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.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 31, 2021

Book of the Day > Gianfranco Gorgoni: Land Art Photographs

● Purchase ● For five decades, photographer Gianfranco Gorgoni (1941-2019) built his reputation as the premier documentarian of Land Art in the US and beyond. After leaving Italy, Gorgoni started making portraits of the major artists of the New York scene, including Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Walter De Maria, Carl Andre, and Richard Serra.
 
It was not long before he was traveling with Heizer, Smithson, and De Maria to the American West in the late 1960s to plot the works that would famously break art practice out of the confines of the gallery world. In Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah, these artists embarked on major Land Art installations that would redefine contemporary art practice of the era. In many cases, Gorgoni was the only photographer on the ground to document their projects, and his images often serve as the definitive photographic record of the planning and creation of these groundbreaking works.
 
Published to coincide with the first major exhibition of Gorgoni’s photographic Land Art images at the Nevada Museum of Art, featuring over fifty of his large-scale photographs, Gianfranco Gorgoni: Land Art Photographs includes an introduction by Ann M. Wolfe, Andrea and John C. Deane Family senior curator and deputy director at the Nevada Museum of Art, an essay by the late art historian and critic Germano Celant, whose contribution here is among the last he wrote before his death in 2020, and William L. Fox, the Peter E. Pool Director of the Center for Art + Environment.
 
A landmark collection of photographs of legendary and lesser-known works by Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Ugo Rondinone, and Charles Ross, Gianfranco Gorgoni: Land Art Photographs is a major new assessment of one of the world’s great art movements.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 28, 2021

Book of the Day > AFROSURF

● Purchase ● Discover the untold story of African surf culture in this glorious and colorful collection of profiles, essays, photographs, and illustrations.
 
AFROSURF is the first book to capture and celebrate the surfing culture of Africa. This unprecedented collection is compiled by Mami Wata, a Cape Town surf company that fiercely believes in the power of African surf. Mami Wata brings together its co-founder Selema Masekela and some of Africa’s finest photographers, thinkers, writers, and surfers to explore the unique culture of eighteen coastal countries, from Morocco to Somalia, Mozambique, South Africa, and beyond. Packed with over fifty essays, AFROSURF features surfer and skater profiles, thought pieces, poems, photos, illustrations, ephemera, recipes, and a mini comic, all wrapped in an astounding design that captures the diversity and character of Africa.
 
A creative force of good in their continent, Mami Wata sources and manufactures all their wares in Africa and works with communities to strengthen local economies through surf tourism. With this mission in mind, Mami Wata is donating 100% of their proceeds to support two African surf therapy organizations, Waves for Change and Surfers Not Street Children.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 27, 2021

Book of the Day > In Color: Spectral Meditations for Healing

● Purchase ● In Color: Spectral Meditations for Healing is a portfolio containing seven full scale reproductions of 16 x 23 inch monoprints by Los Angeles based artist Cheryl Humphreys. The series presents all seven colors of the visible spectrum as visual aids for meditation. Created by the artist as an experiential guide, the prints come folded with a key summarizing how each color affects our minds, moods and make-up. Humphreys invites the viewer to deepen their awareness of color and suggests its use to re-establish balance in the body, mind and spirit. Each print undulates, emits and pulses through softly rolled gradients of color, its motif a signifier of the potential energy encapsulated inside. Hang and frame for daily doses or keep safe on the book shelf for that next trip to the desert.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 26, 2021

Book of the Day > A is For Auteur

● Purchase ● From the creators of Cinephile: A Card Game comes A is for Auteur, an alphabet book for cinephiles of all ages featuring cinema’s greatest filmmakers from A to Z. Clever, beautifully-designed and packed with references to more than 200 films from Alfred Hitchcock to Agnès Varda, this one-of-a-kind collection is a must-own for cinephiles and little cinephiles alike.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 25, 2021

Book of the Day > (Signed) Jamie Hawkesworth: The British Isles

● Purchase ● The British Isles is an account of thirteen years of life across the United Kingdom, as seen through the lens of Jamie Hawkesworth. In this sprawling sequence of portraits and landscapes, Hawkesworth surveys the characters and terrains that make up the everyday fabric of his home country: schoolchildren and shopworkers, markets and estates, priests and professionals, cities and construction sites.
 
These photographs chart an alternative history of this eventful period of British history; a period punctuated by austerity, referenda, celebration, and conflict. And yet as much as a historical document this book is an exercise in curiosity, presenting a radically democratising portrait of the United Kingdom in which individuals, buildings and natural scenes are imbued with Hawkesworth's generous and dignifying eye.
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