Book of the Day Posted Sep 10, 2020

Book of the Day > Anton Corbjin: MOOD/MODE

Purchase ● In MOOD/MODE, leading international photographer and filmmaker Anton Corbijn presents images from his extensive body of work in which he explores the crossover between photography and the world of fashion - in the broadest sense of the word.
 
Corbijn's portraits of figures such as Alexander McQueen, Tom Waits and Naomi Campbell have now achieved iconic status. As visual director behind Depeche Mode and through his decades-long collaboration with U2 and others, he has made his mark on the way we look at an important aspect of contemporary culture.
 
With MOOD/MODE, Anton Corbijn shows that fashion is everywhere. The book contains some 150 photographs, many of them published for the first time, and its world première was in Knokke-Heist, summer 2020.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 09, 2020

Book of the Day > TAROT

Purchase ● Trace the hidden history of Tarot in the first volume from TASCHEN’s Library of Esoterica, a series documenting the creative ways we strive to connect to the divine. Artfully arranged according to the sequencing of the Major and Minor Arcana, this visual compendium gathers more than 500 cards and works of original art from around the world in the ultimate exploration of a centuries-old art form.
 
To explore the Tarot is to explore ourselves, to be reminded of the universality of our longing for meaning, for purpose and for a connection to the divine. This 600-year-old tradition reflects not only a history of seekers, but our journey of artistic expression and the ways we communicate our collective human story.
 
For many in the West, Tarot exists in the shadow place of our cultural consciousness, a metaphysical tradition assigned to the dusty glass cabinets of the arcane. Its history, long and obscure, has been passed down through secret writing, oral tradition, and the scholarly tomes of philosophers and sages. Hundreds of years and hundreds of creative hands—mystics and artists often working in collaboration—have transformed what was essentially a parlor game into a source of divination and system of self-exploration, as each new generation has sought to evolve the form and reinterpret the medium.
 
Author Jessica Hundley traces this fascinating history in Tarot, the debut volume in TASCHEN’s Library of Esoterica series. The book explores the symbolic meaning behind more than 500 cards and works of original art, two thirds of which have never been published outside of the decks themselves. It's the first ever visual compendium of its kind, spanning from Medieval to modern, and artfully arranged according to the sequencing of the 78 cards of the Major and Minor Arcana. It explores the powerful influence of Tarot as muse to artists like Salvador Dalí and Niki de Saint Phalle and includes the decks of nearly 100 diverse contemporary artists from around the world, all of whom have embraced the medium for its capacity to push cultural identity forward. Rounding out the volume are excerpts from thinkers such as Éliphas Lévi, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell; a foreword by artist Penny Slinger; a guide to reading the cards by Johannes Fiebig; and an essay on oracle decks by Marcella Kroll.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 08, 2020

Book of the Day > Orhan Pamuk: Orange

Purchase ● The streetscapes of Istanbul as photographed by Nobel prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk in an exquisitely printed clothbound edition
 
The dominant color in Orhan Pamuk's new book of photographs is orange. When the Nobel-Prize-winning novelist is finished with the day's writing, he takes his camera and wanders through Istanbul's various neighborhoods, visiting the backstreets of his town, areas without tourists, spaces that seem neglected and forgotten, spaces with a particular light. This is the orange light of Istanbul's windows and streetlamps that Pamuk knows so well from his childhood—from the Istanbul of 50 years ago, as he mentions in his introduction.
 
But Pamuk also observes that the homely, cosy orange light is slowly being replaced by a new, bright and icy white light from new lightbulbs. His photographs from the backstreets of Istanbul record and preserve the cosy effect of this old, disappearing orange light, as well as the recognition of this new white vision.
 
