Book of the day > Ruth Asawa. Published by David Zwirner Books. "Known for her intricate and dynamic wire sculptures, the American sculptor, educator and arts activist Ruth Asawa challenged conventional notions of material and form through her emphasis on lightness and transparency.

Asawa began her now iconic looped-wire works in the late 1940s while still a student at Black Mountain College. Their unique structure was inspired by a 1947 trip to Mexico, during which local craftsmen taught her how to create baskets out of wire. While seemingly unrelated to the lessons of color and composition taught in Josef Albers’ legendary Basic Design course, these works, as she explained, are firmly grounded in his teachings in their use of unexpected materials and their elision of figure and ground.

Presenting an important and timely overview of the artist’s work, this monograph brings together a broad selection of her sculptures, works on paper and more. Together they demonstrate the centrality of Asawa’s innovative practice to the art-historical legacy of the 20th century. In addition to an incredible group of photographs of the artist and her work by Imogen Cunningham, a selection of rare archival materials illustrates a chronology of the artist’s life and work. Also featured is an extensive text by Tiffany Bell that explores the artist’s influences, history, and, most importantly, the work itself, as well as a significant essay by Robert Storr discussing Asawa’s work in relation to mid-20th century art history, culture and scientific theory."

Book of the day > Art & Vinyl. Edited by Jeffrey Fraenkel. Published by Fraenkel Gallery / Editions Antoine de Beaupré. "Art & Vinyl is an exhilarating new look into the history of the vinyl record as a medium for modern and contemporary visual art. This beautifully designed and printed publication is the first book to focus in-depth on works of art created specifically for an album, composer or musician.

With reproductions of more than 200 LPs from the mid-20th century to the present, Art & Vinyl traces the trajectory of how the record album has been considered by artists as material for a work of art. The book begins with Pablo Picasso’s 1949 depiction of the dove of peace, printed directly on an audio disc. Significantly, the recording was Paul Robeson’s Chante Pour La Paix (Singing for Peace). Art & Vinyl also includes works by artists as disparate and wide-ranging as Ed Ruscha, Marlene Dumas, Cy Twombly, Yoko Ono, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Barbara Kruger, Robert Rauschenberg, Sol LeWitt, Sophie Calle and Andy Warhol.

Highlights include Gerhard Richter’s extraordinary oil painting made directly on a recording of Glenn Gould’s Bach: The Goldberg Variations (1984), as well as Allan Kaprow’s LP How to Make a Happening (1966). Also featured are albums of original recordings by Joseph Beuys, Yves Klein, Jean Dubuffet, Christian Marclay and Wolfgang Tillmans, among others. Some of the better-known artists' covers for rock, pop and jazz albums featured here are Jann Haworth and Peter Blake's Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; Jim Dine's cover for The Best of Cream; Lee Friedlander's portrait of Miles Davis for In a Silent Way; Warhol's cover for Sticky Fingers and Robert Frank's Exile on Main Street; Mapplethorpe's classic Patti Smith portrait for Horses; Robert Longo's cover for Glenn Branca's The Ascension; Fischli/Weiss's Liliput; and Alec Soth's cover for Dolorean's The Unfazed.

Art & Vinyl has been assembled over the course of nearly a decade by curator and collector Antoine de Beaupré, author of Total Records and founder of Librarie Galerie 213 in Paris."

Book of the day > Jessica Antola: Circadian Landscape. Published by Damiani. "Jessica Antola’s first monograph is a vibrant journey through Sub-Saharan Africa. Traveling mostly by car, she captures the distinctive style and beauty of everyday life in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Ethiopia, Senegal and Togo. Her striking portraits, landscapes and vignettes offer an intimate view of life lived in rural villages, big cities and along the remote roadways between the two. Men dressed head to toe in elaborate African wax textiles share a motorcycle; ancestral spirits bridge earthly and supernatural worlds in masked dances; the rich red soil dusts the lush tropical jungle; a girl in an oversized straw hat steers her boat with a boldly patterned patchwork sail; and a gold jewelry-clad Kumasi King performs a warrior dance. Antola is captivated by how people around the world express themselves in relation to their environments, and her images reflect the astonishing variety of ways people create and define themselves daily through dress and ritual, work and play."

