Book of the Day Posted Jun 14, 2020

Book of the day, In Memoriam > John Hiltunen

In memoriam: John Hiltunen. It was love at first sight when we first encountered Mr. Hiltunen's work through @creativegrowth at the #LAABF2016.

John Hiltunen is a facsimile of John Hiltunen's original artist's book published by Books for All Press ( @bfa_press ),  a non-profit publisher working solely with artists with mental illnesses and developmental disabilities to publish artists' books. "John Hiltunen began making collages in 2006. Before this time, John focused on rug making, wood work, and ceramics. After participating in Paul Butler’s “Collage Party” in 2007, John’s collage work became a consistent artistic pursuit.  His clever juxtapositions, which typically combine animal and human subjects mostly derived from fashion and natural history magazines, are provocative in their humor and yet surprisingly earnest in intention. Straightforward in their absurdity, John’s collages are naturally uncanny with cats, dogs, reptiles, and other wild animals looking posh in the latest fashions. In 2012, John’s work was the focus of a major group exhibition curated by Matthew Higgs at Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco. He has also exhibited at White Columns, New York, Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, the San Francisco International Airport, #goodluckgallery and had his work represented at contemporary art fairs like NADA Miami, the Independent, and Frieze New York. In 2013, he was honored as a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award, given to those artists whose work show promise, talent, and individual artistic strength but who have not yet received widespread recognition. John’s work is also in the private collection of Cindy Sherman." #johnhiltunen @creativegrowth

 

Book of the Day Posted Jun 13, 2020

Book of the Day > Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Today (6/13/20) was *supposed* to have been our book signing with Paul Mpagi Sepuya, but, well, you know the story…
So we’re going to celebrate the book again (it was book-of-the-day on 4/28) here today. "Paul Mpagi Sepuya presents the work of one of the most prominent up-and-coming photographers working today. Sepuya makes photographs of friends, artists, collaborators, and himself. He challenges and deconstructs traditional portraiture by way of collage, layering, fragmentation, mirror imagery, and the perspective of a Black, queer gaze. Although the creation of artist books has been a long-standing part of his practice, Paul Mpagi Sepuya is the first publication of his work to be released widely, co-published with the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis on the occasion of a major solo exhibition. Interview with the artist by Wassan Al-Khudhairi. Contributions by Malik Gaines, Lucy Gallun, Ariel Goldberg, Evan Moffitt, and Grace Wales Bonner."
Book of the Day Posted Jun 12, 2020

Book of the day > Punk Shirts: A Personal Collection by Bryan Ray Turcotte -- SIGNED!

● Purchase ● Hundreds of examples from the author’s personal collection of well-worn vintage punk shirts line the pages of bestselling author Bryan Ray Turcotte’s latest book. Amazing one-of-a-kind pieces including internationally famous t-shirts such as Sid Vicious’ personal Sex Pistols shirt, Joe Strummer’s, ‘Rude Boy’, hand painted red brigade Tee and Darby Crash’s personal Vivian Westwood ‘Boobs’ seditionaries T-Shirt. Turcotte’s collection also features gems such as a hand drawn Ric Clayton (RxCx) Suicidal Tendencies button-up featured on the back of the band’s first LP, dozens of Malcolm McLaren / Vivienne Westwood creations and loads of very rare band tees including Misfits, The Cramps, The Clash, Sex Pistols, The Screamers, Germs, Mentors and more.

 

Book of the Day Posted Jun 11, 2020

Book of the day > The Chiffon Trenches: A Memoir by André Leon Talley

“During André Leon Talley’s first magazine job, alongside Andy Warhol at Interview, a fateful meeting with Karl Lagerfeld began a decades-long friendship with the enigmatic, often caustic designer. Propelled into the upper echelons by his knowledge and adoration of fashion, André moved to Paris as bureau chief of John Fairchild’s Women’s Wear Daily, befriending fashion's most important designers (Halston, Yves Saint Laurent, Oscar de la Renta). But as André made friends, he also made enemies. A racially tinged encounter with a member of the house of Yves Saint Laurent sent him back to New York and into the offices of Vogue under Grace Mirabella. There, he eventually became creative director, developing an unlikely but intimate friendship with Anna Wintour. As she rose to the top of Vogue’s masthead, André also ascended, and soon became the most influential man in fashion. The Chiffon Trenches offers a candid look at the who’s who of the last fifty years of fashion. At once ruthless and empathetic, this engaging memoir tells with raw honesty the story of how André not only survived the brutal style landscape but thrived—despite racism, illicit rumors, and all the other challenges of this notoriously cutthroat industry—to become one of the most renowned voices and faces in fashion. Woven throughout the book are also André’s own personal struggles that have impacted him over the decades, along with intimate stories of those he has turned to for inspiration (Diana Vreeland, Diane von Fürstenberg, Lee Radziwill, to name a few), and of course his Southern roots and ongoing faith, which have guided him since childhood. The result is a highly compelling read that captures the essence of a world few of us will ever have real access to, but one that we all want to know oh so much more about." @andreltalley #ballantinebooks
Book of the Day Posted Jun 10, 2020

Object of the day > Eldridge Cleaver for President Bumper Sticker

Eldridge Cleaver for President – An Unused 1968 Peace and Freedom Party Presidential Campaign Bumper Sticker. In 1968, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover vilified the Black Panthers as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.” So, imagine the divide for the country when Eldridge Cleaver, author of “Soul on Ice", Senior Editor of "Ramparts" Magazine, and Minister of Information of the Black Panther Party qualified for the ballot in some twenty states that same year as the Presidential candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party. The New York Times wrote that November, "Running on a platform of immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and support of the Black liberation movement, Eldridge Cleaver can present the only electoral challenge to the discreditable politics of Nixon, Humphrey, and Wallace." Printed on a day-glo orange, adhesive-backed heavy paper stock at Berkeley Graphic Arts, this was the California Peace and Freedom Party's "Cleaver For President" 1968 election bumper sticker featuring their Dove with a broken chain graphic along with the iconic Black Panther Party logo. Sadly, as we all know, Richard Nixon was the victorious candidate in that fateful election... A bright, unused vintage example of this bit of countercultural political history with its backing still attached showing just a bit of unobtrusive, light soiling (photo shows reflection of protective shrinkwrap around the sticker).

