Events Posted Jun 28, 2021

Show & Tell with Jason E.C. Wright / Burnt Sienna Research Society!

Clear your schedule and tune into @arcanabooks Instagram this Wednesday (6/30), 5:00 PST we are delighted to host another monthly Instagram “Show & Tell” moderated by Jason E.C. Wright of @burntsiennaresearchsociety! You are in for a real treat so gather up your art books, design books, coffee table books or rare magazines and come nerd out with Jason!
 
Watch live for a special discount code to get 10% off any book that is discussed in this week's show & tell. If we have it in stock you can get a discount by visiting/writing/calling the shop!
 
 
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. Chat about your most influential book or bookshop. 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.
 
Jason E.C. Wright is the Founder of Burntsienna 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.
 
* You can watch the 5/26 show and tell through our instagram post here.
 
Thanks to Frances Anderton & Angela Anthony / Helms Bakery District.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 26, 2021

Book of the Day > Acne Paper

● Purchase ● Acne Paper book celebrates some of the best work from the magazine’s archive, accompanied by new essays by Sarah Mower, Vince Aletti and Robin Muir written especially for this lavishly produced 568 page edition, edited by Thomas Persson, Acne Paper’s editor-in-chief and creative director.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 25, 2021

Book of the Day > Paul Graham: Beyond Caring

● Purchase ● Originally self-published in 1985, Paul Graham’s renowned series, ‘Beyond Caring’, was made in the waiting rooms and corridors of the Social Security and Unemployment offices around the UK, documenting the long waits, queues and poor conditions of an overburdened system, to produce a powerful series of photographs conveying the hardship people experienced. Denied official permission to make the work, Graham’s photographs were taken discreetly, usually without looking through the camera, resulting in a spatial disorientation that emphasised the unmoored distress of vulnerable citizens. The work shocked many on its release – leading Magnum photographers were outraged by its use of colour in a classic documentary topic, while others celebrated how it straddled the world of activism and art (it was exhibited at both Trade Union conferences and the Museum of Modern Art, New York). Graham forged a fresh form of engaged photography, mixing elements of social documentary, ‘new colour’ and reportage to create a striking body of work that endures to this day. Many decades have passed since their making in 1984, but these images have grown not only in photographic importance, but also as a unique historic record of the mid-1980s unemployment crisis in the UK.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 23, 2021

Book of the Day > Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group

● Purchase ● Abstract painting meets theosophical spirituality in 1930s New Mexico: the first book on a radical, astonishingly prescient episode in American modernism
 
Founded in Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, in 1938, at a time when social realism reigned in American art, the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG) sought to promote abstract art that pursued enlightenment and spiritual illumination. The nine original members of the Transcendental Painting Group were Emil Bisttram, Robert Gribbroek, Lawren Harris, Raymond Jonson, William Lumpkins, Florence Miller Pierce, Agnes Pelton, Horace Towner Pierce and Stuart Walker. They were later joined by Ed Garman. Despite the quality of their works, these Southwest artists have been neglected in most surveys of American art, their paintings rarely exhibited outside of New Mexico. Faced with the double disadvantage of being an openly spiritual movement from the wrong side of the Mississippi, the TPG has remained a secret mostly known only to cognoscenti.
 
Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group aims to address this slight, claiming the group’s artists as crucial contributors to an alternative through-line in 20th-century abstraction, one with renewed relevance today. This volume provides a broad perspective on the group’s work, positioning it within the history of modern painting and 20th-century American art. Essays examine the TPG in light of their international artistic peers; their involvement with esoteric thought and Theosophy; the group’s sources in the culture and landscape of the American Southwest; and the experience of its two female members.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 22, 2021

Book of the Day > Virginia Wilcox: Arboreal

● Purchase ● Virginia Wilcox’s debut monograph – consisting of photographs made in the large Los Angeles parks that are equally hardscrabble and breathtaking – is quite aptly titled Arboreal. Because they have so many irreconcilable demands placed on them by both civilization and climate, the dominant subjects of the artist’s vision seem more “tree-like” or “relating to trees” than they do the actual thing. We can’t help but admire their stoic resolve. The pictures, Wilcox says, “offer a winding journey through a mangled urban landscape that looks something like wilderness, towing the line between the natural and built environment.”
 
The word “arboreal” of course is also used of animals who live partly or entirely in trees, and we see here how the human animal has used and overused these spaces: alterations to the topography, infrastructural incursions, plain old trash. But Arboreal is no simple environmental diatribe. Rather, it is a clear-headed finding of complicated meaning that is necessarily as ambiguous as its subject. The singular strength of the book lies in the high-wire tension that Wilcox has created between the encroachments on the land and its sheer stubborn beauty – all juxtaposed against the sprawling city below and surrounding. Wrapping everything in that sort of light only known in Southern California, she somehow offers us photographs that are simultaneously as plainly understood as evidence and as thrillingly complex as the mind of the maker.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 19, 2021

Book of the Day > Robert LeBlanc: Moon Dust

● Purchase ● Nothing compares to being up close to a wildfire
 
Moon Dust is a collection of images shot over a length of 4 years by photographer Robert LeBlanc documenting hotshot firefighters in Montana and California.
 
