Book of the Day Posted Jul 21, 2021

Book of the Day > Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Prints and Objects

● Purchase ● An updated catalog of the smaller-scale works created by installation art’s most iconic duo
 
Though born on the same day in 1935, artists Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (1935–2020) and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon (1935–2009) did not cross paths until many years later in Paris. The seemingly fated couple married quickly and embarked on a decades-long artistic collaboration until Jeanne-Claude’s death, engaging creatively with the environment around them through site-specific installations that often enveloped buildings and entire landscapes with fabric and nylon. In order to fund their ambitious projects, Christo and Jeanne-Claude began making more salable items, such as prints, collages and objects, early on in their career. This volume is a completely revised and expanded catalogue raisonné of pieces that may have been made on a smaller scale but with no less creative fervor. This publication is a testament to a creative collaboration that never allowed convention to limit the scope of its activity.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 20, 2021

Book of the Day > Frédéric Chaubin: Stone Age – Ancient Castles of Europe

● Purchase ● Follow photographer Frédéric Chaubin as he embarks on a unique, century-spanning journey through Europe. Featuring images of more than 200 buildings in 21 countries, Stone Age presents the history and architecture of the most dramatic medieval castles of the continent in an unprecedented collection.
 
Building on the success of his foray into Soviet design with CCCP, Chaubin once again documents the afterlife of highly rational structures that seem out of place in a modern-day world. Precursors of Brutalism, these castles value function over form and epitomize the raw materials and shapes that would go on to define so much of architectural history.
 
Shot on film with a Linhof view camera, the collection is the outcome of five years of travel and investigation. Complete with a practical map and explanatory essay, its castles tell the story of 400 years, unfolding through the feudal Middle Ages into the 15th century.
 
A photographic study of decay as much as endurance, Stone Age traces the history of some of these singular structures that continue to enchant their audiences today and that occupy a distinct, mystical place in our collective imagination.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 20, 2021

Book of the Day > Rahim Fortune: I Can’t Stand To See You Cry

● Purchase ● A year and change into father's diagnosis, his nightly calls began to become more frequent. My sister and I, his youngest children, spent countless hours in his room caring for him as his body gave up. Many nights we'd leave his room both knowing his condition was getting much worse, but we chose to say nothing of it.
 
I can't stand to see you cry is an exploration of Texas and the surrounding states, as well as the people who are fixed within its complex landscape. Fortune analyses relationships between family, friends and strangers ,all caught in a flood of health and environmental issues while working to maintain grace. The artist uses his own personal experiences to explore the friction between public and private life, and the unspoken tensions in daily life through an approach rooted in the landscape. Moreover, Fortune’s biographical approach to photography attempts to unpack his own identity and experience in the midst of a pandemic, civil unrest, a cross-country move, a career, and the loss of a parent, thinking about both the future and past.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 20, 2021

Book of the Day > Georgia O’Keeffe (2021)

● Purchase ● A visual feast of flowers, abstractions, cityscapes and landscapes from American modernism’s most iconic painter
 
Offering a complete survey of Georgia O’Keeffe’s illustrious career, this magnificent new book ranges from the works produced between 1910 and 1920 that made her a pioneer of abstraction to her celebrated flower paintings and views of New York, which led to her recognition as one of the key figures in modern American art, and culminating with her paintings of New Mexico.
 
The selection of color plates is accompanied by quotes from O’Keeffe on her art and additional photographic material pertaining to the paintings. The sense of reverence for the world and its forms emerges vividly through O’Keeffe’s words. “The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big far beyond my understanding—to understand maybe by trying to put it into form,” she writes. “To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.”
 
Also featured are a biography and texts by contributing curators from the venues to which the show travels, by scholars at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and by acclaimed French art writer Catherine Millet.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 17, 2021

Book of the Day > Matthew Rolston: Art People -- The Pageant Portraits (Exhibition Catalogue, Collector's Edition)

● Purchase ● ART PEOPLE: THE PAGEANT PORTRAITS is a body of work by photographer and artist Matthew Rolston. This group of photographs furthers Rolston’s investigations into the nature of portraiture and the methods by which society and the human condition are mediated through artwork and art creation. Comprised of emotionally intimate portraits of participants of “Pageant of the Masters,” a tableaux vivants show that is part of an annual arts festival in Laguna Beach, California, Rolston’s photographic subjects reenact pivotal historical figures and works from art history, from antiquity through 20th century modernism.
 
Accompanying Laguna Art Museum’s June 27 – September 19, 2021 exhibition of Matthew Rolston’s Art People is a lavishly-illustrated museum catalogue with essays by cultural critic and journalist Christina Binkley, Pageant of the Masters scriptwriter Dan Duling and classical scholar Nigel Spivey, alongside carefully selected images from art history that contextualize the work in the exhibition. The Trade Edition features a luxurious paper slipcase containing the concertina format catalogue, which is folded rather than bound and printed on both sides.
 
The limited Collector’s Edition is enclosed in a linen-and-inset photographic slipcase with metallic gold and matte white foil stamping on the front and spine and includes a folio with a signed and numbered print.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 16, 2021

Book of the Day > Matthew Rolston: Art People -- The Pageant Portraits (Exhibition Catalogue, Trade Edition)

● Purchase ● ART PEOPLE: THE PAGEANT PORTRAITS is a body of work by photographer and artist Matthew Rolston. This group of photographs furthers Rolston’s investigations into the nature of portraiture and the methods by which society and the human condition are mediated through artwork and art creation. Comprised of emotionally intimate portraits of participants of “Pageant of the Masters,” a tableaux vivants show that is part of an annual arts festival in Laguna Beach, California, Rolston’s photographic subjects reenact pivotal historical figures and works from art history, from antiquity through 20th century modernism.
 
