Book of the Day Posted Aug 17, 2022

Book of the Day > Daniel Jack Lyons: Like a River

● Purchase ● An anthropological exploration of identity, transformation and coming-of-age amongst marginalized communities in the heart of the Amazon.
 
Daniel Jack Lyons’ debut monograph continues the American artist’s long-term commitments to visualizing the social and political rights of under-represented communities. Initially from a background of social and medical anthropology, Lyons began working in the Amazon under the umbrella of Casa do Rio, a community-based organization that celebrates and supports the cultural lives of teenagers and young people living in the depths of the Amazon. Lyons particularly visualizes and empowers the trans and queer communities of the region, exploring how deep indigenous traditions and modern identity politics meet in a celebratory, safe space, deep in the lush canopies and vegetation of the rainforest.
 
Lyons’ empowering images celebrate the perennial coming-of-age impulses to express and affirm one’s individuality, resilient here in the Amazon against a toxic mix of environmental degradation, violence, and discrimination. As another generation passes through the quotidian rites and rituals of adolescence, Lyons asks: what sort of world will they inhabit, and how much autonomy will they have over it?
Book of the Day Posted Aug 13, 2022

Book of the Day > Piet Mondrian: Mondrian Evolution

● Purchase ● Celebrating Mondrian's journey from Dutch landscape painter to pioneer of lively, hard-edged abstraction
 
Published on the occasion of the Dutch artist’s 150th birthday, Mondrian Evolution celebrates the multifaceted work and artistic development of Piet Mondrian. The artist cemented his place in the art historical canon with his geometric compositions characterized by black lines cast against white surfaces partially filled by the primary colors blue, red and yellow. Indelible as they are, these compositions comprise only a portion of Mondrian’s expansive oeuvre. The artist moved through various formal evolutions, corresponding to his various geographical residences, before he arrived at his signature minimalist abstract style. After his classical training in figurative painting, Mondrian departed for Paris, where he immersed himself in the avant-garde currents energizing the city; Cubism, in particular, stimulated his imagination. Taking the movement as a point of departure, Mondrian developed Neo-Plasticism, a nonrepresentational “pure plastic art,” which he believed to be the pathway to universal beauty.
 
This monograph diligently traces the artist’s progression from landscape painter to abstractionist trailblazer—and all the stops in between. Each chapter homes in on a specific motif within Mondrian’s oeuvre, including windmills, dunes, the sea, farms reflected in the water and plants in various forms of abstraction.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 12, 2022

Book of the Day > Football: Designing the Beautiful Game

● Purchase ● The design story of soccer, from stadium planning to team badges
 
Soccer is unquestionably the world’s most popular sport, with a dedicated fan base and truly international reach. It is also a significant industry, with European soccer alone being estimated to hold a value of $30 billion in 2016. How did soccer evolve to be such a significant part of our cultural landscape, and what role has design played in shaping the sport?
 
This catalog—the first of its kind—explores the design story behind soccer, unpicking how design has been used to push the game to its technical and emotional limits. From the master-planning of the world’s most significant stadiums to the innovative materials used in today’s boots, the graphic design of team badges and the grassroots initiatives pushing back against the sport’s commercialization, this book provides a rare insight into the people and processes that have made soccer what it is today.
 
Accompanying the Design Museum exhibition of the same name, this book features informed and sometimes provocative contributions from figures across the world of football and design, from analyst Statman Dave and broadcaster Martin Tyler to architect Jacques Herzog and Adidas vice president Sam Handy.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 11, 2022

Book of the Day > Ruth Asawa: Citizen of the Universe

● Purchase ● Ruth Asawa is an artist of vital importance to modern art. Ruth Asawa: Citizen of the Universe, which accompanies the first public exhibition of Asawa’s work in Europe, introduces readers to Asawa’s work, including her signature hanging sculptures in looped and tied wire, and her pioneering education practice. It positions her expansive ethos—her self-identification as “a citizen of the universe” and belief that art education can be life enriching for everyone—as a catalyst for creative forward-thinking in the twenty-first century.
 
Focusing on a dynamic and formative period in her life from 1945 to 1980, this book gives readers a unique experience of the artist and her work, exploring her legacy and positioning her as an abstract sculptor crucial to American modernism. It is a wonderful celebration of her holistic integration of art, education, and community engagement, through which she called for a revolutionary and inclusive vision of art’s role in society.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 10, 2022

Book of the Day > Albarrán Cabrera: Photographic Syntax

● Purchase ● Photography duo Albarrán Cabrera uses photography as a tool to investigate reality. The images that make up their latest book ‘Photography Syntax’, function as the notebooks of their philosophical research. Together with the texts, the photographs testify to the use of photographic processes as a means of going deeper into the reasons and thoughts behind the images.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 05, 2022

Book of the Day > Harry Benson: Paul

● Purchase ● A personal portrait of Paul McCartney by Harry Benson
 
Harry Benson began photographing the young Paul McCartney in 1964, a pivotal year for the Beatles when they took America by storm, toured the world, and made their movie debut with A Hard Day’s Night—all documented by the affable Scotsman. And when the Fab Four called it quits, it was Benson who was afforded intimate access to Paul and wife Linda, as Paul forged a new path creatively and personally.
 
