Book of the Day > Janet Delaney: Public Matters. Published by Mack Books. "Capturing the spirit of protest and parade, Public Matters brings together photographs made by Janet Delaney in Reagan-era San Francisco. At this turbulent time in the mid eighties, Delaney was living in the primarily Latino neighbourhood of the Mission District. She would spend the weekends photographing public gatherings, from the annual Cinco de Mayo parade, to the Peace, Jobs and Justice marches, which rallied against the U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. If political governance was regressing, the West Coast city was a place where, as Delaney remembers, ‘progressive ideas would always be upheld.’ Celebrating multiculturalism and collective struggles for social justice, Public Matters surfaces at a juncture when the message of building bridges is needed now more than ever.

In the vintage glow of her sun-drenched images, Delaney leads us in and out of crowds – among demonstrators, fair-goers, cross-dressers, union organisers, beauty pageants, dancers, salesmen, mothers, kids, and market punters – searching for as many intimate moments as she found collective voices. Fearlessly upbeat, her photographs nevertheless intimate a time when, as Delaney recollects, people ‘were reeling from the shift to a conservative government. The demands of the 1960s were addressed in the 70s: the end of the Vietnam war, women’s rights, environmental issues, gay rights, to name a few. Then when Reagan was elected all this came to a halt.’ And as soon as the streets were filled with placards – ‘babies are for loving, not for bombing’; ‘Hatred can never cure the disease of fear, only love can do that’ – Delaney was there, in the middle of the maelstrom, making pictures of public matters."

Book of the Day > W.E.B. Dubois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. Published by Princeton Architectural Press.

"The colorful charts, graphs, and maps presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition by famed sociologist and black rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois offered a view into the lives of black Americans, conveying a literal and figurative representation of "the color line." From advances in education to the lingering effects of slavery, these prophetic infographics —beautiful in design and powerful in content—make visible a wide spectrum of black experience. W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits collects the complete set of graphics in full color for the first time, making their insights and innovations available to a contemporary imagination. As Maria Popova wrote, these data portraits shaped how "Du Bois himself thought about sociology, informing the ideas with which he set the world ablaze three years later in The Souls of Black Folk."

Book of the Day > Alex Prager: Silver Lake Drive. Published by Chronicle Books. "Photographer Alex Prager is an essential cultural figure: one of the truly original image makers of our time. Working fluidly between photography and film, she creates elaborate scenes that reference a wide range of influences, including Hollywood and experimental cinema, popular culture and street photography. These delicately staged compositions are famliar yet strange, utterly compelling, and unerringly memorable. Silver Lake Drive presents more than 120 images from her career to date: the early Polyester and Big Valley series; Prager's first collaborations with actor Bryce Dallas Howard; the tour-de-force of Face in the Crowd-- shot on a Hollywood sound stage with over 150 performers; and her 2016 commission for the Paris Opera, La Grande Sortie. Featuring an introduction by Michael Govan, Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; essays by Clare Grafik of the Photographers' Gallery and Michael Mansfield of the Ogunquit Museum of American Art; and an in-depth interview with the artist by Nathalie Herschdorfer of the Museum of Fine Arts, Le Locle, this deluxe hardcover volume is a must-have for those who follow Prager's career and an ideal inititation for new audiences everywhere." 

Please join us on Sunday, November 4th from 4:00 –6:00 PM, with

Dewey Nicks and publisher T. Adler Books to celebrate the the launch of 

Dewey Nicks: Polaroids of Women.
 

If you cannot attend, you can order signed copies of this lovely book here.

Book of the Day > Artists and Their Books / Books and Their Artists. Published by Getty Publications. “This stunning volume illuminates the current moment of artists’ engagement with books, revealing them as an essential medium in contemporary art. Ever innovative and predictably diverse in their physical formats, artists’ books occupy a creative space between the familiar four-cornered object and challenging works of art that effectively question every preconception of what a book can be. Many artists specialize in producing self-contained art projects in the form of books, like Ken Campbell and Susan King, or they establish small presses, like Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn’s Coracle Press or Harry and Sandra Reese’s Turkey Press. Countless others who are primarily known as sculptors, painters, or performance artists carry on a parallel practice in artists’ books, including Anselm Kiefer, Annette Messager, Ed Ruscha, and Richard Tuttle. Artists and Their Books / Books and Their Artistsincludes over one hundred important examples selected from the Getty Research Institute’s Special Collections of more than six thousand editions and unique artists’ books.

This volume also presents precursors to the artist’s book, such as Joris Hoefnagel’s sixteenth-century calligraphy masterpiece; single-sheet episodes from Albrecht Dürer’s Life of Mary, designed to be either broadsides or a book; early illustrated scientific works; and avant-garde publications. Twentieth-century works reveal the impact of artists’ books on Pop Art, Fluxus, Conceptualism, feminist art, and postmodernism. The selection of books by an international range of artists who have chosen to work with texts and images on paper provokes new inquiry into the nature of art and books in contemporary culture.”