Whether reflected in well-trodden snow, concentrated as a glaring ball atop a lamppost or subtly present as a diffuse haze, orange literally and aesthetically gives shape to Pamuk's pictures, which reveal to us the unseen corners of his home city.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 05, 2020

Book of the Day > Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness

Purchase ● A new focus on the sublime landscapes in Lisa Yuskavage’s voluptuous figure paintings
 
Though she is arguably best known for the voluptuous female nudes that populate her paintings, Lisa Yuskavage’s work is just as focused on the ethereal settings in which these subjects appear. Yuskavage creates finely detailed landscapes that blur the line between the fantastical and the familiar, melding abstraction with realism to depict self-contained worlds. These outdoor scenes defy conventions of landscape painting with surreal color palettes of lush greens and delicate pinks, cast in a gauzy light quality that highlights the almost magical nature of her paintings.
 
Published in conjunction with a joint exhibition between the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado and the Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland, this volume includes color reproductions of Yuskavage’s paintings and watercolors from the early 1990s to the present, as well as an interview between Yuskavage and fellow artist Mary Weatherford.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 04, 2020

Book of the Day > Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists

Purchase ● What’s new, now and next from contemporary Black artists
 
This book surveys the work of a new generation of Black artists, and also features the voices of a diverse group of curators who are on the cutting edge of contemporary art. As mission-driven collectors, Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi have championed emerging artists of African descent through museum loans and institutional support. But there has never been an opportunity to consider their acclaimed collection as a whole until now.
 
Edited by writer Antwaun Sargent (author of The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion), Young, Gifted and Black draws from this collection to shed new light on works by contemporary artists of African descent. At a moment when debates about the politics of visibility within the art world have taken on renewed urgency, and establishment voices such as the New York Times are declaring that “it has become undeniable that African American artists are making much of the best American art today,”
 
Young, Gifted and Black takes stock of how these new voices are impacting the way we think about identity, politics and art history itself. Young, Gifted and Black contextualizes artworks with contributions from artists, curators and other experts. It features a wide-ranging interview with Bernard Lumpkin and Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem; and an in-depth essay by Antwaun Sargent situating Lumpkin in a long lineage of Black art patrons. A landmark publication, this book illustrates what it means (in the words of Nina Simone) to be young, gifted and Black in contemporary art.
 
Artists include: Mark Bradford, David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Adam Pendleton, Pope.L, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Henry Taylor, Mickalene Thomas, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Sadie Barnette, Kevin Beasley, Jordan Casteel, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Bethany Collins, Noah Davis, Cy Gavin, Allison Janae Hamilton, Tomashi Jackson, Samuel Levi Jones, Deana Lawson, Eric N. Mack, Arcmanoro Niles, Jennifer Packer, Christina Quarles, Jacolby Satterwhite, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Sable Elyse Smith, Chanel Thomas, Stacy Lynn Waddell, D’Angelo Lovell Williams, Brenna Youngblood, and more.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 03, 2020

Book of the Day > Debi Cornwall: Necessary Fictions

Purchase ● From the author of Welcome to Camp America, an eerie exploration of America’s performance of power and identity in the post-9/11 era
 
What are the stories we tell ourselves, the games we play, to manage unsettling realities? Made on ten military bases across the United States since 2016, Necessary Fictions documents mock-village landscapes in the fictional country of “Atropia” and its denizens, roleplayers who enact versions of their past or future selves in realistic training scenarios.
 
Costumed Afghan and Iraqi civilians, many of whom have fled war, now recreate it in the service of the US military. Real soldiers pose in front of camouflage backdrops, dressed by Hollywood makeup artists in “moulage”—fake wounds—as they prepare to deploy.
 
Brooklyn-based conceptual documentary artist and former civil rights lawyer Debi Cornwall (born 1973) photographs this meta-reality—the artifice of war—presented in the book with a variety of texts to provoke critical inquiry about America’s fantasy industrial complex. The book includes an essay by PEN Award–winning critical theorist Sarah Sentilles.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 02, 2020

Book of the Day > Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe

Purchase ● The first extended monograph on Saar, featuring older and more recent works, gorgeously bound in cloth with embossed details
 
Drawing inspiration from the imagery of African, Caribbean and Latin American folk art as well as found objects and her own upbringing in a multiracial artist family, Los Angeles artist Alison Saar (born 1956) creates works that reflect on the duality of body and spirit within the context of a larger cultural setting, focusing in particular on black womanhood. In life-size wooden sculptures and mixed-media portraits, Saar crafts complex narratives about diasporic identity.
 
