Book of the Day Posted Sep 14, 2021

Book of the Day > Nicole Eisenman

● Purchase ● With a body of work that explores a broad spectrum of subjects - from lesbianism and feminism to contemporary politics and the natural world - Nicole Eisenman (b.1965) challenges convention and encourages viewers to construe meanings from images that demand interrogation and debate.
 
Illustrating paintings spanning the early 1990s to the present day, Dan Cameron unpacks the complexities of Eisenman's oeuvre via thematic chapters that address key ideas which emerge when drawing specific works together. As such, this first major account of Eisenman's painting career, presents a clear analysis of the primary motivators that have fuelled the imagination of one of the most interesting and original contemporary artists working today.
Events Posted Sep 14, 2021

9/15/21 - Show & Tell with Jason E.C. Wright / Burnt Sienna Research Society!

Tomorrow, Wednesday 9/15/21, please tune in to Instagram (@arcanabookss) at 5:00pm for the latest and greatest Show & Tell with Jason EC Wright of @BurntSiennaResearchSociety !
 
Gather up your art books, design books, coffee table books or rare magazines and come nerd out with Jason!
 
Here’s how it works: Jason will be live @arcanabooks sharing some of his favorites with you. Raise your hand to share and he will tap you in. Enjoy the hour, meet some interesting people, and support your local bookstore. There’s nothing like a little book fun in the middle of the week. If there's something in the discussion that piques your interest and we have it in stock, we'll even give you a 10% discount for mentioning that you participated!
 
Jason E.C. Wright is the Founder of Burnt Sienna Research Society, a critical-thinking research consultancy for design histories, intangible culture, and reference materials. Jason is Indiana born and raised, who now considers Los Angeles home. He is an accomplished designer, researcher, writer, with 20+ years as a retail and fashion professional, who takes his love of books seriously, serving as librarian-in-residence at home in Treehouse Hollywood.
 
Thanks to Frances Anderton & Angela Anthony / @HelmsBakeryDistrict.

 

Book of the Day Posted Sep 10, 2021

Book of the Day > Niki de Saint Phalle in the 1960s

● Purchase ● A timely reassessment of the artist’s early performances and feminist sculptures, affirming their radical engagements and art historical significance
 
This volume is a focused look at two bodies of work, the Tirs (“shooting paintings”) and Nanas (“dames”), in the experimental 1960s practice of the French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002). Alongside a poetic response to the work, four essays treat Saint Phalle’s oeuvre as works of radical performance and feminist art, as well as highlighting her transatlantic projects and collaborations. A chronology with photo-documentation and known participants details for the first time all Tirs shooting events in Europe and the United States, and another timeline recaps Saint Phalle’s life in the 1960s.
 
Tirs were made by firing a .22 caliber rifle at the surfaces of paintings. The bullets pierced bags of pigment, aerosol paint cans, or even food embedded in dense assemblages covered in painted plaster. Saint Phalle’s increasingly liberated female figures with outstretched arms, curvaceous forms, and powerful poses developed into her well-known Nanas, an evolution contemporaneous with the rise of a Euro-American feminist movement.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 09, 2021

Book of the Day > Toyin Ojih Odutola: The UmuEze Amara Clan and the House of Obafemi

● Purchase ● A seminal work by one of today’s most vital figurative artists explores the complexity of race, wealth, and class through storytelling and multimedia drawings.
 
This extraordinary illustrated story—Toyin Ojih Odutola’s best-known body of work—chronicles the private lives of two fictional aristocratic Nigerian families, the UmuEze Amara Clan and the House of Obafemi, if colonialist and slave-trade interventions had never disrupted the country. Rendered life-size in charcoal, pastel, and pencil, Ojih Odutola’s figures appear enigmatic and mysterious, set against the artist’s larger conceived narrative, highlighting the malleability of identity and assumptions about race, wealth, and class. The UmuEze Amara Clan and the House of Obafemi presents the story of these families in four chapters illustrated and authored by Ojih Odutola, accompanied by the artist’s sketches and notes. Also included are several insightful essays on the artist herself by noted writers and critics Zadie Smith, Leigh Raiford, and others.
 
An introduction to the artist’s vivid fictionalized world, as well as a reflection on the role of this body of work within her broader practice, this remarkable volume serves as the essential guide to Ojih Odutola’s unique form of storytelling.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 08, 2021

Book of the Day > Helen Frankenthaler: Imagining Landscapes: Paintings 1952–1976

● Purchase ● This gorgeously illustrated volume offers new perspectives on Helen Frankenthaler’s art, taking a detailed look at her large-scale paintings that allude to landscapes, both real and imagined.
 
Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) has long been recognized as one of the great American artists of the twentieth century. A member of the second generation of postwar American abstract painters, she is widely credited with expanding the possibilities of abstraction through her invention of the soak-stain technique, while at times referencing figuration and landscape in highly personal ways.
 
