Book of the Day Posted Aug 07, 2021

Book of the Day > Organic Music Societies

● Purchase ● Archival documents and new writings on the intermedia collaborations of avant-garde jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and textile artist Moki Cherry
 
Don Cherry and Moki Karlsson met in Sweden in the late ’60s. They married and began to perform together, dubbing their mix of communal art, social and environmental activism, children’s education and pan-ethnic expression “Organic Music.” Their home in Tågarp became a locus of artistic production, attracting free-spirited musicians, poets, actors and artists with the promise of collective life. There, Keith Knox assembled Tågarp Publication Number One to document the collectivistic practices blooming under the Cherrys’ guidance. Reproduced here, the text includes interviews with Terry Riley and Cherry, a piece on Pandit Pran Nath, a report on the Bombay Free School and a survey of the esoteric Forest University by Bengt af Kintberg. This book explores Don Cherry’s work of the period through additional interviews by Knox, a piece on his Relativity Suite and an essay by Fumi Okiji. Moki’s writings on her workshops are featured alongside full-color reproductions of her tapestries, used as performance environments by Don’s ensembles. Cherry collaborators Bengt Berger and Christer Bothén contribute travelogues from the era.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 06, 2021

Book of the Day > Robert Crumb. Sketchbook Vol. 6. 1998–2011

● Purchase ● “Silly Fool Comics” fills the final page in this final volume, with a devilish creature telling the anguished Crumb, “YOU Will Soon Be DEAD!” He was a mere 67, but in his self-absorbed Crumbish way was obsessing about death, when not making intimate and loving portraits of his wife Aline and all the other women who’d tormented his libido since boyhood. Most impressive in this book are his historic tableau, some single page, others multi-page strips, including Piers the Ploughman of 14th century England, My Secret Life by “Walter,” Rough Women of the Dark Ages and The Apache Dance, from a 1930s Parisian postcard. His Rapidographed cross hatching is superb as ever and we are treated to long screeds displaying his undimmed brilliance at analyzing the human condition, in a morbid but nonetheless amusing way.
 
One could say there are no surprises in content, as Crumb has produced a consistent body of work over the last 40, if not 50, years, yet each page is also jarringly different from the one before, due to his personal juxtaposition of images. So much is packed in you can spend an hour and find you’re only a quarter of the way through, with Crumb bemoaning his mortality, while continuing to prosper, every few pages. A fine stand-alone volume, and must-have completion for the sketchbook set.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 04, 2021

Book of the Day > David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968–1979 (Expanded and Revised 2nd Edition)

● Purchase ● The first book dedicated to these pivotal early works on paper, David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968–1979 brings together the monoprints and collages in which the artist used the body as both a drawing tool and printing plate to explore performative, unconventional forms of image making. Hammons created the body prints by greasing his own body—or that of another person—with substances including margarine and baby oil, pressing or rolling body parts against paper, and sprinkling the surface with charcoal and powdered pigment. The resulting impressions are intimately direct indexes of faces, skin, and hair that exist somewhere between spectral portraits and physical traces. Hammons’ body prints represent the origin of his artistic language, one that has developed over a long and continuing career and that emphasizes both the artifacts and subjects of contemporary Black life in the United States.
 
More than a half century after they were made, these early works on paper exemplify Hammons’ celebration of the sacredness of objects touched or made by the Black body, and his biting critique of racial oppression. The 32 body prints highlighted in this volume introduce the major themes of a 50-year career that has become central to the history of postwar American art.
 