This publication accompanies an exhibition co-organized by the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College in Claremont, California and the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California. Alongside photographic reproductions of Saar’s work, the clothbound catalog contains an interview between Saar and the exhibit’s co-curator, never-before-published photographs from the artist’s childhood and poetry by Camille Dungy, Harryette Mullen and Evie Shockley.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 01, 2020

Book of the Day > Mark Flood: Protest Signs from 1992

Purchase ● Collecting Mark Flood’s irreverent reinventions of the protest sign Houston-based artist
 
Mark Flood’s (born 1957) 1992 protest signs were first deployed outside the Republican National Convention of that year. With cardboard, foam core upcycled from the Menil Collection and vintage stencils gifted by a relative of Jackson Pollock, Flood’s signs display ironic slogans beside silkscreened images of Reagan, Bush and Schwarzenegger.
 
“Flood’s Protest Signs may similarly be regarded as a form of history painting, as markers of where some stood, of what they stood against, of what they stood for. Flood’s Signs can be seen in clear relation to all of his text-based works, articulated in a way that is by turns acerbic, bemused, and irreverent, a voice that yet echoes from a year that was a year and a day.” – Bob Nickas
Book of the Day Posted Aug 28, 2020

Book of the Day > Lina Bo Bardi: HABITAT

Purchase ● From furniture and exhibition design to monumental domestic and public architectural projects, the breadth of Lina Bo Bardi’s multidisciplinary work is showcased in this richly illustrated book.
 
Lina Bo Bardi is regarded as one of the most important architects in Brazil’s history. Beginning her career as a Modernist architect in Rome, Bo Bardi and her husband emigrated to Brazil following the end of WWII. Bo Bardi quickly resumed her practice in her adopted homeland with architecture that was both modern and firmly rooted in the culture of Brazil. In 1951 she designed “Casa de Vidro” (“Glass House”), her first built work, where she and her husband would live for the rest of their lives. She also designed the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (São Paulo Art Museum), a landmark of Latin American modernist architecture which opened in 1968. It was for this museum she created the iconic glass easel display system, which remains radical to date. This book presents a comprehensive record of Bo Bardi’s overarching approach to art and architecture and shows how her exhibition designs, curatorial projects, and writing informed her spatial designs. Essays on Bo Bardi’s life and work accompany archival material such as design sketches and writings by the artist, giving new insight into the conceptual and material processes behind this radical thinker and creator’s projects.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 27, 2020

Book of the Day > Interiorities: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Leonor Antunes, Henrike Naumann, Adriana Varejão

Purchase ● An international coterie of contemporary female artists give form to the political and aesthetic facets of our interior lives.
 
The artists featured in this book proffer a radical and innovative formal language that positions interiority as both political and aesthetic. The work of Njideka Akunyili Crosby comprises vibrantly patterned paintings on paper that negotiate the complex cultural terrain of a life formed between two worlds: her adopted home in America and her native Nigeria. Inspired by photography, fashion, architecture, and design, as well as her own family history, Akunyili Crosby’s works often feature domestic spaces that function as physical, conceptual, and emotional points of arrival and departure. Conversely, the Portuguese sculptor Leonor Antunes focuses on migration and the transformation of form and ideas beyond temporal and geographical spaces. The starting point for her elegant site-specific sculptures is the exploration of art, design, and architectural history. Adriana Varejão addresses the colonial history of Brazil in her visceral sculptures and paintings. She often deploys the motif of the wall, the boundary between inside and outside, in her work. The omnipresence of the past also colors the work of trained stage designer Henrike Naumann, whose immersive installations engage with the history of East-West German relations, as well as contemporary instances of right-wing ideology. Naumann explores the mechanisms of radicalization and explores how they manifest themselves in space.
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