Books

Named one of the best books of 2021 by Artforum

Afro-Atlantic Historiesbrings together a selection of more than 400 works and documents by more than 200 artists from the 16th to the 21st centuries that express and analyze the ebbs and flows between Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe. The book is motivated by the desire and need to draw parallels, frictions and dialogues around the visual cultures of Afro-Atlantic territories—their experiences, creations, worshiping and philosophy. The so-called Black Atlantic, to use the term coined by Paul Gilroy, is geography lacking precise borders, a fluid field where African experiences invade and occupy other nations, territories and cultures.
The plural and polyphonic quality of “histórias” is also of note; unlike the English “histories,” the word in Portuguese carries a double meaning that encompasses both fiction and nonfiction, personal, political, economic and cultural, as well as mythological narratives.
The book features more than 400 works from Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean, as well as Europe, from the 16th to the 21st century. These are organized in eight thematic groupings: Maps and Margins; Emancipations; Everyday Lives; Rites and Rhythms; Routes and Trances; Portraits; Afro Atlantic Modernisms; Resistances and Activism.
Artists include: Nina Chanel Abney, Emma Amos, Benny Andrews, Emanoel Araujo, Maria Auxiliadora, Romare Bearden, John Biggers, Paul Cézanne, Victoria Santa Cruz, Beauford Delaney, Aaron Douglas, Melvin Edwards, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Ben Enwonwu, Ellen Gallagher, Theodore Géricault, Barkley Hendricks, William Henry Jones, Loïs Mailou Jones, Titus Kaphar, Wifredo Lam, Norman Lewis, Ibrahim Mahama, Edna Manley, Archibald Motley, Abdias Nascimento, Gilberto de la Nuez, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Dalton Paula, Rosana Paulino, Howardena Pindell, Heitor dos Prazeres, Joshua Reynolds, Faith Ringgold, Gerard Sekoto, Alma Thomas, Hank Willis Thomas, Rubem Valentim, Kara Walker and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

Proceeds from sale of this book have been donated to 826NYC  who offer highly individualized creative writing instruction for over 4,000 young New Yorkers every year. Free programs throughout NYC empower young authors and develop crucial skills they need to thrive in the classroom and beyond.

“(D)on’t think for one minute that Black Imagination is easy. As you will read here, it is hard-earned and sometimes dangerous, but it’s necessary, and radical, to claim and work towards. Listening to my people in this book gave me so much life, and I’m pretty sure, dear reader, you’re in for the same.” —from the Foreword by Steven Dunn



What is your origin story?

How do you heal yourself?

Imagine a world where you are loved, safe, and valued.



“Witnessing is sacred work too. Seeing ourselves as whole and healthy is an act of pure rebellion in a world so titillated by our constant subjugation,” reflects viral curator Natasha Marin, on Black Imagination. This dynamic collection of Black voices works like an incantation of origin, healing, and imagination. Born from a series of conceptual art exhibitions, the perspectives gathered here are no where near monochromatic. “Craving nuance over stereotype, we sought out black children, black youth, LGBTQ+ black folks, unsheltered black folks, incarcerated black folks, neurodivergent black folks, as well as differently-abled black folks.” Each insists on their own variance and challenges every reader to witness for themselves that Black Lives (and Imaginations) Matter.



Cover art by Vanessa German.





Praise for Black Imagination



Recommended by Jason Reynolds on PBS News Hour



“Black Imagination reads like a survival guide with a sense of humor as deep as its sense of history, a literary oasis for black people fed up with the white gaze.”

—The Stranger



“Our bodies and actions are under external control, but the well-spring of rebellion is our own imagination. In Black Imagination, Natasha Marin shows us how to free our imagining — as a first step toward freeing ourselves.”

—Gloria Steinem



“Black Imagination is somehow as innovatively utopic as it is sincerely soulful. I’ve never felt the physical feeling of pages melting in my hands or chapters folding themselves into squadrons of black airplanes flying to freedom because I’ve never experienced an art object like Black Imagination. It is exquisite art in action.”

—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy



“Have you ever read a book and realized you’re reading something you didn’t know you needed? This is not a book to simply read in total and digest—yes, do that—but it is also a work to return to in parts whenever necessary. It’s a book to ingest like medicine, because it is that. Lastly, it is a reminder that joy, too, is necessary and also a form of resistance.”

—Rion Amilcar Scott, author The World Doesn’t Require You



“In an age where spirituality has a price-tag and crystals, teas, and sage reign supreme, this book is a welcome rebuttal. Black Imagination shakes us out of our cultural trance and reminds us that so much of what we deem to be true is learned, and so much of what is actually true has to be remembered. With the storytelling talent of Grio tradition this book is required reading for the African diaspora.”

—Akilah Hughes, author of Obviously: Stories from My Timeline and host of Crooked Media’s What A Day



“If there is healing to be done it begins with a book like Black Imagination. It’s time to return to our beauty, step by step, word by word.”

—E. Ethelbert Miller, author of If God Invented Baseball



“Words create worlds. Black Imagination weaves lyrical narratives of being and becoming into a tapestry that shows us the beauty and power of unfettered imagination. From cosmic allegories on origin to piercing reckonings with race and family trauma, this book creates a doorway through which we can become reacquainted with our essential selves, and dream a whole new reality.”

—Keisha-Gaye Anderson, author of Everything Is Necessary



“(W)eaponize(s) a conceptual work of art in the asymmetrical war that is race in America… the words penetrate the defenses and break your heart.”

—Dr Jon Woodson, author of Summer Games and The Esoteric Mission of Zora Neale Hurston



“Moving, nuanced, and realer than real, Black Imagination is a necessary archive for these times. This unique project asks Black people to respond to three simple yet profound questions about one’s origin, self-healing rituals and alternate world visions in which Black people feel safe and are valued. The rawness of these pages, along with a versatility of voice and vision makes for an immersive read that galvanizes the imagination and massages the heart.”

—Samantha Thornhill author of A Card for My Father



“Authentic and empowered, wistful and insistent, the chorus of voices gathered in Black Imagination sings in defiance of patriarchal, heterosexist, white supremacist erasure. Drawing from the ether of pre-memory, the soulsoil of ancestral knowledge, and depths of individual and collective longing, this collection bears witness to the many ways Blackfolk have devised/unearthed to resist the chokeholds of violence on our subjectivity. A powerful testament to the richness and resilience of Black interiority, Black Imagination reminds each and every one of us of our truest story: ‘Despite and beyond time, I am.’”

—Lauren K. Alleyne, author of Honeyfish



“The agenda of Black Imagination is defiantly hopeful, and rests on a simple, but deeply complicated tenet of faith—faith in the proposition that empathy and hope are all functions of the imagination, or even the products of the imagination. To read Black Imagination is to witness writers wrestling with the abstraction of language to achieve the tangible and bodily effects of safety in a hostile world. Think Soul Train Line, think The Stroll, think the joyous striving with language for the possibilities of safety and hope.”

—Kwame Dawes, author of Nebraska



“Black Imagination reveals itself at times as a baptism, a confessional, a communion, and a coronation. This really isn’t a book. It’s more like a rosary or a mandala. Which is to say, this is a holy thing. Handle it with reverence. Read it out loud like a prayer.”

