Book of the Day Posted Oct 15, 2022

Book of the day > Ice Cold. A Hip-Hop Jewelry History

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Ice Cold: A Hip-Hop Jewelry History presents the bling culture of rappers and their jewelry. Using 40 years of iconic imagery and compelling stories, this visual history shines a light on the world of hip-hop, where mega stars from Run-DMC to Tupac and Jay-Z to Migos and Cardi B flash brilliant custom pieces to show status and personal style.
 
 
Book of the Day Posted Oct 13, 2022

Book of the day > Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal

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"The first major publication in twenty years on the prodigious and innovative work of this beloved twentieth-century New York multimedia artist and poet, whose work in collage and assemblage transformed the ordinary into the beautiful.
 
Known for his internationally popular memoir, I Remember, which uniquely captures 1950s America, Joe Brainard (1942–1994) was also a prolific and beloved artist. This beautifully illustrated book covers the entire range of his versatile art, including hundreds of drawings, collages, assemblages, prints, and paintings, many unpublished or never exhibited.
 
Brainard was closely associated with the New York School, a community of poets and artists such as Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Alex Katz, Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and Fairfield Porter, who thrived in downtown Manhattan in the 1960s and ’70s. Brainard transformed ordinary objects and ephemera collected from his Lower East Side neighborhood into stunning assemblages and collages. The book brings together Brainard’s classic subjects, such as the comic strip heroine Nancy; Madonnas (inspired by Ukrainian images in the Lower East Side); his iconic pansies, poppies, and daisies; and erotic works (male torsos).
 
Poet and art critic John Yau describes in vivid detail how Brainard produced thousands of lush multimedia pieces radiant with poignancy, wit, intimacy, and a sheer beauty that express Brainard’s unabashed affection for the world."

 

Book of the Day Posted Oct 12, 2022

Book of the Day > (Signed) Katie Shapiro: Big Sur

● Purchase ● "Located in California's Central Coast, Big Sur has long been a place of escape, retreat and renewal. As an artist, it has been all of those things for me. A magic hovers amongst the raised-up cliffs that make up its rugged topography. Extending for roughly 26 miles, Big Sur is a region of organic flowing coastline that no boundaries can clearly define. Perhaps this is what makes it feel so free.
 
Big Sur has long been a magnet for artists and dreamers alike. Driving between this meeting of land and sea yields a profound quiet of the mind. These feelings are unique to this location. Simply being in this place is a meditation.
 
Over the years I have returned to Big Sur as a place for retreat, renewal, and inspiration. This series of photographs explore different approaches to the landscape. They speak to the place as a changing topography over time, and a space that emits a palpable energy."
Book of the Day Posted Oct 11, 2022

Book of the day > Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party


By Stephen Shames and Ericka Huggins. Published by ACC Artbooks. "Many of us have heard these three words: Black Panther Party. Some know the Party’s history as a movement for the social, political, economic and spiritual upliftment of Black and indigenous people of color – but to this day, few know the story of the backbone of the Party: the women.
 
It’s estimated that six out of ten Panther Party members were women. While these remarkable women of all ages and diverse backgrounds were regularly making headlines agitating, protesting, and organizing, off-stage these same women were building communities and enacting social justice, providing food, housing, education, healthcare, and more. Comrade Sisters is their story.
The book combines photos by Stephen Shames, who at the time was a 20-year-old college student at Berkeley. With the complete trust of the Black Panther Party, Shames took intimate, behind-the-scenes photographs that fully portrayed Party members’ lives. This marks his third photo book about the Black Panthers and includes many never before published images.
 
Ericka Huggins, an early Party member and leader along with Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, has written a moving text, sharing what drew so many women to the Party and focusing on their monumental work on behalf of the most vulnerable citizens. Most importantly, the book includes contributions from over 50 former women members – some well-known, others not – who vividly recall their personal experiences from that time. Other texts include a foreword by Angela Davis and an afterword by Alicia Garza.
All Power to the People."
 
Stephen Shames has authored over 10 monographs, and his images are in the permanent collections of 40 museums and foundations. His work is dedicated to promoting social change, and sharing the stories of those who are frequently overlooked by society. His previous monographs include Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers by Stephen Shames and Bobby Seale (Abrams, 2016) and The Black Panthers (Aperture, 2006).
 
As an activist, former political prisoner and leader in the Black Panther Party, Ericka Huggins has devoted her life to the equitable treatment of all human beings, beyond the boundaries of race, age, culture, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability and status associated with citizenship. For the past 40 years she has lectured across the country and internationally. She spent 14 years in the Black Panther Party, and eight years as Director of the renowned Oakland Community School (1973-1981).

 

Book of the Day Posted Oct 04, 2022

Book of the Day > Liza Lou

 
The most comprehensive book on the work of Liza Lou, whose popular and critically acclaimed installations made entirely of beads consider the important themes of women, community, and the valorization of labor.
 
Liza Lou first gained attention in 1996 when her room-sized sculpture Kitchen was shown at the New Museum in New York. Representing five years of individual labor, this groundbreaking work subverted standards of art by introducing glass beads as a fine art material. The project blurred the rigid boundary between fine art and craft, and established Lou's long-standing exploration of materiality, process, and beauty. Working within a craft métier has led the artist to work in a variety of socially engaged settings, from community groups in Los Angeles, to a collective she founded in Durban, South Africa. Over the past fifteen years, Lou has focused on a poetic approach to abstraction as a way to highlight the process underlying her work.
 
