerability. In that encounter, even as we move through expansive geographies, reverberating across space and time, through the world of associations drawn together by Lewis’s capacious work, we are ultimately brought into contact with ourselves. Within every work, like hidden objects, is an invitation to consider how we might conserve our own spirit, and how ideas of material transformation always relate to our own.”

Featured here is panel 58 of Jacob Lawrence's 1940–41 multi-panel masterwork, The Migration Series, Back in Stock from MoMA at a time when our country is addressing issues of civil rights, antiracism and migration with fresh energy. This particular panel is captioned: "In the North the Negro had better educational facilities." Elsewhere in the book Lawrence is quoted, looking back on the darkest days of slavery from the vantage of 1940: "We don't have a physical slavery, but an economic slavery. If these people, who were so much worse off than people today, could conquer their slavery, we certainly can do the same… I'm an artist, just trying to do my part to bring this thing about."

Thirty years before broad dating platforms like Match.com, forty years before niche sites like CougarLife and FarmersOnly, and fifty years before the total swipe-right takeover of apps like Grindr, Bumble, Feeld and Tinder, there was Operation Match—the very first computer dating service, developed and launched in 1965 by a curious Harvard undergrad from Auburn, Maine. Spreads here are from Operation Match: Jeff Tarr and the Invention of Computer Dating, authored by real-time Jeff Tarr authority, Patsy Tarr. Not only does the book—designed by world-renowned consultancy Pentagram—detail the history of Operation Match with a wealth of archival materials, essays and iconic quotations that build a multi-dimensional portrait of the times, but it gets into important moments and societal changes like the Kennedy assassinations, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and feminism that would forever change our culture, and thus the dating game.

Movie lovers, graphic designers and poster collectors, rejoice! Reel Art Press’s long-awaited, 640-page colossus 1001 Movie Posters: Designs of the Times has arrived at last. Edited by world film-poster authority Tony Nourmand and featuring 950 color reproductions and 150 black-and-white, this lovingly assembled (if back-breaking) compendium features posters from more than 20 countries and work by more than 140 art directors and illustrators—and includes several posters that have never been published before. Featured here is the 1944 poster for Teen Age, a “zero-budget exploitation flick that recycled footage from Gambling With Souls (1936) and Slaves in Bondage (1937),” according to Nourmand and text contributor Alison Elangasinghe. “The film is unwatchable by modern standards, yet its beautiful poster art is still able to arrest 80 years after it was hastily printed. The film took its title from the hot new phrase of 1944, ‘teen age’—coined to label the distinct spending power of the hormone-fueled 14- to 18-year-old age group. In the April 1945 issue of American Speech, it was listed in the ‘new words’ section, while in 1947 Encyclopaedia Britannica identified ‘teen ager’ as a new word coined in 1944.”

Back by popular demand! We are excited to announce the reprint of What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined, Nicole Rudick's remarkable biography of the visionary French artist, assembled from Saint Phalle's paintings, drawings, sketches and writings—many of which had been previously unpublished. "Put together, the distinct works in this book make a non-narrative story," Rudick writes. "I intend them to be read in sequence, cover to cover. Subjects recur and vibrate against and contradict one another. They make meaning through their contiguity, their role in a syntactic construction (each work a word in a sentence, a sentence in a paragraph, and so on). Certain emblematic images reappear, too—trees, monsters, snakes, birds—but shift in meaning, from iteration to iteration, as words do. Each work can be read and understood on its own, but when they come together, we get a bigger picture of Saint Phalle’s inner world. It is a picture I have put together, but who’s to say it wasn’t already there, just needed a different way of reading and looking? This book is an act of cooperation or participation between Saint Phalle and me, and the reader, too. A cooperative, to borrow from Roland Barthes: 'To the United Readers and Lovers.' It contains gaps and breaths, an abiding and uncertain openness that characterizes not only the progress of a conversation but the progress of living."

Featured photograph—taken in Coney Island, NYC, sometime between 1952 and 1958—is from Twin Palms Publishers' revelatory 2024 collection of Garry Winogrand’s rarely-seen color photography, culled from more than 45,000 slides made between the early 1950s and the late 1960s. "Winogrand’s color work confronts us with [an] intimate, flashing mirror," editor Michael Almereyda writes, "disclosing yearning and loss within American commotion and plenitude, all the while serving up sharp glimpses of the commonplace—the face of a sleeping boy gilded with Coney Island sand, a young woman’s profile suspended over a half-eaten plate of eggs—that cross into the realm of lyric contemplation.”

Don't miss Pacita Abad—on view at MoMA PS1 through September 2 and a “thrilling” recent critic's pick in the New York Times. Spreads here are from the Walker Art Center's superbly-designed, first-ever retrospective catalog on the exuberant, internationally itinerant Filipino textile-plus artist. “Textiles, for Abad, were more than a material consideration,” Walker curator Victoria Sung writes. “They constituted a theoretical modality—one that incorporated feminist, transnational and decolonial strategies—in their maker’s insistence on fabric as painting, stitching as labor and ornamentation as objective. Just as the Congolese sapeurs (and present-day sapeuses, as the women are known) mixed and matched different articles of European clothing into defiantly bold yet elegant ensembles, Abad created her own compositional aesthetic using the technique of trapunto (from the Italian word trapungere meaning “to embroider”). Abad described trapunto in straightforward terms: ‘I paint, using either oil or acrylic, on canvas and then collage. This top layer carries the design. To this I add a backing cloth and stuff polyester filling in between. The two layers are then joined with running stitches.’ Yet, the medium was far from straightforward. … Abad practiced a defiant form of bricolage that art historian Patrick Flores has described, tongue in cheek, as the work of a ‘flaneur bricoleur.’”

It's a thrill to finally have our own copies of Distinguishing Piss from Rain, Hauser & Wirth Publishers' whopping 400-page collection of interviews and writings on art, history, race, sexuality and popular culture by the noted American artist Glenn Ligon. Weighing in at 400 pages, with 80 color and 20 black-and-white reproductions, this beautifully produced volume is edited by Primary Information publisher James Hoff with Introduction by MoMA curator Thomas (T.) Jean Lax. “Reading these essays when they were first published gave me a pathway through the art world as a younger curator,” Lax writes. “Reading them anew, I sometimes had the feeling of being told a story I had heard before but whose meaning I hadn’t fully understood the first or second time around. It was as if their full significance was still emerging, not unlike the way you know the unmistakable feeling of true love the first time you feel it, but nevertheless must practice receiving it, repeatedly over time. Love is a subtext and refrain in this volume. At least twice, Ligon invokes a phrase from bell hooks: ‘Love will take you places you might not ordinarily go.’ De Kooning’s ‘Flesh [is] the reason . . . oil paint was invented’ is also reprised across the writings. Who knew hooks and de Kooning had so much in common?”

Featured spreads are from JRP|Editions’ exciting new book on the previously under-examined performative aspects of the legendary, ultra-liberated and often explicitly sexual Berlin-based American artist Dorothy Iannone, whose sometimes outrageously confessional artworks tackled themes like unconditional love, the celebration of matriarchy and the myth of Eros. M KHA curator Joanna Zielińska quotes the artist, from a 1970 Robert Filliou publication entitled Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts: “Never mind what they say about the nature of ecstasy, I’ve got a feeling one could limit oneself to such an extent that it would be possible half the time—and that’s like all the time. At thirty-six I am down to (in a passionate way) eating, drinking, sleeping, smoking, only the greatest friends, love and sex. Work is no longer a constant matter of being alive happily. It’s a method of expression waiting for those times when I am not being a beauty in other ways (today, for example).”

On the occasion of the 100th birthday of James Baldwin, we present a few spreads from God Made My Face a collective portrait of the singular American writer and truth-teller edited by Hilton Als and presenting artworks and essays by some of the greatest, and most relevant, voices of our time—including Diane Arbus, Beauford Delaney, Alice Neel, Kara Walker, Teju Cole, Barry Jenkins and Darryl Pinckney, to name a few. Jamaica Kincaid writes, “When we make art, we don’t know how it will work out, what it will mean. The writing, the novels, the essays: He did them in a place and in a time, in a country, that has no real love of certain people and certain things and no real love of literature, no real love of Black people doing anything, really, that can’t be appropriated. We must remember that there are a great many things that African Americans have done, making something out of the despair and the horror of the mess they found themselves in, and that they’ve been simply lifted up out of their culture. The blind faith he had in just saying these things, writing these things, doing, living this life and not knowing how it would go. Would it be remembered? Would it vanish? He got inspiration, it seems to me, from the essential life that was going on in the country at the time, the essential life of America, which is something Americans would like to forget. The essential existence of America is the African American. Toni Morrison said that Baldwin was her brother and her ancestor, and that’s what he is for all of us.”

In renowned Dutch artist-illustrator Timo Kuilder’s thoughtful new children’s book Pablo Dreams of Cats—the first in Atelier Éditions’ highly-anticipated, fun-yet-sophisticated Atelier Enfants board book series—an artistically-inclined dog named Pablo is fascinated by cats and longs to paint them from life. But other dogs make fun of him—even bully him—about his independent vision, and cats won’t sit still or pose for him anyway because they also distrust and fear dogs. Pablo despairs. He loses inspiration and all seems lost until he meets a beautiful cat with glorious whiskers, a curvy tail and an open mind. Et voilà! A muse is born, masterpieces ensue, and the species begin to feel free to see one another afresh.