Accompanying Laguna Art Museum’s exhibition of Rolston’s Art People is a lavishly illustrated museum catalogue with essays by cultural critic and journalist Christina Binkley, Pageant of the Masters scriptwriter Dan Duling and classical scholar Nigel Spivey, alongside carefully selected images from art history that contextualize the work in the exhibition.
 
The Trade Edition features a luxurious paper slipcase containing the concertina format catalogue, which is folded rather than bound and printed on both sides.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 15, 2021

Book of the Day > 100 Years of All-American Toy Ads

● Purchase ● Up until the 20th century, children’s play was not a subject that demanded much attention. While objects that entertained children have been present from ancient history, it was only with industrial mass production—and a developing urban middle class—that toys appeared more frequently. As playthings began to display a robust economic performance, an industry rose to provide this new market with the objects of their desire. European manufacturers dominated the toy market, with Germany, in particular, supplying the American market with the bulk of both singular and mass-produced products. World War I ended its dominance, and by the 1920s, bolstered by American ingenuity and an ever-growing consumer culture supported by the media empires of newspapers, radio, and television, American toys became ubiquitous in the consumer market.
 
Ranging from the simple to the complex, children were inundated with a commodity to be wished for and sold to by the millions. From frilly dolls to science sets, children were marketed to with gusto, first through magazines and comic books and later through television. Toys fell along familiar gender lines all while being developed with the unspoken subtext of stimulating developing minds and being vehicles of problem solving with educational value.
 
If the first part of the 20th century represented the rise of toys in America, the postwar period signaled a market unleashed by the baby boom. That one event gained traction for the toy industry and propelled it to its current state. Unforeseen was the next chapter in the industry—the advancement of the technical revolution—which would create another dimension of toy products that would captivate both children and adults as one century blended into the next.
 
Filled with a Santa’s sack full of surprises, Toys. 100 Years of All-American Toy Ads takes us down the aisles of America’s toy stores delivering the favorites and forgotten memories of toys that were hugged and hoarded, saved and disposed of, and now finally brought back in their pristine glory. Once again it’s Christmas, your birthday, and a reward for a job well-done.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 14, 2021

Book of the Day > Common Practice: Basketball & Contemporary Art

● Purchase ● The first, comprehensive, illustrated publication to explore the relationship between basketball and contemporary art
 
From David Hammons' Higher Goals and Robert Indiana’s Mecca Floor to the more recent works of Nina Chanel Abney and Titus Kaphar, basketball has proven an especially popular sport in art. Whether in the depiction of players, abstract use of motifs, or as a means of examining social inequality and political justice, this collection takes readers on a journey to understand the game of basketball, not only as a physical activity played between a series of lines, but also as a reflection of a greater human experience.
 
Gathering work by more than 250 artists from the 20th century to now, this volume reveals a little-discussed point of overlap between art and sport, in part to be found in the titular phrase “common practice”—“practice” in the sense of “to perform an activity or exercise regularly in order to improve or maintain one’s proficiency.” This book argues that the need to rehearse, discover and explore through the act of doing makes these two very different ideas of perfecting one’s craft very similar.
 
Artists include: Nina Chanel Abney, Emma Amos, Romare Bearden, Salvador Dalí, Elaine de Kooning, Keith Haring, David Hammons, Barkley Hendricks, Robert Indiana, JR, KAWS, Titus Kaphar, Jacob Lawrence, Roy Lichtenstein, Sharon Lockhart, Robert Longo, Claes Oldenburg, Paul Pfeiffer, Alex Prager, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Faith Ringgold, Lorna Simpson, Andy Warhol, Ai Weiwei and Wendy White.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 13, 2021

Book of the Day > Frank Bowling

● Purchase ● Over a half-century of bright, liberating, Pop-inflected expressionism, from British painter Frank Bowling Over the past decade, Frank Bowling (born 1934) has enjoyed belated attention and celebration, including a major Tate Britain retrospective in 2019. This comprehensive monograph, published in 2011, is now available in an updated and expanded edition. Born in British Guiana, Bowling arrived in England in his late teens, going on to study at the Royal College of Art alongside David Hockney and Derek Boshier. By the early 1960s he was recognized as an original force in the vibrant London art scene, with a style that brilliantly combined figurative, symbolic and abstract elements. Dividing his time between New York and London since the late 1960s, Bowling has developed a unique and virtuosic abstract style that combines aspects of American painterly abstraction with a treatment of light and space that consciously recollects the great English landscape painters Gainsborough, Turner and Constable.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 10, 2021

Book of the day > Russell Etchen: About 3400 People

We are so stoked for our manager Russell Etchen whose exhibition is on view now @billarningexhibitions in Houston! If you can't make it there, we have copies of the 'zine he produced in conjunction with the show in the store. Book of the day > Russell Etchen: About 3400 People. ● Purchase Here ●
"Russell Etchen’s drawings, painting installations, and books originate in ’Zine culture, cartooning, graffito, rock and roll aesthetics, and his philosophical meditations on similarity, difference, repetition and reproduction. The repeated elements of counting, grouping, and sorting objects—whether they are Rocks or People—lend an oddly elegant and subtly humorous charm that belies the miasma commonly associated with monotony and repetition. Based in Los Angeles, Etchen was raised in Houston. This exhibition’s multi-scale mix of wall paintings and drawings marks the artist’s first Houston show since his widely reproduced and much loved public art installation at the Lawndale Art Center in 2016."
 
Congratulations, Russell! Now come back -- we miss you!
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