Book of the Day Posted Jan 15, 2020

Book of the Day > Basil Wolverton: Brain Bats of Venus: The Life and Comics of... Vol. 2 (1942–1952)

Book of the Day > Basil Wolverton: Brain Bats of Venus: The Life and Comics of... Vol. 2 (1942–1952). Published by Fantagraphics Books. "The peak period of a producer of preposterous pictures. Basil Wolverton was a commercial oddity, a one-man art factory who sidestepped conventional virtuosity by forging a highly personal and intricate approach to black-and-white graphics, linked to an intense, often disturbing, imagination and sense of humor. He created an impressive body of work, and Brain Bats of Venus represents Wolverton during his most prolific decade. In 1946, Wolverton attained national prominence by creating the winning image of Lena the Hyena, “the ugliest woman in all creation,” for Al Capp’s hit comic strip, Li’l Abner. Wolverton’s Lena was unveiled in nearly 400 newspapers, and prominently featured in Life Magazine. This exposure led to his most successful period as a working cartoonist. The volume continues Sadowski’s biography, which includes scores of letters between Wolverton and his editors and publishers and excerpts from his personal diaries, providing documentary insight not only into Wolverton’s day-to-day life and career, but also the inner workings of the early comic book industry. Brain Bats is also chock full of Wolverton’s comics stories from this period, including 17 science-fiction and horror tales fully restored and never before collected in a single volume."
Miscellany Posted Jan 15, 2020

Steve

Our friend Steve Kilfoy - and 20-year Arcana veteran - has passed away. The last three years have been fraught for him and his body succumbed to leukemia last night. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who supported him through his life and through his illness, supported his Go Fund Me campaign, sent him books, brought him food, thought a good thought for him. We love him and we will miss him. Lee + Whitney + all of the Arcana family
Book of the Day Posted Jan 12, 2020

Book of the Day > Off The Wall: American Art To Wear

Book of the Day > Off The Wall: American Art To Wear. Published by Philadelphia Museum of Art & Yale University Press. “This is the first publication to consider art to wear, also known as wearable art, as a discrete American movement that mirrored the cultural, political, social, and spiritual concerns of a generation that came of age in the late 1960s and 1970s. Trained primarily in the fine arts, they adopted nontraditional forms, materials, and techniques to create works using the body as an armature. Collectively, these practitioners have had a significant but underrecognized impact on art making and education. Their legacy continues today among younger artists who have embraced multimedia forms of expression.”
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!
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