“I want to begin talking about the creation of a transnational feeling in the nineteen-sixties. Now that may sound like an ideal, but in the sixties if you were a young artist like I was, a teenager, you were part of a shared feeling, it was a body sensation where you felt cosmically united with the heavens, with the earth, with everything that was happening in the world. The word ‘global’ didn’t exist, but that was how we existed—and this is because the military coup [in Chile] had not yet occurred. We didn’t have the sense that ‘this is Argentina, this is Chile, this is the border, that is Europe’; we had the feeling that there was just humanity searching for itself.” Featured spreads and this quote, from a 2020 dialogue between Valerie Fraser and Cecilia Vicuña, are from the beautifully produced, 364-page new release, Cecilia Vicuña: Dreaming Water: A Retrospective of the Future (1964–…)—the most thorough monograph on the Chilean artist, poet and ecofeminist to date.

Pictured here is the side view of Marcel Breuer's Stillman House (1953) in its original location, on the top of a dune on Wellfleet's Griffin Island. It is reproduced from Metropolis Books' perennial summer bestseller, Cape Cod Modern: Mid-Century Architecture and Community on the Outer Cape. Authors Peter McMahon and Christine Cipriani write, "Spanning hollows scooped out by glaciers, or dunes confronted by surf, Breuer's Cape Cod houses hover on their stilts like birds in shallow water, knowing they will have to retreat when the tide comes in. The Stillman House has, in fact, been moved twice due to storm-driven erosion, losing in the process its wood stilts and diagonal struts, its entry ramp, bridge, and porch, and its intended relationship with the landscape."

This 1924 Cartier vanity case—made of gold, platinum, mother-of-pearl, turquoise, emeralds, pearls, diamonds and enamel—is reproduced from sumptuous new release Cartier: Islamic Inspiration and Modern Design. According to essayist Judith Henon-Raynaud, the inspiration for this deluxe object—meant to store cosmetics or toiletries—has its design roots in an Islamic pattern on a nineteenth-century Iranian wooden and ivory casket pictured in the archives of the legendary Art Deco jewelry designer Charles Jacqueau, who traveled with Jacques Cartier to Persia, and was deeply influenced. Lovers of jewelry and decorative objects, Middle Eastern art and architecture and Islamic design history will be fascinated by the obvious pollination that this volume, published to accompany a recent exhibition at the Louvre Abu Dhabi, makes admiringly clear.

“Thy Name We Praise” (2023) is reproduced from Calida Rawles: Away with the Tides, published to accompany the artist’s first solo museum show in America—on view at the Pérez Art Museum through February 2025. Specifically for this show, Rawles’ paintings depict residents of Miami's Overtown neighborhood—known as the Harlem of the South before it was bifurcated by the development of I-95—submerged in the formerly segregated waters of Virginia Key Beach. “Overtown continues to become further fragmented, but the heart and soul of the community is still there, beautiful and connected,” Rawles writes. “I wanted to capture that beauty holding together the fragmented. I’m excited and honored to create something that comes out of my time with the residents and the folks of Overtown. In one of the paintings, you can see light that has a spiritual element to it, that light coming through the fragmented body. This is a time for unity, mobilization, creativity and power. We are going to make it through, and these beautiful Black people, their culture and history are going to be honored.”

Featured spreads are from Gordon Parks: Born Black, the new, expanded edition of Parks’ 1971 book of photographs and writings from the forefront of the civil rights and Black Power movements. “In the last ten years black Americans have turned four hundred years of despair and oppression into an era of rebellion and hope,” Parks wrote in the 1970 Foreword. “It was a turbulent decade filled with demonstrations, riots, bombings and violent death; a period in which we black people combined to mutiny against a common fate. The white symbols and images that for so long disfigured our minds and blackness are being jettisoned by that very blackness. And it was clearly revolt that had to be employed to alter this country’s conduct toward us. Now we are beginning to know who we are, what we mean to America—and what America means to us.”

The years 1900 to 1950 were transformational around the world, and particularly in Japan. The culture shifted from traditional to modern, a war was waged and lost, an empire shattered. Throughout, musicians wrote songs and artists illustrated the sheet music. Published to accompany the exhibition currently on view at MFA Boston, Songs for Modern Japan collects more than 100 of the most beautiful score illustrations for movies, Western jazz, opera and patriotic songs. Pictured here is Kimata Kyoshi’s cover illustration for “Hoshi no nagare ni” (On the Stream of Stars), the most popular Japanese song of early 1948. It was inspired by an October 1946 letter to a newspaper from a jobless woman—repatriated from Manchuria—who became a prostitute to survive.

Color photography lovers, rejoice! Steidl has released a new photobook from American master, Joel Sternfeld. Collecting photographs taken while Sternfeld was contemplating a major health crisis, they capture Nags Head, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, in peak, unself-conscious, Summer-of-1975 form. “Delaying surgery,” Sternfeld writes, “I had come to Nags Head, an old beach town floating in time, seeking a sense of temporal and spatial fluidity, a sense of oneirism. After about six weeks of intense work, my idyll was broken by a phone call: my brother Gabriel had died in an automobile accident in Colorado. I returned to New York; I never went back to Nags Head. Two out of my three brothers were now gone.” He grieved and stopped making photographs. Eventually, he found his way to Rockaway Beach in Queens. “And then something happened: a different sense came over me, a heightened color awareness engendered perhaps by all the looking and thought I had given to color. At once, the ugly scene appeared beautiful to me. The hues of the sand and the apartments were the perfect complements to the dusty blue of the sky. Seemingly disparate parts fused into a coherent whole. I made a photograph. Long ago, I had read of a phenomenon which might be described as ‘clear seeing in a clear light.’ Although I cannot now identify the source of this notion, I believe this was such a moment for me. At the time, I had no way of knowing it, but that photograph, made in despair, would eventually shape my entire practice.”

In 1978, Montauk surfer Tony Caramanico took the advice of his boss and mentor, photographer Peter Beard, and began keeping a daily journal, which he has maintained every day since, without exception. “What began as simple notes on the day’s waves slowly evolved. A printout of a surf article here, a business card there,” surf journalist Zach Raffin writes in Damiani’s new book collecting the best of more than 16,000 visual journal entries made over the last half-century. “By 1980, the journals had taken on a whole new life. Opening up one of these duct tape-bound, eighteen-inch thick binders invites one on a mind-numbing journey of colorful exotica through the lens of surf culture. Layered with pop cultural moments from old Tylenol and bikini ads to the Iran hostage crisis and Clinton’s impeachment, the journals act not only as a ledger of Tony’s immense surfing life but a life well lived through four decades of profound cultural evolution. And that’s all before we mention the travel. Morocco. Indonesia. Egypt. Tobago. Jamaica. Kenya. France. Japan. China. All in pursuit of that same mythical feeling he first achieved at age thirteen. … Tony Caramanico is many things. A historian. An accomplished competitive surfer. An artist. A devoted husband. A quintessential Italian New Yorker with the mustache to boot. And while all true, Tony Caramanico is, first and foremost, a lifelong surf-obsessed kid from Amityville, New York, who still gets up and checks the waves every single day.”

In contrast to Alfred Eisenstaedt’s iconic 1945 photograph, “V-J Day in Times Square,” Amy Sherald's “For love, and for country” (2022) “decisively queers the intimate pose, swapping out a straight, white couple in favor of two black males in uniform,” Jenni Sorkin writes. “Keenly political, Sherald’s painting exemplifies the era of military policy known as ‘open service,’ in which homosexuality is no longer treated as a crime, a shameful secret or a deficiency. Floating on a bright blue background, Sherald’s couple is the embodiment of the celebratory slogan ‘out, loud, and proud’—both for love, embedded in their own chemistry, seemingly oblivious to the external world, and for country, their patriotism embodied by the white-and-blue-striped sailor shirt, topped with a jaunty red scarf knotted at the throat.” In celebration of the national holiday, this painting is reproduced from the recent Hauser & Wirth monograph, The World We Make.

Featured photographs are from Portraits to Dream In, the National Portrait Gallery’s stunning exhibition catalog pairing the work of the enigmatic American photographer Francesca Woodman—who died of suicide in 1981, at the age of just twenty-two—and Julia Margaret Cameron—the Victorian portraitist, overlooked in her lifetime, who died just over a century before. Though many differences in their work exist, there are also remarkable correspondences, including a strangely gripping, shared dream space. “The title of this book comes from an observation made by Woodman that photography could be a place ‘for the viewer to dream in,’ that her photographs do not ‘record reality [but] offer images as an alternative to everyday life,’” former NPG photography curator Magdalene Keaney writes. “This sentence describes not only the intention to depict an experience of a vision, fantasy or the subconscious, but is also an invitation for the viewers themselves to dream.”

CLOCKWISE ABOVE: Julia Margaret Cameron, “Sadness” (1864); Francesca Woodman, “Polka Dots #5” (1976); Julia Margaret Cameron, “I Wait (Rachel Gurney)” (1872); Francesca Woodman, “Untitled” (1977) from the Angels series.

"Why does everybody think I'm so wild? I'm not wild. I happen to stumble onto wildness. It gets in my path." So begins Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller, Chloé Griffin's must-read, low-fi homage to the beloved cult writer, actress and muse to many, who died in 1989 of AIDS-related causes at the age of 40. "Cookie looked like Janis Joplin meets Jayne Mansfield, a redneck hippie with a little bit of glamour drag thrown in. She never led a safe life, unsafe was her middle name. She lived on the edge, always," John Waters is quoted. "She was like a woman in flames—she was something like I'd never seen before in my life," Gary Indiana tells Griffin. "Not just a beauty, but the freedom that she had about herself, that extraordinary freedom… She was like a comet going across the sky once in 100 years." Featured photograph is Cookie Mueller, N.Y.C, 1979 by Don Herro.

