Book of the Day Posted Jan 11, 2020

Book of the Day > Julie Mehretu

Book of the Day > Julie Mehretu. Published by DelMonico Prestel. "This full-scale retrospective monograph of Julie Mehretu’s work traces the development of one of America’s most celebrated abstract painters. Over the past twenty-five years Julie Mehretu has emerged as a major force in American art. Known mostly for her enormous abstract paintings, she also produces exquisite drawings, often created as studies for larger works. This sumptuous volume accompanies a major mid-career survey of Mehretu’s work. Designed to allow close viewing of Mehretu’s vast canvases, it features lush reproductions of her paintings in their entirety, as well as numerous full-page details. The genesis for much of Mehretu’s work lies in the black ink drawings she created in the late 1990s. From these early drawings and paintings, Mehretu moved onto large-scale canvases. These drawings and paintings are maplike and colorful, with diagrammatic elements that reflect her life experience. Each of these stages of her oeuvre is represented here, including works from her landmark exhibition Drawing into Painting, the twelve-panel intaglio, Auguries, and the paintings she created as a result of time spent in Africa and the Middle East. Accompanying these images are numerous essays by leading curators, scholars, and writers. Long overdue, this magnificent volume pays tribute to an artist whose work and process intermingle in a unique and important examination of painting, history, geopolitics, and displacement."
Book of the Day Posted Jan 09, 2020

Book of the Day > Great Women Artists

Book of the Day > Great Women Artists. Published by Phaidon. “Five centuries of fascinating female creativity presented in more than 400 compelling artworks and one comprehensive volume The most extensive fully illustrated book of women artists ever published, Great Women Artists reflects an era where art made by women is more prominent than ever. In museums, galleries, and the art market, previously overlooked female artists, past and present, are now gaining recognition and value. Featuring more than 400 artists from more than 50 countries and spanning 500 years of creativity, each artist is represented here by a key artwork and short text. This essential volume reveals a parallel yet equally engaging history of art for an age that champions a greater diversity of voices.”
Book of the Day Posted Jan 08, 2020

Book of the Day > Margaret Kilgallen: that's where the beauty is.

Book of the Day > Margaret Kilgallen: that's where the beauty is. Published by Aspen Art Press. "Margaret Kilgallen: that’s where the beauty is. is published on the occasion of Kilgallen’s first posthumous museum exhibition, and the largest presentation of her work in more than a decade. Using the artist’s exhibition history as a chronological tool, that’s where the beauty is. examines Kilgallen’s roots in histories of printmaking, American and non-Western folk history and folklore, and feminist strategies of representation, expanding the narrative around her work beyond her association with the Bay Area Mission School and the "Beautiful Losers" artists. Kilgallen’s graphic, schematic style came from a deep engagement with the handmade in wildly divergent forms—from folk art to letterpress printing to freight train graffiti, among many other sources. “I like things that are handmade and I like to see people's hand in the world anywhere in the world,” she said, embracing the idiosyncrasies and imperfections that come from hand craft. “I think that’s where the beauty is.” Kilgallen’s work, in form and content, celebrates the handmade, making heroes and heroines of those who live and work in the margins and challenging traditional gender roles, hierarchies and mainstream culture. This publication offers a comprehensive look at Kilgallen’s work, revisiting the ongoing legacy and idiosyncratic spirit of one of California’s most innovative artists." Purchase here.
Miscellany Posted Jan 08, 2020

Thank you, Jess!

We have been blessed - truly - to have had Jess at Arcana for 10 of the last 17 years. It’s a bittersweet day for us as she sashays out the door today to devote herself full-time to her primary careers of making exquisite jewelry, making exquisite spaces (along with her husband with their company, Landlocd ), and raising her wonderful son. Jess’s glamour, elan, and flair are foils for her deep intellect and massive knowledge. She is a pure delight and her sparkling presence, her passion, and her solidarity have been priceless gifts to us.
Book of the Day Posted Jan 05, 2020

Book of the Day > John Baldessari: Catalogues Raisonnés

Book of the Day > In remembrance. John Baldessari: Catalogues Raisonnés. Published by Yale University Press. "The pioneering conceptual artist John Baldessari (1931-2020) began his career as a painter in the 1950s, but in the subsequent decades he expanded his practice in a new and groundbreaking direction by juxtaposing texts with found photography or appropriated images. These texts questioned the nature of art and the art-viewing experience, suggesting new meanings for the images they accompanied. This interaction of words and images remained a critical aspect of Baldessari's work, even as he branched into other media, such as site-specific installations, drawings, video, sculpture, prints, and multiples."

Book of the Day Posted Jan 04, 2020

Book of the Day > Sticking it to the Man; Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980

Book of the Day > Sticking it to the Man; Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980. Published by PM Press. "From civil rights and Black Power to the New Left and gay liberation, the 1960s and 1970s saw a host of movements shake the status quo. The impact of feminism, anticolonial struggles, wildcat industrial strikes, and antiwar agitation were all felt globally. With social strictures and political structures challenged at every level, pulp and popular fiction could hardly remain unaffected. Feminist, gay, lesbian, Black and other previously marginalised authors broke into crime, thrillers, erotica, and other paperback genres previously dominated by conservative, straight, white males. For their part, pulp hacks struck back with bizarre takes on the revolutionary times, creating fiction that echoed the Nixonian backlash and the coming conservatism of Thatcherism and Reaganism. Sticking It to the Man tracks the ways in which the changing politics and culture of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s were reflected in pulp and popular fiction in the United States, the UK, and Australia. Featuring more than three hundred full-color covers, the book includes in-depth author interviews, illustrated biographies, articles, and reviews from more than two dozen popular culture critics and scholars. Among the works explored, celebrated, and analysed are books by street-level hustlers turned best-selling black writers Iceberg Slim, Nathan Heard, and Donald Goines; crime heavyweights Chester Himes, Ernest Tidyman and Brian Garfield; Yippies Anita Hoffman and Ed Sanders; best-selling authors such as Alice Walker, Patricia Nell Warren, and Rita Mae Brown; and myriad lesser-known novelists ripe for rediscovery.
Book of the Day Posted Jan 03, 2020