—Mike Gaston, CUT CEO



“What happens when the Black imagination thrives, unburdened by the white gaze? This collection reaches across time and generations, cities and continents, identities and experiences, to answer: We fill the unburdened space with rituals, remembrances, and discoveries, with our joys and vulnerabilities. The contributors’ poems, vignettes and smaller morsels of language come together to form a chorus, their voices recurring in multiple passages throughout the collection, to powerful effect. Black Imagination is a freedom song, deep-throated and resonant. The collection also answers the age-old Black question—Where your people from?—and builds on it: Where do you go to heal? And there is healing in the pages of this collection, medicine in the lines.”

—Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies



“It’s fitting that this project began on the backend of Marin’s two reparations projects—the first for folks to reach out to each other; the second Marin’s healing of herself—cause this here is a catalogue and a map. One of the riffs begins “[l]egend says that I was born in the back seat of a Cadillac,” and you know Avery Young is telling you all that’s needed to know he survives. These pieces, together, are a kind of rent party, a reminder that Black folks can gather in a room and heal. “Coping is ever so awkward,” as Natasha herself says—but damn if it ain’t necessary. And damn if that coping itself, does turn into a beauty here, a Black imagination makes all of us better.”

—Reginald Dwayne Betts author of Bastards of the Reagan Era



“I challenge us to read this tremendous and tremendously important book, white friends. I challenge us to read it without inserting ourselves into the narrative and without rushing to interpret experiences that are not our own (a hint: none of these are). I challenge us to read it without revving into some look-at-me-ish version of empathy which, at best, only ever demonstrates the weakest, most facile form of allyship. And then I challenge us to read it again. And again. “We persist,” Natasha Marin writes. “We have persisted. We will continue to persist with or without acknowledgement.” Black Imagination does not need our justification. But it demands our attention. And it’s about damn time it gets it.”

—Jill Alexander Essbaum, author of Hausfrau



“Black Imagination required Natasha Marin to curate as a curate in the medieval sense—a spiritual guide that cares for souls. This assemblage—at once a book, an installation, a secret meeting and a waiting room—dares to sing an aria in white and violet with Brooks. We are challenged to move beyond the abject, beyond pure pessimism, on the wings of a different criticality—to walk with Hayden, with Douglass ‘visioning a world where none is lonely, none hunted, alien.’”

—Christian Campbell, author of Running the Dusk



“Like a goooood gris-gris sack comes this book. I looked inside and among the medicines found some warm balsam, some astringent drams in brilliant vials, even powerful seeds that tumbled me up into deep interiors. What Natasha Marin has curated via this anthology-as-curative she herself needed, is a multifarious and vibrant sociality of Black care; thus, a network entangling giving a damn with only one left to give. That generosity is Black Imagination’s principle ingredient pot-and-kettled into the poems, microessays, origin stories, spells, and rituals gathered for our collective dreaming and healing. How you feeling? That so? Black Imagination invites you to accept this good balm being given.”

—Douglas Kearney, author of Buck Studies

“These feel like images you might have dreamed, both of the kind that slip away and the ones you manage to keep tenuously in your grasp, slippery, otherworldly. . . . Before our eyes, Zanele Muholi transforms into a mother, a domestic worker, an Afrofuturist, an oracle. It’s fiction and it is not.”—Yrsa Daley-Ward, The New York Times Book Review

Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness is the long-awaited monograph from one of the most powerful visual activists of our time. The book features over ninety of Muholi’s evocative self-portraits, each image drafted from material props in Muholi’s immediate environment. A powerfully arresting collection of work, Muholi’s radical statements of identity, race, and resistance are a direct response to contemporary and historical racisms. As Muholi states, “I am producing this photographic document to encourage individuals in my community to be brave enough to occupy spaces—brave enough to create without fear of being vilified. . . . To teach people about our history, to rethink what history is all about, to reclaim it for ourselves—to encourage people to use artistic tools such as cameras as weapons to fight back.”

With more than twenty written contributions from curators, poets, and authors, alongside luxurious tritone reproductions of Muholi’s images, Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness is as much a manifesto of resistance as it is an autobiographical, artistic statement.

Details

“The first thing to note about Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama: Hail the Dark Lioness is that it begins before you open it. The striking cover portrait itself—“Ntozakhe II, Parktown, Johannesburg,” from 2016—demands ample time to be taken in…This is how the book starts on you, its front and back cover working together to prepare you for what lies within. A hint at its insides.”—Yrsa Daley-Ward, The New York Times Book Review

Contributors

Photographs by Zanele Muholi. Interviewer Renée Mussai. Contributions by Unoma Azuah, Milisuthando Bongela, Cheryl Clarke, Fariba Derakhshani, Andiswa Dlamini, Sophie Hackett, M. Neelika Jayawardane, Mapula Lehong, Sindiwe Magona, Napo Masheane, Hlonipha Mokoena, Jackie Mondi, Carla Williams, Deborah Willis, and Christie van Zyl.

Zanele Muholi (born in Umlazi, Durban, South Africa, 1972) is a visual activist and photographer, cofounder of the Forum for the Empowerment of Women, and founder of Inkanyiso, a forum for queer and visual media. Muholi has won numerous awards for their work, including the ICP Infinity Award for Documentary and Photojournalism (2016); the Fine Prize for an emerging artist at the 2013 Carnegie International; a Prince Claus Award (2013); and both the Casa África award for best female photographer and a Fondation Blachère award at Les Rencontres de Bamako biennial of African photography (2009). Their Faces and Phases series was shown at dOCUMENTA (13) and the 55th Venice Biennale and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2015. Muholi is an honorary professor at the University of the Arts Bremen, Germany. They are represented by Stevenson Gallery, Johannesburg, and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York.

“Travel back in time to witness the creation of the world’s favorite web-slinger as dreamed up by comic book legends Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, who redefined what it meant to be a hero. In this Hulk-sized, collector’s dream, the first 21 Spider-Man stories from 1962–1964 have been meticulously photographed from the most pristine copies of these rare comic books—a fine art celebration of the teen super hero in this inaugural volume of TASCHEN’s Marvel Comics Library series.”

Hardcover, 11 x 15.6 in., 10.62 lb, 698 pages

A New York Times Book Review 2020 holiday gift guide pick

When Life magazine asked Gordon Parks to illustrate a recurring series of articles on crime in the United States in 1957, he had already been a staff photographer for nearly a decade, the first African American to hold this position. Parks embarked on a six-week journey that took him and a reporter to the streets of New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Unlike much of his prior work, the images made were in color. The resulting eight-page photo-essay “The Atmosphere of Crime” was noteworthy not only for its bold aesthetic sophistication, but also for how it challenged stereotypes about criminality then pervasive in the mainstream media. They provided a richly hued, cinematic portrayal of a largely hidden world: that of violence, police work and incarceration, seen with empathy and candor.