As we head into peak tourism season, we’re taking a page from Ryan Thompson’s smile-inducing new release, Ah Ah: Conscience Letters and Photographs from the Haleakala & Hawai'i Volcanoes National Parks, the follow-up to Thompson's 2014 best-seller, Bad Luck, Hot Rocks: Conscience Letters and Photographs from the Petrified Forest, also published by The Ice Plant. Pictured here, a note from a tourist whose regrettable impulse at the Chain of Craters Road lava flow in Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park has done enough post-holiday damage to warrant return postage to the Big Island. Perhaps the thief caught wind of the “apocryphal story of a curse wrought by Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes and fire, on anyone who removes volcanic rocks from Hawai'i,” Thompson writes. Or perhaps it’s “simply a desire to return something that the letter writers later felt was not theirs to take.”

"Portrait, South of France" is from Michael Stipe’s fourth and most recent photobook, Even the birds gave pause, collecting the artist and R.E.M. frontman’s poetic, sometimes enigmatic portraiture in unconventional media. Yes, celebrities show up—Michèle Lamy, Bono, Christy Turlington—because Stipe is documenting his world. But in reality, you’re seeing treasured friends and loved ones portrayed, somehow, at their most themselves. And that is an interesting thing to study.

Featured image, by Chilean photographer Paz Errázuriz’s La Manzana de Adán (Adam’s Apple) series, is from Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark. Edited by noted Barbican curator Shanay Jhavari, this 424 paperback collects 20 photo portfolios and 21 essays about films made during and about the night. “In the 1980s, Errázuriz photographed sex workers,” Ela Bittencourt writes, “but the women, whose trade was illegal, didn’t want their images shown. She then turned to the siblings Pilar and Evelyn, and so began a four-year collaboration with trans-identifying sex workers in Santiago and the provinces. Working alone at first, she was later joined by journalist Claudia Donoso, who recorded the workers’ testimonies. The resulting book, Adam’s Apple, was censored. Today it serves as a poignant record of a trans community subjected to violence and repression, the vast majority of whom perished from AIDS. Its title references the part of the male anatomy that Errázuriz’s trans subjects often wished to hide. With its biblical ring, it evokes the mysteries of sex, calamity and exhilaration—Edenic scenes portraying perfect bodies of uncanny beauty, tragically marked by fate.”

"Mama Bush (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me), Higher and Higher" (2009) is reproduced from Mickalene Thomas: All About Love, a staff favorite for both Juneteenth and Pride Month. “According to Thomas, it was making portraits of her mother and herself that allowed her to activate her own self-love,” Claudia Rankine writes. “It is this authentic unfolding that gets communicated to her viewer. The importance of her process mimics the journey we take in the culture as we move through acts of erasure to arrive at Thomas’s glorious embrace. In order for this process to be authentic, Thomas needed to bring Mama Bush along. What was once a question—‘That’s your mama?’—needed to become a statement, one owned by Thomas. In this way, Mama Bush and her daughter Mickalene become the artist’s most important muses. ‘That’s your mama,’ without the question mark, eventually transforms into a new understanding and embrace of who we Black women can be across time and generations. The unabashed intimacy and celebration and love of Black womanhood takes flight in Thomas’s work.”

Featured image is reproduced from Jenny Holzer: Trace, published to accompany the artist’s blockbuster Guggenheim exhibition and full-scale rotunda takeover, Jenny Holzer: Light Line. Whereas the exhibition reimages Holzer’s landmark 1989 installation at the museum, this tactile artist’s book—printed on vellum paper with exposed smyth-sewn binding—features phrases from her powerful Truisms, Living and Survival text series, rendered as drawings, or rubbings, in the style of her iconic stone benches. Alongside the phrase shown here—“You live the surprise results of old plans”—are “Technology will make or break us,” “Use what is dominant in a culture to change it” and “Abuse of power comes as no surprise,” among others.

Featured image is from What Matters Most: Photographs of Black Life—a book of found vintage Polaroids documenting special and mundane moments in Black American life, primarily from the 1970s through the early 2000s. "A great many of the photographs in this collection exhibit a kind of wholesomeness of Black family life—holidays, just-born babies, family reunions, graduations, people and new cars, snapshots of everyday life," Dawn Lundy Martin writes. "A woman lies on a sofa talking into a red telephone receiver. Two middle-aged men play cards on Thanksgiving, 1985. A father gives his son his first haircut in a kitchen. A girl in a white dress sits at a white piano. Even cool cats, ya dig, sign photos 'To Dad with Love.' Like all worthwhile archives, this one refuses wholeness, but instead points us toward what’s outside of the frame and in its corners/off center, what’s missing and what’s singular. It’s in these fissures, peripheries and striking singularities where one might glimpse what I think of as a Black understanding."

PHOTO: Unknown photographer, assembled by Zun Lee, [Man holding girl, sitting in armchair (fist bump)], 1988. Instant print (Polaroid Type 600), 10.8 x 8.8 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, Fade Resistance Collection, purchase, with funds donated by Martha LA McCain, 2018. Digital image: © Art Gallery of Ontario.

Although LaToya Ruby Frazier’s work is revered for its social-activist, Black feminist world-building, certain images are also just great photographs—capable of delivering their message well beyond their original context. “Marilyn Moore, UAW Local 1112, Women’s Committee and Retiree Executive Board, (Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co., Lear Seating Corp., 32 years in at GM Lordstown Complex, Assembly Plant, Van Plant, Metal Fab, Trim Shop), with her General Motors retirement gold ring on her index finger, Youngstown, OH,” from Frazier's 2019 The Last Cruze series, is such an image. “Like the photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks, Frazier has chosen the radical ‘eye’ of the camera as her weapon against social injustice,” curator and editor Roxana Marcoci writes, later citing Frederick Douglass's March 1865, late Civil War speech, "Pictures and Progress," in which "Douglass emphasized that pictures—a form through which humanity externalizes its thoughts and experiences—have the power to undermine racist authority and offset stereotypical portrayals of African Americans. 'Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers,' he intoned, 'and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.' Frazier wields the power Douglass identified in pictures to alter the moral orientation of a nation, awakening viewers to myriad crises and daring them ‘to remove the contradiction’ between ideals and practice.”

Soundsuit (2008) is from Nick Cave: Forothermore, a staff favorite year-round, but also an essential volume in our Pride Month Staff Picks booklist. “In a sense, the dysmorphic physical forms of Cave’s pretty monsters resist a want for racial or gendered assignation,” Romi Crawford writes. “The Soundsuits might therefore be interpreted in terms not unlike those used to describe the status of the Black dandy, who, as Monica L. Miller explains, ‘brought along with him a destabilization of other categories of identity; he was essentially nothing but mixed, a product of interracial relations, a sliding point on the spectrum of gender and sexuality.’ Cave’s objects welcome a state of, and a space for, alternate or next-level otherness, instantiating secure pockets and emplacements that secure gender and racial autonomy and inventiveness.”

Much more than a gay icon, John Waters is a visionary artist, bibliophile and cinephile, as well as a general national treasure. And yet, as we continue to celebrate Pride Month 2024, we certainly can’t fail to feature John Waters: Pope of Trash. Published to accompany the first museum exhibition dedicated solely to Waters’ films—at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles—it’s a must-have compendium of costumes, props, handwritten scripts, concept drawings, correspondence, promotional gimmicks, production photography and other original materials from all of the underground auteur’s features and shorts. In addition, the book spotlights many of Waters' essential longtime collaborators—including Divine, pictured here playing the unrepentant, degenerate criminal Babs Johnson, defending the title of “filthiest person alive” in the indelible 1972 cult film, Pink Flamingos. Scoping out to the mainstream, curator Jenny He notes that in February 1997, Waters guest starred as a gay novelty store owner in the “Homer’s Phobia” episode of The Simpsons. “His role on the network television show—appearing months before Ellen DeGeneres announced, “Yep, I’m gay,” on the cover of Time magazine and her character came out on Ellen in April 1997—was monumental for queer representation in the mainstream cultural landscape.”

"I first saw them—Ivy and Naomi and Colette—crossing the bridge near Morgan Memorial Thriftshop in downtown Boston. They were the most gorgeous creatures I'd ever seen. I was immediately infatuated. I followed them and shot some Super 8 film. That was in 1972. It was the beginning of an obsession that has lasted twenty years.
Soon after, I met them again through David, my closest friend, who had started to do drag. From my first night at The Other Side—the drag queen bar of Boston in the 70s—I came to life. I fell in love with one of the queens and within a few months moved in with Ivy and another friend. I was eighteen and felt like I was a queen too. Completely devoted to my friends, they became my whole world. Part of my worship of them involved photographing them. I wanted to pay homage, to show them how beautiful they were. I never saw them as men dressing as women, but as something entirely different—a third gender that made more sense than either of the other two. I accepted them as they saw themselves; I had no desire to unmask them with my camera. Since my early teens, I'd lived by an Oscar Wilde saying, that you are who you pretend to be. I had enormous respect for the courage my friends had in recreating themselves according to their fantasies…" —Nan Goldin, The Other Side. Featured image is "Picnic on the esplanade, Boston 1973."

