Book of the Day Posted Jul 16, 2020

Book of the Day > Artemisia

● Purchase ● The first exhibition catalogue dedicated only to Artemisia
 
Gentileschi Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1654 or later) is the most celebrated woman artist of the baroque period in Italy. Her career spanned more than 40 years, as she moved between Rome, where she was raised and trained by her father, Orazio Gentileschi, to Florence, where she gained artistic independence and became the first female member of the city’s academy of artists, and to Venice, London, and Naples. Often featuring heroic female subjects, her paintings were predominantly intended for private clients. Today they are recognized for their dramatic power and originality, showing Artemisia to be one of the most compelling storytellers of her time. This beautiful book includes essays on her life and career; a discussion of her personal and artistic relationship with her father; a summary of critical writings and an overview of the wide range of approaches to Artemisia’s work since her rediscovery by feminist art historians more than 50 years ago; a more personal insight into Artemisia through her letters; a discussion of the artist’s self-representation in her work; and an essay dedicated to her painting technique.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 15, 2020

Book of the Day > PUBLIC Issue 3

● Purchase ● Public is a biannual arts and fashion journal with an emphasis on experimental work. Offering a unique perspective on subjects in life, each subject is archived and its theme never repeated. Issue 3 features work by Roxane Danset, Sian Davey, Frank Lebron, Gary David Moore, Guinevere van Seenus, Jack Webb, and Tom Wood.
 
In a unique collaboration, Siân Davey works with stylist Gary David Moore to cover youth and innocence. She revisits her daughter Martha as a subject, now aged 21, in a series of portraits at their family home in Devon (Siân's original series ‘Martha’ was displayed at The National Portrait Gallery in London, and captured her daughter at age 16). Frank Lebon covers family, having documented an intimate family holiday last summer in Spain for the issue. Iconic supermodel turned photographer Guinevere van Seenus collaborates with stylist Roxane Danset to capture a series of self portraits that form a reflective study on herself as a strong, middle aged women. Tom Wood casts his eye on the relationship between men and women through decades of covering communities in Liverpool, England. And finally, Jack Webb explores the emotional highs and lows between a group of friends and family on a night out in a Yorkshire pub, captured in 1996.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 14, 2020

Book of the Day > John Cage: A Mycological Foray: Variations on Mushrooms

● Purchase ● Foraging for mushrooms with John Cage: writing, art, photography and ephemera from an idiosyncratic chapter in the composer's life
 
Imagined as an extended mushroom-foraging expedition, John Cage: A Mycological Foray gathers together Cage’s mushroom-themed compositions, photographs, illustrations and ephemera. Indeterminacy Stories and other writings by Cage are interwoven throughout the first volume within a central essay examining Cage’s enduring relationship with mycology. Also included is a transcript of Cage’s 1983 performance, MUSHROOMS et Variationes. The second volume is the inaugural reproduction of Cage’s 1972 portfolio, Mushroom Book, authored in collaboration with illustrator Lois Long and botanist Alexander H. Smith. Readers are thus drawn through the landscape of Cage’s mycologically centred oeuvre and interests, discovering assorted works, images, compositions, philosophies and ephemera, as one might encounter assorted fungi and flora while foraging.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 11, 2020

Book of the Day > Soviet Signs and Street Relics

● Purchase ● Russia’s forgotten world of avant-garde public signage—the latest in Fuel’s collectible Soviet series
 
For this volume, French photographer Jason Guilbeau has used Google Street View to virtually navigate Russia and the former USSR, searching for examples of a forgotten Soviet empire. The subjects of these unlikely photographs are incidental to the purpose of Google Street View—captured by serendipity, rather than design, they are accorded a common vernacular. Once found, Guilbeau strips the images of their practical use by removing the navigational markers, transforming them according to his own vision.
 
From remote rural roadsides to densely populated cities, the photographs reveal traces of history in plain sight: a brutalist hammer and sickle stands in a remote field; a jet fighter is anchored to the ground by its concrete exhaust plume; a skeletal tractor sits on a cast-iron platform; a village sign resembles a constructivist sculpture. Passersby seem oblivious to these objects. Relinquished by the present they have become part of the composition of everyday life, too distant in time and too ubiquitous in nature to be recorded by anything other than an indiscriminate automaton.
 