Through Benson’s lens, Paul traces the evolution of its namesake as an icon, performer, and a devoted family man. We follow the musician at the height of his fame with the Beatles; in the recording studio with Linda and their band, Wings; with the family; behind the scenes and on stage during the 1975–76 “Wings Over America” tour; dancing the night away at a star-studded party on the Queen Mary to celebrate the band’s newest album; and with Linda on the couple’s farm in the U.K. in the early 1990s—a fittingly soft landing after so many years of flying high.
 
Featuring more than 100 color and black-and-white images by the legendary photojournalist, many never seen before, this collection is a window onto a one-of-a-kind artist, one who has remained somewhat enigmatic despite nearly a lifetime of being in the limelight.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 03, 2022

Book of the Day > Philipp Mueller: 120 bpm

● Purchase ● The dawn of Zurich’s 1990s techno scene, in photographs, ephemera and testimonials
 
Titled after the number of beats per minute on a club track, 120 bpm tracks techno’s meteoric rise in Switzerland, where it became one of the country’s last great youth movements, leaving a massive imprint on the nightlife, clubs and ongoing innovation in electronic dance music to this day. Swiss photographer Philipp Mueller, who has shot for Vogue, GQ and Playboy, covered the dawn of the Swiss techno scene in the early 1990s, in raw photographs of Zurich’s first street parades, underground raves and parties—whether backstage in clubs or in the intimacy of private venues—for various magazines. Mueller’s photographs are interleaved here with facsimile clippings from rave magazines and fanzines, as well as firsthand accounts from some of the ravers who made the nascent scene.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 02, 2022

Book of the Day > *Signed* Colby Deal: Beautiful, Still.

● Purchase ● Beautiful, Still. is the first monograph from photographer Colby Deal, documenting the people, objects, and environments of everyday life in the Third Ward neighbourhood in Houston, Texas, where the artist grew up. In this ongoing project, currently consisting of over a thousand negatives, Deal sets out to provide a visual record of overlooked communities and the cultural characteristics gradually being erased by gentrification, as well as a depiction of communities of colour whose members are often portrayed with negative connotations. Through these instinctive black-and-white photographs, Deal’s down-to-earth approach to his subjects is made apparent; at times candid and blurred, other times poised and sharply focussed, the series builds to convey the dynamism and vibrancy of family, community, and individual life in the Third Ward. The scratches and dust left on the negatives reflect the marks of lived life and simultaneously suggest the fragility of these documents and the corresponding precarity of the fabrics of social life they often depict. Deal’s almost conversational tone — the antithesis of media portrayals of the neighbourhood — invites his viewers in with a sense of joy and intuitive playfulness. From these alternately staged and documentary images, a new narrative emerges about a reductively and oppressively narrativized place, celebrating the agency and freedom that the photographic medium can offer.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 29, 2022

Book of the Day > Mark Flood in the Nineties by Clark Flood

● Purchase ● A dark chapter of art history dragged into the light.
 
Painter and provocateur, Mark Flood’s career blazed like an erratic comet thru the bubblicious art world of the early twenty-first century. Now his brother Clark Flood tells the story of Mark’s struggles of the 1990s, before he hit the big time.
 
Meticulously researched, Mark Flood in the 1990s recounts accusations of Satanism, confiscation of work by the local police, and a decision to sell advertising space on the surface of paintings. We learn about a profusion of false identities and Flood’s innovative use of surrogates for public appearances. Finally, we retrace the artist’s prolific output as he spirals down into depression and fantasies of suicide. This arc unexpectedly culminates in the discovery of the lace painting technique that would make him rich.

Mark Flood in the 1990s reproduces hundreds of paintings and documents, many never published before, as well as vintage photographs of studios and exhibits.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 27, 2022

Book of the Day > Larry Vigon: Serious Play

● Purchase ● Larry Vigon is an award-winning art director and designer who is credited for some of the most iconic album covers from the 70’s and 80’s. As a graduate from Art center College of Design in 1972 Vigon set out to create a career in album cover design combining his love of music and art. For the next 20 years that is exactly what he did. He has designed over 200 albums and single sleeves for Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton, Counting Crows, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Chicago, Pat Benatar, Carol King, Sparks, Boney James, Thomas Dolby and many more. Vigon has partnered with some of the greatest photographers of the late 20th century including Helmut Newton, George Hurrell, Joyce Tenneson, William Claxton, Peter Beard, and numerous other. After two decades of almost exclusively album cover work, he branched out into corporate design including the clients IBM, Epson, The City of Los Angeles, Paramount Television, The Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, The House of Blues, also Broadway posters, advertising campaigns, magazines and books, including C.G. Jung’s Red Book. Vigon first book in 2006 DREAM A Journal was published by W.W. Norton, New York.
 
When Vigon is not working on commercial projects he enjoys creating personal art projects but often combining the two disciplines. His paintings are in private collections all over the world.
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