Asim Abu Shakra’s 1988 oil painting on paper, “Garters,” is reproduced from Alcove: Intimate Essays on Arab Modernist Artists, published by Beirut-based Kaph Books. Beautifully designed, clothbound and printed on lovely uncoated paper, this enlightening compendium of testimonies from relatives, friends and students of Arab Modernist artists is authored by Dubai-based writer Myrna Ayad. About his uncle Asim Abu Shakra—originally from Umm Al Fahem in the West Bank of Palestine, but later of Tel Aviv, where his work was celebrated—Karim Abu Shakra writes, “Like the cactus, he was also resilient. The symbol that would become the hallmark of his oeuvre first caught his attention in the early 1980s, when a potted cactus on a neighbor’s windowsill sparked an immediate connection. Like the plant, uprooted from its natural habitat, separated from the rest of its species, and living in isolation in a pot, so too my uncle felt deracinated in Tel Aviv. And, again, in spite of all this, like the potted cactus, he continued to thrive. … For Palestinians, the cactus holds both metaphoric and linguistic meaning: the saber (cactus) was associated with Palestinian farmers and farmland, and was used as a tool for defining land boundaries, largely because of its resistant and robust roots. Saber in spoken Arabic means patience, tenacity and perseverance—qualities that speak directly to the Palestinian identity. The cactus continues to feature in Palestinian art, but in the case of Uncle Asim in particular, the cactus was him.”

“We know ourselves as this fragmented jumble of limbs and this kind of code switching that happens throughout our lives and throughout our days,” Christina Quarles is quoted in the new monograph, Collapsed Time. “A lot of the work is trying to tap into that experience of the self, and then, for me, it’s about overlapping that with what it is to be in a racialized body as somebody who’s multiracial and who is half Black but is also half white and is legibly seen as white by white people… The basis of the work is trying to get at what it is to be in a racialized body, to be in a gendered body, to be in a queer body, really to be in any body and the confusing place that that actually is with knowing yourself.” Featured image is Always (Get Me Down) (2021).

In 1937, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius wrote of radical textile artist Otti Berger, “her work realizes more perfectly than anybody else’s of my followers the peculiar idea of the Bauhaus to work out ready made models for industrial multiplication instead of mere designs on paper.” Featured photograph, of Berger, ca. 1931, is from staff favorite Otti Berger: Weaving for Modernist Architecture—the first comprehensive study of her work. A peer of Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl, Berger designed upholstery, wall fabrics, curtains and floor coverings with unique weaves and patterns that look as gorgeous and yet as bold and experimental now as they did running up to the Second World War, during which she perished at Auschwitz. The book itself is beautifully produced and illustrated with 500 reproductions from a goldmine of archival materials, alongside important new scholarship by Judith Raum.

“I am not a carbon copy of anyone, just as you are not a composite of your mother, father, grandparents, siblings or extended relatives. The self-portrait you see—the image of your presence—will be the life you live. Part of the root of the world photograph is phōs, which means ‘light’ or ‘to shine.’ It appears also in the ancient Greek word phōsphóros, which means “bearer of light” or “bringer of light.” To photograph means to draw light. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” So begins Monuments of Solidarity, the catalog to LaToya Ruby Frazier’s formidable MoMA survey, collecting more than two decades of her rich, empathetic photographic projects dealing with equity in labor, gender relationships, race, environmental justice and health care, to name just a few of the major issues she tackles head on. “Momme” (2008) is from Frazier’s earliest, breakthrough body of work, The Notion of Family (2001–14)—centered around her collapsed steel-milling hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, and three generations of African American women including herself, her mother and her grandmother—which she initiated when she was just sixteen years old.

“Untitled (Vincent)” (1982) is reproduced from Silvana new release, The World of Tim Burton, featuring 200 color reproductions of rarely or never-before-seen materials—including early sketches from Burton’s childhood, paintings, drawings, photographs, concept art, storyboards, costumes, moving-image works, maquettes, puppets and life-size sculptural installations. “There are directors who build filmographies and others who create worlds,” Giona A. Nazzaro writes. “And others still who consciously, like architects, build cathedrals over time. Among the latter are the likes of Claude Chabrol or Fassbinder. Poetics is the product of a set of recurring signs, obsessions and refrains that enables in its accumulation of evidence a conversation with a filmmaker. Creators of worlds work differently. Poetics—which usually emerges midway through the career of a director, if the premise of the early works is retained—is already all there in that first image, in the first sign (in this sense Bertrand Mandico is the closest director to Tim Burton today). The world itself is motive force to the very existence of their filmmaking. Tim Burton is a creator of worlds.”

“Hands shaking, temperature 103. The days were not much different than the nights, then the fever lifted. I was still having difficulty breathing, but needed to move, get out of the house, go to where there’d be more than a glimpse of the sky. I barely remember my first days in Green-Wood. There were gravestones up and down the hills, bare branches floating overhead.” So begins Remembrance Garden: A Portrait of Green-Wood Cemetery, noted American documentary photographer Eugene Richards’ contemplative new three-year study of the beloved Brooklyn landmark. Begun in March 2020, when he was recovering from an early case of Covid—long before the vaccine and during that eerie time when the world was first shutting down—this quiet, powerful volume reminds us that Richards is a living treasure whose vision can be as poetic as it has sometimes been searing. We are proud to have published this newest volume in his half-century output as a master photography book maker.

Featured spreads are from new release Lee Quiñones: Fifty Years of New York Graffiti Art and Beyond, published by Damiani and launching this weekend at Artbook @ MoMA PS1. The first major monograph on Quiñones—considered by many to be the single most influential artist to emerge from the NYC subway art movement—this book features 180 color images and essays by a dozen leading lights including Franklin Sirmans, Isolde Brielmaier, Bisa Butler, Futura, Debbie Harry and Barry McGee, to name a few. Sirmans writes, “Dig if you will, a picture of early 1970s New York City when digital images were hard to come by except in Times Square, no one had a personal phone or even a beeper, unless you were a cop or a doctor. Drawing on walls may have originated more than 70,000 years ago and the tradition of muralism as a support for mark making is also long but, in the universe of 1970s New York City there was no greater canvas than the moving subway car, seen by millions every day. This is where Lee Quiñones got his start as a precocious, mercurial kid who loved to paint. As a teen¬ager, Lee was struck by the paintings he saw on this most readily available canvas, that of the public transportation system, where no one had to pay to see paintings, a free museum. After painting a car, the young artist would ride the train to watch and listen to people’s responses, a built-in critical apparatus to glean the public’s opinion. The newspaper critics would come later.…”

Featured spreads are from Loft Law, filmmaker and photographer Joshua Charow’s new book documenting the last of New York City's original artist lofts. “Walk through SoHo today and look up into the cast iron windows that line its cobblestone streets,” Charow writes. “Between tech offices, luxury storefronts and multi-million dollar condos, you might catch a glimpse of a space that commands your attention. The loft’s rawness stands out from its surroundings, with rusted tin ceilings and empty cans of paint lining the ground. Inside the loft, an 85-year-old artist is having their morning coffee while working on a painting. Behind them are thousands of other canvases stored in the wooden shelves they’ve filled up over the past 50 years. This person is not just a painter, but a time traveler. If you’re lucky enough to walk into one of their studios, you will be transported back to the year they moved in, to a New York that doesn’t exist anymore. However, due to the perfect storm of history, politics and enough of a fight, these artists remain today, giving us a peek into the wonderful worlds they’ve created and sustained in our ever-changing city.”

Featured image, titled “Rodeo Queen, Okmulgee, Oklahoma,” is reproduced from Oregon photojournalist Ivan McClellan’s critically acclaimed new release, Eight Seconds: Black Rodeo Culture, published by Damiani. McClellan concludes the book with a letter to the culture that has taken hold of him and changed his life. He writes, “Cowboy culture has always been synonymous with hard times, and I have seen it firsthand in my journey with you. Losing friends and acquaintances along the way, sometimes taking the last photos of people before they were killed or arrested. This life attracts folks with the grit to push past the odds and continue, despite their trauma and pain. When I was young, I could never envision myself as an old man, but now I can quite clearly see myself as an old rodeo boss, perched on the fence, drenched in sweat under the blazing sun, and watching Eight Second [bull] rides until night falls and zydeco music battles the crickets for my ear. As I pass on this legacy to my children, I’m humbled by the realization that it’s a treasure trove that I never knew I had the right to possess, an inheritance lost to me, has been preserved for them. I’m overjoyed that when my kids color a cowboy in their coloring book, they color him brown. I hope they grow up loving you as I have, as this is their birthright, their legacy.”

It was very hard to choose an image from FUEL’s joy-inducing new release Audio Erotica: Hi-Fi Brochures 1950s–1980s—the newest vintage ephemera revelation from collector and Trunk Records founder Jonny Trunk. Featured here, an ad for “the one and only” Sony Walkman, one of the most ubiquitous innovations of the 1980s. Trunk describes the experience of being hit by a car the first time he wore his. “Wired for sound and deaf to the noise of the traffic, I had simply ‘strutted’ right into the road without looking—or even caring. Bang! Clatter! The Sony Walkman was a magic invention. The perfect poppy, portable, personal sound machine. According to legend, it was invented by the founder of Sony, Masaru Ibuka, when he spotted a guy at a Tokyo station, walking along holding a large ghetto blaster with a pair of headphones attached. He thought to himself: ‘that would be better if the cassette player was smaller.’ This may be an apocryphal story, but I like it anyway. The Walkman II I’d bought with hard-earned, saved-up cash, came with a belt hook—as well as cool-looking, comfortable headphones (these even had a button to mute the sound if you ever needed to hear the outside world). Supremely modern in its styling, it included a spare battery pack, so I could listen for hours on end. The Walkman II was the first piece of audio tech I’d bought myself …”

Featured image is reproduced from noted American photographer Danny Lyon's new memoir, This Is My Life I’m Talking About, releasing this week from Damiani and launching in New York with a signing at Mast Books. Lyon is of course noted for his New Journalism style documentation of the civil rights movement, the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club, the Texas prison system, and much more. He captions this image, which is from the body of work that became his iconic 1967 photobook The Bikeriders (set to release this summer as a major motion picture), with typical affection. “Cal, born in Canada as Arthur Dion, riding with Little Barbara. Cal, a former Hells Angel from San Bernadino, is my best friend in the Outlaws. In my Hyde Park apartment, he narrated many of the stories that became the text of the book. In the film Cal is played by Boyd Holbrook. A housepainter, Cal fell off a ladder and died in the 1980s.”