This collection of photographs portrays a surreal reality: it is a document of a vanishing era, captured by an omniscient technology that is continually deleting and replenishing itself—an inadvertent definition of Russia today.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 10, 2020

Book of the Day > Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door

● Purchase ● Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door examines the thirty-eight-year relationship between painter Beauford Delaney (born in Knoxville, 1901; died in Paris, 1979) and writer James Baldwin (born in New York, 1924; died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, 1987) and the ways their ongoing intellectual exchange shaped each other’s creative output and worldview. This full-color publication documents the groundbreaking exhibition organized by the Knoxville Museum of Art (KMA) and is drawn from the KMA’s extensive Delaney holdings, from public and private collections around the country, and from unpublished photographs and papers held by the Knoxville-based estate of Beauford Delaney. This book seeks to identify and disentangle the skein of influences that grew over and around a complex, lifelong relationship with a selection of Delaney’s works that reflects the powerful presence of Baldwin in Delaney’s life. While no other figure in Beauford Delaney’s extensive social orbit approaches James Baldwin in the extent and duration of influence, none of the major exhibitions of Delaney’s work has explored in any depth the creative exchange between the two.
 
The volume also includes essays by Mary Campbell, whose research currently focuses on James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney within the context of the civil rights movement; Glenn Ligon, an internationally acclaimed New York-based artist with intimate knowledge of Baldwin’s writings, Delaney’s art, and American history and society; Levi Prombaum, a curatorial assistant at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum who did his doctoral research at University College London on Delaney’s portraits of James Baldwin; and Stephen Wicks, the Knoxville Museum of Art’s Barbara W. and Bernard E. Bernstein Curator, who has guided the KMA’s curatorial department for over 25 years and was instrumental in building the world’s largest and most comprehensive public collection of Beauford Delaney’s art at the KMA.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 09, 2020

Book of the Day > It Don’t Mean a Thing: Photographs by Saul Leiter With a Story by Paul Auster

● Purchase ● It Don’t Mean a Thing is the second volume in The Gould Collection, a series of books that brings together contemporary photographers with short story and prose writers.
 
Volume two presents fifty-eight photographs by Saul Leiter with the story It Don’t Mean a Thing by Paul Auster. Black-and-white and color photographs by Leiter from 1947 through the 1970s—with many images never before published—are paired with Auster’s tale of interlinked life events and chance encounters. Reflections on New York City, its urban rhythm, people and places, feature prominently in both artists’ work and provide a unifying focus for the book.
 
The Gould Collection was created to honor the memory of Christophe Crison, a photobook collector from Paris who died prematurely in 2015 at the age of forty-five. The photographers and writers showcased throughout the series are artists whose works Christophe admired.
 
For volume two of the collection, we searched for inspiration in the neatly ordered rows of photobooks and short story anthologies that line the bookshelves in the Paris apartment where Christophe (known online as Gould Bookbinder) lived with his wife and two sons. It’s been two years since he died and sadly, our email inboxes have stopped pinging with his excited messages about photobook and short story discoveries. His presence remains strong, but as we began to prepare this volume, we had to remind ourselves of all his favorite photographers and writers. An inquiring email was sent to his wife: What is on the bookshelves? Who are we overlooking? For this volume, she reminded us that the choices were obvious: Saul Leiter and Paul Auster, two keen observers of New York City, a place where Christophe felt truly happy.
 
It Don’t Mean a Thing: Photographs by Saul Leiter with a Story by Paul Auster is a bilingual publication. Auster’s story, the artists’ biographies and supporting texts are printed in both English and Japanese (with story translation by Motoyuki Shibata).
Book of the Day Posted Jul 08, 2020

Book of the Day > Seleen Saleh: Street Culture

● Purchase ● Street Culture is a stunning collection of photographs representing women and men of color who exhibit a unique style. Seleen Saleh’s photographs reveal individuality, fearlessness, and creativity in the most vibrant beings who collectively represent street style. This style is as varied as the people; it is a personal expression that changes day to day. It is an expression of a person’s culture, mood, influences, and aesthetics. Street style originated in the street where top designers look for inspiration for their next collections. The book preserves the integrity of street style and features some of the muses that have been forgotten or were never acknowledged.
 
