Book of the Day Posted Jun 17, 2021

Book of the Day > The IBM Poster Program: Visual Memoranda

● Purchase ● In the late 1960s, IBM was one of the world’s pre-eminent corporations, employing over 250,000 people in 100 countries and producing some of the most advanced products on earth. IBM President Thomas J. Watson Jnr. sought to elevate the company’s image by hiring world-renowned design consultants, including Eliot Noyes and Paul Rand. As well as developing the iconic IBM logo and a corporate design guide, Rand also brought together a remarkable team of internal staff designers.
 
One of the designers he hand-picked was Ken White, who, along with John Anderson and Tom Bluhm, headed up the design team at the IBM Design Center in Boulder, Colorado. Together, they initiated a poster program as a platform for elevating internal communications and initiatives within the company. These posters were displayed in hallways, conferences rooms and cafeterias throughout IBM campuses, with subject matter including everything from encouraging equal opportunity policies to reminders on best security practices to promoting a family fun day. Designers often incorporated figurative typography, dry humor, visual puns, and photography to craft memorable and compelling messages. Many of the posters won Type Directors Club awards and a large number were ‘re-appropriated’ from walls by enthusiastic IBM employees.
 
While Paul Rand’s creative genius has been well documented, the work of the IBM staff designers who executed his intent outlined in the IBM Design Guide has often gone unnoticed. The poster designs by White, Anderson, and Bluhm included in this book represent some of the most creative examples of mid-century corporate graphic design, while offering a unique commentary into corporate employee communications of the period. They also embody the full extent to which Thomas J. Watson Jr.’s mantra, “Good Design is Good Business” permeated every facet of the IBM organization, and created a lasting influence on curated corporate design in America.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 16, 2021

Book of the Day > Louise Bourgeois, Freud's Daughter

● Purchase ● An exploration of the art and writing of Louise Bourgeois through the lens of her relationship with Freudian psychoanalysis
 
From 1952 to 1985, Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) underwent extensive Freudian analysis that probed her family history, marriage, motherhood, and artistic ambition—and generated inspiration for her artwork. Examining the impact of psychoanalysis on Bourgeois’s work, this volume offers insight into her creative process. Philip Larratt-Smith, Bourgeois’s literary archivist, provides an overview of the artist’s life and work and the ways in which the psychoanalytic process informed her artistic practice. An essay by Juliet Mitchell offers a cutting-edge feminist psychoanalyst’s viewpoint on the artist’s long and complex relationship with therapy. In addition, a short text written by Bourgeois (first published in 1991) addresses Freud’s own relationship to art and artists. Featuring excerpts from Bourgeois’s copious diaries, rarely seen notebook pages, and archival family photographs, Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter opens exciting new avenues for understanding an innovative, influential, and groundbreaking artist whose wide-ranging work includes not only renowned large-scale sculptures but also a plethora of paintings and prints.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 15, 2021

Book of the Day > Encampment, Wyoming: Selections From The Lora Webb Nichols Archive 1899-1948

● Purchase ● ‘Encampment, Wyoming: Selections from the Lora Webb Nichols Archive 1899- 1948’ features Nichols’ own work and the images by amateur photographers she collected in the early 20th century as the proprietor of a photofinishing business in southern Wyoming. Culled from over 24,000 photographs, the book provides a dynamic visual window into the social, domestic, and economic aspects of the American Western frontier and captures an elusive sense of place through the images of this community of friends, families, and strangers.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 12, 2021

Book of the Day > Mona Kuhn: Works

● Purchase ● A stunning career retrospective of Mona Kuhn, one of the leading figures in contemporary art photography.
 
Mona Kuhn is one of the most respected contemporary photographers of her time, best known for her large-scale photographs of the human form. Throughout a career spanning more than twenty years, the underlying theme of her work is her reflection on humanity’s longing for spiritual connection and solidarity. As she solidified her photographic style, Kuhn created a notable approach to the nude by developing friendships with her subjects, and employing a range of playful visual strategies that use natural light and bucolic settings to evoke a sublime sense of comfort between the human figure and its environment. Her work is natural, restful, and a reinterpretation of the nude in the canon of contemporary art.
 
Kuhn’s distinct aesthetic has propelled her as one of the most collectible contemporary art photographers—her work is in private and public collections worldwide and she is represented by galleries across the United States. Mona Kuhn: Works, the artist’s first retrospective, features images from throughout her career, accompanied by insightful texts by Rebecca Morse, Simon Baker, Chris Littlewood, and Darius Himes. An interview with Elizabeth Avedon provides insights into Kuhn’s creative process and the ways in which she works with her subjects and locations, and achieves the visual signature of her imagery. Published to coincide with a traveling international exhibition, opening at Fotografiska in New York, this book introduces Kuhn’s distinct aesthetic to a wide popular audience., It is an essential volume for anyone with an interest in the human form in contemporary art.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 11, 2021

Book of the Day > Ken Light: Midnight La Frontera

● Purchase ● Between 1983 and 1987 along the California/Mexico border, Ken Light took his Hasselblad camera and flash and rode along with US Border Patrol agents in the middle of the night as they combed the Otay Mesa looking for “illegal aliens.” He was there when they were apprehended – captured by authorities as well as the photographer’s flash. The black and white images are stark, impromptu mug shots in the desert, taken at a moment of extreme vulnerability, when hope gave way to despair, migrants caught in a cruel game of hide and seek.
 