Parks rejected clichés of delinquency, drug use and corruption, opting for a more nuanced view that reflected the social and economic factors tied to criminal behavior and afforded a rare window into the working lives of those charged with preventing and prosecuting it. Transcending the romanticism of the gangster film, the suspense of the crime caper and the racially biased depictions of criminality then prevalent in American popular culture, Parks coaxed his camera to record reality so vividly and compellingly that it would allow Life’s readers to see the complexity of these chronically oversimplified situations. The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 includes an expansive selection of never-before-published photographs from Parks’ original reportage.

Gordon Parks was born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912. An itinerant laborer, he worked as a brothel pianist and railcar porter, among other jobs, before buying a camera at a pawnshop, training himself and becoming a photographer. He evolved into a modern-day Renaissance man, finding success as a film director, writer and composer. The first African-American director to helm a major motion picture, he helped launch the blaxploitation genre with his film Shaft (1971). Parks died in 2006.

A Chicago Tribune 2020 holiday gift guide pick

AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) was founded on the South Side of Chicago in 1968 by a group of five young Black artists. Today, it is one of the oldest continuously active American art collectives. The pronunciation—Af-FREE-co-bruh—emphasizes the second syllable, signaling the group’s central principle grounded in Black liberation: creative expression reflecting the Black experience and Black influences.
AfriCOBRA’s founding artists—Jeff Donaldson, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu and Gerald Williams—differed in disciplines and artistic vocabularies but were brought together by the common aspiration to create work that speaks directly to Black people utilizing an identifiably Black aesthetic. This publication celebrates the fifty-year anniversary of AfriCOBRA’s founding and marks the collective’s powerful relevance today. AfriCOBRA: Messages to the People documents two exhibitions curated by Jeffreen M. Hayes, PhD: one at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, and another as an official collateral event of the 58th Venice Biennale. It features more than 80 works by the original members as well as those by Sherman Beck, Napoleon Jones-Henderson, Omar Lama, Carolyn Mims Lawrence and Nelson Stevens.
More than a historical overview of AfriCOBRA, this book is a response to the artists’ continuing contributions and influence, connecting their works to the contemporary moment through essays, archival photographs and ephemera, exhibition views, and contemporary photographs that celebrate the impact of this revolutionary art collective. As their name states, the artists and artworks of AfriCOBRA were as relevant in 1968 as they are today in the continued struggle for Black liberation.

Named one of the best books of 2021 by The Financial Times

From the most avant-garde jazz musicians, visual artists and poets to architects, philosophers and writers, Black Ivy: A Revolt in Style charts a period in American history when Black men across the country adopted the clothing of a privileged elite and made it their own. It shows how a generation of men took the classic Ivy Look and made it cool, edgy and unpredictable in ways that continue to influence today's modern menswear.
Here you will see some famous, infamous and not so famous figures in Black culture such as Amiri Baraka, Charles White, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Sidney Poitier, and how they reinvented Ivy and Prep fashion—the dominant looks of the time. The real stars of the book—the Oxford cloth button-down shirt, the hand-stitched loafer, the soft shoulder three-button jacket and the perennial repp tie—are all here. What Black Ivy explores is how these clothes are reframed and redefined by a stylish group of men from outside the mainstream, challenging the status quo, struggling for racial equality and civil rights.
Boasting the work of some of America's finest photographers and image-makers, this must-have tome is a celebration of how, regardless of the odds, great style always wins.

Printed in time to coincide with a gallery show in San Francisco, this is Dave Eggers's first collection of drawings. Most of these works are of unusual mammals, most often accompanied by slogans with ancient, heroic, or just plain odd overtones. This 14" x 19", full-color package is a combination of 26 large-sized prints and an accompanying booklet.

It Is Right to Draw Their Fur echoes questions posed by Eggers in McSweeney's Issue 27: What is the line between a doodle, a cartoon, a gag, and a work of fine art? Does it seem, sometimes, that the artist is defacing his or her own work by adding text? Is loose draftsmanship appealing, in that it's intimate and disarming? Is absurdity more appealing when it comes across as humble?

For most of his youth, author/editor Dave Eggers was an aspiring painter. After college, he was a cartoonist and illustrator for dozens of magazines and newspapers. In 2008, he curated a show for apexart (a nonprofit art gallery in New York) featuring the works of René Magritte, Francisco Goya, Andy Warhol, David Shrigley, Kurt Vonnegut, Shel Silverstein, Raymond Pettibon, and many others.

Proceeds from sale of this book have been donated to 826NYC  who offer highly individualized creative writing instruction for over 4,000 young New Yorkers every year. Free programs throughout NYC empower young authors and develop crucial skills they need to thrive in the classroom and beyond.

The Abridged History of Rainfall is a finalist for the National Book Award.
Jay Hopler’s second collection, a mourning song for his father, is an elegy of uproar, a careening hymn to disaster and its aftermath. In lyric poems by turns droll and desolate, Hopler documents the struggle to live in the face of great loss, a task that sends him ranging through Florida’s torrid subtropics, the mountains of the American West, the streets of Rome, and the Umbrian countryside. Vivid, dynamic, unrestrained: The Abridged History of Rainfall is a festival of glowing saints and fighting cocks, of firebombs and birdsong.

Praise for The Abridged History of Rainfall:

“By these poems, your faith will be shattered and restored, restored and wondrously shattered again.”
—Craig Morgan Teicher

“This is a major work of art. Hopler’s vision and voice, both painfully complex because of how much of the world he allows to attach to him, to stake its claim on him, teach us we are in the presence of lasting, inimitable poems. No one writes like Hopler. And no one ever will.”
—Katie Ford

“In his second collection of poetry, Jay Hopler’s incredible ear and inventiveness with poetic from return full throttle. Even as they engage grief and loss, the poems here are funny and sardonic, not afraid to wear their feelings on their sleeves; they’re a tonic.”
—Dana Levin

Proceeds from sale of this book have been donated to 826NYC  who offer highly individualized creative writing instruction for over 4,000 young New Yorkers every year. Free programs throughout NYC empower young authors and develop crucial skills they need to thrive in the classroom and beyond.

A band of intrepid chickens leave behind the boredom of farm life, joining the crew of the pirate ship Pitiless to seek fortune and glory on the high seas. Led by a grizzled captain into the territory of the Dog Knights, they soon learn what it means to be courageous, merciful, and not seasick quite so much of the time.

A whimsical and unexpected adventure tale, Chicken of the Sea originated in the five-year-old mind of Ellison Nguyen, son of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen; father and son committed the story to the page, then enlisted the artistic talents of Caldecott Honor winner Thi Bui and her thirteen-year-old son, Hien Bui-Stafford, to illustrate it. This unique collaboration between two generations of artists and storytellers invites you aboard for adventure, even if you’re chicken. Maybe especially if you’re chicken.

Ice Cold: A Hip-Hop Jewelry History presents the bling culture of rappers and their jewelry. Using 40 years of iconic imagery and compelling stories, this visual history shines a light on the world of hip-hop, where mega stars from Run-DMC to Tupac and Jay-Z to Migos and Cardi B flash brilliant custom pieces to show status and personal style.