Book of the day > Dark City. The Real L.A. Noir by Jim Heimann. Published by @Taschen. "In the years following World War I, Los Angeles was a city awakening to its darker side, transforming itself from a backwater town to a gleaming metropolis and city of the future. But along the way a tarnished patina began to coat its ever-more glamorous façade. As thousands flocked to the city with their dreams and desires, so too came get-rich-quick schemes, phony religions, organized crime, and corruption.

A visual history like no other, Dark City brings together images from archives, museums, newspaper photo morgues, private collections, and the author’s extensive image library to reveal the true grit, grime, and sheer horror stories of Los Angeles from the 1920s to 1950s. In large format, we roam through the back alleys, gin joints, tattoo parlors, gambling dens, nightclubs, and the most brutal crime scenes, to uncover a city crawling with murder and mayhem.

From Sunset Boulevard to a jazz-saturated Central Avenue, tabloid headlines chronicle the most famous celebrities and infamous crimes in a hopped-up city that provided inspiration for journalists, pulp fiction scribes, and filmland script writers in their creation of the noir genre. With rare vintage magazine reprints from the crime tabloids of the time, this is a uniquely evocative visual history through which the crime, crooks, crazies, and mean streets of the City of Angels are transformed from myth to reality."

Book of the day > Give Me Shelter: Architecture Takes on the Homeless Crisis. Published by ORO Editions. "Give Me Shelter documents the work of the MADWORKSHOP Homeless Studio at the USC School of Architecture and their solutions for tackling the Los Angeles homeless crisis through design, compassion, and humanity. The book features exclusive content from leaders in the field including Michael Maltzan, Ted Hayes, Betty Chinn, Gregory Kloehn, Skid Row Housing Trust, and many more. Paired with a forward by Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles, Give Me Shelter provides an in-depth look at how design can bridge the gap in services to get people off the streets and into housing sooner. In 2015, Los Angeles declared a state of emergency on homelessness. Since then, homelessness has increased by nearly 30 percent. Our homeless epidemic is more than a humanitarian crisis, it is a call for action. The book tells the story of eleven fourth year architecture students and their two instructors' journey through the world of homelessness as they tackle real world design solutions for emergency stabilization housing. From nomadic and temporary shelters to the city supported and award winning Homes for Hope, Give Me Shelter follows the MADWORKSHOP Homeless Studio and their designs from the encampment all the way to City Hall."

Book of the day > Andy Warhol's The Chelsea Girls. Published by D.A.P. and the Andy Warhol Foundation Museum. "Andy Warhol's 1966 movie The Chelsea Girls is the iconic document of the Factory scene and 1960s New York. Filmed in part at the Chelsea Hotel with Factory Superstars like Nico, Ondine, Brigid Berlin, Gerard Malanga and Mary Woronov, The Chelsea Girls was Warhol's first commercially successful film. 'In one film alone,' an early reviewer noted, '[Warhol] has sadism, masochism, whipping, transvestites, homos, prostitutes, a homosexual ‘Pope,' boredom, stunningly beautiful girls, depravity, humor, ‘psychedelics,' truth, honesty, liars, poseurs....' In honor of the 24th anniversary of The Andy Warhol Museum, the publication of Andy Warhol's The Chelsea Girls coincides with a major project undertaken by the museum to digitize hundreds of his well-known and never-before-seen films.

The book is an in-depth, deluxe treatment of the film, featuring stills from the newly digitized film, previously unpublished transcripts and archival materials, and expanded information about each of the individual films that comprise The Chelsea Girls. The film's alternation of sound between the left and right screens is recalled in the publication's design in which the transcripts are printed directly beneath the corresponding imagery to evoke an authentic experience of the film. Also included are previously unpublished transcriptions of unheard reels. Andy Warhol's The Chelsea Girls is a beautifully produced document of a legendary movie and a mythic moment."

