Join us at Helms (@HelmsBakeryDistrict) on Saturday (you’ll be able to ride the Expo Line from DT-LA or DT-SM!) for A Design Field Day: #ThisModernLife at Helms Bakery District Saturday, May 21, 12pm to 6pm. Come for for pop--up installations, refreshments and a lively panel discussion with three design experts. There will also be festivities, music, food, Trunk Club stylists, and Happily’s event planning app demo. In addition, you can visit our newest neighbors for the first time: Louis Poulsen , Kohler and Harbour Outdoor. . Details here http://helmsbakerydistrict.com/this-modern-life/

Book of the day today – book signing at Arcana tomorrow, 5-7! > Olivia Bee: Kids in Love. Join us Saturday at Arcana for a book signing with Olivia Bee, featuring a short but special acoustic set with BØRNS! Olivia Bee: Kids in Love. Aperture. “Olivia Bee is celebrated for her dreamy, evocative portraits and landscapes rich with implied narratives of intimacy, freedom, and adventure. Olivia Bee: Kids in Love showcases two bodies of photographic work, including the series, Enveloped in a Dream, that first brought Bee recognition as a teenager. This first series offers a visual diary of girlhood friendship and the exploration of self, showcasing Bee’s unique ability to convey the bittersweet nostalgia of adolescence on the brink of adulthood and new possibilities. The second set of images, Kids in Love, is drawn from recent work and continues Bee’s photographic chronicle of her circle of friends and new loves, capturing both the pleasures and terrors of the fleeting passage of romanticized youth. While the work continues to evolve, what remains constant is her seductive use of color and photographic artifact, as well as the immediacy and charge of each image. Bee gives voice to the self-awareness and visual fluency of the millennial generation. Experiences are sharply felt, and easily communicated and shared, generating visual records that render these memories as significant as the moments themselves. Tavi Gevinson, founding editor of the online magazine Rookie and Bee’s frequent collaborator and model, writes about the work and about the role of images as social currency in today’s image-driven world.” $ 39.95 @oliviab33, @bornsmusic, @aperturefnd

Can't make it but want Olivia to sign a book for you? Order one here until 4pm tomorrow.

Book of the day > Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem. Steidl / The Gordon Parks Foundation / The Art Institute of Chicago. “By the mid-1940s, Gordon Parks was a successful photographer and Ralph Ellison began work on his acclaimed novel Invisible Man (1952). It is relatively unknown, however, that the two men were friends and that their common vision of racial injustice inspired collaboration on two important projects, in 1948 and 1952. Parks and Ellison first joined forces on an essay titled “Harlem Is Nowhere” for ’48: The Magazine of the Year. Conceived while Ellison was already writing Invisible Man, this illustrated essay was centered on Harlem’s Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic—the first non-segregated psychiatric clinic in New York City—as a case study for the social and economic conditions of the neighborhood. He chose Parks to create the accompanying photographs and during the winter months of 1948, the two roamed the streets of Harlem. In 1952 they worked together again on “A Man Becomes Invisible” for the August 25 issue of Life magazine, which promoted Ellison’s newly released novel.  This is the first publication on Parks’ and Ellison’s collaboration on these two projects, one of which was lost while the other was published only in reduced form. The catalogue provides an in-depth look at the artists’ shared vision of black life in America, with Harlem as its nerve center.”

Book of the day > The Decorators of the 1960s and 1970s. Editions Norma. “The 1960s and 1970s marked a sharp turning point in the history of decoration and furniture. Until that point, the world was confined to national and elitist forms of expression. At the beginning of the 1960s, the sector took its inspiration from Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, Italian and French decoration. Genres were combined in a frenzied desire to live in symbiosis with one's time. The progress of technology strengthened the conviction that the individual had unlimited freedom and aroused the desire to inhabit in a new manner. Forms became rounder, furniture was in sync with a warm, playful, and anti-conformist universe. Colors and decorative motifs took on the brilliance and fantasies of Pop Art and psychedelia. The living environment was transformed into a waking dream in which luxurious furniture in original materials and surprising objects were mixed, associated, for the first time, with early furniture. The end of the 1970s marked the advent of a period in which beauty and classic elegance gave way to a host of expressions that were unclassifiable and rejected any hierarchy. The postmodern period had arrived. Composed of a long introduction that provides a synoptic view and 32 monographs that describe its many faces, this book invites the reader to discover an exceptionally creative period and revels through an abundant iconography.” $ 75.00

Book of the day > Daido Tokyo. Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. “Daido Moriyama invented a new visual language with his work beginning in the mid-1960s. Frenetic and tormented, it depicted a reality that was grainy, blurry, and out-of-focus. Witness to the spectacular changes that trans-formed postwar Japan, his photographs express the contradictions in a country where age-old traditions persist within a modern society. Often blurred, taken from vertiginous angles, or overwhelmed by close-ups, they show a proximity to and a particular relationship with the subject. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, Daido Tokyo includes many previously unpublished photographs (as well as those featured in the exhibition), and an interview with the artist. The catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition provides a unique occasion to discover Daido Moriyama’s recent work and to rediscover the subjects that are omnipresent in the artist’s work and his penchant for textures and shaky compositions.”