“Woman with Dead Child,” state IV/X (1903), is from Käthe Kollwitz: A Retrospective, published to accompany the exhibition on view now at MoMA. Surely years in the making, this gut-punching gathering of rare drawings, prints and sculptures centered on motherhood, grief and resistance could not be more perfectly timed for those of us who are struggling to comprehend or even live with the turmoil and anguish of today’s military, social and political conflicts around the world and at home. (Read Aruna D’Souza’s recent review in The New York Times for more on this.) In the exhibition catalog, curator Starr Figura writes, “The five decades during which [Kollwitz] was professionally active were some of the most volatile in German history. From the 1890s through the early 1940s, as the country lurched from the upheavals of industrialization through the traumas of two world wars, she dedicated her art to advocating for those whose burdens were the most acute and underrecognized. ‘I felt that I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate,’ she wrote. ‘It is my duty to voice the sufferings of people, which are never-ending and as large as a mountain.’”

Featured spreads are reproduced from Ed Ruscha / Now Then, the definitive survey of the revered west coast Pop artist’s work, published on the occasion of the career-spanning exhibition on view now in his adopted hometown. Collecting everything from his earliest works on paper to his classic, deadpan word paintings to his legendary self-published artist’s books, photographs, prints and rare installations, this is a book for life. “I’m not just looking for pretty flowers to paint,” he is quoted in the book. “There is a certain flavor of decadence that inspires me. And when I drive into some sort of industrial wasteland in America, with the themeparks and the warehouses, there’s something saying something to me.”

Featured spreads are from Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, published to accompany the pioneering performance and video artist’s career retrospective on view now at MoMA. Perhaps the most written-about exhibition of the spring season, Good Night Good Morning collects five decades of playful and poetic videos, drawings, notebooks, photographs, major installations and performances at a moment when the culture is finally ready to stop, watch and listen to the elusive artist, who has been feeding back prolifically from the sidelines—and the frontlines—virtually undetected, while simultaneously influencing everybody and saying everything—but quietly.

“We adore chaos because we love to produce order.” So said Dutch graphic artist and geometric-mathematical savant M.C. Escher, known throughout the world for his disturbing, enigmatic works featuring tessellations, perspectival paradoxes, twists of logic and visual puzzles. In this bold new silver-covered monograph, published to accompany a major exhibition of the artist’s work in Italy, all of Escher’s most important and classic woodcuts, lithographs, linocuts, mezzotints and wood engravings are collected, with a special emphasis on works produced during his formative twelve-year period in Italy, where he lived from 1922 until 1935. “This exhibition is all about technique, beauty, illusions and dreams,” M.C. Escher Foundation President Mark Veldhuysen writes, reminding those of us who grew up in the age of computers, smartphones, video games and now AI, “in Escher’s days, computers didn’t exist and everything you see is handmade.” New from Skira, read more about the book here.

Featured spreads are from surprising and enlightening staff favorite Jay DeFeo: Photographic Work, published by DelMonico Books and the Jay DeFeo Foundation. Collecting almost 200 photo collages, photograms, photographs and photocopies—many published here for the first time—by the legendary Bay Area artist, this beautifully produced hardcover features writing by an all-star cast including Leah Levy, Judith Delfiner, Corey Keller, Justine Kurland, Dana Miller, Catherine Wagner and Hilton Als, who writes, “And what would we do without Jay DeFeo, who is only partly alive because she dares us to look at the work and make sense of that sofa covered in netting, or the empty picture frame with the broken wire, or the telephone with the white bulb that burns brightly in the imagination? What can any of these images mean? Are they images of DeFeo’s idea of sculpture, or sculptural elements? What can she mean by those teeth, that shoe? Let us enter her pictures subtly and swiftly together and take from them what we will, freely, as we revel in the eye of DeFeo the beholder. Behold.”

New publisher on our list No More Rulers is coming out strong with two books in its accessible, collectible and highly giftable Handbooks series. We are thrilled to announce the Jean-Michel Basquiat Handbook—an affordable, compact primer on the artist who drastically shifted the course of late 20th-century art, featuring texts by NMR publisher Larry Warsh, Henry Geldzahler and Henry Louis Gates Jr.—and the KAWS Handbook—an essential guide to the emblematic New York street artist turned pop culture sensation, featuring writing by Warsh and Carlo McCormick. Measuring just 4.5 x 7 inches, these brightly-colored, vinyl-bound volumes couldn't be more enticing, affordable or portable. Welcome No More Rulers!

Published to accompany the landmark show at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940 is one of the hottest new releases of the year. Featuring more than 50 works from the 1940s to the present that show how artists of the Black diaspora have transformed and even radicalized what was already a radical European Surrealism, this is a book for any serious art library. Curator María Elena Ortiz “sketches” some weirdness: “We see everywhere the long shadow of histories of colonial domination. Forms of racism that many thought were extinct have come roaring back to life. Moments of glory compete with episodes of despair. As I reflect on it, the situation seems absurd—nonsensical. This is rich soil in which Surrealism can grow—a Surrealism that helps us better see the strange situation we are in, and provokes us to imagine different ways of being. Generations have drawn inspiration from the history this show presents. The flowers of Surrealism are perennials, it seems, for better or worse. They sprout when the situation demands it, when some new absurdity or domination needs to be pictured and navigated. They answer to no-one and follow their own needs.” Featured here is the first panel of Elliot & Erick Jiménez’s “Blue Chapel (Rejection, Acceptance, Advocacy, Interdependence),” 2022.

“Pussy Riot is punk as a way of life—direct action, activism and peaceful protests that are desperate, sudden and joyous. Pussy Riot were the first artist-activists jailed by Putin for protesting against his regime. The corruption, inhumane laws, censorship, fabricated criminal cases and torture that are prevalent in the repressive police state that is modern Russia are reflected here through the system’s various responses to Pussy Riot and other activists. It shows how this system has paved the way for the brutal war that Russia is waging against Ukraine, crimes against humanity, fascism, and terrorism. … Pussy Riot calls on everyone to engage in any form of activism as a basis for civic responsibility. Fight for yourself and your freedom, take action! Anyone can be Pussy Riot.” So begins the galvanizing new release Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot's Russia, published to accompany the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art exhibition currently on view in Munich and Vancouver. Featured photo is from the 2012 action, “Putin Peed his Pants,’ performed at Lobnoye Mesto, Red Square, Moscow.

Featured spreads are from new release Las Mexicanas, RM’s small but mighty paperback album of found photographs of Mexican women in positions of power, play and perhaps even seduction from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s. How we love it! Essayist Brenda Navarro writes, “What is Mexico without the women who have been born in this land? What would be of this country without many of them, who have birthed the Manichaean concept of a nation that has been obliged to live beneath the heavens, in which every person seems to be destined to be a soldier? As Agota Kristof wrote in her novel, The Notebook (1987), women are the ones who carry the weight of wars: ‘Have we seen nothing? Idiot! We women have all the work and all the worries: children to feed, wounded to tend… You men, once the war is over, are all heroes. The dead: heroes. The survivors: heroes. The maimed: heroes. That’s why you invented war. It’s your war. You wanted it, so get on with it—heroes my ass!’”

“Bayo” (2017) is reproduced from hot new release Tschabalala Self: Bodega Run, edited by Sascha Bonét, designed by Pacific and published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. A remarkable publication that has been flying off shelves since the moment it arrived in our warehouses, this clothbound hardcover with zine insert features paintings, sculpture and installation works related to Self’s multiyear examination and celebration of the bodega—underrecognized “hood institution” of NYC Black and Brown communities. Self writes, “There are many inspiring and positive aspects of bodega culture, mainly the fact that these small, versatile businesses are, and always have been, owned by people of color to serve communities of color. The bodega also functions as a multicultural space within the Black diaspora, a space where individuals of African descent, from the Americas and abroad, share both social and financial interactions. … The bodega is both positive and problematic, and through this complexity its significance arises. The culture of the bodega is a reflection of so many aspects of Black and Brown city life. For this reason, the bodega is the perfect avatar by which to speak on the community at large."

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." So said Albert Einstein, born on this day in 1879. Both this quotation and this rare 1947 print signed by photographer Philippe Halsman are reproduced from Einstein: The Man and His Mind—Damiani's stunning visual biography, featuring a wealth of signed photographs, letters, manuscripts and more from the collection of Gary S. Berger. According to the editors, Halsman's iconic photograph has become one of the most recognizable images of the twentieth century. "It appeared on a 1966 US postage stamp and was featured on the cover of the December 31, 1999, edition of Time magazine, which honored Einstein as the 'Person of the Century.' … In his book Philippe Halsman: A Retrospective, Halsman explained the circumstances of the photo: 'I admired Albert Einstein more than anyone I ever photographed, not only as the genius who single-handedly had changed the foundation of modern physics but even more as a rare and idealistic human being. Personally, I owed him an immense debt of gratitude. After the fall of France, it was through his personal intervention that my name was added to the list of artists and scientists who, in danger of being captured by the Nazis, were given emergency visas to the United States.'"