“Montgomery’s photographs capture the reality of Americans in crisis, in all our flawed, tragic, ridiculous glory.” —Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

American Mirror is award-winning photographer Philip Montgomery’s dramatic chronicle of the United States at a time of profound change. Through his intimate and powerful reporting and a signature black-and-white style, Montgomery reveals the fault lines in American society, from police violence and the opioid addiction crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic and the demonstrations in support of Black lives. Yet in his unflinching images, we also see moments of grace and sacrifice, glimmers of solidarity and tireless advocates for democracy. Like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans before him, Montgomery has made an unforgettable testament of a nation at a crossroads.

Peter Lindbergh and Azzedine Alaïa, the photographer and the couturier, were united by their love of black, a love that they would cultivate alike in silver print and solid color garments. Accompanying the exhibition Azzedine Alaïa, Peter Lindberghat the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa in Paris, this book celebrates their artistic partnership.

Hardcover, 9.4” x 12.9”, 240 pages

A visual and conceptual conversation between two leading US photo-artists famed for their mutual explorations of race, class and power

Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems met in New York in the late 1970s, and over the next 45 years these close friends and colleagues have each produced unique and influential bodies of work around shared interests and concerns. This publication brings together over 140 photographs and video art from the 1970s through the 2010s by two of our most notable and influential photo-based artists.
Since first meeting at the Studio Museum in Harlem five decades ago, Bey and Weems have maintained spirited and supportive mutual engagement while exploring and addressing similar themes: race, class, representation, and systems of power. Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue brings their work together in five thematic groupings to shed light on their unique creative visions and trajectories, and their shared concerns and principles.
Photographer Dawoud Bey (born 1953) had his first exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. Since then, his work has been presented internationally to critical and popular acclaim. Recent large-scale exhibitions of his photographs have been presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and Tate Modern, London. Bey’s writings on his own and others’ work are included in Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply and Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities. He is a professor of art and Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago.
Famed for her Kitchen Table Series, among other works, Carrie Mae Weems(born 1953) explores power, class, Black identity, womanhood, and the historical past and its resonance in the present moment. In addition to photography, Weems creates video, performance and works of public art, and organizes thematic gatherings which bring together creative thinkers across a broad array of disciplines. Her work has been exhibited across the world, at venues such as the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo and the American Academy in Rome.

Hardcover, 9.8” x 13.4” (9.24lbs; 560 pages)

William Eggleston's Guide was the first one-man show of color photographs ever presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum's first publication of color photography. The reception was divided and passionate. The book and show unabashedly forced the art world to deal with color photography, a medium scarcely taken seriously at the time, and with the vernacular content of a body of photographs that could have been but definitely weren't some average American's Instamatic pictures from the family album. These photographs heralded a new mastery of the use of color as an integral element of photographic composition. Bound in a textured cover inset with a photograph of a tricycle and stamped with yearbook-style gold lettering, the Guide contained 48 images edited down from 375 shot between 1969 and 1971 and displayed a deceptively casual, actually super-refined look at the surrounding world. Here are people, landscapes and odd little moments in and around Eggleston's hometown of Memphis--an anonymous woman in a loudly patterned dress and cat's eye glasses sitting, left leg slightly raised, on an equally loud outdoor sofa; a coal-fired barbecue shooting up flames, framed by a shiny silver tricycle, the curves of a gleaming black car fender, and someone's torso; a tiny, gray-haired lady in a faded, flowered housecoat, standing expectant, and dwarfed in the huge dark doorway of a mint-green room whose only visible furniture is a shaded lamp on an end table. For this edition of William Eggleston's Guide, The Museum of Modern Art has made new color separations from the original 35 mm slides, producing a facsimile edition in which the color will be freshly responsive to the photographer's intentions.

Flowers is a facsimile of the third of William Eggleston’s (born 1939) rare artist’s books, which was first published in an edition of only 15 by Caldecott Chubb in New York in 1978. The original Flowers was a linen-bound volume with red leather spine and corners recreating the look of a photo album, and housed in a slipcase. Within its pages were 12 original chromogenic coupler prints focused on the theme of flowers.

The latest in the Dung Beetle Learning series, Mummy, John and Susan are taken on a thrilling Christmas adventure. "Come with me," says Father Christmas, "and I will show you the magic of kindness." "And I will undermine your vicious program of indoctrination," Mummy counters. She then proceeds to strip Christmas of all its magic and meaning, for the benefit of John, Susan and mankind in general. This book will joyfully ruin the Yuletide festival period for children and adults alike.

American visual artist Marilyn Minter (born 1948) has long cultivated a space between the classical and the commercial for her photorealistic paintings and visceral photographs. Minter’s art is characterized by an emphasis on natural textures in all of their extremes—whether that of the turquoise eyeshadow on a young woman’s face or the glittery grit on the underside of a high-heeled shoe. This monograph dedicated to her recent works presents her 2009 film Green Pink Caviar and a dozen monumental paintings as well as the processes behind such works.
In her most recent painting series, Minter is inspired by classical representations of the female bather as an artistic subject from ancient Greece to early Impressionism. She offers a contemporary version of this figure: her female subjects relax and wash themselves in modern showers, their faces and bodies partially obscured by a film of condensation on the glass separating them from the viewer. In some images the women appear as a mere blur behind the glass; in others, the rivulets of water that course down the glass plane reveal enough to identify a face or body part. The effect is a sensuousness that defies the male voyeuristic gaze seen throughout art history.

Many tattoo connoisseurs consider the Japanese tradition to be the finest in the world for its detail, complexity and compositional skill. Its style and subject matter are drawn from the visual treasure trove of Japanese popular culture, in particular the color woodblock prints of the early 19th century known as ukiyo-e.

This book tells the fascinating story of how ukiyo-e first inspired tattoo artists as the pictorial tradition of tattooing in Japan was just beginning. It explores the Japanese tattoo’s evolving meanings, from symbol of devotion to punishment and even to crime, and reveals the tales behind specific motifs. With lush, colorful images of flowers blooming on the arm of a thief, sea monsters coiling across the back of a hero and legendary warriors battling on the chests of actors, the tattoos in these prints can offer the same vivid inspiration today as they did 200 years ago.

A Chicago Tribune 2020 holiday gift guide pick

In 1961, Leonard Freed was on assignment in Berlin. He photographed a Black soldier standing in front of the wall. The irony of this soldier defending the USA on foreign soil while Black Americans at home were fighting for their civil rights was not lost on Freed. He returned to the States in 1963 to photograph the March on Washington and began a journey to document Black communities in the North and South living within a deeply segregated and racist country.

Leonard Freed’s seminal civil rights photo essay, Black in White America, was first published in 1968. This newly expanded and redesigned edition includes unseen photographs, as well as Freed’s most iconic images and is the definitive collection of his photographs from the time. The images have never been printed in such quality before, the clarity of print serving to bring home the singular power of Freed’s talent as a documentarian.

This extraordinary work includes pivotal moments in the civil rights movement, such as the March on Washington and the Selma to Montgomery marches. It is also a nuanced journey into the ordinary lives of a marginalized Black community living within a deeply divided nation. Freed was celebrated for his singular talent as a socially conscious photojournalist, and this essay conveys with power and dignity the exhausting, endless struggle of being Black in white America.