Book of the day > Double Vision: The Photography of George Rodriguez. Published by Hat & Beard. The first ever career retrospective of Los Angeles photographer George Rodriguez. "Since the 1950s, Rodriguez has quietly documented multiple social worlds—in California and beyond—that have never before been displayed together, a rare mix of Hollywood and Chicano L.A., film premieres and farmworker strikes, album covers and street scenes, celebrity portraits and civil rights marches. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Rodriguez, raised in South Los Angeles, led something of a double life as a photographer. He worked for film studios, record labels, and magazines like Tiger Beat, processing film for Hollywood photographers and shooting countless photographs of the era's biggest music and film stars, while also photographing the social movements and protests that were exploding on the streets of Los Angeles and throughout the country: the East Los Angeles Walkouts, the Chicano Moratorium, the United Farm Workers movement, the Sunset Strip riots, among others. Double Vision explores both of these worlds alongside the many other urban scenes Rodriguez has shot over the years, from L.A. gang graffiti and boxing to early hip-hop. A student of Sid Avery and a contemporary of Dennis Hopper, Rodriguez is one of the great visual documentarians of Los Angeles and of the cultural complexities of Mexican-American life. Assembled by Rodriguez himself, in conjunction with scholar and writer Josh Kun, this book will be an invaluable addition to the way we understand identity, popular culture, and civil rights in American life, and a visual biography of one of the country's most important, yet unsung, visual historians."

Book of the day (and MAJOR staff pick) > Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968–2018. Published by Walker Art Center. "Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968–2018 accompanies a major retrospective exhibition on one of conceptual art's most inventive and acclaimed practitioners. Emerging in late-1960s Los Angeles, Ruppersberg was among that city's first generation of conceptual artists to espouse a working method that privileges ideas and process over conventional aesthetic objects. Deploying posters, books, postcards and even a café and hotel, his projects have consistently had at their center a focus on the American vernacular—its music, popular imagery and ephemera—mining the nuances of culture through its unsung conventions. From his earliest works, the artist has also welcomed the involvement of the viewer as participant, inviting an immersive experience of his work through language, visual density, accumulated elements and ideas. This fully illustrated catalog is the most comprehensive publication to date on Ruppersberg's work, featuring a wealth of scholarly content and critical writing connecting Ruppersberg's work to the larger contemporary art field. Produced by the Walker's award-winning design studio and in close collaboration with the artist, the book presents a holistic view of Ruppersberg's wide-ranging, 50-year practice."

Book of the day > The Photographer In The Garden. Published by Aperture and the George Eastman Museum. "This book explores our unique relationship with nature through the garden. From famous locations, such as Versailles, to the simplest home vegetable gardens, from worlds imagined by artists to vintage family snapshots, The Photographer in the Garden traces the garden's rich history in photography and delights readers with spectacular photographs. The book explores gardens from many angles: the symbolism of plants and flowers, how humans cultivate the landscapes that surround them, the change of the seasons, and the gardener at work. An informative essay from curator Jamie M. Allen and picture-commentaries by Sarah Anne McNear broaden our understanding of photography and how it has been used to record the glory of the garden. The book features photographers from all eras, including Anna Atkins, Karl Blossfeldt, Eugène Atget, Edward Steichen, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore, Robert Mapplethorpe, Nobuyoshi Araki, and Collier Schorr, to name a few. This sublime book brings together some of the most stunning photography in the history of the medium."

Book of the day > My Ramones: Photographs by Danny Fields. Published by Reel Art Press @reelartpress. "Danny Fields first saw the Ramones play at CBGBs in New York in 1974, and instantly offered to manage them, also setting them up with a record deal. Originally published in a rare limited edition, My Ramones features more than 200 photographs from Danny’s personal collection of one of the most loved and well-known bands from the last four decades. Danny managed the band from the ground up, accompanying them across Europe and America, while also photographing them at work with fans and during more informal moments. Taken between 1975 and 1977, Field’s photographs offer a rare insight into the lives of the band on tour, backstage and recording their first album. The images are further brought alive by his accompanying commentary and memories and recollections from Michael Stipe, Seymour Stein and David Johansen. This is a unique and special volume of a mythical time."