Kerry James Marshall’s 2009 “Untitled (Painter)” is reproduced from new release The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure, published to accompany the critically acclaimed survey on view now at National Portrait Gallery, London. Called “tremendous” and “stunning from first to last” by The Guardian, this must-see exhibition brings together 22 contemporary African diasporic artists, including Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Jordan Casteel, Noah Davis, Lubaina Himid, Titus Kaphar, Wangechi Mutu, Lorna Simpson and Henry Taylor, to name a few. “Through the arts, we are dignified with the entire range of emotions experienced by every other human being on the planet, when we have often been treated as less than fully human because demeaning and reductive concepts of Blackness have been constructed, categorized, perceived and perpetuated in majority white societies for centuries,” Bernardine Evaristo writes. “Through the arts, we throw it all up into the air. We write our poems, plays, scripts. We dance, design. We compose and create music. We make art from our cultures, communities, individuality, imagination. Our creativity strives to burst free from the edicts of those who police its borders, because our aliveness recognizes no borders. It is its own free state.”

Featured spreads are from Ukranian American visual artist Yelena Yemchuk's most recent photobook, Malanka, documenting "Old New Year," a heavily incantatory, night-long, pre-christian, folklore ritual that takes place on January 14 every year. It is celebrated by ethnic Romanians in western Ukraine. For this project, Yemchuk traveled to Crasna (aka Krasnoilsk) in 2019 and 2020, photographing the celebration meant to drive out winter and stimulate spring into existence—an ancient custom reminiscent of Persephone’s return in Greek mythology. ⁠
Through Yemchuk’s gaze, spaces blur to create dreamscapes and metamorphoses. As with all of her work, Malanka is a personal, feminine, surrealist and magical project—in this case including a poetic essay by Romanian cultural journalist Ioana Pelehatăi, who traveled to Ukraine in 2023, as war raged to the east. She writes, “The locals shudder at the term ‘carnival,’ but we’ll circle back to that later. For now, I just want to point out that the origins of the term come from carne levare, or ‘remove flesh.’ Shrove Tuesday. Mardi Gras. The right time and place to renounce the old and bring in the new, to flip hierarchy on its head, to laugh in the face of hegemony. Malanka. Carnival. Maybe. … The Malanka chases out evil spirits and brings in the wealth of the new year. Here, in the old world’s east, death isn’t a boogeyman; it’s an acquaintance. It shows up, and you give it a place at the big table because you can’t make it leave. You respect death, but you don’t love it. Death is a strict mother, or a grandma who raised you.”

Featured photograph, of a 1950s mother and daughter, city unknown, is from Ruth Orkin: Women, a book that celebrates not only the work of one of the great midcentury female fashion and photo journalists, but women themselves. There’s something very different, independent and special about the way Orkin relates to her subjects, and the way that they respond to her lens. “Do women see differently than men?” she asks. “Of course we do, because we’re different people. Everybody sees differently from everybody else. Partly it’s because you’re tall or short, or because you’re a minority or a non-minority … all the things that make up a person make their view of the world, and part of your person is your sex.”

Just in time for Black History Month, leap-year edition, Barkley L. Hendricks: Solid! has arrived! Collecting the influential American figurative painter’s iconic portraits alongside his increasingly prized landscapes, geometric abstractions, watercolors and photographs, this is the major and must-have monograph on the artist. Featured here is his 1979 painting, Have You Met Ms. Jones, from editor Zoé Whitley’s essay, “For the Love of You: Barkley L. Hendricks’s Reasons for Painting.” In it, Whitley cites Toni Morrison’s noted 2019 essay on “The Source of Self-Regard” in Black culture, which Morrison traced in music, lyrics, “the literature, the language, the custom, the posture…” and other evolutions in how “the possibility of personal freedom, and interior imaginative freedom […] could be engaged.” “Like Morrison,” Whitley concludes, “Barkley L. Hendricks took in all of these aspects and translated physical bodies into a body of work too often reduced to cool surfaces, but in reality teeming with heart, humor and humanity.”

Ohara Koson’s 1926 polychrome woodblock print “Scops Owl in Flight under Cherry Blossom and Full Moon” is reproduced from Utamaro, Hokusai, Hiroshige: Geisha, Samurai and the Culture of Pleasure, Skira’s scholarly yet beautifully-produced survey of 460 of the Edo period’s greatest woodblock prints—some elegant, some delicate and others brazenly erotic. Poetic landscapes, flowers and birds, Kabuki dramas, the female universe, the art of love, warriors and heroes all make appearances in prints that exemplify the concept of ukiyo-e, or the floating world, which seventeenth-century Japanese novelist Asai Riyoi described as “living only for the moment, savoring the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves, singing songs, drinking wine and diverting oneself in simply floating, unconcerned by the prospect of imminent poverty, buoyant and carefree like a gourd carried along with the current of the river…”

Featured spreads are from new release Chez Walti, Edition Patrick Frey’s vivid and incorrigible 418-page collection of Walter Pfeiffer photographs, made 2000–2022. In regards to photography, he says, “everything depends on the model. Is he or she funny and playful? Or are they just lame ducks? Worst-case scenario: they really do aspire to become a professional model. I have to enjoy photographing them, otherwise it doesn’t work. It’s the same with a still life or a landscape. I can’t plan it in advance, any more than with people. I have to be there and see it for myself. A still life can, admittedly, be a little embellished, so to speak. But when it comes to landscape, I can immediately look at it and think: That’s it!” In regards to his drawing practice, he says, “I need change, and I always need new people. As long as I can, I’ll just keep on fishing and sometimes somebody will take the bait. People who are captivating, and independent-minded, are a great source of inspiration for me. … There are very few of these one-off individuals. … I’m interested in creating a kind of dream world.”

Featured spreads are from new release Unlicensed: Bootlegging as Creative Practice, NYC-based graphic designer Ben Schwartz’s playful, 432-page investigation of the practice of bootlegging in the creative world. From Virgil Abloh’s Off-White logo (borrowed from the Glasgow International Airport) to Dwayne Johnson's "The Rock" stunt double, Jeff Koons’ 2008–2012 “Balloon Venus” (borrowing from the “Venus of Willendorf,” c. 25,000 BP) or even nature’s own Caligo Owl Butterfly, Schwartz drops a lens on the ambiguous practice of borrowing, quoting, sampling, copying—or stealing, depending on how you look at it—via in-depth discussions with 21 creative practitioners, including BLESS, Experimental Jetset, Printed Matter (Jordan Nassar and Christopher Schulz), Hassan Rahim, SHIRT and Oana Stanescu, among others. “By its very nature, a bootleg defies definition,” Schwartz writes. “It travels in black markets and hides in unmarked record sleeves; it communicates in the errors of cheap production and escapes into the loopholes of property law. It cares little for the stability a definition might offer. To define a bootleg would be to contain it. It creates order where mess is much more welcome. Definitions, language, and names clarify, but they also tend to pin things down. A bootleg’s survival is dependent on its ambiguity. Maybe we can talk about a bootleg while resisting the urge to define it. Maybe we can open it up, explore its edges, extend them outward, or destroy them altogether.”

Ellsworth Kelly’s 1956 painting Atlantic is reproduced from Glenstone Museum’s fearlessly well-designed, 314-page, clothbound new release, featuring jaw-droppingly beautiful tipped-on images on front and back cover. “It’s about perception, to feel it somehow,” Kelly is quoted. “It’s a special way of looking. I have trained my eye over and over ever since I was a kid. I was a bird watcher when I was a little boy. My grandmother gave me a bird book, and I got to like their colors. I said, ‘Jesus, a little blackbird with red wings.’ That was one of the first birds I saw in the pine tree behind my house, and I followed it as he flew into one of the trees—like he was leading me on. In a way, that little bird seems to be responsible for all of my paintings.”

Featured spreads are from Marilyn Minter: Elder Sex, JBE Books’ beautifully-produced and celebratory monograph based on the artist’s recent work for a New York Times feature on the joys and challenges of sex after seventy. In her aptly-named catalog essay, “Screw it, this is who I am,” New Yorker writer Naomi Fry states that Minter's work "shows us that we are human in our fullness, in our repellent and attractive parts, and, too, that what counts as repellent can also often be attractive. In the Elder Sex, photos, Minter is unembarrassed to put on display what we are not used to seeing—what culture thinks we don’t want to see—and there is joy and magnificence in that gesture. The bodies that Minter depicts heave and pulse with sensation and texture, giving us something radical. They’re real, and they’re spectacular.”

"Looking at photographs of people with no clothes on is always exciting," Cressida Connolly begins her semi-redacted essay in Valentine’s Day Staff Pick Private Collection: A History of Erotic Photography, 1850-1940. "The experience can also be funny, or troubling, or arousing: the pictures here assembled are all three. This collection has a unique claim on our attention, not only for the remarkable candor of many of the images, but because some of these pictures are among the earliest erotic photographs we have. No one had ever photographed nudity or genitals or the acts of sex before. There were no rules. It is the revolutionary newness of these images that makes them as exciting as their subjects." Featured image is courtesy Other Criteria © Danny Moynihan.

"It is of the utmost importance that a black child see on that screen someone who looks like him," James Baldwin wrote in 1968. "Our children have been suffering from the lack of identifiable images for as long as our children have been born." For film lovers and students of Black history alike, Regeneration: Black Cinema, 1898–1971 is an absolute must. Published by DelMonico Books and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures to accompany the exhibition currently on view in Detroit, this scholarly, 288-page visual goldmine presents the remarkable, overlooked history of Black representation in American cinema, from the silent film era through the Black Power movement. Featured image is a production still of Fayard and Harold Nicholas in the 1943 all-Black musical comedy, Stormy Weather.