Book of the Day > Josef Koudelka: Gypsies

Book of the Day > Josef Koudelka: Gypsies. Published by Aperture. "This mini paperback edition of Gypsies makes a foundational body of work by master photographer Josef Koudelka newly accessible. This volume includes all 109 photographs from Koudelka’s recent remastering of the Cikáni series (Czech for Gypsies)—photographs of Roma society taken between 1962 and 1971 in then-Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, France, and Spain. Roma scholar and sociologist Will Guy, who wrote for both the 1975 and 2011 editions, updates his analysis of the condition of the Roma today, including the most recent upheavals in France and Europe. Stuart Alexander, photo historian and newly appointed editor in chief of Delpire Éditeur, contributes a brief historiography of the evolution of this body of work in book form." KOUDELKA!
Book of the Day Posted Dec 29, 2019

Book of the Day > Doug Meyer: Heroes: A Tribute

Book of the Day > Doug Meyer: Heroes, A Tribute. Published by Tra Publising. "Heroes: A Tribute pays homage to fifty brilliant, creative figures who were early victims of AIDS and AIDS-related illnesses. Through captivating, three-dimensional portraits that reflect core aspects of each individual, artist Doug Meyer celebrates the lives and accomplishments of pioneers from the worlds of art, design, film, and dance—people such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, Rudolph Nureyev, Freddie Mercury, Rock Hudson, John Duka, Tina Chow, Klaus Nomi, Halston, and Angelo Donghia. In addition to honoring the individuals portrayed, Meyer hopes to highlight their contributions for younger generations. Heroes began as an installation at a DIFFA (Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS) event and grew into a traveling exhibition. The portraits vary significantly in form, material, and style, and incorporate drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography. Meyer often blends techniques and media, such as terracotta, églomisé, papier-mâché, and computer-generated collage. The text includes essays by Meyer and contributing writer Beth Dunlop as well as short biographies of each hero. The Trade Edition was produced in response to the popularity of the Art and Collector’s editions and includes additional pages from Meyer’s sketchbooks showing his process, new photography of the portraits, a graphic redesign featuring colorful backgrounds for the portraits, and reorganized editorial content."
Book of the Day Posted Dec 28, 2019

Book of the Day > Bruce Weber: All-American XIX: No Small Thing, Desire

Book of the Day > Bruce Weber: All-American XIX: No Small Thing, Desire. Published by Little Bear Press. "Willa Cather once wrote, “The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing—desire.” Using her insight as a point of departure, Bruce Weber has devoted this nineteenth edition of the “All-American” journal series to individuals whose creativity, fearlessness or endurance in the face of adversity exemplify some shared human impulse for expression, for freedom, for life. Artists light the way in this latest editon. Nova Stanley, a junior at LaGuardia in New York City, illustrates her family with a practiced, youthful swagger. The sculptor Sheila Hicks shares a lifetime’s worth of wisdom picked up while working and weaving in every corner of the globe. Jamie Wyeth, accomplished heir to his family’s painting tradition, welcomes our readers into his Maine studio. And one of the all-time great art world love stories is captured in a photoessay devoted to Rachel Feinstein and John Currin. Bruce Weber shares photography duties in this issue with Consuelo Kanaga, a lesser-known contemporary of Weston, Lange and Stieglitz whose work reflects her deep commitment to social justice—and with John Dugdale, who employs 19th century photography techniques in a practice informed by his experience with and survival of the AIDS crisis. We are also honored to present portraits and a testimonial by Auschwitz survivor Magda Bader. All-American XIX: No Small Thing, Desire features texts by Lucille Clifton, William Carpenter, Rachel Carson and Joni Mitchell."
Book of the Day Posted Dec 27, 2019

Book of the Day > Shirley Baker

Book of the Day > Shirley Baker. Published by MACK. "Shirley Baker developed her first photograph as a young girl ‘from the darkness of the coal shed’ in her hometown of Salford, Northwest England. From this moment, she developed a lifelong interest in documentary photography, amounting to a vast and celebrated archival collection that spans the length of her career, dating from the 1950s until 2000. Edited by Lou Stoppard, this book presents an extensive–and, uniquely, female–depiction of post-war life; an eccentric survey which combines her better-known street photographs of Manchester, Salford and Blackpool with previously unseen photographs that span the UK, all the way to the South of France, Italy and Japan. Instances of humour abound in the collection, casting a spotlight on the idiosyncrasies of British identity: a high street shopper cocks his head echoing the mannequin behind him, an older woman with cigarette-wrinkled lips looks into the lens with an almost comic stoicism, children play, mimicking adults. The changing landscapes, fashions, photographic styles and tones that make up the sequence are woven together by Baker’s singular attentiveness to moments of wit and warmth in daily life."
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