This volume accompanies an exhibition on view at the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center June 26 to October 28, 2018.

Book of the Day > Lars Tunbjörk. Published by Max Ström. “Initially inspired by Swedish masters such as Christer Strömholm, as well as Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, Lars Tunbjörk (1956-2015) was one of the great and truly original European photographers. Tunbjörk's international breakthrough came in 1993 with the photobook Country beside Itself. Celebrated by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger as "an acute observer of modern life," Tunbjörk's color images amplified the mundane and the absurd in a quietly surreal fashion using the hard light of flash photography, which became his signature style and influenced a subsequent generation of photographers. His best-known photobook series include Office (2001), which depicts office workers in bizarre chance positions, and Home (2003), in which everyday items such as flowers or armchairs are made to reveal a quiet absurdity in Swedish suburbia. With more than 250 images, this volume constitutes the most substantial overview of his work.”

Book of the day > Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool. Published by Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

"Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool accompanies the first career retrospective of the renowned American artist Barkley L. Hendricks, curated by Trevor Schoonmaker at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University from February 7, 2008 through July 13, 2008. Hendricks was born in 1945 in Philadelphia. His unique work contains elements of both American realism and postmodernism, occupying a space between the portraitists Chuck Close and Alex Katz and the pioneering black conceptualists David Hammons and Adrian Piper. Hendricks is best known for his life-sized portraits of people of color from the urban northeast. His bold portrayal of his subject's attitude and style elevates the common person to celebrity status. Cool, empowering, and sometimes confrontational, Hendricks' artistic privileging of a culturally complex black body has paved the way for today's younger generation of artists.

This richly illustrated book contains 100 color images of paintings created from 1964 to the present. It focuses primarily on the artist's full-figure portraits, as well as lesser known early works and the artist's more recent portal-like landscape paintings. The catalog includes the most comprehensive biography and bibliography on Hendricks to date, a timeline of the artist's life, and an interview with the artist by Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem. It also includes essays by Barkley L. Hendricks, Duke University art historian Richard J. Powell, exhibition curator Trevor Schoonmaker, and Franklin Sirmans, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Menil Collection.Publication of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University"

Book of the Day > Hilma Af Klint. Published by University of Chicago Press. “At the turn of the twentieth century, Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) created a body of work that left visible reality behind, exploring the radical possibilities of abstraction years before Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, or Piet Mondrian. Many consider her the first trained artist to create abstract paintings. With Hilma af Klint: Notes and Methods, we get to experience the arc of af Klint’s artistic investigation in her own words.

Hilma af Klint studied at the Royal Swedish Academy in Stockholm where she was part of the first generation of female students.  Up until the beginning of the century, she painted mainly landscapes and detailed botanical studies. Her work from this period was that of a young artist of her time who meticulously observed the world around her. But, like many of her contemporaries, af Klint was also interested in the invisible relationships that shape our world, believing strongly in a spiritual dimension. She joined the Theosophical Society, and, with four fellow female members who together called themselves “The Five,” began to study mediumship.  Between 1906 and 1915, purportedly guided by a higher power, af Klint created 193 individual works that, in both scale and scope of imagery, are like no other art created at that time. Botanically inspired images and mystical symbols, diagrams, words, and geometric series, all form part of af Klint’s abstract language. These abstract techniques would not be seen again until years later.
 

Notes and Methods presents facsimile reproductions of a wide array of af Klint’s early notebooks accompanied by the first English translation of af Klint’s extensive writings. It contains the rarely seen “Blue Notebooks,” hand-painted and annotated catalogues af Klint created of her most famous series “Paintings for the Temple,” and a dictionary compiled by af Klint of the words and letters found in her work. This extraordinary collection is edited by and copublished with Christine Burgin, and features an introduction by Iris Müller-Westermann. It will stand as an important and timely contribution to the legacy of Hilma af Klint.”

Book of the Day > Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph.  Published by Aperture. "Deana Lawson is one of the most compelling photographers of her generation. Over the last ten years, she has created a visionary language to describe identities through intimate portraiture and striking accounts of ceremonies and rituals. Using medium- and large-format cameras, Lawson works with models she meets in the United States and on travels in the Caribbean and Africa to construct arresting, highly structured, and deliberately theatrical scenes animated by an exquisite range of color and attention to surprising details: bedding and furniture in domestic interiors or lush plants in Edenic gardens. The body—often nude—is central. Throughout her work, which invites comparison to the photography of Diane Arbus, Jeff Wall, and Carrie Mae Weems, Lawson seeks to portray the personal and the powerful. Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph features forty beautifully reproduced photographs, an essay by the acclaimed writer Zadie Smith, and an expansive conversation with the artist Arthur Jafa.