In this comprehensive volume that considers the entirety of Lou’s singular vision, curators, art historians, and artists offer important perspectives on the breadth of the work. Author Julia Bryan-Wilson and Cathleen Chaffee and Glenn Adamson and Elisabeth Sherman, Contributions by Carrie Mae Weems @liza_lou_studio @rizzolibooks Designed by @purtillfamilybusiness

 

Book of the Day Posted Oct 01, 2022

Book of the Day > Penny Wolin: Guest Register

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“Penny Wolin from Cheyenne, Wyoming flies into Hollywood on the wings of inspiration and intuition and lands at the St. Francis Hotel. There, in three short weeks as a tenant, Penny creates a body of photographs and text comparable to those of the great documentary photographers of the 20th century, only to be hidden in the photographer’s archive for nearly fifty years – until now.”
— Norman Mauskopf, Photographer
 
When Penny Wolin created Guest Register in 1975, she was twenty-one and a recent transplant to Hollywood from Cheyenne, Wyoming. You can see the residents of the St. Francis Hotel as people who could not fit in elsewhere, or you can see them, as Wolin does, as people whose dreams are bigger than their rooms. She moved into the 1920s hotel, a five-story pay-by-the week building on Hollywood Boulevard and began photographing her neighbors. She could see at once it was a “milieu of dreamers,” both those who “had not yet realized their dreams” and those who “had left them behind.” Wolin suspended judgement. She was not categorizing the residents as she made her rounds, and her project was not intended to fix anything. This generosity of spirit is the defining quality of Guest Register. The book is arranged as a tour, one image per spread, with residents identified by their room number and an insightful caption. The tour begins on the ground floor in room 105, vacated by the death of a former stuntman, and rises to a barbell aficionado in the penthouse, before returning to earth by way of an artisan welder in the basement, who seems to have lit his cigarette with a flaming torch. Guest Register is a both a culmination and a relaunch for an endeavor that is about the possibility of a second chance for all of us.

 

Book of the Day Posted Sep 24, 2022

Book of the Day > Wild Things Are Happening: The Art of Maurice Sendak

● Purchase ● The most comprehensive survey of the work of Maurice Sendak, the most celebrated picture book artist of all time—with previously unpublished archival materials
 
Published in conjunction with the eponymous Sendak retrospective touring museums in the United States and Europe in 2022–24, Wild Things Are Happening emphasizes Maurice Sendak’s relationship to the history of art and the influences of his art collecting on his images. It features previously unpublished sketches, storyboards and paintings that emphasize Sendak’s creative processes.
 
Bringing together a broad diversity of perspectives on the award-winning artist, the book includes an extended essay by the renowned art historian Thomas Crow that traces the genesis and cultural contexts of Sendak’s most famous book, Where the Wild Things Are. It also includes interviews and appreciations by many of Sendak’s key collaborators, including Carroll Ballard, Michael Di Capua, John Dugdale, Spike Jonze, Twyla Tharp and Arthur Yorinks.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 24, 2022

Book of the Day > Kandis Williams

● Purchase ● The inaugural volume in a new series of books, Kandis Williams documents the Los Angeles–based artist’s exhibition A Line. Interrogating issues of race, nationalism, authority, and eroticism, her topical work is made across collage, sculpture, and video.
 
Williams draws on her background in dramaturgy to envision a space that accommodates the biopolitical economies that inform how movement might be read. Looking at the interconnections between popular culture and myth, she relates in her work anatomy, regions of Black diaspora, and communication and obfuscation. Williams’s body of work shapes an alternative language that examines how Black moving bodies are regarded. Williams continues to make visible the inexpressible violence Black bodies have been subjected to in dance and beyond.
 
Featuring contributions by the curator of 52 Walker—a David Zwirner gallery space—Ebony L. Haynes and the artist and writer Hannah Black, and a stirring conversation between Williams and the artist Okwui Okpokwasili, the book serves as an extension of the exhibition. Included are high-quality illustrations of the artworks alongside rich archival materials. @kandis_williams @ebotron @hannah_black___ #okwuiokpokwasili @davidzwirnerbooks
Book of the Day Posted Sep 22, 2022

Book of the Day > Emma Webster: Behind the Scenes

● Purchase ● Emma Webster’s landscape paintings teleport viewers into the otherworldly. The places she depicts, convincing and hallucinatory, merge spatial expectations with mystifying fantasy. The paintings come from a hybrid sketching-sculpting process within screen-space. Webster first constructs scenes in virtual reality, which she then embellishes with theatrical illumination, to create natural vistas that relish in artifice, drama, and distortion. Of her VR models, Webster says: “Working from within the still-life is more akin to how we go about the world. There can be no ‘outside.’”
Book of the Day Posted Sep 21, 2022

Book of the Day > Unseen Saul Leiter

● Purchase ● A thrilling trove of newly discovered color works from the photographer celebrated for his pioneering painterly vision
 
Now firmly established as one of the world’s greatest photographers, Saul Leiter (1923–2013) was relatively little known until the 2006 publication of Saul Leiter: Early Color, when he was already in his eighties. Choosing to shoot in color when black and white was the norm, Leiter portrayed midcentury New York’s street life with a gorgeous painterliness that evoked the sensuality of his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries Rothko and Newman. His studio in the East Village, where he lived from 1952 until his death in 2013, is now the home of the Saul Leiter Foundation, which has commenced a full-scale survey of his more than 80,000 works.
 
This volume contains works discovered through this project—specifically, color photography from slides never before published or seen by the public. It is edited by Margit Erb and Michael Parillo of the Saul Leiter Foundation, and is embellished with texts that describe how Leiter assembled his slide archive and how it is being catalogued and restored.
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