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!
Book of the Day Posted Jul 09, 2021

Book of the day > Dries Van Noten Spring Summer 2021 photographed by Viviane Sassen

Dries Van Noten Spring Summer 2021 photographed by Viviane Sassen with projections of Len Lye films. ● Purchase here ●
The late Mr. Lye was a pioneering New Zealand artist known primarily for his experimental films and kinetic sculpture. His work helped inspire this collection and its optimistic prints of "psychedelic sun, sunshine and moons, light bars, and palm trees."

 

Book of the Day Posted Jul 08, 2021

Book of the day > Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph by Jason Fulford

Purchase here!     At turns humorous and absurd, heartfelt and searching, Photo No-Nos is for photographers of all levels wishing to avoid easy metaphors and to sharpen their visual communication skills. Photographers often have unwritten lists of subjects they tell themselves not to shoot—things that are cliché, exploitative, derivative, sometimes even arbitrary.
 
Photo No-Nos features ideas, stories, and anecdotes from many of the world’s most talented photographers and photography professionals, along with an encyclopedic list of more than a thousand taboo subjects compiled from and with pictures by contributors. Not a strict guide, but a series of meditations on “bad” pictures, Photo No-Nos covers a wide range of topics, from sunsets and roses to issues of colonialism, stereotypes, and social responsibility.
 
At a time when societies are reckoning with what and how to communicate through media and who has the right to do so, this book is a timely and thoughtful resource on what photographers consider to be off-limits, and how they have contended with their own self-imposed rules without being paralyzed by them.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 07, 2021

Book of the day > Jams Barnor: The Roadmaker

Published by @ @maisoncf / @ rrbphotobooks.  "The Roadmaker is a new retrospective book of work by photographer James Barnor drawing from across his career, demonstrating his modernism and inherent skill as a colourist. The publication of the book coincides with the exhibition James Barnor: Ghanaian Modernist at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery from 17 May 2021 as part of Bristol Photo Festival, and a major retrospective of Barnor’s work at Serpentine, London from 20 May 2021.
 
James Barnor (b.1929) was Ghana’s first international press photographer. He came from a family of photographers and established his own studio in Accra, Ever Young in 1950. He worked from this studio at the time of Ghana’s independence whilst also selling his pictures to the Daily Graphic and Drum magazines. He came to Britain in 1959, and whilst working in a factory, he took photography evening classes at the London College of Printmaking and lessons with the Colour Processing Laboratory in Kent. He went on to study at Medway College of Arts, where he gained employment as a technician, eventually returning to Accra in 1969, where he established X23, the city’s first colour photography studio. He returned to London in the 1990s.
 
In 2009 the 80 year-old photographer revealed his archive to two London curators. His archive is a remarkable document of post-war modernity spanning photographs from the time of Ghana’s independence, scenes of multi-cultural London, and later images recording a strong postcolonial identity in Ghana. The metaphor of the road in the book’s title, suggests the continuity between the past and the present, tradition and progress, and the links between generations and peoples of different contents present in Barnor’s work.
 
The book includes an essay by @damariceamao photography historian and curator, and is translated into English by Mélissa Laveaux
 
The exhibition James Barnor: Ghanaian Modernist at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery is part of the inaugural Bristol Photo Festival and will showcase over 40 photographs. The exhibition will be on display from 17 May 2021 until January 2022."  Additionally, there is a current retrospective exhibition at @serpentineuk . 
 
@james_barnor_archives

 

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