Leonard Freed (1929–2006) was an acclaimed American documentary photojournalist and member of Magnum Photos. Born and raised in working-class Brooklyn, Freed rose to prominence for his portrayal of societal and racial injustices, particularly in relation to the Black community during the American civil rights movement in the 1960s. He is also renowned for his photo-essays on the Jewish community in Amsterdam and Germany, the Yom Kippur War, Asian immigration in England, North Sea oil development, Spain after Franco and the New York police department in the 1970s, among others.

In 1941, Jacob Lawrence, then just 23 years old, made a series of 60 small tempera paintings on the Great Migration, the decades-long mass movement of black Americans from the rural South to the urban North that began in 1915–16. The child of migrant parents, Lawrence worked partly from his own experience and partly from long research in his neighborhood library. The result was an epic narrative of the collective history of his people. Moving from scenes of terror and violence to images of great intimacy, and drawing on film, photography, political cartoons and other sources in popular culture, Lawrence created an innovative format of sequential panels, each image accompanied by a descriptive caption. Within months of its completion, the series entered the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Phillips Memorial Gallery (today The Phillips Collection), Washington, DC, each institution acquiring 30 panels.

The Migration Series is now a landmark in the history of modern art. Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series, now in paperback, grounds Lawrence’s work in the cultural and political debates that shaped his art and demonstrates its relevance for artists and writers today. The series is reproduced in full; short texts accompanying each panel relate them to the history of the Migration and explore Lawrence’s technique and approach. Alongside scholarly essays, the book also includes 11 newly commissioned poems, by Rita Dove, Nikky Finney, Terrance Hayes, Tyehimba Jess, Yusef Komunyakaa, Patricia Spears Jones, Natasha Trethewey, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Crystal Williams and Kevin Young, that respond directly to the series. The distinguished poet Elizabeth Alexander edited and introduces the section.

Leah Dickerman is Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Elsa Smithgall is Curator at The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Jodi Roberts is Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Elizabeth Alexander is Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University. Her most recent book of poetry is Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010 (Graywolf Press, 2010).

Rita Dove is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1987) and a former United States Poet Laureate (1993–95). Her most recent book of poetry is Sonata Mulattica (W. W. Norton, 2009).

Nikky Finney is John H. Bennett, Jr. Endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Southern Letters, the University of South Carolina. She is a winner of the National Book Award for Poetry for her book Head Off & Split (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2011).Terrance Hayes is Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a MacArthur Fellow (2014) and a winner of the National Book Award for Poetry for his book Lighthead (Penguin, 2010).Tyehimba Jess is Assistant Professor of English at the College of Staten Island in City University of New York. He is a winner of the National Poetry Series for his book leadbelly (Wave Books, 2005).

Yusef Komunyakaa is Global Distinguished Professor of English at New York University. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1994). His most recent book of poetry is The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).

Patricia Spears Jones is a poet based in New York. Her most recent book of poetry is Living in the Love Economy(Overpass Books, 2014).

Natasha Trethewey is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing, Emory University. She is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2007) and a former United States Poet Laureate (2012–14). Her most recent book of poetry is Thrall (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Cornell University. Her most recent book of poetry is Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).

Crystal Williams is Associate Vice President, Chief Diversity Officer and Professor of English at Bates College. Her most recent book of poetry is Detroit as Barn(Lost Horse Press, 2014).

Kevin Young is Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Previously, he was the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing and Curator of Literary Collections and Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University. His most recent book of poetry is Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014).

By the start of 1966, the Rolling Stones’ position as rock gods was established. They were making serious money and splashing out on new homes and cars. Their official photographer and friend, Gered Mankowitz, was invited to shoot an “at home” session with each member of the band. “They hated the idea of unknown photographers visiting their private sanctuaries … If I did it then the press office would have a large selection of this type of image and could fulfil any magazine request without having to bother the band.”

Mankowitz kept these photographs in supermarket carrier bags stashed under his desk for several years, “getting in my way and frequently wondering why I continued to hold on to them.” This is the first time these sessions have been collated and published. The book includes both iconic and unseen photographs: Mick in a kipper tie turning on his new television and posing outside with a new Aston Martin; Keith, Lord of the Manor-style, with his blue Bentley and antique sword at his East Sussex home; Charlie grinning next to lingerie drying in the garden; Brian in obligatory silk shirt in front of a handpainted mural; Bill in the kitchen with his dog.

Goin’ Home with the Rolling Stones ’66 is a beguiling collection of images, shot with incredible skill, that offers that rare thing in Stones photography—a fresh perspective. It features an introduction by Mankowitz and a foreword from the Rolling Stones’ legendary manager, Andrew Loog Oldham.

Fashion photographer Arthur Elgort has loved jazz since he was nine years old, when a childhood friend introduced him to the music; he soon found himself frequenting jazz clubs all over his native New York City.

The dynamic style that made Elgort such a sensation in fashion photography was directly informed by his love for jazz and dance. His talent as a photographer grew alongside his interest and knowledge of jazz. By the time he was a well-known working photographer, Elgort could parlay his influence into meetings with his boyhood idols, requesting to have his favorite musicians appear in both his fashion and personal work.

Countless jazz greats have appeared in front of Elgort's camera, including Illinois Jacquet, Dexter Gordon and Dorothy Donegan. Each sitting produced not only images but memorable stories: the time Elgort took Dorothy shopping at Chanel; what it was like to shoot Dexter in his Hell's Kitchen apartment; getting to know Illinois and his wife personally. Arthur Elgort: Jazz collects these moments and more, exploring for the first time the creative exchange between the photographer and his musical heroes.

Arthur Elgort (born 1940) studied painting at Hunter College but quickly transitioned to photography, finding painting too slow and solitary. Elgort attributes much of his spontaneous and liberated style to his lifelong love of music and dance, especially jazz and ballet. In his long career he has worked on many major advertising campaigns, including for Chanel, Valentino and Yves Saint Laurent, shot countless fashion spreads and published several books.

This book features more than 150 rarely seen images documenting the rise of hip hop in the early 1980s, taken by French photographer Sophie Bramly. Bramly lived in New York during this period and became firmly embedded in the emergent scene. The book features many stunning, intimate images of a star-studded roll call of legendary hip hop figures, all of whom were only just getting known or in their ascendency. These include Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmixer DST, Jazzy Jay, Red Alert, Grandmaster Melle Mel, Kurtis Blow, Lisa Lee, the Fat Boys, Run-DMC, Beastie Boys and many more.

Bramly knew that hip hop was becoming a cultural force rather than just a musical fashion, and spent many hours photographing the four essential elements of this new world: the emcees, the deejays, the graffiti artists and the break dancers. Here you will see legendary graffiti artists captured at work and play, such as Keith Haring, Dondi, Futura, Phase One, Zephyr and Lady Pink, and break dancers including members of Magnificent Force, Dynamic Breakers and the Rock Steady Crew.

Bramly’s photographs also chronicle the desolate cityscapes from which hip hop emerged; the energy of the fans who first embraced hip hop; and the crucial players behind the scenes (Bill Laswell, Bernard Zekri, Rick Rubin, Fun Gallery co-owner Patti Astor).

