PAMELA LITTKY: VACANCY

Vacancy is a multifaceted portrait of two towns that are as much rural desert communities as they are states of mind. While driving between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, Pamela Littky was exposed to the small towns at either edge of Death Valley - the legendary region of the Mojave Desert that hosts the hottest and driest climate in the US. Anyone who has ever been there can tell you that there is little else on either side except for long, empty stretches of straight-line desert highway. But the Mojave’s harshest conditions have not deterred all living things. The towns that both claim the title of "Gateway to Death Valley" - Baker, California and Beatty, Nevada - are tight-knit communities of people who remain settled where most merely pass through. Littky found an America that is far from "frozen in time," but entirely in its own cultural zone. Independent, hardy, and idiosyncratic, the people of these towns were ideal subjects for Littky to explore the heart of what seems like a big empty place, but may reflect back something important about the American experience today. From domestic scenes to colorful bars, trailers to bingo halls and the always beautiful-but-unrelenting landscape, Vacancy illuminates the everyday life of these two unique Desert communities.

Top 10 Art and Design Bookstores Around the World

"For lovers of art and design, a travel itinerary should always include a good bookstore among its listings of local museums and art galleries. After all, a great bookstore is often a destination unto itself. Here are of ten of the most sensational bookstores around the world where the selection of books on contemporary art, design, architecture, fashion and photography is unsurpassed.

5. Arcana, Culver City, CA

With a loyal customer base of industry insiders and discerning bibliophiles always on the lookout for a new gem to add to their burgeoning book collections, this esteemed store stocks a massive trove of new and used books on art, fashion, photography, film, design, and architecture. Its new location in the Helms Bakery complex provides a bright, airy space for perusing rows of metal shelves full of exquisite books."

How To Spend It: Los Angeles’ Arcana: Books on the Arts

A chic destination shop for design and fashion tomes and out-of-print titles

August 21 2014

Christina Ohly Evans
 

HUCK MAGAZINE # 45: THE ED TEMPLETON ISSUE

Hot off the press, London-based Huck # 45 is specially guest-edited by artist, photographer, skate legend, and unique chronicler of Southern California, Ed Templeton. It presents an insightful, colorful cruise through The Tempster’s crew of creative friends spawned from the cultures of skateboarding, surfing and beyond.

Along with an epic, multi-part illustrated visit with Ed – in which skateboarding’s favorite expressionist reflects on his Huntington Beach history, artistic inspirations and the community of like-minded DIYers he surrounds himself with – The Ed Templeton Issue also features in-depth interviews and beautiful photo shoots with Ed’s countercultural coterie:

Lee Kaplan - whose Arcana: Books on the Arts in Culver City is entering its thirtieth year of curating and purveying the printed matter of visual culture.

Curator and gallerist Joseph Allen Shea is bringing Aussie openness to the Parisian art scene.

To flick through photographer Deanna Templeton‘s archives is to see femininity flash past in its many varied forms, ebbing and flowing through Huntington Beach, California.

Photographer of the demonized Dennis McGrath is weaving a thread between skateboarding and porn.

Philly artist Dan Murphy celebrates the fringe of American culture through experimental media project Megawords.

Documentary photographer Tobin Yelland embeds himself in underground subcultures to get a sixth sense about his subjects.

Artist Ashley Macomber is rendering the details of what it means to be a woman in a world of extremes.

Artist, comedian, actor, skater - only Los Angeles could have spat out someone like Kevin Christy.

Street photographer Daniel Arnold channels daily moments of curious New York life into square little social media updates.

California’s quirks are a constant muse for The Deadbeat Club - a zine-making, analogue-snapping, tight-knit street photography crew.

From a dark den in San Francisco's Mission District, photographer Ray Potes is capturing life in stark black and white.

Una Kim channels the principles of punk into Keep Shoes, a company that helps her navigate life.

How did skate filmmaker Kevin Barnett become the visual voice of Ed Templeton’s Toy Machine?

Highland Park’s Ashley Thayer is patiently reconnecting LA to its artisanal roots.

Come to Arcana this Saturday, August 2nd between 4:00 and 6:00 PM to celebrate with Ed, Deanna, and a slew of the contributors who will be happy to sign your copy! And, thanks to the generous cooperation of Emerica and Huck, Ed has produced a limited edition poster for the event that will be included with each issue, as supplies last. There will be no advance or phone sales - you must be present - and purchases must be limited to one per customer. No exceptions!

Read Lee's playlist here and read everything you ever wanted to know about him (and more) here!

ANTHONY FRIEDKIN:THE GAY ESSAY

For more than forty years, Los Angeles-based photographer Anthony Friedkin has created captivating full-frame black-and-white images documenting people, cities, and landscapes. During the culturally tumultuous years of 1969 and 1970, Friedkin made a series of photographs that offer an eloquent and expressive visual chronicle of the gay communities of Los Angeles and San Francisco at the time. This is the first book to explore that series, titled The Gay Essay, in depth, within the broader historical context that gave rise to it.

1969 witnessed the Stonewall riots in New York City and was a turning point in the history of community building and organized political activism among homosexuals in the United States. The Gay Essay provides a singular, intimate record of this crucial moment. Friedkin’s images taken in streets, hotels, bars, and dancehalls demonstrate a sensitivity and an understanding that imbues these photographs with an enduring resonance. This handsome hardbound book is published by Yale University Press in conjunction with a retrospective exhibition of the work at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and features seventy-five full-page plates accompanied by engaging essays and a poem by Eileen Myles.