“On first encounter, Chinese scholars’ rocks perplex,” Phillip E. Bloom writes in the National Bonsai Foundation's enlightening study, Cultivated Stones: Chinese Scholars' Rocks from the Kemin Hu Collection. “Though composed of solid stone, they may appear to billow like clouds or dance like flames; though viewed atop stands or tables, they may evoke snowcapped mountains or turbulent seas, ferocious beasts or tranquil vistas. When tapped with a mallet—or even a fingernail—they may resonate like bells or tinkle like chimes. A good rock encourages close looking, inviting viewers to explore its wrinkles and crevices, to become lost among its peaks and holes, to embrace its alluring strangeness. One quickly becomes bewildered: ‘What is this odd thing that I am viewing? Why does it exert such a pull on me? What is so appealing about its weirdness?’" Featured here is the Hubei Province turquoise scholars' rock "Charm of a Verdant Peak," reflecting a classic cloud shape.

Featured photograph, by NYC- and Atlanta-based filmmaker and photographer Braylen Dion, is from Black History Month staff pick Black Masculinities: Creating Emotive Utopias through Photography. Featuring work by 22 international photographers, this 320-page hardcover explodes clichés that have been "sugarcoated with ‘coolness,’” according to editor Joshua Amissah. “Unfortunately, the big portion of ‘coolness’ usually does not keep its promise and reveals a bittersweet aftertaste. Once this sugarcoat is deconstructed, the representation of Black men in popular culture exposes its bitter core of attributions such as aggression, hypersexuality, toxic masculinity, class struggle and criminal tendencies.…” The photographers in this book, including Dion, Arielle Bobb-Willis, Kwaku Alston, Kofi Duah, Jabari Jacobs, Isaac West and Ussi’n Yala, among others, “are forming a youthful and liberatory vision based in and around the figures of Black men. Their extraordinary works offer new ways of seeing, imagining and also experiencing Black masculinities, whose cultural meanings are not only full of talent, but also unapologetically reclaiming, brilliant, courageous, thoughtful, decolonizing, captivating, pioneering and absolutely game-changing."

Featured spreads are from Separate Cinema: The First 100 Years of Black Poster Art—back in stock in time for the book's tenth anniversary. This 320-page treasure trove collects more than 300 emblematic Black cinema posters of the last century, drawn from the largest private archive of African-American film memorabilia in the world, numbering more than 30,000 movie posters and photographs from more than 30 countries. “Film posters constitute an art form about an art form, and as well, in the case of the Black cinema tradition, a quasi-Black History lesson,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writes in his Foreword. “I think I first realized this when I was about to interview Spike Lee at his 40 Acres and a Mule production company in Fort Green. As I waited for our interview to begin, I became enamored—entranced, really—by the marvelous historical posters that Spike had on the walls of his office. I was green with envy and decided to start collecting Black film posters as avidly as I could afford. … The images gathered here in Separate Cinema provide a brilliant overview of the last century of film poster art that every student of film and every student of African American history and culture should experience. And perhaps you, too, will be moved, like I was in Spike’s office, to begin collecting them on your own. For they are a national treasure.”

In celebration of Black History month, we're highlighting the work of Kerry James Marshall, certainly one of the greatest painters of his generation but also an innovative master printmaker. “Today, Marshall is one of the world’s most celebrated artists, hailed for having redefined Blackness as a visual device and cultural subject, as well as for opening new vistas on what pictorial art can be and do,” the noted art historian and critic Susan Tallman writes in her comprehensive new survey, Kerry James Marshall: The Complete Prints, 1976–2022. "His grand figurative paintings are often larger than the entire six-by-nine footprint of the room at the South Side Chicago YMCA … where he resided for three years. Yet some things remain the same: Black faces still anchor his images, and printing is still central to the enterprise. Like Rembrandt or Mary Cassatt or Edvard Munch, Marshall is a peintre-graveur—a painter who uses printmaking as a way of thinking, of aligning image and surface, of being in the world.” Featured image is the 1982 woodcut Nat, made from two pieces of found wood, printed in two hues of black, and inspired by the slave rebellion leader Nat Turner.

We’ve always been fans of the Brooklyn-based painter, sculptor and ceramicist Sarah Crowner. Turns out, she’s also a very interesting designer of theater sets and architectural environments—as seen in Turner new release, Sarah Crowner: Serpentear. Take, for example, Ceiling (Stretched Pentagons), Crowner’s 2022 collaboration with renowned Mexico City-based architecture firm Tatiana Bilbao Estudio, installed at Valhalla, a private home in Punta Mita, Mexico. “In Valhalla the floor, Crowner’s tiled ceiling and the brilliant blue horizon of the oceanfront surroundings blur and merge into a singular sensation as the perception of this work changes in the shifting light throughout the day,” Ana Elena Mallet writes. “Patterns and repetitions create an environment that frames the entrance to the house, as well as the surrounding landscape. The interior and the exterior come together to become a painting, and the viewer becomes both participant and observer.” Additional texts by Nikki Columbus, Quinn Latimer, Diego Matos and Ingrid Schaffner accompany gorgeous photographs of Crowner’s paintings in gallery and domestic settings, her tileworks, theater sets, installations and more.

Congratulations to Pippa Garner on her inclusion in the upcoming 2024 Whitney Biennial, Even Better Than The Real Thing! Featured spreads are from Primary Information’s 2023 facsimile reprint of Pippa Garner: Better Living Catalog, published to coincide with $ELL YOUR $ELF—the deeply satirical octogenarian conceptualist’s recent exhibition at Art Omi. A cult sensation when it was first published in 1982—before Garner began her gender transition—Better Living Catalog somehow broke through to the mainstream and earned the artist spots on late-night TV and coverage in popular magazines. Featured here are Garner’s concept for the “Half-Suit” with abbreviated midsection (modeled on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson); a self-explanatory “Bird Hot Tub with Jazuzzi;” a DIY projectile “Garbage Shoot” disposal system; the “Talkman” private oratory system; and a “Blaster Bra” wearable stereo system.

Featured spreads are from Winogrand Color, an instant classic from the internationally renowned photography book publisher, Twin Palms. Collecting 150 rarely seen photographs from Garry Winogrand’s archive of more than 45,000 color slides—housed at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona—this is, remarkably, the first monograph ever dedicated entirely to the late American street photographer’s color work. “We have not loved life,” Winogrand ended a 1964 Guggenheim grant application. Essayist Michael Almereyda quotes this line in his essay, continuing, “Winogrand made the photographs in this book in defiance of this self-appraisal. A loving spirit charges and elevates picture after picture, riding an emotional circuit that sweeps from empathy to affection to outright elation, extending across two decades of work made mostly in broad daylight, on the street, on the road, at the beach, in color.”

Featured spreads are from Let's Become Fungal! Mycelium Teachings and the Arts, a staff favorite illustrated reader whose subtitle—Based on Conversations with Indigenous Wisdom Keepers, Artists, Curators, Feminists and Mycologists—explains much of what makes it so special. A passionate paean by Mexico City-based curator and researcher Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez to mycological activism and Indigenous fungal knowledge spanning Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia, this 336-page paperback includes redolent illustrations by Berlin-based Chilean artist Rommy González and chapters that touch on collaboration, decoloniality, nonlinearity, toxicity, mobilization, biomimicry, death and being nonbinary—all through the auspices of the world of fungi. Read up, and resist the demand for purity, embrace mystery and surprise, de-zombify and re-train your senses and find your fungal alter ego!

Featured photograph, of Marina Abramović performing Rhythm 0 in 1974, is reproduced from the Royal Academy’s eponymous new exhibition catalog—complete with image recognition app linking to historic video content. Documenting the entirety of the groundbreaking artist’s long and remarkable career, this 264-page hardcover was created in close collaboration with Abramović. For Rhythm 0, Abramović stood stock still for an entire day at the radical Studio Morra exhibition space in Naples, Italy. “Before her stood a table on which she had placed objects that referenced pain and pleasure—from a feather to a gun and a single bullet—and which members of the audience were invited to use on her as they wished,” Andrea Tarsia writes. “‘I am the object,’ the artist stated. ‘During this period I take full responsibility.’ As the day progressed, silence and incredulity gave way to increasingly violent interactions. Abramović was stripped to the waist, her skin cut with the thorn of a rose, her hands tied and the gun, loaded, eventually held to her neck.” As in The Artist Is Present (2010), the iconic endurance work that made her virtually a household name, Abramović “used her body as a cipher, a reflective mirror for the audience’s own feelings and behaviors.”

Featured image is reproduced from The Crick, collecting Jim Magnan’s extraordinary photographs of the “lost boys” of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, raised by plural families in households with one father and multiple wives, but now cast out since the arrest and imprisonment of polygamist cult leader Warren Jeffs in 2011. “Some of the boys are related by birth—half-brothers with different mothers and the same father—and some are full brothers or cousins,” Judith Freeman writes, “but whatever their familial connections they have formed a kind of band of brothers and are now bonded irrevocably through their history and their love of horses and of each other. … The town where the boys were raised—the Crick—was ruled by a prophet whose word they were bound to obey until the prophet was convicted of sexually abusing minors and sent to prison in 2011, receiving a life sentence, and then things slowly began to change though the prophet still demanded obeisance from his prison cell. During his final days, as he became more paranoid, he excommunicated many people for their sins—for watching a movie, or listening to music, wearing a short-sleeved shirt or showing interest in a girl. Before that time, before the fall of the prophet, many of the teenage boys were cast out, as had been the custom for many generations. They were left to fend for themselves to ensure the older men had no competition for the younger girls. These boys were referred to as the lost boys only they were not lost they were forsaken, cast beyond the pale to fend for themselves in a world they did not know.”