 

Book of the Day Posted Jun 09, 2020

Book of the day > Christina Quarles

Christina Quarles by Grace Deveney. Published by Prestel and MCA Chicago. “Heralding the ascent of one of the art world’s most promising young painters, this monograph shows how Quarles's works confront themes of sexual identity, gender, and queerness. A member of the vanguard of artists who are upending the white-male-dominated art scene, Christina Quarles’s art is often considered in relation to her identity as a queer, ciswoman of mixed race. Her large-scale, exuberantly colored paintings reflect both the ambiguities of these identities as well as the constraints that such labels enforce. This book features paintings and drawings from throughout Quarles’s career. Working mostly in acrylic, Quarles populates her canvases with polymorphous figures that reference her background in life drawing, but with an expressionist spin all her own. Her figures’ disconnected arms and legs break through a surface punctuated with bold patterns, textures, and staccato markings. Curator Grace Deveney’s illuminating insights into Quarles’s work reinforce its power and vitality and illuminate why this young painter is making waves in the contemporary art world."
Book of the Day Posted Jun 05, 2020

Book of the Day > Dawoud Bey: Two American Projects

With a powerful juxtaposition of portraiture and landscape photography, this book explores Dawoud Bey’s vivid evocations of race, history, time, and place
 
Dawoud Bey (b. 1953) is an American photographer best known for his large-scale portraits of underrepresented subjects and for his commitment to fostering dialogue about contemporary social and political topics. Bey has also found inspiration in the past, and in two recent series, presented together here for the first time, he addresses African American history explicitly, with renderings both lyrical and immediate. In 2012 Bey created The Birmingham Project, a series of paired portraits memorializing the six children who were victims of the Ku Klux Klan’s bombing of Birmingham, Alabama’s 16th Street Baptist Church, a site of mass civil rights meetings, and the violent aftermath. Night Coming Tenderly, Black is a group of large-scale black-and-white landscapes made in 2017 in Ohio that reimagine sites where the Underground Railroad once operated. The book is introduced by an essay exploring the series’ place within Bey’s wider body of work, as well as their relationships to the past, the present, and each other. Additional essays investigate the works’ evocations of race, history, time, and place, addressing the particularities of and resonances between two series of photographs that powerfully reimagine the past into the present.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 04, 2020

Book of the Day > The Art Of Protest

Presented in collaboration with Amnesty International, this stunning collection of more than a hundred posters charts a visual journey across more than a century of political and social activism.
 
From the suffragettes of the early twentieth century to the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s to contemporary, social-media-driven demonstrations of dissent and resistance, this illustrative history features iconic art from the archives of Amnesty International, work by world-renowned artists, and spontaneous posters from short-lived print collectives and activists on the ground.
 
The Art of Protest covers key campaigns, global and local, including the refugee and climate crises, women’s empowerment, nuclear disarmament, LGBTQ activism, Black Lives Matter, and issues around war and the misuse of the world’s resources. These are images that have pushed boundaries as they give voice to the marginalized and confront those who would deny people their rights to peace and equality.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 03, 2020

Book of the Day > Melvin Edwards: Lynch Fragments

Ominous and angular, the acclaimed steel sculptures of Melvin Edwards convey racial violence with edgy ingenuity
 
This volume brings together a significant selection of works from the titular series by the New York–based sculptor Melvin Edwards (born 1937), created between 1963 and 2016, comprising more than 50 years of what is considered the artist's central body of work.
 
Edwards started to produce the Fragments series when he lived in Los Angeles, at a crucial time of the civil rights movement in the United States. The works directly reference the practice of lynching after the abolition of slavery. Denouncing violence against African Americans, Edwards created these steel sculptures as forms between bodies and machines that can also be interpreted as weapons, given the sense of violence and danger suggested by their blunt, angular and protruding shapes. The selection of works in this book reflects the multiplicity of thematic interests and the formal variations across the series.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 01, 2020

Book of the day > Collecting Black Studies: The Art of Material Culture at the University of Texas at Austin

We stand with you in outrage  -- Black Lives Matter.  
Book of the day > Collecting Black Studies: The Art of Material Culture at the University of Texas at Austin. “What began as an effort to prevent the neglect and potential loss of hundreds of African objects at the University of Texas at Austin has evolved into one of the most significant collections on campus. The art collections at Black Studies were born from the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies’ Art and Archive Initiative, under the leadership of Cherise Smith, Omi L. Jones, and Edmund T. Gordon. Today Black Studies at the University of Texas boasts approximately 900 objects from sub-Saharan Africa, over 200 contemporary works from African American and Afro-Caribbean artists, and more than 100 pieces jointly held with other collecting entities on campus, adding a diverse richness to the overall collections. Collecting Black Studies gathers and presents these holdings—including costumes, jewelry, paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and photography—and prominently features five Black artists whose work is particularly significant. Scholars and curators examine how John Biggers, Michael Ray Charles, Christina Coleman, Angelbert Metoyer, and Deborah Roberts—artists with deep relationships to Texas—contributed to the Black Studies collections, to art history, and to the culture of our state and beyond.”

 

 

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