The August Complex wildfire of 2020, which is currently the largest wildfire in California History, burned throughout the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, Mendocino National Forest, and Six Rivers National Forest. The wildfire burned for a total of three months scorching 1,032,648 acres. Rarely do photographers gain intimate access to hotshot crews while on remote wildfires. The images in Moon Dust give an intimate vision of what it's like battling such an unpredictable natural disaster and how these firefighters risk their lives every day. In partnership with Mystery Ranch and Monster Energy Cares, 100% of proceeds of book sales will be donated to the Eric Marsh Foundation, U.S. Hotshot Association, and Backbone Series Scholarship.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 18, 2021

Book of the Day > Barkley L. Hendricks: Photography

● Purchase ● The penultimate installment in Skira’s five-volume Barkley Hendricks survey reveals the artist’s little-known work in photography
 
Barkley L. Hendricks (1945–2017) revolutionized postmodern Black portraiture. This volume, the fourth in a five-part series dedicated to Hendricks’ career, focuses on the artist’s photographic oeuvre. Hendricks credited photography as a key facet of his practice, both as a tool for documenting his own work and as a source of inspiration for his paintings. Influenced by his experiences under Walker Evans’ tutelage at Yale, Hendricks frequently took to the streets to capture the world as he saw it, with his subjects in their element as they lingered in front of stores or performed in jazz clubs. As in his paintings, Hendricks’ attention to graphic composition and ability to capture his subjects’ dynamism are stunning. For the first time, Hendricks’ considerable body of photographic work is collected in a single volume, revealing an essential though underdiscussed dimension of his art.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 17, 2021

Book of the Day > The IBM Poster Program: Visual Memoranda

● Purchase ● In the late 1960s, IBM was one of the world’s pre-eminent corporations, employing over 250,000 people in 100 countries and producing some of the most advanced products on earth. IBM President Thomas J. Watson Jnr. sought to elevate the company’s image by hiring world-renowned design consultants, including Eliot Noyes and Paul Rand. As well as developing the iconic IBM logo and a corporate design guide, Rand also brought together a remarkable team of internal staff designers.
 
One of the designers he hand-picked was Ken White, who, along with John Anderson and Tom Bluhm, headed up the design team at the IBM Design Center in Boulder, Colorado. Together, they initiated a poster program as a platform for elevating internal communications and initiatives within the company. These posters were displayed in hallways, conferences rooms and cafeterias throughout IBM campuses, with subject matter including everything from encouraging equal opportunity policies to reminders on best security practices to promoting a family fun day. Designers often incorporated figurative typography, dry humor, visual puns, and photography to craft memorable and compelling messages. Many of the posters won Type Directors Club awards and a large number were ‘re-appropriated’ from walls by enthusiastic IBM employees.
 
While Paul Rand’s creative genius has been well documented, the work of the IBM staff designers who executed his intent outlined in the IBM Design Guide has often gone unnoticed. The poster designs by White, Anderson, and Bluhm included in this book represent some of the most creative examples of mid-century corporate graphic design, while offering a unique commentary into corporate employee communications of the period. They also embody the full extent to which Thomas J. Watson Jr.’s mantra, “Good Design is Good Business” permeated every facet of the IBM organization, and created a lasting influence on curated corporate design in America.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 16, 2021

Book of the Day > Louise Bourgeois, Freud's Daughter

● Purchase ● An exploration of the art and writing of Louise Bourgeois through the lens of her relationship with Freudian psychoanalysis
 
From 1952 to 1985, Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) underwent extensive Freudian analysis that probed her family history, marriage, motherhood, and artistic ambition—and generated inspiration for her artwork. Examining the impact of psychoanalysis on Bourgeois’s work, this volume offers insight into her creative process. Philip Larratt-Smith, Bourgeois’s literary archivist, provides an overview of the artist’s life and work and the ways in which the psychoanalytic process informed her artistic practice. An essay by Juliet Mitchell offers a cutting-edge feminist psychoanalyst’s viewpoint on the artist’s long and complex relationship with therapy. In addition, a short text written by Bourgeois (first published in 1991) addresses Freud’s own relationship to art and artists. Featuring excerpts from Bourgeois’s copious diaries, rarely seen notebook pages, and archival family photographs, Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter opens exciting new avenues for understanding an innovative, influential, and groundbreaking artist whose wide-ranging work includes not only renowned large-scale sculptures but also a plethora of paintings and prints.
Events Posted Jun 16, 2021

Stephen Shore LIVE with Mack Books USA SCREENING 6/17 !

MACK BOOKS pressents a live discussion on Thursday, June 17th 3:00 PDT with STEPHEN SHORE!
Order signed copies of STEEL TOWN and TRANSPARENCIES while supplies last here! 
Stephen Shore joins architect and author Jack Self to discuss Steel Town, Shore’s revelatory document of the American Rust Belt in 1977. They discuss the turbulent historical moment the project depicts as well as the history of Shore’s own process and photography’s capacity for illuminating our past, present, and future.
The conversation will be broadcast four times for UK, European, Asian and Australian, and US audiences, with relevant subtitles:
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Monday 14 June: UK Screening, 18:00 BST London⁠
In partnership with @villagebooksdulwich @thephotographersgallery⁠
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Tuesday 15 June: Europe Screening with French subtitles, 18:00 CEST Paris⁠
In partnership with with @librairieartazart @ofrparis @lanouvellechambreclaire @l.ascenseur_vegetal @leplacartphoto @librairiequaidesbrumes @librairiesanstitre #lerevelateurphoceen @kominekbooks @micamera_milan @dispara.cultura @fragmentphotobooks @tronsmobok ⁠ 
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Wednesday 16 June: Asia & Australia Screening with Japanese subtitles, 18:00 JST Tokyo / 19:00 AEST Sydney / 14:30 IST Delhi⁠
In partnership with @perimeterbooks⁠
 
Thursday 17 June: USA Screening, 18:00 EDT New York / 15:00 PDT Los Angeles⁠
In partnership with @arcanabooks⁠
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Follow this link for more info and global screening times, and to sign up for reminders for all screenings.
 
A limited number of signed copies of both Steel Town and Transparencies are available on our website here!
 

 

 

 

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