Book of the Day Posted Jun 03, 2020

Book of the Day > Melvin Edwards: Lynch Fragments

Ominous and angular, the acclaimed steel sculptures of Melvin Edwards convey racial violence with edgy ingenuity
 
This volume brings together a significant selection of works from the titular series by the New York–based sculptor Melvin Edwards (born 1937), created between 1963 and 2016, comprising more than 50 years of what is considered the artist's central body of work.
 
Edwards started to produce the Fragments series when he lived in Los Angeles, at a crucial time of the civil rights movement in the United States. The works directly reference the practice of lynching after the abolition of slavery. Denouncing violence against African Americans, Edwards created these steel sculptures as forms between bodies and machines that can also be interpreted as weapons, given the sense of violence and danger suggested by their blunt, angular and protruding shapes. The selection of works in this book reflects the multiplicity of thematic interests and the formal variations across the series.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 01, 2020

Book of the day > Collecting Black Studies: The Art of Material Culture at the University of Texas at Austin

We stand with you in outrage  -- Black Lives Matter.  
Book of the day > Collecting Black Studies: The Art of Material Culture at the University of Texas at Austin. “What began as an effort to prevent the neglect and potential loss of hundreds of African objects at the University of Texas at Austin has evolved into one of the most significant collections on campus. The art collections at Black Studies were born from the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies’ Art and Archive Initiative, under the leadership of Cherise Smith, Omi L. Jones, and Edmund T. Gordon. Today Black Studies at the University of Texas boasts approximately 900 objects from sub-Saharan Africa, over 200 contemporary works from African American and Afro-Caribbean artists, and more than 100 pieces jointly held with other collecting entities on campus, adding a diverse richness to the overall collections. Collecting Black Studies gathers and presents these holdings—including costumes, jewelry, paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and photography—and prominently features five Black artists whose work is particularly significant. Scholars and curators examine how John Biggers, Michael Ray Charles, Christina Coleman, Angelbert Metoyer, and Deborah Roberts—artists with deep relationships to Texas—contributed to the Black Studies collections, to art history, and to the culture of our state and beyond.”

 

 

Book of the Day Posted May 29, 2020

Book of the Day > Mixtape Potluck Cookbook

● Purchase ● What if Questlove threw a dinner party and everyone came?
 
Questlove is best known for his achievements in the music world, but his interest in food runs a close second. He has hosted a series of renowned Food Salons and conversations with some of America’s most prominent chefs. Now he is turning his hand to creating a cookbook. In Mixtape Potluck Cookbook, Questlove imagines the ultimate potluck dinner party, inviting more than fifty chefs, entertainers, and musicians—such as Eric Ripert, Natalie Portman, and Q-Tip—and asking them to bring along their favorite recipes. He also pairs each cook with a song that he feels best captures their unique creative energy. The result is not only an accessible, entertaining cookbook, but also a collection of Questlove’s diverting musical commentaries as well as an illustration of the fascinating creative relationship between music and food. With Questlove’s unique style of hosting dinner parties and his love of music, food, and entertaining, this book will give readers unexpected insights into the relationship between culture and food.
Book of the Day Posted May 28, 2020

Book of the Day > Giacomo Costa: A Helpful Guide to Nowhere

● Purchase ● Further adventures in dystopian and fantastical cities with Giacomo Costa, virtuoso of digitally manipulated, ultra-detailed photography

 

Since the mid-1990s, when he debuted his Agglomerati series, Florentine photographer Giacomo Costa (born 1970) has been creating large-format photographs that employ Hollywood blockbuster–style digital techniques to portray unreal, fantastical cityscapes straight out of science fiction.

 

In 2009 Damiani published The Chronicles of Time, with an introduction by Norman Foster. By turns historical and contemporary, real and imagined, the images in The Chronicles of Time could be the result of natural catastrophe or nuclear war. His latest monograph, A Helpful Guide to Nowhere, presents his latest fascinating, majestic and terrifying images of ominous yet nondidactic dystopias and cityscapes, focusing on work from the last ten years, with numerous previously unpublished images.

Book of the Day Posted May 27, 2020

Book of the Day > Super 8: An Illustrated History

● Purchase ● Super 8: An Illustrated History is a coffee table art book showcasing the history of Super 8 filmmaking. In addition to featuring stunning photography documenting the sleek mid-century design of Super 8 cameras and projectors, the book also offers a detailed history of the beloved medium—one not only embraced by suburban dads, the target audience of the format, but by the art world, punk rockers, and ultimately popular culture. Filmmakers who got their start in Super 8 include, Robert Zemeckis, Jim Jarmusch, Todd Haynes, Sam Raimi, Wes Anderson, and Alex Gibney. Thanks in part to a renewed interest in analog technologies, Kodak will be bringing a new Super 8 camera to market in 2019, their first new camera to roll off the assembly line in over thirty years.


Super 8 also features interviews from filmmakers who got their start in Super 8 and individuals who were instrumental in the development of the medium. Interviews include filmmakers Richard Linklater (Slacker, Boyhood, Dazed and Confused), Dave Markey (1991: The Year Punk Broke), Rocky Schenk (music videos for Adele, Devo, Nick Cave, The Cramps, Robert Plant), James Mackay on Derek Jarman (Last of England, Jubilee), Lenny Lipton (The Super 8 Book), James Nares (Rome ’78), G.B. Jones (The Lollipop Generation), Bruce LaBruce (Hustler White, The Misandrists), Peggy Ahwesh (Martina's Playhouse), Paul Sheptow (Super-8 Filmmaker magazine), Ed Sayers (The Straight 8 Film Festival), Melinda Stone (Super Super 8 Film Festival), Jonathan Tyman (Ann Arbor 8mm Film Festival), Norwood Cheek (Flicker zine and screening series), Martha Colburn, Narcisa Hirsch, slit, Matthias Müller, John Porter, and Karissa Hahn. On the technical front, the book features interviews with Roland Zavada (Kodak), Bob Doyle (Super8 Sound), Phil Vigeant (Pro8mm), Frank Bruinsma (Super8 Reversal Lab), and Tommy Madsen (Logmar Camera Solutions).