Light’s photographs and José Ángel Navejas’ first hand, compelling memoir, presented in both English and Spanish, offer testimony of the harrowing night border crossing of those desperately seeking a chance at a better life. A day after Navejas first crossed the US border from Mexico, he was caught and deported back onto the streets of Tijuana. Undeterred, he crawled back through a tunnel to San Diego, where he entered the United States forever.
 
In piercing words and in strobe lit images caught against the dark of night, Midnight La Frontera’s immediacy underscores the struggle and defiance of those who make the perilous hike for days and weeks in search of the American Dream.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 10, 2021

Book of the Day > Catherine Opie

● Purchase ● Long awaited, the first survey of the work of one of America's foremost contemporary fine art photographers
 
For almost 40 years, Catherine Opie has been documenting with psychological acuity the cultural and geographic identity of contemporary America. This unique artist monograph presents a compelling visual narrative of Opie's work since the early 1980s, pairing images across bodies of work to form a full picture of her artistic vision. With more than 300 beautiful illustrations and made in close collaboration with Opie, the book marks a turning point in the consideration of this artist's work to date.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 09, 2021

Book of the Day > German Design 1949–1989: Two Countries, One History

● Purchase ● The fertile dual evolution of design under socialism and capitalism in postwar Germany The cheap, colorful plastic designs of East Germany pitted against the cool functionalism of West German design: German Design 1949–1989: Two Countries, One History does away with such clichés. More than 30 years after German reunification, it presents a comprehensive overview of German design history of the postwar period for the first time ever. With over 300 illustrations and numerous examples from the fields of design—fashion, furniture, graphics, automobile, industrial and interiors—the book shows how design featured in daily life on both sides of the Wall, the important part it played in the reconstruction process and how it served as a propaganda tool during the Cold War. Key objects and protagonists—from Dieter Rams or Otl Aicher in the West to Rudolf Horn or Renate Müller in the East—are presented alongside formative factors such as the Bauhaus legacy and important institutions such as the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) Ulm.
 
The exceptional case of the division of Germany allows a unique comparative perspective on the role design played in promoting socialism and capitalism. While in the Federal Republic to the West, it became a generator of the export economy and the “Made in Germany” brand, in the East it was intended to fuel the socialist planned economy and affordability for broad sections of the population was key. While the book highlights the different realities of East and West, the many cross references that connected design in both are also examined. It impressively illustrates the many facets of German design history in the postwar period: from the domestic sphere to global politics, from industrial products to design’s role as a tool of protest that foreshadowed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 08, 2021

Book of the Day > Michael Schmelling: Scrapyard

● Purchase ● Photographs from 2019–2020, shot in Los Angeles. Includes an essay of sorts in which Schmelling writes about his ongoing interest in trash/scrap, and perennial inspirations: Don DeLillo, Marylinne Robinson, Mandel & Sultan’s ‘Evidence’, Daniel Spoerri, Los Angeles, etc…
Book of the Day Posted Jun 05, 2021

Book of the Day > Arthur Jafa: MAGNUMB

● Purchase ● An essential overview of Jafa's sweeping, dynamic and disquieting video portraits of Black American life Though he has worked in film and music for decades, American video artist Arthur Jafa only garnered acclaim in the art world in 2016 for his video work Love is the Message, the Message is Death. Composed of found images and videos, his oeuvre revolves around Black American culture, the history of slavery, and ongoing structural and physical violence against Black Americans. As Jafa put it in his 2003 text “My Black Death”: “The central conundrum of black being (the double bind of our ontological existence) lies in the fact that common misery both defines and limits who we are. Such that our efforts to eliminate those forces which constrain also function to dissipate much which gives us our specificity, our uniqueness, our flavor by destroying the binds that define we will cease to be, but this is the good death (boa morte) to be embraced.”
 
This essential overview presents Jafa’s best-known works, such as Love is the Message, the Message is Death and its 2018 follow-up piece The White Album, alongside never-before-seen projects and essays by notable scholars.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 04, 2021

Book of the Day > Calvin Marcus: Conspiracy Of Asses

● Purchase ● This publication reproduces Calvin Marcus’s large paintings since 2018. Each painting attempts to achieve complete autonomy within its edges. Capturing dream-like visions and snapshots of the absurdity of contemporary life, they depict diverse subjects: animals, humanoid figures, interiors and landscape-like spaces. These singular representations share a sensibility, at once idiosyncratic and disarming, that immediately draws the viewer into the mysteries of the quotidian world. Each poses—with Marcus's humorous brand of surrealism—as many questions as answers.
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