Events Posted Apr 03, 2021

Remote Book Signing for > THE SPANISH STYLE HOUSE

On Thursday, February 8th, 5:00-6:30 PM, join photographer Melba Levick and author Ruben G. Mendoza for the launch of The Spanish Style House: From Enchanted Andalusia To The California Dream published by Rizzoli, presented by The Ruskin Art Club. Purchase here!

”Luminous new photography showcases contemporary and historic homes in the beloved Spanish Style in Southern California, while offering, as well, a rare look at the original inspirations to the style born in Andalusia, Spain. This presentation will include photographs of the Ruskin Art Club’s historic 1922 clubhouse designed by Frank Meline (now a private residence), and review a host of 12th through 18th century palatial Spanish estates, and their Andalusian expressions in southern California for the period spanning the 1920s through the present.”

This will be an online discussion celebrating the book’s launch with photographer Melba Levick and writer Rubén G. Mendoza moderated by Dr. William Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. Both authors will be signing copies especially for Arcana on August 9th that will begin shipping Tuesday, April 13th. Order your signed copy here!

Join the Ruskin Art Club discussion April 8th at 5:00 PM by clicking here.

Book of the Day Posted Apr 02, 2021

Book of the Day > Alice Neel: People Come First

● Purchase ● "For me, people come first," Alice Neel (1900–1984) declared in 1950. "I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being." This ambitious publication surveys Neel's nearly 70-year career through the lens of her radical humanism. Remarkable portraits of victims of the Great Depression, fellow residents of Spanish Harlem, leaders of political organizations, queer artists, visibly pregnant women, and members of New York's global diaspora reveal that Neel viewed humanism as both a political and philosophical ideal. In addition to these paintings of famous and unknown sitters, the more than 100 works highlighted include Neel's emotionally charged cityscapes and still lifes as well as the artist's erotic pastels and watercolors. Essays tackle Neel's portrayal of LGBTQ subjects; her unique aesthetic language, which merged abstraction and figuration; and her commitment to progressive politics, civil rights, feminism, and racial diversity. The authors also explore Neel's highly personal preoccupations with death, illness, and motherhood while reasserting her place in the broader cultural history of the 20th century.
Book of the Day Posted Apr 01, 2021

Book of the Day > The Chemarts Cookbook

● Purchase ● Inspiration for Material Enthusiasts
 
How can we make flexible, transparent wood-based materials? What kinds of materials can we derive from trees, while still respecting the preciousness of nature? Could the innovative use of renewable cellulosic materials change our material world?
 
The CHEMARTS Cookbook offers both simple and more advanced ideas and recipes for hands-on experiments with wood-based materials. The book showcases interesting results, focusing on raw materials that are processed either chemically or mechanically from trees or other plants: cellulose fibres, micro- or nano-structured fibrils, cellulose derivatives, lignin, bark, and wood extractives.
 
Find inspiration, test our recipes at home, in workshops or chemistry labs, and develop your own experiments! Have fun!
Book of the Day Posted Mar 30, 2021

Book of the Day > Frank Horvat: Side Walk

● Purchase ● The legendary photojournalist’s early ’80s New York photographs, published alongside his autobiographical musings in an elegant clothbound edition
 
From 1979 to 1986, the city of New York functioned as a kind of refuge for photographer Frank Horvat (born 1928). Born in present-day Croatia, for years Horvat lived and worked rather nomadically, traveling extensively through Asia and Europe on photojournalist excursions with a brief stopover in Paris where he shot fashion photography for Jardins de Mode and Elle. Eventually he found himself in New York; during this period, he allowed himself to surrender to the daily hustle and bustle of the city streets. In between commissions, Horvat created a prolific series of photography and writing that was not intended for public consumption, instead functioning as a reflection upon his own craft as well as the significance of photography itself.
 
Frank Horvat: Side Walk publishes many of these photographs for the first time alongside the photographer’s writing. The elegant presentation of this clothbound volume is representative of the great pride that Horvat took in the creation of his personal projects as well as his professional pursuits: the photojournalist's texts are published on thin Munken offset paper and his photographs are printed on deep matte photo paper. This publication is both a compelling depiction of a beloved city and a portrait of the sensitive man behind the camera.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 27, 2021

Book of the Day > Dear Elio: A Marvelous Journey into the World of Fiorucci

● Purchase ● The world and creativity of Elio Fiorucci seen from the inside and recounted by those who took part in his fashion adventure.
 
The fashion and stores created by Elio Fiorucci in the late 1960s were a great creative hotbed for the following decades, anticipating many of the trends that emerged later and the ideas of the next generation of designers.
 
Elio Fiorucci's innate curiosity led him to explore the unknown, to broaden his vision towards new currents of freedom of expression, beyond the borders of his country, in search of other energies.
 