Book of the Day Posted May 22, 2020

Book of the day > The Way We Walk by Jill Hoffman-Kowal

●Purchase here● From the co-founder of Target Video and the host of The Spirit Of Punk radio show comes over 100 pages of photos from the birth of the San Francisco punk scene, Los Angeles and a dash of NYC spanning 1977-1980. Many never seen before. Featuring The Mutants, The Cramps, Crime, The Screamers, The Zeros, Dils and more.
None Posted May 21, 2020

Book of the Day > Philip Guston Now

● Purchase ● A long-overdue retrospective of Philip Guston’s influential work, from social realism to abstract expressionism to tragicomic, cartoony figuration Philip Guston—perhaps more than any other figure in recent memory—has given contemporary artists permission to break the rules and paint what, and how, they want. His nonlinear career, embrace of “high” and “low” sources, and constant aesthetic reinvention defy easy categorization, and his 1968 figurative turn is one of 20th-century art’s most legendary conversion narratives. “I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?” And so Guston’s cross-hatched abstractions gave way to large, cartoonlike canvases populated by lumpy, lugubrious figures and personal symbols in a palette of meaty pinks. That Guston continued mining this vein for the rest of his life—despite initial bewilderment from his peers—reinforced his reputation as an artist’s artist; he has become hugely influential as contemporary art has followed Guston into its own antic figurative turn. Published to accompany the first retrospective museum exhibition of Guston’s career in 15 years, Philip Guston Now includes a definitive chronology reflecting many new discoveries. It highlights the voices of artists of our day who have been inspired by the full range of his work: Tacita Dean, Peter Fischli, Trenton Doyle Hancock, William Kentridge, Glenn Ligon, David Reed, Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, Art Spiegelman and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Essays trace the influences, interests and evolution of this singular force in modern and contemporary art—including a close look at the 1960s and ’70s, when Guston gradually abandoned abstraction, returning to the figure and to current history but with a personal voice, by turns comic and apocalyptic, that resonates today more than ever.
Book of the Day Posted May 20, 2020

Book of the Day > Claudia Andujar: The Yanomami Struggle

● Purchase ● This book is published to accompany “Claudia Andujar, The Yanomami Struggle” at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, one of the most ambitious exhibitions devoted to the Brazilian photographer. Since the 1970s, Claudia Andujar has dedicated her life to photography and the protection of the Yanomami Indians, one of the largest Amerindian communities in the Brazilian Amazon. Claudia Andujar features over 200 black-and-white and color photographs, historical documents, and drawings produced by Yanomami artists. The fruit of several years’ research into the photographer’s archives, this exhibition catalog reflects the two inseparable aspects of Andujar’s approach: aesthetic and political. This catalog also shows Andujar’s significant contribution to art photography and the essential role she has played in the defense of Yanomami rights and the forest where they live.
Book of the Day Posted May 19, 2020

Book of the Day > Richard Prince: COWBOY

● Purchase ● A visually stunning compilation of Richard Prince’s 40-year-long project of examining the cowboy as an American symbol.
 
In the mid-1970s, Richard Prince was an aspiring painter working in Time Inc.’s tear sheet department clipping texts for magazine writers. After he removed the articles, he was left with advertisements: glossy pictures of commodities, models, and other objects of desire. He began to re-photograph the advertisements, cropping and enlarging them, and selling the artworks as his own. Prince paid particular attention to the motif of the cowboy, often depicted in advertisements for Marlboro cigarettes. He had an explosive effect on the art world, provoking lawsuits and setting auction records for contemporary photography. More recently, he has revisited copies of TIME from the 1980s and 90s using contemporary technology to produce a new series of work, extending his preoccupation with the cowboy in the era of Instagram to demonstrate that the stakes around originality, appropriation, and truth in advertising are as high as ever. This book showcases how Prince has mined the mythological American West within the artwork he produced during the last four decades. Each chapter contains a brief introduction, followed by artwork by Prince, and concludes with a section of related ephemera, relics, and fragments that aid in contextualizing Prince’s work. Once again challenging the conventional limits of photography, Prince is reigniting the debate he sparked forty years ago through the lens of cowboys and the West.
Book of the Day Posted May 15, 2020

Book of the Day > Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah: Andy Sweet's Summer Camp 1977

● Purchase ● The golden days of tube socks, bunk beds, marshmallows and first crushes: 1970s summer camp, from the photographer behind Shtetl in the Sun

 

A companion volume to Shtetl in the Sun, Andy Sweet's love letter to the colorful Jewish community of late 1970s South Beach, Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah chronicles the summer of 1977 at Camp Mountain Lake, serving up a knowing portrait of the era's fashion, pop culture and frank expressions of adolescent sexuality.

 

Set against the cherished rituals of camp life—from the parade of trunks as 300 campers arrive at Mountain Lake's rural North Carolina setting to the end-of-August Dionysian frenzy of "Color War"—Sweet's photos tell a classic coming-of-age story, one full of awkward crushes, intense friendships and the kind of deep truths that emerge over late-night, campfire-toasted marshmallows.

 

As the camp's photography instructor and one of its counselors, Sweet brings an intimate familiarity to his subject, capturing the rhythms of the camp's daily life through both posed compositions and spontaneous images. By turns nostalgic, poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, this collection includes a foreword by award-winning Miami arts journalist Brett Sokol and an introductory essay by New Yorker staff writer Naomi Fry.

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