Finally, this book also includes a bonus section documenting the rise of hip hop in Europe. Bramly returned to France in 1984 to find herself once again at the center of a new cultural phenomenon, helping bring the first US hip hop artists to Europe, including Fab Five Freddy, Futura 2000, Rocksteady Crew and many more.

At the 1900 Paris Exposition the pioneering sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois presented an exhibit representing the progress of African Americans since the abolition of slavery. In striking graphic visualisations and photographs (taken by mostly anonymous photographers) he showed the changing status of a newly emancipated people across America and specifically in Georgia, the state with the largest Black population. This beautifully designed book reproduces the photographs alongside the revolutionary graphic works for the first time, and includes a marvelous essay by two celebrated art historians, Jacqueline Francis and Stephen G. Hall.

Du Bois' hand-drawn charts, maps and graphs represented the achievements and economic conditions of African Americans in radically inventive forms, long before such data visualization was commonly used in social research. Their clarity and simplicity seems to anticipate the abstract art of the Russian constructivists and other modernist painters to come. The photographs were drawn from African American communities across the United States. Both the photographers and subjects are mostly anonymous. They show people engaged in various occupations or posing formally for group and studio portraits. Elegant and dignified, they refute the degrading stereotypes of Black people then prevalent in white America. Du Bois' exhibit at the Paris Exposition continues to resonate as a powerful affirmation of the equal rights of Black Americans to lives of freedom and fulfilment. Black Lives 1900 captures this singular work.

American sociologist, historian, author, editor and activist W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was the most influential Black civil rights activist of the first half of the 20th century. He was a protagonist in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, and his 1903 bookThe Souls of Black Folkremains a classic and a landmark of African American literature.

Follow Peter Lindbergh across four decades of pioneering fashion photography. Through countless collaborations with the most venerated names in fashion, the German photographer created new narratives with his humanist approach, which resulted in iconic shots at once introspective and appealing. This book features more than 300 images, many previously unpublished, as well as an updated introduction in which Lindbergh establishes his sentiment on “so-called fashion photography”.

Hardcover, 9.4 x 13.4 in., 7.04 lb, 440 pages

Albertus Seba’s catalog of natural specimens is not only one of the 18th century’s greatest natural history achievements but also one of the most prized natural history books of all time. Inspired from a rare hand-colored original, this collection gathers all his extraordinary illustrations of strange and exotic plants, snakes, corals, as well as “double-headed monsters”, dragons, and many more.

Hardcover, 9.6 x 14.6 in., 10.23 lb, 592 pages

Legendary tattoo artist and historian Henk Schiffmacher takes us on a personal journey through the history of tattooing from the 1730s to the 1970s in this oversized book of stunning tattoo artifacts and designs. Showcasing over two hundred years of worldwide tattoo history, the book brings together the best of SchiffmacherÕs renowned private collection with lively personal commentary by the artÕs most beloved raconteur and philosopher. Hardcover, 11.4 x 15.3 in., 12.23 lb, 440 pages

Proceeds from sale of this book have been donated to 826NYC  who offer highly individualized creative writing instruction for over 4,000 young New Yorkers every year. Free programs throughout NYC empower young authors and develop crucial skills they need to thrive in the classroom and beyond.

In More Curious, Sean Wilsey travels across the U.S., from the launchpad at Cape Canaveral, to the isolated artists’ enclave of Marfa, Texas, to the boardrooms and ballrooms of post–9/11 New York City. Wherever he is, Wilsey captures his surroundings with the precision of a photographer and the raw grace of a skateboarder (he’s an amateur practitioner of both arts). These essays—some of which have been expanded and updated from pieces originally published in Vanity Fair, GQ, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere, and some of which appear here for the first time—comprise nearly fifteen years of Wilsey’s most vital work on the glory and the misery, the beauty and absurdity of contemporary America.

Interviews and Extras:

Read an excerpt on Sean Wilsey’s More Curious in Time Out New York and on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

“Honest writing is funny”: The Atlantic talks to Sean Wilsey about his creative process.

Check out the Paste Magazine interview with Sean Wilsey.

Read the Late Night Library interview with Sean Wilsey.

SF Gate talks to Sean Wilsey and recounts his skateboarding days in San Francisco.

Listen to the Los Angeles Review of Books interview with Sean Wilsey here.

Praise for More Curious:

“Wilsey (Oh the Glory of It All) makes curiosity the unifying aesthetic and raison d’être of this eclectic collection of essays on places and people, hobbies and grief, and the ‘comedy and poverty of the United States.’”
—Publishers Weekly

“Sean Wilsey’s witty essays from his cross-country adventures form a portrait of the weird side of contemporary America.”
—Los Angeles Times

“More Curious is the most delicious of literary smorgasbords. Whether Sean Wilsey’s subject is rats, NASA, or a surreal road trip across America, the writing is animated and diverse, dappled with literary oddities and enlivened, always, by his eye for the absurd. More Curious begins by making you wonder what kind of book it is, exactly, and ends by reminding you that categories are nonsense when you’re enjoying something this much.”
—Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Sean Wilsey puts the fire out with wine, as he reports was done after the 1906 Earthquake in San Francisco. To douse a fire with wine, as I take it, is to respond with something unexpected, and a little extravagant, but in that moment, a tool at hand. Wilsey is playful, maximal, wonkily earnest and fun to read, as he ranges over the varied landscapes of this book.”
—Rachel Kushner, author of The Flame Throwers

“Mr. Wilsey can write in a range of emotional octaves, moving from the comic to the philosophical to the streetwise with ease, while putting body language on his prose to give the reader an almost synesthetic sense of what he’s saying.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“More Curious captures the dizzying absurdity of contemporary America.”
—Vanity Fair

“An insightful and witty portrait of modern America’s highs and lows.”
—Largehearted Boy

“Wilsey is a punchy, captivating writer with a perceptive eye.”
—Dallas Morning News

“A marvelous book… Wilsey has a gift for shifting gears emotionally — changing the focus at precisely the right moment, and those shifts, those juxtapositions are effective and often profound.”
—Austin American-Statesman

“Generation-defining… a welcome chronicle of our age”
—San Francisco Bay Guardian

“[C]areful, thoughtful, perfect sentences”
—Portland Mercury

“[T]he essays are a testament to Wilsey’s infectious ability to make his curiosity ours”
—The Rumpus

“Enjoyable, occasionally hilarious, and always insightful.”
—Fiction Advocate

“A funny, touching, and smart look at the core of Americana.”
—Vol. 1 Brooklyn

 Proceeds from sale of this book have been donated to 826NYC  who offer highly individualized creative writing instruction for over 4,000 young New Yorkers every year. Free programs throughout NYC empower young authors and develop crucial skills they need to thrive in the classroom and beyond.

My Favorite Girlfriend was a French Bulldog is a novel told in fifteen stories, linked by the same protagonist, our narrator, who—in her own voice and channeling the voices of others—creates an unsparing, multigenerational portrait of her native Cuba. Though she feels suffocated by the island and decides to leave, hers is not just a political novel—nor just a queer novel, an immigrant novel, a feminist novel—but a deeply existential one, in which mortality, corporeality, bureaucracy, emotional and physical violence, and the American Dream define the long journey of our narrator and her beloved pet dog, who gives the book both its title and its unforgettable ending. In its daring style and structure—both playful and profound, youthful and mature—and its frank discussion of political and sexual identity, My Favorite Girlfriend was a French Bulldog marks the emergence of an original and essential new voice.