Book of the day > Shore Leave. Edited Ryan Mungia, Essay by Jim Heimann. BOYO Press. “For the thousands of US sailors bound for the Pacific theatre of World War II, the Hawaiian Islands were the staging ground for an unknown fate. Their perception of Honolulu as a tropical paradise quickly deflated upon their arrival. The anticipation of a moonlit Diamond Head, available hula girls and free-flowing and affordable rum quickly materialized into crowded streets, beaches cordoned off with barbed wire and endless lines to nowhere. Still, as with many ports of call, diversions were plentiful, and set against the warm trade winds, sailors took advantage of them on their last stop to hell. Shore Leave is the first photobook to capture the Honolulu of this time and place. It is a one-of-a-kind visual document of a port that, for many sailors who passed through, was their initiation into manhood. Classic 1940s images of Hawaiian hula girls complement scrapbook photos of jaunty, uniformed sailors touring the island on a motorcycle or playing pool. Young women masquerading as bonafide hula girls pose with sailors in photobooth arcades, a ritual that for many would be the last human embrace before being deposited onto the battefield. Whether on the crowded streets of Waikiki or in line at the famed Black Cat Cafe, the young American men appear content for the moment with the liberties that their 48 hours away from the ship afforded. Meticulously culled from a 30-year collection of scrapbooks, photo albums and ephemera, Shore Leave―beautifully packaged with its clothbound, tipped-on cover―presents the dreams and realities of young men on their way to war in a Honolulu as exotic and forbidden as it was banal and lonely.” $ 40.00

Book of the day > Paul Bulteel: Cycle & Recycle. Hatje Cantz. “Fascinated by the discarding and recycling of consumer and industry goods, Belgian photographer Paul Bulteel visited more than 50 recycling facilities in Europe, creating images of the processes undergone by tons of materials, from paper, metal, glass or plastic products to complex appliances and all kinds of manufacturing, construction or consumer leftovers.” $ 70.00

Book of the day > Louise Dahl-Wolfe. Aperture “Louise Dahl-Wolfe opens a window onto the work of one of the most influential fashion photographers of the twentieth century. After being discovered by Edward Steichen and having her work exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1937, Louise Dahl-Wolfe went on to revitalize the Hollywood portrait and invigorate the fashion photography of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. During her tenure at Harper’s Bazaar—which lasted over two decades—Dahl-Wolfe pioneered the use of natural lighting in fashion photography, shooting on location and outdoors. Her modernist outlook changed American visual culture, influencing a school of artists—namely Richard Avedon, Horst P. Horst, and Irving Penn. Spanning over thirty years, this survey takes into account Dahl-Wolfe’s work not just in fashion, but also in portraiture and nude photography. Today, she stands among some of the most prestigious photographers of her time, including Steichen, George Hoyningen-Huene, Erwin Blumenfeld, and Martin Munkácsi, with a mastery of the genre that still resonates with fashion and portraiture lovers alike. Louise Dahl-Wolfe (born in San Francisco, 1895; died New Jersey, 1989) began her career making pictures in 1923. After studying at the San Francisco Institute of Art, she moved to New York and opened a photography studio, which she maintained until 1960. In 1936 she was hired as a staff photographer at Harper’s Bazaar, and over the next thirty years revolutionized fashion photography through her editorial and personal work. Her work has been exhibited at the Grey Gallery at New York University; International Museum of Photography, Rochester, New York; Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson; and Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, among others.” $ 60.00

Book of the day > Domestic Scenes: The Art of Ramiro Gomez. Abrams. “Award-winning author Lawrence Weschler’s book on the young Mexican American artist Ramiro Gomez explores questions of social equity and the chasms between cultures and classes in America.  Gomez, born in 1986 in San Bernardino, California, to undocumented Mexican immigrant parents, bridges the divide between the affluent wealthy and their usually invisible domestic help—the nannies, gardeners, housecleaners, and others who make their lifestyles possible—by inserting images of these workers into sly pastiches of iconic David Hockney paintings, subtly doctoring glossy magazine ads, and subversively slotting life-size painted cardboard cutouts into real-life situations.  Domestic Scenes engages with Gomez and his work, offering an inspiring vision of the purposes and possibilities of art.”

$ 35.00