Book of the Day Posted Sep 01, 2020

Book of the Day > Mark Flood: Protest Signs from 1992

● Purchase ● Collecting Mark Flood’s irreverent reinventions of the protest sign Houston-based artist
 
Mark Flood’s (born 1957) 1992 protest signs were first deployed outside the Republican National Convention of that year. With cardboard, foam core upcycled from the Menil Collection and vintage stencils gifted by a relative of Jackson Pollock, Flood’s signs display ironic slogans beside silkscreened images of Reagan, Bush and Schwarzenegger.
 
“Flood’s Protest Signs may similarly be regarded as a form of history painting, as markers of where some stood, of what they stood against, of what they stood for. Flood’s Signs can be seen in clear relation to all of his text-based works, articulated in a way that is by turns acerbic, bemused, and irreverent, a voice that yet echoes from a year that was a year and a day.” – Bob Nickas
Miscellany Posted Aug 29, 2020

Independent Bookstore Day!

It’s Independent Bookstore Day and we want to salute our colleagues and customers. You inspire us in this zany, anachronistic, less-than-lucrative business -- one made even more tumultuous in 2020. Your faith in value of printed matter is beautiful and your commitment to supporting spaces devoted to keeping ideas, art, community, and beauty alive through these miraculous objects is heroic. Thanks for being our allies and fighting the good fight along with us. Today, tomorrow and every day, we hope you will celebrate LA’s rich book culture by buying from our esteemed colleagues who prove true the #gothambookmart adage that  “wise men fish here.” Here’s to you: @aliasbookseast, @artbookhwla, @bblitarts, @booksoup, @chevaliersbooks, @counterpointrecordsandbooks, @dieselbookstore, @esowonbooks, @familybooks, @hennesseyingalls, @iliadbookshop, @lalibreria, @larryedmunds1938, @lastbookstorela, @librosschmibros, @malikbooks, @nowservingla, @reparations.club, @skylightbooks, @storiesbooksandcafe, @theundergroundbookstore, @vromansbookstore, the FORTHCOMING @thesalteaters @villagewellcc and so many more. Look around - books are everywhere!

 

Book of the Day Posted Aug 28, 2020

Book of the Day > Lina Bo Bardi: HABITAT

● Purchase ● From furniture and exhibition design to monumental domestic and public architectural projects, the breadth of Lina Bo Bardi’s multidisciplinary work is showcased in this richly illustrated book.
 
Lina Bo Bardi is regarded as one of the most important architects in Brazil’s history. Beginning her career as a Modernist architect in Rome, Bo Bardi and her husband emigrated to Brazil following the end of WWII. Bo Bardi quickly resumed her practice in her adopted homeland with architecture that was both modern and firmly rooted in the culture of Brazil. In 1951 she designed “Casa de Vidro” (“Glass House”), her first built work, where she and her husband would live for the rest of their lives. She also designed the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (São Paulo Art Museum), a landmark of Latin American modernist architecture which opened in 1968. It was for this museum she created the iconic glass easel display system, which remains radical to date. This book presents a comprehensive record of Bo Bardi’s overarching approach to art and architecture and shows how her exhibition designs, curatorial projects, and writing informed her spatial designs. Essays on Bo Bardi’s life and work accompany archival material such as design sketches and writings by the artist, giving new insight into the conceptual and material processes behind this radical thinker and creator’s projects.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 27, 2020

Book of the Day > Interiorities: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Leonor Antunes, Henrike Naumann, Adriana Varejão

● Purchase ● An international coterie of contemporary female artists give form to the political and aesthetic facets of our interior lives.
 
The artists featured in this book proffer a radical and innovative formal language that positions interiority as both political and aesthetic. The work of Njideka Akunyili Crosby comprises vibrantly patterned paintings on paper that negotiate the complex cultural terrain of a life formed between two worlds: her adopted home in America and her native Nigeria. Inspired by photography, fashion, architecture, and design, as well as her own family history, Akunyili Crosby’s works often feature domestic spaces that function as physical, conceptual, and emotional points of arrival and departure. Conversely, the Portuguese sculptor Leonor Antunes focuses on migration and the transformation of form and ideas beyond temporal and geographical spaces. The starting point for her elegant site-specific sculptures is the exploration of art, design, and architectural history. Adriana Varejão addresses the colonial history of Brazil in her visceral sculptures and paintings. She often deploys the motif of the wall, the boundary between inside and outside, in her work. The omnipresence of the past also colors the work of trained stage designer Henrike Naumann, whose immersive installations engage with the history of East-West German relations, as well as contemporary instances of right-wing ideology. Naumann explores the mechanisms of radicalization and explores how they manifest themselves in space.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 26, 2020

Book of the Day > Mick Rock. The Rise of David Bowie, 1972–1973

● Purchase ● A unique tribute from David Bowie’s official photographer and creative partner, Mick Rock, compiled in 2015, with Bowie’s blessing.
 
In 1972, David Bowie released his groundbreaking album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. With it landed Bowie’s Stardust alter ego: a glitter-clad, mascara-eyed, sexually ambiguous persona who kicked down the boundaries between male and female, straight and gay, fact and fiction into one shifting and sparkling phenomenon of ’70s self-expression. Together, Ziggy the album and Ziggy the stage spectacular propelled the softly spoken Londoner into one of the world’s biggest stars.
 
A key passenger on this glam trip into the stratosphere was fellow Londoner and photographer Mick Rock. Rock bonded with Bowie artistically and personally, immersed himself in the singer’s inner circle, and, between 1972 and 1973, worked as the singer’s photographer and videographer.
 