THE WAY WE WERE: THE  PHOTOGRAPHY OF JULIAN WASSER
 

The Way We Were presents photographer Julian Wasser's intimate panorama of Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s when celebrity culture had yet to become all-consuming and privacy was still possible. Best known for his iconic images of Joan Didion with cigarette in hand leaning against a Corvette Stingray, and Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a nude Eve Babitz in the galleries of his seminal 1963 Pasadena Museum of Art exhibition, the book includes many others such as Barbara Hershey and David Carradine in bed in their Laurel Canyon house, Jack Nicholson and Angelica Huston at Jack’s Mulholland Drive home, and the Fondas lined up on the family sofa. Also featured are pictures of California counterculture; the Hog Farm Commune in Sunland; surfers at Malibu Beach; The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Byrds, Frank Zappa, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Joni Mitchell, Elton John, and many more; Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign, the Watts riots; and Roman Polanski at his house on Cielo Drive in 1969 after the murder of Sharon Tate.

Julian Wasser started his career in photography as a copy boy in the Washington, DC bureau of the Associated Press. He was a contract photographer for Time magazine for many years, and his photographs have appeared in (and on the covers of) Life, Newsweek, People, Vanity Fair, Paris Match, Der Spiegel, Oggi, Hello, Playboy, Elle, Vogue and GQ. He exhibits at Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica where his work will be on display through July 5th.

THE ASTONISHING WORKS OF JOHN ALTOON WITH AUTHOR TIM NYE

John Altoon was one of the most outspoken, charismatic, and complex figures in the Los Angeles art scene of the 1950s and ’60s. He energized the circle of artists associated with the Ferus Gallery, a nexus of L.A. avant-gardism that included such influential figures as Ed Kienholz, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, Larry Bell, and Ed Ruscha. A boisterous, hard-living man, he was plagued by bouts of depression and episodes of mania that sometimes turned destructive; this personal struggle is reflected in his work. He died young, at the age of forty-three, from a massive heart attack. Walter Hopps called his funeral the largest gathering of Los Angeles artists ever.

Published to coincide with a major Altoon retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (June 8th –September 14th), The Astonishing Works of John Altoon surveys the colorful paintings and virtuosic drawings of this larger-than-life personality. His art is intimate, haunting, and erotic, capturing a magical moment in California art between the Beat Generation and the sexual and psychedelic revolutions. The work is put in context through essays and remembrances from those who knew him best: the poet Robert Creeley; psychiatrist and fan Dr. Milton Wexler; pioneering West Coast curator Walter Hopps; and curator, gallerist, and critic Klaus Kertess. This lavishly produced original collection also features a juxtaposition of Altoon’s lithographs with a selection of Creeley’s poems that the long-time friends originally published as About Women in 1965, a facsimile of his Ed Kienholz-published memorial exhibition catalog, and posthumously addressed letters from friends.

Tim Nye is director of Nyehaus - a New York gallery that focuses on the innovative Southern California artists of the 1960 and '70s.

 

WE ARE  PLEASED TO PRESENT A VERY SPECIAL TWO-DAY EXHIBITION FEATURING THE WORK OF THE RECLUSIVE OUTSIDER ARTIST AND FOLK ENGINEER,

“eb, THE JERSEY GENIUS”
-INVENTOR OF THE BOONSBURG EGG -
 

 

THE BLIGHTED EYE: ORIGINAL COMIC ART
FROM THE GLENN BRAY COLLECTION

With Glenn Bray and Doug Harvey

All from the mind-boggling collection of Glenn Bray, The Blighted Eye is the most copious, most diverse, and most lavish compilation of original comic art ever published. An enthusiast of marginal and outsider American pop culture, he started to collect original comic art in 1965 - a time when very few people, including the artists themselves, truly valued the original art. Bray has over the last nearly fifty years amassed likely the most eclectic collection of original comic art in private hands. The Blighted Eye presents not only a staggering array of original art, but a testament to Bray's dogged and visionary commitment to preserving the work by the greatest artists working in an art form habitually sneered at by cultural gatekeepers throughout most of the 20th Century.

The book features work by a pantheon of cartooning masters, including Charles Addams, Carl Barks, Hans Bellmer, Charles Burns, Al Capp, Daniel Clowes, Jack Cole, Coop, R. Crumb, Jack Davis, Kim Deitch, Bill Elder, Al Feldstein, Virgil Finlay, Drew Friedman, Ernst Fuchs, Chester Gould, Justin Green, Rick Griffin, Bill Griffith, Matt Groening, Milt Gross, George Grosz, Rory Hayes, Jaime Hernandez, George Herriman, Alfred Hitchcock, Al Hirschfeld, Graham Ingels, Cameron Jamie, Bernard Krigstein, Harvey Kurtzman, Travis Louie, Jay Lynch, Don Martin, Gary Panter, Virgil Partch, Savage Pencil, Peter Pontiac, Charles Rodrigues, Spain Rodriguez, Doreen "Weird Wanda" Ross, Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, Bud Sagendorf, Charles Schulz, Jim Shaw, Gilbert Shelton, Joost Swarte, Stanislav Szukalski, Irving Tripp, Jeffrey Vallance, Chris Ware, Robert Williams, Karl Wills, Gahan Wilson, S. Clay Wilson, Basil Wolverton, Wallace Wood, Jim Woodring, Art Young, Bob Zoell, and  - it should go without saying - many more.

With the increasing sophistication of comics over the last thirty years in the form of graphic novels, journalism, and memoirs, the cartoon form is finally taking its place alongside more traditional popular narrative media - novels, films, theatre - as an art form to reckon with, widely reviewed and embraced by a discriminating reading public. Simultaneous with this growing acceptance of comics as a literary form has been the recognition among museums and galleries that the artists' original drawings are art objects, and public exhibitions of original comics art has proliferated over the last decade with such shows as Masters of American Comics at LA's Hammer Museum and R. Crumb's Underground at Seattle's Frye Museum.