Praise for My Favorite Girlfriend Was a French Bulldog

Listed as a featured top book by Publishers Weekly, Chicago Review of Books, and Ms Magazine.

One of Lithub’s ”5 Books You May Have Missed in July.”

“(A) boundary-breaking work… at once wild, compassionate, and challenging… precise and correct.”
—ZYZZYVA

“This profound and delightful novel-in-stories… is a breathtaking exploration of identity, country, art, and family.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“There is a power and rawness to these stories that is deeply affecting....clever and intriguing.”
—Booklist

“Unique, raw, funny, ruthless prose.”
—Cristóbal Pera, Editor, Vintage Español

“There is only one way to know that you are alone, believing you are not,” said a voice in My Favorite Girlfriend Was a French Bulldog. Thought-capsules such as this pop open when least expected in this intriguing collection of vignettes in which bodies and beings are bound to a collective claustrophobia that stretches from the small towns in Cuba to the big city of Miami. There is something rotting away here. It is pervasive, and it reeked. It reeks of the decay of humanity. And yet, as much as there is sullenness of expression throughout, so too are there flashes of tender joy and humorous affection, like the tossing of a flip flop into the air or the wagging of a dog’s tail. The book ends wagging its tail, and it made me wag mine.”
—Giannina Braschi author of Yo-Yo Boing!

“Legna Rodríguez Iglesias is the most enchanting Cuban writer alive today and My Favorite Girlfriend was a French Bulldog is a wry, brilliant and delightful ride.”
—Achy Obejas author of The Tower of Antilles

“There is a winning self-awareness to these stories that charms as much as it disorients. Funny, surprising, and disturbing—not so much by turns as in layers, all at once—the fifteen sections of Legna Rodríguez Iglesias’s strange and wonderful My Favorite Girlfriend Was a French Bulldog stand alone and also build on one another. I both admired and enjoyed this book, happy to get a little lost along its deceptively meandering paths, and happy to have this author snap me back to attention, over and over, and then startle and satisfy me with the ending. Even as she yanks you around, Rodríguez Iglesias knows precisely what she’s doing: she’ll rip your heart out—with a wink.”
—Hadley Moore author of Not Dead Yet and Other Stories

“In My Favorite Girlfriend Was a Bulldog, Legna Rodríguez Iglesias reminds the reader that revolution lives in the world and in the self. Dog is a droll god in Cuba, one that takes the protagonist on wild adventures in these interconnected stories that slay me with their wry humor and potent storytelling.”
—Carmen Gimenez Smith author of Milk and Filth

Proceeds from sale of this book have been donated to 826NYC  who offer highly individualized creative writing instruction for over 4,000 young New Yorkers every year. Free programs throughout NYC empower young authors and develop crucial skills they need to thrive in the classroom and beyond.

Tragic Magic is the story of Melvin Ellington, a.k.a. Mouth, a Black, twenty-something, ex-college radical who has just been released from a five-year prison stretch after being a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. Brown structures this first-person tale around Ellington’s first day on the outside. Although hungry for freedom and desperate for female companionship, Ellington is haunted by a past that drives him to make sense of those choices leading up to this day.

Through a filmic series of flashbacks, the novel revisits Ellington’s prison experiences, where he is forced to play the unwilling patsy to the predatory Chilly and the callow pupil of the not-so-predatory Hard knocks; then dips further back to Ellington’s college days, where again he is led astray by the hypnotic militarism of the Black Pantheresque Theo, whose antiwar politics incite the impressionable narrator to oppose his parents and to choose imprisonment over conscription; and finally back to his earliest high school days, where we meet in Otis, the presumed archetype of Ellington’s “tragic magic” relationships with magnetic but dangerous avatars of black masculinity in crisis. But the effect of the novel cannot be conveyed through plot recapitulation alone, for its style is perhaps even more provoking than its subject.

Originally published in 1978, and edited by Toni Morrison during her time at Random House, this Of the Diaspora edition of Tragic Magic features a new introduction by author Wesley Brown.

Praise for Tragic Magic

“Tragic Magic is a tremendous affirmation. . One hell of a writer.”
—James Baldwin

“(W)onderfully wry.”
—Donald Barthelme

“Wesley Brown’s Tragic Magic is an underrated classic in the vein of my favorite albums. This is a book worth holding close and hugging hard. There has been much talk about the literary foreparents to hip-hop culture and for my money Brown has to take his place alongside the likes of the Black Arts Movement, The Nuyoricans, Piri Thomas, and Julius Lester. Pick this one up and ride alongside a masterful storyteller.”
—Nate Marshall, author of Finna: Poems

“A prescient ancestor to today’s insurgent, boundary-breaching African American fiction… deserves rediscovery by a new generation of readers curious about where an earlier generation of Black protest came from and how they came through its challenges.”
—Kirkus

Future Gender explores the relationship between photography and transgender lives, histories, and communities.

Guest-edited by Zackary Drucker, the artist, activist, and producer of the television series Transparent, the issue offers an urgent reflection on gender and society and considers how trans and gender-nonconforming individuals have used photography to imagine new expressions of social and personal identity, from the nineteenth century to today.

Aperture magazine is an essential guide to the art and phenomenon of photography, that combines the smartest writing with beautifully reproduced portfolios. Published quarterly, each issue focuses on a major theme in contemporary photography, serving as a book about its subject, for everyone interested in understanding where photography is heading. With fresh perspectives on the medium by leading writers and thinkers, and beautifully designed and produced, Aperture magazine makes new ideas in photography accessible to the photographer, student, and the culturally curious alike. 

Spanning over two centuries from around 1800 to the present day, Black American Portraits chronicles the ways in which Black Americans have used portraiture to envision themselves in their own eyes. Remembering Two Centuries of Black American Art, curated by David C. Driskell at LACMA 45 years ago, this book is a companion to the exhibition of the same name that reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters and spaces. This selection of approximately 140 works from LACMA’s permanent collection highlights emancipation, scenes from the Harlem Renaissance, portraits from the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, multiculturalism of the 1990s and the spirit of Black Lives Matter.

The London-based painter Humphrey Ocean (born 1951) has painted portraits of Paul McCartney and Philip Larkin, among many others. But alongside these prestigious commissions, he has always returned to drawing the simpler things in life: our “alluringly unnatural world,” as he puts it. The result is this idiosyncratic and charming collection of birds, all rendered in Ocean’s unique style.

This volume features new watercolor works on paper and assemblages by Betye Saar (born 1926) that incorporate the artist’s personal collection of Black dolls. These watercolors showcase the artist’s experimentation with vivid color and layered techniques, and her new interest in flat shapes. While Saar has previously used painting in her mixed-media collages, this is the first publication to focus on her watercolor works on paper.