This collection brings together spectacular stage shots, iconic photo shoots, as well as intimate backstage portraits. It celebrates Bowie’s fearless experimentation and reinvention, while offering privileged access to the many facets of his personality and fame. Through the aloof and approachable, the playful and serious, the candid and the contrived, the result is a passionate tribute to a brilliant and inspirational artist whose creative vision will never be forgotten.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 25, 2020

Book of the Day > Hilma af Klint: Artist, Researcher, Medium

● Purchase ● With new scholarship, this volume casts af Klint as a pioneering cosmonaut of inner space
 
For decades a relatively unknown artist, Hilma af Klint has posthumously claimed her rightful place in art history recently but dramatically: her 2019 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum was seen by more than half a million visitors. In 2013, curator Iris Muller-Westermann organized the first retrospective exhibition of af Klint’s work. Now she presents us with an extensive survey show, curated with Milena Høgsberg, at the Moderna Museet in Malmö, which this volume accompanies, supplementing reproductions with the latest information and research on af Klint.
 
Hilma af Klint: Artist, Researcher, Medium investigates, from a variety of perspectives, the question of how this trailblazing abstract artist linked her painting to a higher consciousness. Essays by art historians, a quantum physicist, a spiritual teacher and an historian of theosophy and esotericism, among others, provide insights into a world beyond the visible which fascinates us now even more than ever.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 22, 2020

Book of the Day > Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium

● Purchase ● A timely survey on the new figuration and its origins in the painting of Ensor, Lassnig and Guston
 
In the 1990s, after a long period dominated by abstraction and conceptual approaches, painting saw a revival of figuration by artists whose work updated portraiture and history painting but remained rooted in the conventions of realism. Now, however, a new generation, coming to prominence in the new millennium, is distinguished by a radically different approach to the figure, in which bodies are fragmented, morphed, merged and remade but never completely cohesive.
 
Radical Figures brings together ten painters at the heart of this zeitgeist: Michael Armitage, Cecily Brown, Nicole Eisenman, Sanya Kantarovsky, Tala Madani, Ryan Mosley, Christina Quarles, Daniel Richter, Dana Schutz and Tschabalala Self. Presenting for the first time this new direction in painting, this fully illustrated catalog includes key works, as well as interviews with each of the artists.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 21, 2020

Book of the Day > Modern Architecture and Interiors

● Purchase ● This atlas of more than one thousand Modernist architectural masterpieces uncovers hidden gems while offering new perspectives on old favorites.
 
In 2006, architecture and design curator Adam Stech embarked on a photographic project to document the best Modernist architecture around the globe. More than thirty countries and more than a decade later, the fruits of that monumental project are gathered in this impressive collection covering nearly a century of architectural history. Driven by a passion for rediscovering forgotten or lesser known architectural treasures of Modernism, Stech took thousands of diverse photographs of exteriors and interiors. This survey features often overlooked details and hidden projects that Stech helps bring to light. His brief commentary on each featured building reveals insights into his vast collection of images that includes treasures of Italian Modernism, American mid-century classics, South American Art Deco, Belgian organic architecture, French Brutalism, forgotten Australian modern houses, and much more. This expansive and inspiring book is the definitive guide to architecture in the 20th century in all its different forms and tendencies from its strict rationalist to flamboyant decorative styles.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 20, 2020

Book of the Day > Holding the Camera

● Purchase ● Artist Alberto Vieceli compiles the strange, humorous and aslant images designed to teach a neophyte camera user how to use their new device
 
Before one’s camera was one’s phone, the camera makers of the world had to explain the possible uses of their product in the space of a few pages of a user’s manual. How one tilts the camera, holds it with both hands in front of the waist. How one looks through the viewfinder, gazes one-eyed into the world. How one hides it in stockings, behind the back, and how one lets it peep out from behind the corner of a building, as though he or she were a detective.
 
Holding the Camera shows a pictorial genre from the now extinct era of analog photography. These images that were once distributed a million times over in instructions and advertisements, had almost entirely disappeared from culture, until now.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 19, 2020

Book of the Day > Tyler Mitchell: > I Can Make You Feel Good

● Purchase ● In his first published monograph, Tyler Mitchell, one of America’s distinguished photographers, imagines what a Black utopia could look like.
 
I Can Make You Feel Good, is a 206-page celebration of photographer and filmmaker Tyler Mitchell’s distinctive vision of a Black utopia. The book unifies and expands upon Mitchell’s body of photography and film from his first US solo exhibition at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York.
 
Each page of I Can Make You Feel Good is full bleed and bathed in Mitchell’s signature candy-colored palette. With no white space visible, the book’s design mirrors the photographer’s all-encompassing vision which is characterized by a use of glowing natural light and rich color to portray the young Black men and women he photographs with intimacy and optimism.
 
The monograph features written contributions from Hans Ulrich Obrist (Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries), Deborah Willis (Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University), Mirjam Kooiman (Curator, Foam) and Isolde Brielmaier (Curator-at-Large, ICP), whose critical voices examine the cultural prevalence of Mitchell’s reimagining of the Black experience.
 
Based in Brooklyn, Mitchell works across many genres to explore and document a new aesthetic of Blackness. He is regularly published in avant- garde magazines, commissioned by prominent fashion houses, and exhibited in renowned art institutions, Mitchell has lectured at many such institutions including Harvard University, Paris Photo and the International Center of Photography (ICP), on the politics of image making.
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