Honestly, who wouldn't want to look through a beautiful hardcover book containing 401 of the best pictures from Frida Kahlo's private archive of more than 6,000 photographs? Naturally, we are delighted to have this staff favorite 524-page bombshell back in stock and still in high demand. From Kahlo's sometimes harrowing self-portraits to the many gorgeous and revealing portraits taken of her by artists, friends, lovers and family, to photographs of the important people in her life—including her father, mother, Diego Rivera, Marcel Duchamp, Edward Weston, Georgia O'Keeffe, André Breton, Isamu Noguchi, Dolores del Rio, Tina Modotti, Alfred Stieglitz, Gisele Freund and Leon Trotsky, to name a fraction, each of these photographs is a fascinating document. Bonus: many are inscribed, incised, or decorated with lipstick kisses. Featured here is a 1946 photograph of Kahlo in her New York hospital bed by sometimes-lover Nickolas Muray.

Untitled, Shady Grove, Alabama (1956) is reproduced from Gordon Parks: Segregation Story—one of the great photography books of the twentieth century and perhaps Parks’ photographic masterpiece—recently expanded to include 30 previously unpublished photographs and a new essay by artist Dawoud Bey, among other special features. “In picture after picture,” Bey writes, we see that “deliberate choices of tool, material and sensibility lend the Black Southern presence, often under siege, a sense of lives fully and expressively lived. We see Black subjects and spaces that are rendered with all of the qualities of expressivity that the medium is capable of in the hands of one seeking to use it as not only an information-gathering tool, and as a ‘weapon against all the things I dislike about America,’ as Parks once stated, but also as a transformative tool capable of reshaping the experience of the world, and the Southern Black peoples who lived in it, into photographs that are the equal of those made by others whose works are considered formative to the medium’s expressive potential.”

“Cupboard IX” (2019) is reproduced from Simone Leigh, the first major monograph on the influential American artist, published on the occasion of her touring exhibition on view now at the Hirschhorn. Tracing the arc of her work in ceramic, bronze, raffia, video and social sculpture alongside “writings and ideas [that] are inextricably entwined with her art,” this is essential reading, according to curator Eva Respini, “that provides a series of pathways to consider Leigh’s groundbreaking, expansive art.” She continues: “In 2013 Leigh penned a manifesto, positing an art world in which her work might circulate: ‘I imagine a future where auto-ethnographic initiatives documenting “local forms” of craft and vernacular knowledge would exist across the world. . . . I foresee a time when Black artists will be encouraged to dive deep into their work . . . without this strange, accompanying commentary and gatekeeping.’ All along, Leigh has been sculpting her own time, looping her own histories, with a clear vision of what the future will bring.”

Best known for his iconic, cinematic portraits of musicians including Björk, Amy Winehouse, Pharrell Williams and Patti Smith, for the past seven years Danish photographer Søren Solkær has been quietly documenting the mysterious natural aerial phenomenon of the annual starling migration from Ireland through Denmark, the Netherlands and Italy. His first book, Black Sun, collecting 176 hypnotic, almost abstract, color photographs of the starling migration’s patterns and shapes, became an international cult collectible photobook when it released in 2020. His equally mesmerizing follow-up, Starling, is out now from Edition Circle, collecting new photographs made over the last three years. Recent perspectives capture the birds’ murmurations against backgrounds such as Roman urban architecture, while two new series zoom in on feathers photographed through a microscope.

“I think of the solo instrumentalist, who paints a dream in the sky—a singular guide whose roaming sound opens space for collective experience, who may even offer some connection to the divine, the portal of a free harmony.” ⁠So writes Grace Wales Bonner in the introduction to Dream in the Rhythm: Visions of Sound and Spirit in the MoMA Collection, the London-based fashion designer’s deeply personal meditation on and around modern Black expression, published to accompany the exhibition on view now at MoMA. An “archive of soulful expression,” this is a book whose visual poetry itself speaks volumes. “Beyond the immaculate individual expression, I hear an enthralling symphony," Wales Bonner concludes her essay. “It is a call to leap into this wider consciousness. To constellate here is to be part of something complete and yet unfolding in the moment. More magnificent than seeing is to dream in the rhythm.” Featured here is a 1990 photograph by Beuford Smith, founder of Cesaire Photo Agency and a founder and chief photo editor of the Black Photographers Annual. It is titled “Kiane Zawadi/Euphonium Player, Brooklyn, NY.” ⁠

Featured photograph—“Dorothy Gisborne (Pratt) as Psyche” (1935)—is reproduced from Yevonde: Life and Colour, the first comprehensive monograph on the subtly radical, previously overlooked British studio photographer whose motto was “be original or die.” Published to accompany the critically acclaimed exhibition on view now at Laing Art Galley in the UK, this 240-page hardcover is a universal staff favorite Holiday Gift Book for 2023. Feminist (suffragette), inherently experimental and gifted with a bold sense of humor, Yevonde opened her first studio in 1914, at the age of twenty-one, and went on to pioneer the nascent technology of Vivex color photography. Not only was color photography obscure and even considered vulgar at the time, but successful women professional photographers were then rare. “Mrs. Gisborne posed as Psyche,” Yevonde is quoted in the book, describing this recently discovered, previously unpublished photograph of the London society figure. “Her mournful brown eyes, exquisite mouth and fair hair seemed to me to express the pleasure as well as the pain that Psyche was force to endure.”

Drawn from a quote by Guy Debord, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “untitled 2014 (the days of this society is numbered / December 7, 2012),” 2014, is reproduced from A LOT OF PEOPLE, published to accompany the endorphin-releasing, four-decade-spanning, first American survey on the beloved pioneer of Relational Aesthetics, on view at MoMA PS1 until March 2024. “I remember having conversations with my friend Greg Tate about how Rirkrit, as a non-white man, was rolling in the art space,” Arthur Jafa writes. “The word ‘audacity’ comes up. How was he getting away with things that, on the surface, seemed effortless? Part of the beauty of his work is that it doesn’t feel overwrought. It seems immanent. Like it was always there—as if he didn’t make anything. I think Rirkrit’s work in general is very resistant to language, to being couched in aesthetic terms. He does not make grand gestures that feel traumatic or cathartic. His work is much more gentle. … I find it interesting when artists can keep making things that sit in the cut in a certain way. It is tricky to calibrate something that makes itself available, but is not solicitous. Something very telling, that is not telling you what to think. It’s a very hard thing to do even once or twice, much less consistently over a long period of time.”

Featured spreads are from Lars Müller Publishers’ gorgeous clothbound new release The Spirit of Chairs, collecting superb examples of chair design—from to Isamu Noguchi to Gaetano Pesce, Donald Judd to Mary Heilmann—from the world renowned collection of Thierry Barbier-Mueller. Featuring no fewer than 927 reproductions of works by more than 300 visionaries across various disciplines, this is a design-lover’s nirvana—as playful as it is hard-core experimental. “I was initially intrigued by original and occasionally outlandish chairs, prototypes which, in some instances, remained unique pieces, never put into production,” Barbier-Mueller writes. “It goes without saying that at that time, in the 1980s and 1990s, the market wasn’t yet turning artists and designers into superstars. Eventually I realized just how timeless this object, the chair, is—spanning centuries, crossing continents—and how much it had inspired a broad range of designers and artists, styles and cultures. … The ultimate magic of an object by [a true] maker is that it stands alone, requiring no explanation, no special knowledge. A chair is a chair for one and all! Revolutionary, wacky, innovative, humorous, ironic, joyous, elegant, boring, surprising, spare, mysterious, makeshift, cheeky, brutal, sophisticated, practical, impractical or straight-out unusable, the character of each piece is understandable to everyone. No words are needed—even though a title may occasionally add a bit of spice—no mediation is required to borrow a term currently in fashion and fairly irritating. It is an art that is free and that sets us free, encouraging each of us to explore rather than to identify.”

At last we are able to feature David Hockney’s much talked-about portrait of Harry Styles, made while the pop star was visiting the Pop artist’s remote, seventeenth-century cottage in northern France in the spring of 2022. It’s reproduced from David Hockney: Normandy Portraits, published to accompany the exhibition—which also comes with a previously published catalog, David Hockney: Drawing from Life—on view now at National Portrait Gallery, London, through January 21, 2024. Combined, the two books feature the artist’s most important and iconic sitters, from his partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima to his longtime muse Celia Birtwell, to his mother, Laura Hockney, and others equally close or, like Styles, equally spectacular. A number of superb self-portraits round the books out.

Featured photograph, from William Eggleston’s 1969–74 series The Outlands, is reproduced from Mystery of the Ordinary, the beautifully produced, clothbound new release from Steidl and C/O Berlin, published to accompany the black-and-white-to-color survey currently on view at Fundación MAPFRE. Essayist Jörg Sasse cites Eggleston’s sense of visual wit. “Humor? Eggleston’s images are full of it, sometimes obviously, often subtly, and also purely visually. This is another reason why many of his images have set aside their photographic references to gain a timeless validity. And because the world is funnier than we could determining think, if you just look closely enough, one can greet the eeriness of some of Eggleston’s images with a smile.”

New from Heni and launching this week in Miami, Remember to Dream! presents a selection of 100 notes from Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Instagram / Post-It project, in which he posts handwritten messages from the wide world of thinkers that he encounters in his life as a curator, critic, historian and self-professed human book-machine. Featured here is perhaps the most emblematic and timely note, contributed by the late Lebanese-American painter and poet Etel Adnan. “The world needs togetherness, not separation. Love, not suspicion. A common future, not isolation.”

Drumroll, please! We hereby name the freshly redesigned, rethought and reopened store at the Walker Art Center our Museum Store of the Month! A high-design concept store inside a high-design museum (the latter designed by Herzog & de Meuron), the store, designed by Zak Group and now known as Idea House 3, is a super-vibrant space that champions the brightest new ideas in architecture and product design alongside an ever evolving selection of smart, well curated books on art, photography, and of course, design.⁠

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