In the book Seleen combines photographs from her work at Essence Magazine with new images of jaw-dropping, creative and colorful moments. As a lover of fashion, art, and people, Seleen brings out the authentic nature of these known and unknown muses. Each person depicted here can be considered a brilliant artist in his or her own right. These portraits were taken in New York City—the perfect global destination—diverse and open and where people are not afraid to tell you who they are. There is an underfed audience for this book; the world is waking up and wants to see more diversity and more eclectic styles.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 07, 2020

Book of the Day > The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air

● Purchase ● The work of American artist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) is brought into brilliant focus in this definitive book, originally published to accompany the first complete retrospective of Asawa’s career, organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in 2006. This new edition features an expanded collection of essays and a detailed illustrated chronology that explore Asawa's fascinating life and her lasting contributions to American art. Beginning with her earliest works—drawings and paintings created in the 1940s while she was studying at Black Mountain College—this beautiful volume traces Asawa’s flourishing career in San Francisco and her trajectory as a pioneering modernist sculptor who is recognized internationally for her innovative wire sculptures, public commissions, and activism on behalf of public arts education.
 
Through her lifelong experimentations with wire, especially its capacity to balance open and closed forms, Asawa invented a powerful vocabulary that contributed a unique perspective to the field of twentieth-century abstract sculpture. Working in a variety of nontraditional media, Asawa performed a series of remarkable metamorphoses, leading viewers into a deeper awareness of natural forms by revealing their structural properties. Through her art, Asawa transfigured the commonplace into metaphors for life processes themselves. The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa establishes the importance of Asawa’s work within a larger cultural context of artists who redefined art as a way of thinking and acting in the world, rather than as merely a stylistic practice.
 
This updated edition includes a new introduction and more than fifty new images, as well as original essays that reflect on the impact of American political history on Asawa's artistic vision, her experience with printmaking, and her friendship with photographer Imogen Cunningham. Contributors include Susan Ehrens, Mary Emma Harris, Karin Higa, Jacqueline Hoefer, Emily K. Doman Jennings, Paul J. Karlstrom, John Kreidler, Susan Stauter, Colleen Terry, and Sally B. Woodbridge.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 02, 2020

Book of the Day > This Book Contains Pictures Of Police Vehicles On Fire

● Purchase ● ... This Book Also Contains Pictures Of Vehicles On Fire And Pictures Of Vehicles In Swimming Pools
Book of the Day Posted Jul 01, 2020

Book of the Day > Rockers: The Making of Reggae’s Most Iconic Film

● Purchase ● Set amongst the reggae scene of late 70s Jamaica, the film Rockers achieved instant cult status among music and cinema fans. Rockers’ director, Ted Bafaloukos, has received many accolades for his work on the film, but the fact that he was also a fine writer and undercover photographer is often overlooked. In 2005, just before his death, Bafaloukos penned this vivid and never-before-published autobiography.
 
Beyond Bafaloukos’ fascinating story of the “making-of” Rockers, it tells the tale of a Greek immigrant from a family of sailors and his move to New York, eventually rubbing shoulders with the likes of The Velvet Underground, Robert Frank, Jessica Lange and Philippe “Man on Wire” Petit. But there’s a twist to this 1970s’ New York story: Bafaloukos fell in love with reggae when it was still just an underground facet of Jamaican culture in the City. His experiences in New York eventually led him to shoot Rockers, praised for the portrait it paints of Kingston’s late 70s music scene along with its unique style, mentality and fashion.
 
The director’s intense experiences in Jamaica and New York between ’75 – ’78 provide the substance of the scorching stories within, including; gunshots at his first ever reggae concert in Brooklyn, the director’s bizarre arrest for suspicion of being a CIA operative, paranoia at the Bob Marley compound, musicians-turned actors’ “rude boy” antics, and naturally, sympathetic, highly descriptive recollections of the music that first drew Bafaloukos into Jamaica’s music and culture.
 
An invaluable collection of photographs taken during the conception, writing and production of the film captures the zeitgeist and breathes life into the book. Production stills and photos taken during the era by Bafaloukos form the visual, cinematic backbone of the tome, faithfully rendering the amazing people, styles, and locations in living, breathing color. Taken all together, the text and images within Rockers will uncover new facets of this all-important era in Reggae music for even the most seasoned reggae aficionados. Beyond reggae circles, this new anthology offers an unparalleled snapshot of a highly fantasized and sought after je-ne sais-quoi: the all-time Jamaican cool.
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