This volume explores references to landscape in Frankenthaler’s paintings over a period spanning more than two decades, beginning in 1952, just prior to her breakthrough to stain painting. Focusing on fourteen works, it examines an extraordinary variety of gesture, from linear drawing to areas of lush, stained color and flatter, more opaque applications of paint. An essay by art historian Robert Slifkin considers the complex evocations of space in Frankenthaler’s works of this period. Richly illustrated with full-color plates, details, and documentary photographs, Imagining Landscapes offers a close and detailed look at the artist’s approach to painting over this twenty-five-year period.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 07, 2021

Book of the Day > Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful

● Purchase ● A sweeping retrospective of Alma W. Thomas’s wide-reaching artistic practice that sheds new light on her singular search for beauty
 
Achieving fame in 1972 as the first Black woman to mount a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Alma W. Thomas (1891–1978) is known for her large abstract paintings filled with irregular patterns of bright colors. This insightful reassessment of Thomas’s life and work reveals her complex and deliberate artistic existence before, during, and after the years of commercial and critical success, and describes how her innovative palette and loose application of paint grew out of a long study of color theory. Essays trace Thomas’s journey from semirural Georgia to international recognition and situate her work within the context of the Washington Color School and creative communities connected to Howard University. Featuring rarely seen theatrical designs, sculpture, family photographs, watercolors, and marionettes, this volume demonstrates how Thomas’s pursuit of beauty extended to every facet of her life—from her exuberant abstractions to the conscientious construction of her own persona through community service, teaching, and gardening.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 04, 2021

Book of the Day > Fulvio Ventura: SAGACITY

● Purchase ● Nearly 50 years after its inception, Italian photographer Fulvio Ventura’s Sagacity is finally seeing the light of day. Begun in 1975 and originally scheduled for publication in 1978 by Luigi Ghirri’s ill-fated Punto e Virgola imprint, Ventura continued to amass his photographic archive organically for the next four decades as an open-ended project called Sagacity, Sunstar and Salamandra (a title copied from a portentous inscription discovered by chance on a brass plate in the window of a typesetter). This was Ventura’s living body of work, inspired by an evolving passion for esoteric philosophies, the mysteries of happenstance, the sound of jazz, and the literature of surrealism and mythology.
 
Designed by Jason Fulford, the current monograph was edited and sequenced by Giulia Zorzi of Micamera Milan, who worked closely with Ventura on the selection until his death in 2020 (at his home in Ghiffa, Italy). The images in this volume, gathered over many years in various locations around Europe, are spontaneous yet full of intention, cryptic but playful, and often strikingly cinematic – an altogether cohesive and self-contained psychic world, bound by visible and invisible energies…

 

Book of the Day Posted Sep 03, 2021

Book of the Day > Pope.L: My Kingdom for a Title

● Purchase ● My Kingdom for a Title is a collection of writing by Chicago–based artist Pope.L documenting his use of language as a mode of visual, narrative, and performative story telling.
 
The act of writing has been integral to how Pope.L works and is arguably the most consistent element in his practice. These works take various forms: scripts, short stories, scribbled notes, large scale installation, and painting—many never before released. Assembled here for the first time, My Kingdom for a Title allows the breadth of the artist’s engagement with language to be fully assessed. Within the book, Pope.L’s work is supplemented with extensive endnotes sourced by artist Kandis Williams.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 02, 2021

Book of the Day > Masahisa Fukase: Sasuke

● Purchase ● A tender and joyful portrait of cat companionship from the author of The Solitude of Ravens
 
In 1977, photographer Masahisa Fukase turned his lens toward a new companion: his cat, Sasuke. “That year I took a lot of pictures crawling on my stomach to be at eye level with a cat and, in a way, that made me a cat. It was a job full of joy, taking these photos playing with what I liked, in accordance with the changes of nature.” A year later, he acquired a second cat, named Momoe. “I didn’t want to photograph the most beautiful cats in the world but rather capture their charm in my lens, while reflecting me in their pupils,” he wrote of these images. “You could rightly say that this collection is actually a ‘self-portrait’ for which I took the form of Sasuke and Momoe.”
 
Featuring tipped-on cover images, this gorgeously made book is arranged in four chapters, organized around the chronology of Fukase’s life with his cats. As so often in his work, these tender images also express the photographer’s subjectivity and his connection to his subject.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 01, 2021

Book of the Day > Teju Cole: Golden Apple of the Sun

● Purchase ● In the period leading up to the November 3, 2020 elections in the United States, Teju Cole began to photograph his kitchen counter in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Working in the still life tradition of Chardin, Cezanne, and the Dutch masters, as well as such contemporary photographers as Laura Letinsky and Jan Groover, he photographed every day over the course of five weeks. Unlike those illustrious forbears, Cole left his arrangements entirely to chance, “the bowls and plates moving in their unpredictable constellations.”
 
What emerges is a surprising portrait, across time, of one kitchen counter in one home at a time of social, cultural, and political upheaval. Alongside the photographs is a long written essay, as wide-ranging in its concerns—hunger, fasting, mourning, slavery, intimacy, painting, poetry and the history of photography—as the photographs are delimited in theirs.
 
The text and photographic sequences are interspersed with an anonymous handwritten eighteenth century cookbook from Cambridge. Golden Apple of the Sun is a luminous and humane work, presented with the formal boldness and oblique intelligence we have come to expect from Teju Cole.
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