This book recalls his new, joyful, mocking, free realm, and the conception of unconventional clothing that upset the rules of the bourgeois, conformist world of the 1960s. It is a choral fresco, told through the letters of those who worked with him, including absolute beginners, professionals who knew him and shared his passions, family, and friends: architects such as Antonio Citterio and Michele De Lucchi, photographers, artists (Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, who decorated the entire Milan store in 1983), singers, and actors who attended his stores and parties. Direct testimonials come from the likes of Biba (Barbara Hulanicki), Oliviero Toscani, Donna Jordan, Terry Jones, Italo Lupi, Alessandro Mendini, Paul Caranicas and Joey Arias. The book also features a preface by Janie and Stephen Schaeffer, the current brand owners.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 26, 2021

Book of the Day > Mark Templeton: Ocean Front Property

● Purchase ● “I was in search of water and the effect its absence had on me,” writes Canadian sound artist and photographer Mark Templeton about his second photobook, Ocean Front Property. From this sense of absence and geographic isolation grew a new body of work with two components: A book of color photographs, made entirely in the landlocked province of Alberta (“where the nearest ocean is a thousand kilometers away”), and an Audio Experience (a ‘soundtrack’ to the book, included as a digital download or available on a limited edition cassette). Rooted in the same sense of longing — for the imagined comfort of warm blue water and an escape from one’s familiar surroundings — these complementary sensory worlds form a kind of mirage: a prism of banal surfaces, spaces, and sonic textures through which the fragments of an intangible fantasy can be glimpsed, a circular psychic journey from the desolate to the sublime. The photobook also contains an 8-page supplement, compiling selections by eight artists whom Templeton invited to choose pairings of sound and image, suggesting possible feedback loops and alternative readings between the eight audio tracks and his photographs.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 25, 2021

Book of the Day > Shapes From Out of Nowhere

● Purchase ● Adventures in abstract ceramics, from George E. Ohr and Ken Price to Kathy Butterly
 
A comprehensive overview of 20th-century non-representational ceramics from the earliest years of the modernist revolution to the postwar period through to the present, Shapes From Out of Nowhere features an unparalleled gathering of over 150 works from New York City-based collector Robert Ellison. It explores the featured artists’ rejection of symmetrical, utilitarian forms in clay in favor of the sculptural and abstract, and challenges the boundaries between function, non-function, design, drawing, painting, sculpture and architecture. Built over a period of 40 years, this singular collection reflects the personal and discerning eye of a collector focused on the exploration of shape and form.
 
Ellison’s introduction to abstraction in clay was the work of George E. Ohr, whose late 19th-century creations represent the first seismic shift in a challenge to form itself. Ohr was the catalyst for this new direction in clay, and his vision foreshadows 20th-century postwar experimentation in fine art. The book showcases the sculptures by Ohr along with artists from the second half of the 20th century to the present, including seminal works by Axel Salto, Ken Price and Peter Voulkos, the progenitor of the American studio movement.
 
Shapes From Out of Nowhere tells this important story through the work of these key figures, but also introduces lesser known artists who transformed—and continue to push—the possibilities of the medium, including Kathy Butterly, Elisa D’Arrigo, Anne Marie Laureys and Aneta Regel.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 24, 2021

Book of the Day > David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968–1979

● 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. The book 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 Hammons at work in his Los Angeles studio in 1974.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 23, 2021

Book of the Day > Lee Friedlander

● Purchase ● A new, up-to-date retrospective on photography legend Lee Friedlander
 
One of the masters of contemporary photography, Lee Friedlander has dedicated his career to the documentation of everyday life in the United States. His images are characterized by a composition that utilizes the urban geometry of storefronts and street signs—and later car windows and telephone poles—as a framing technique. This catalog, published in conjunction with a retrospective organized by the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid, surveys the wide scope of Friedlander’s career from the 1960s to today. High-quality reproductions of all of the exhibited works are supplemented by text written by curator Carlos Gollonet and photographer Nicholas Nixon.
 
The volume serves as a comprehensive guide to Friedlander’s body of work, with personal insight provided through an interview between Maria Friedlander and gallery director Jeffrey Fraenkel, as well as a chronology of the artist’s life by his grandson Giancarlo T. Roma.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 20, 2021

Book of the Day > Carlo Scarpa: Beyond Matter

● Purchase ● A tribute to a great master of postwar Italian architecture, through a photographic journey with high visual impact.
 
Carlo Scarpa was one of the great masters of postwar Italian architecture. This book proposes a photographic itinerary that unfurls through Venice, Treviso, Verona and Bologna, before reaching the Dolomites.
 
His most significant projects have been photographed specifically for the book, including constructions and installations in public spaces, such as museums, shops and offices. Each example illustrates Scarpa's ability to approach the architectural volume as a whole while at the same time tending to its interior layout down to the smallest details, exploring the potential of the material, giving rhythm to the volumes through light, and expressing the poetics of the shape, even in its simplest lines.
 
The projects featured in the book alternate between overviews and close-ups, with a very high photographic quality. They are all briefly introduced by a text that describes their genesis, explains the context in which they were made and focuses on the details that best represent Scarpa's style, with a summary and clear key to understanding the architect's work.
 
The volume ends with a postscript by his son, Tobia Scarpa, who is currently designing the forthcoming Scarpa Museum in Treviso.
more