This volume features new watercolor works on paper and assemblages by Betye Saar (born 1926) that incorporate the artist’s personal collection of Black dolls. These watercolors showcase the artist’s experimentation with vivid color and layered techniques, and her new interest in flat shapes. While Saar has previously used painting in her mixed-media collages, this is the first publication to focus on her watercolor works on paper.

This handsome publication presents legendary American photographer Berenice Abbott’s work in three categories: her portraits, photographs of the city and scientific photographs. The opening section presents Abbott’s portraits of mold-breaking individuals who changed the world from the mid-1920s onward such as Djuna Barnes, the New Yorker's Janet Flanner, Jean Cocteau and James Joyce.

The Bauhaus looms large as one of the most influential legacies in 20th-century graphic design. Known for its bold sans-serif typefaces, crisp asymmetrical grids and clean use of negative space, the school emerged as the forebearer of a new look—one that seized the tools of mass production in the creation of a radical new art. Today, just over 100 years after the Bauhaus’s opening in 1919, the school’s visual hallmarks have come to define modernity as it appears on the printed page.

The Bauhaus looms large as one of the most influential legacies in 20th-century graphic design. Known for its bold sans-serif typefaces, crisp asymmetrical grids and clean use of negative space, the school emerged as the forebearer of a new look—one that seized the tools of mass production in the creation of a radical new art. Today, just over 100 years after the Bauhaus’s opening in 1919, the school’s visual hallmarks have come to define modernity as it appears on the printed page.

The first African-American artist to attain art superstardom, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) created a huge oeuvre of drawings and paintings (Julian Schnabel recalls him once accidentally leaving a portfolio of about 2,000 drawings on a subway car) in the space of just eight years. Through his street roots in graffiti, Basquiat helped to establish new possibilities for figurative and expressionistic painting, breaking the white male stranglehold of Conceptual and Minimal art, and foreshadowing, among other tendencies, Germany's Junge Wilde movement. It was not only Basquiat's art but also the details of his biography that made his name legendary--his early years as "Samo" (his graffiti artist moniker), his friendships with Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Madonna and his tragically early death from a heroin overdose. This superbly produced retrospective publication assesses Basquiat's luminous career with commentary by, among others, Glenn O'Brien, and 160 color reproductions of the work.

Since the mid-1970s, Barbara Kruger (born 1945) has been interrogating the hierarchies of power and control in works that often combine visual and written language. In her singular graphic style, Kruger probes aspects of identity, desire and consumerism that are embedded in our everyday lives. This volume traces her continuously evolving practice to reveal how she adapts her work in accordance with the moment, site and context. The book features a range of striking images—from her analogue paste-ups of the 1980s to digital productions of the last two decades, including new works produced on the occasion of the exhibition. Also featured are singular works in vinyl, her large-scale room wraps, multichannel videos, site-specific installations and commissioned works.

The Atlas of Furniture Design is the most comprehensive overview of the history of furniture design ever published. The book documents 1,740 objects by 546 designers and 565 manufacturers, and features more than 2,500 images, from detailed object photographs to historical documentation such as interiors, patents, brochures and reference works in art and architecture.

The Art of Film Projection: A Beginner's Guide is a beautifully produced, comprehensive outline of the materials, equipment and knowledge needed to present the magic of cinema to an enthralled audience.

Part manual and part manifesto, The Art of Film Projection compiles more than 50 years of expertise from the staff of the world-renowned George Eastman Museum and the students of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation into the most complete and accessible guide to film projection ever produced. The product of more than ten years of painstaking work by renowned film preservation specialists, and featuring a foreword by Tacita Dean and Christopher Nolan, this volume addresses a changing film landscape.

This facsimile of the fifth edition of The Art and Craft of Garden Making (1926) preserves both the beauty of the book’s original design and the encyclopedic information contained within its pages. Featuring a sumptuous clothbound cover, gold detailing and illustrations, this publication is an art piece in and of itself as much as it is a valuable resource for professional and hobbyist gardeners alike.

Ghanaian painter Amoako Boafo has built a practice synthesizing the ways that art both reflects and perpetuates the power of representation. Amoako Boafo is the first monograph to comprehensively examine the artist's career to date. Heavily illustrated and featuring original contributions by Osei Bonsu, Rachel Cargle, Mutombo Da Poet and Aja Monet, the book also presents an insightful and expansive conversation with the artist by Paul Schimmel.
Exclusively portraying individuals from the diaspora and beyond, Boafo invites a reflection on Black subjectivity, diversity and complexity. His portraits, notable for their bold colors and patterns, celebrate his subjects as a means to challenge portrayals that objectify and dehumanize Blackness. As Boafo has stated, “the primary idea of my practice is representation, documenting, celebrating and showing new ways to approach Blackness.”

This is a reenvisioned, fresh look at Agnes Martin, the enigmatic, influential, highly independent painter whose life and work have proved inspirational to audiences across many fields and disciplines. Accompanied by color reproductions of works by Martin, Agnes Martin: Independence of Mind presents a series of essays by living artists and writers commissioned especially for this volume. Contributors include artists Martha Tuttle, Jennie C. Jones and James Sterling Pitt, as well as authors Teju Cole, Bethany Hindmarsh, Darcey Steinke and Jenn Shapland. These contributors write about Martin’s influence on their creative lives and work, and offer new interpretations that defy stereotyped notions about Martin's life. Longer essays are mixed with shorter, more anecdotal texts by a wider selection of artists.

This groundbreaking survey provides an in-depth account of Martin's artistic career, from lesser-known early experimental works through her striped and gridded grey paintings and use of color in various formats, to a group of her final pieces that reintroduce bold forms. A selection of drawings and watercolors and Martin's own writing are also included.

Filled with 26 colorful marker drawings contributed by some of graffiti art's ultimate style masters, The ABCs of Styleis part children's book, part adult art primer, tracking the evolution of graffiti letterforms

A spellbinding journey through the global history of witchcraft, the third volume in The Library of Esoterica follows this magickal tradition from its ancient roots to its modern incarnations. Through more than 400 artworks, and revelatory essays and interviews with modern practitioners, Witchcraft chronicles a cathartic evolution, from the craft’s emergence in ancient goddess worship to the embrace by today’s diverse witch community.

From Air Jordan 1 to Air Presto, Nike and Virgil Abloh reinvented sneaker culture with their project, The Ten. Experience engineering ingenuity and Abloh’s investigative design process: each shoe is a piece of industrial design and a readymade sculpture. The binding on ICONS showcases an open spine, reflecting Abloh’s design philosophy.

A connoisseur’s overview of typeface design, Type offers a dependable history of elegant fonts from 1628 to the mid-20th century. Derived from a distinguished Dutch collection, exquisitely designed catalogues trace the evolution of the printed letter through specimens in roman, italic, bold, semi-bold, narrow, and broad fonts, as well as borders, ornaments, and initial letters.

The first and only publication of its kind, Sneaker Freaker has been at the forefront of the global sneaker scene for nearly two decades. With over 650 redesigned pages, fresh photography, insane historical detail, and otaku-level minutiae, this monster anthology combines the magazine’s finest and content created exclusively for TASCHEN into one seriously epic celebration of sneakers.