This edition features a conversation between curator and activist Linda Goode Bryant and artist Senga Nengudi, as well as a photo essay by photographer Bruce W. Talamon, who documented David Hammons at work in his Los Angeles studio in 1974. The publication is expanded from its first edition to include reproductions of a selection of rarely-seen body prints that Hammons added from his personal collection to the exhibition during its final weeks. The publication also features a revised introduction by Laura Hoptman to mark the unique expansion of the exhibition.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 03, 2021

Book of the Day > David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring in Normandy, 2020

● Purchase ● An uplifting celebration of spring and the power of art against lockdown: Hockney’s new iPad drawings, in an intimate sketchbook format
 
At the beginning of 2020, just as global COVID-19 restrictions were coming into force, David Hockney was at his new house, studio and garden in Normandy. From there, he witnessed the arrival of spring, and recorded the blossoming of the surrounding landscape on his iPad, a method of drawing he has been using for over a decade.
 
Drawing outdoors was an antidote to the anxiety of the moment for Hockney; “we need art, and I do think it can relieve stress,” he says. This uplifting publication—produced to accompany a major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts—includes 116 of these new iPad drawings and shows to full effect Hockney's singular skill in capturing the exuberance of nature. The book begins with an interview with the show's curator, Edith Devaney, in which Hockney discusses his heralding of the spring. It also features augmented reality, an exciting technology that enables smartphones and tablets to recognize printed images and play a related film or animation.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 31, 2021

Book of the Day > Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography and the Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante, 1946–1964

● Purchase ● How a small photography club gave birth to modernist photography in Brazil
 
Published in conjunction with the first major museum exhibition of Brazilian modernist photography outside of Brazil, Fotoclubismo presents the groundbreaking creative achievements of São Paulo’s Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante, a group of amateur photographers founded in 1939 that is essentially unknown today to European and North American audiences. The vast majority of FCCB members pursued photography outside of their day jobs as lawyers, businessmen, accountants, journalists, engineers, biologists and bankers, but they were nonetheless quite serious about their artistic ambition. Their radical experimentations with process and form and their determination to distill inventive compositions from everyday life contributed to their esteemed reputation within an active international postwar scene—a status that has been all but forgotten.
 
This richly illustrated publication assembles a robust selection of photographs to introduce the FCCB’s photographic experiments to an international audience. Six chapters highlight individual achievements nestled between thematic groupings that suggest the breadth of the club’s talent. Curator Sarah Meister’s essay situates the FCCB within the broader contemporary art scene in Brazil as well as a dynamic network of photographers around the world, and offers fresh insight into the status of the amateur then and now. This is the first non-Portuguese-language publication to grapple with these photographs that were widely heralded at the time of their creation.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 29, 2021

Book of the Day > Polaroid Now: The History and Future of Polaroid Photography

● Purchase ● Polaroid Now celebrates new work created by contemporary artists working with Polaroid cameras and film today, and discusses the history, and evolution of the first instant imaging camera system that became a household name.
 
This curated selection of images is diverse aesthetically and geographically, and embraces the world-wide community of Polaroid artists. The book celebrates the unique, one-of-a-kind, and instantly gratifying qualities of Polaroid imagery. Additionally, Polaroid photographs by renowned luminaries such as Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Chuck Close are included, as well a section on the 20x24 Polaroid camera.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 29, 2021

Book of the Day > Anni & Josef Albers: Equal and Unequal

● Purchase ● A spectacular and unprecedented visual biography of the leading pioneers and protagonists of modern art and design
 
Josef - painter, designer, and teacher - and Anni Albers - textile artist and printmaker - are among the twentieth century's most important abstract artists, and this is the first monograph to celebrate the rich creative output and beguiling relationship of these two masters in one elegant volume. It presents their life and work as never before, from their formative years at the Bauhaus in Germany to their remarkable influence at Black Mountain College in the United States through their intensely productive period in Connecticut.
 
Accessibly written, the book is packed with more than 750 artworks, archival images, and documents—many published here for the first time—all tracing the remarkable lives and careers of this legendary couple.
 
Dispersed throughout area series of short essays on artists that focuses on the Alberses relationship with a number of important artists and architects of the 20th century, like Ruth Asawa, Marcel Breuer, Merce Cunningham, Philip Johnson, Paul Klee, Jacob Lawrence, and many more.
 
The beautifully cloth-bound package utilizes an elegant color palette and design that speaks to the work of both artists. This comprehensive visual biography showcases the artists’ rich and dynamic lives, and their infinite influence on each other, as they shared the profound conviction that art was central to human existence.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 22, 2021

Book of the Day > Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw

● Purchase ● Joseph Elmer Yoakum (1890–1972) started drawing late in life and produced some two thousand works on paper, primarily landscapes and select portraits, over just ten years. This beautifully illustrated monograph offers the most comprehensive study of the artist’s work, illuminating his vivid and imaginative world of drawings and giving definition and dimension to his remarkable life. It charts his rise from an unknown veteran to an untrained artist with work represented in major museum collections in Chicago and New York and examines what fueled his creative process, which he described as a “spiritual unfoldment.” Essayists delve into Yoakum’s friendships with the up-and-coming community of Chicago Imagists that secured his place in art history, explore the religious outlook he may have adopted to help him cope with a racially fractured city, and reveal his complicated relationship to his African American and Native American heritage. Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw also features an assessment of Yoakum’s understudied sketchbooks as well as in-depth conservation analysis.

Book of the Day Posted Jul 22, 2021

Book of the Day > Kovi Konowiecki - And In Its Place, Another

● Purchase ● As the title of Kovi Konowiecki’s debut monograph – and in its place, another – reminds us, we are always and forever subject to the twin certitudes of transience and change. As is the artist, who has moved back and forth between California, Mexico, Europe, and the Middle East, all of which places are part of the fabric of this sprawling, unscripted book.
 
Here we are confronted with the geographical and emotional margins of society and the mind: the external and internal boundaries that inhibit both human movement and human potential. The photographs portray individuals and communities that exist in a liminal space between belonging and abandonment, many of which exert feelings of desolation.
 
But what might seem on the surface political is made intensely personal through Konowiecki’s purposeful reliance on emotional connections in the pictures rather than specific relationships of place or subject. As he says, this work comes as a “happy accident, inspired by the frequent travels that nourished a sharp eye for the liminal types of communities to which I am drawn: people I have met in my wanderings, passersby in the street, a horse trained in a small Arab village, and untended gardens.”
 
The “unscripted” nature of the work has an impact on the form of the book, in particular in the variety of genres and colors, from landscape photography to portraiture and from black and white to color. The various forms of expression serve as ways to materialize the ideas at the core of the project and to break down barriers or restrictions within the photographic medium.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 21, 2021

Book of the Day > Kusama: Cosmic Nature

● Purchase ● Experience the brilliant artist's lifelong obsession with nature and immersion in gardens, a bedrock of her hugely influential work.
 
Yayoi Kusama’s work is the product of an infinite curiosity and obsessive drive to create. Throughout the artist’s long and varied career, there is one persistent yet little-studied through line—her deep engagement with nature. From early sketches depicting flowers at her family’s plant nursery in Japan, to her most recent monumental sculptures of botanical forms poised to take flight, Kusama consistently calls our attention to the patterns, connections, and cycles of living things that are not always visible.
 
KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature is the accompanying catalogue to the first comprehensive exploration of the artist’s enduring fascination with the natural world, exhibited across the 250-acre landscape of The New York Botanical Garden. The exhibition examines her lifelong awareness and attunement to nature, which serves not merely as a source of inspiration, but is an integral source of power for her artistic language. This profound life force pervades all of Kusama’s work, from studies of the molecular to contemplations of the universal, resulting in a transcendent, cosmic nature.
 
Exhibition guest curator Mika Yoshitake, an independent scholar specializing in postwar Japanese art, and Joanna L. Groarke, NYBG exhibitions curator, catalogue co-editors, bring together essays by art historians, curators, and a scientist, who each present unique interpretations of Kusama’s engagement with the natural world. Featuring more than 120 drawings, paintings, sculptures, and archival photographs, including stunning views of the works displayed in NYBG’s gardens and galleries, KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature offers a new perspective on one of the world’s most celebrated contemporary artists.
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