Books

Melted cheese between slices of toasted bread—the ultimate in comfort food. This mouthwatering cookbook features 39 grilled cheese recipes created by Heidi Gibson, winner of seven grilled cheese championships and the co-owner (with husband Nate) of the American Grilled Cheese Kitchen in San Francisco. The classic Mousetrap is dripping with three kinds of cheese. The Piglet wows with its thinly sliced ham and sharp cheddar. And grilled cheese makes a great breakfast—just add an egg!

With 40 additional recipes for great accompaniments and side dishes—including hearty soups, many varieties of mac & cheese, spicy pickles, and tangy spreads—plus tips on choosing the best bread and cheese and techniques for grilling each sandwich at just the right temperature, anyone can create the perfect grilled cheese sandwich.

James Beard nominee for Best Wine and Spirit Book The bartender's bible and a cocktail recipe book for the ages. The cocktail book for your home: The Ultimate Bar Book is an indispensable guide to classic cocktails and new drink recipes. Loaded with essential-to-know topics such as barware, tools, and mixing tips. Classic cocktails and new drinks:

As the mistress of mixology, the author Mittie Hellmich has the classics down for the Martini, the Bloody Mary—and the many variations such as the Dirty Martini and the Virgin Mary. And then there are all the creative new elixirs the author brings to the table, like the Tasmanian Twister Cocktail or the Citron Sparkler.

In The Ultimate Book of Cocktails, bestselling cocktail author shares over 100 of his best-loved drinks. Starting with the basics, Dan covers the essentials of a home bar, from equipment and glassware to spirits needed, also including his own recipes for syrups, sours, brines.

The cocktail list will have you powering through that leftover vodka you've had gathering dust in the kitchen in no time! From classic tipples to batch drinks for a crowd, hair-of-the-dog hangover cures, inventive new drinks, seasonal hits, tropical tasters and more, this is the bible of cocktails. Written in Dan's witty, engaging style, The Ultimate Book of Cocktails is perfect for the hard drinker in your life.

Congressman Hakeem Jeffries' ABCs of Democracy speech on American values is brought to life with colorful illustrations.

American values over autocracy. Benevolence over bigotry.

So begins the rousing finale of the first floor speech delivered by Congressman Hakeem Jeffries upon his historic elevation as House Democratic Leader, affirming the values of our great country one letter of the alphabet at a time. Equal parts inspiring and urgent, his words provide a timeless reminder of what will keep the United States the greatest democracy in the history of the world. In clever and memorable turns of phrase, Jeffries paints an alphabetic road map for a brighter American future and warns of the perils of taking a different path. Now, with vibrant illustrations for each letter, The ABCs of Democracy brings this blueprint for the future to vivid, colorful life. 

Sweet yet sinister, Nara's paintings of children and animals are beloved the world over for their punchy iconography and punk-rock spirit

This definitive monograph spans 40 years, from 1984 to the present day, in the career of the iconic artist, shedding light on Nara's conceptual process through paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics and installations that reflect his empathetic vision of the world around him. Published in conjunction with the epochal exhibition at Museo Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain, this eponymous monograph divides Nara's oeuvre into three chronological periods, beginning with his first artworks created in Japan in the 1980s, in which recurring elements of his personal history appear, such as his family's house and childlike figures, developed under the influence of artists such as Takeshi Motai. The volume then highlights the artist's fruitful stay in Germany, where Nara reacted to the isolation imposed by the language barrier while he studied and discovered German Expressionism with A.R. Penck at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and introduced in his production the central characters that would soon be recognized as part of his signature language. Finally, the monograph closes by exploring the work Nara produced after his return to Japan in 2000, presenting an essential selection of his late paintings, drawings, installations and sculptures.

Filmmaker, painter, anthropologist, musicologist and occultist—Harry Smith (1923-1991) was an incomparable polymath and seminal figure in the realms of beat culture and avant-garde art. Smith's kaleidoscopic experimental films have influenced generations of artists and cinephiles, while his landmark three-volume compilation, the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), laid the foundation for the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to his ecstatic artwork, Smith is renowned for his vast collections of curious objects. The Collections of Harry Smith, Catalogue Raisonné series spotlights and indexes his eclectic research obsessions.

Volume one features richly detailed photographic documentation of 251 paper airplanes gathered by Smith from the streets of New York City over an approximately 20-year period. Whimsical and weird, the paper airplanes rank among Smith's most mysterious collecting pursuits. This extensive compendium presents the fruits of his extraordinary aeronautic pursuit and highlights the tangled history and myths that accompany the

A stationery set for fans of the beloved San Francisco printer

San Francisco–based printer Jack Stauffacher’s (1920–2017) bold experiments in letterpress expanded the ideas of wood type’s formal possibilities. Born in San Mateo, California, Stauffacher began his study of printing at the age of 16 and went on to design and print outstanding books for 80 years. He was the owner and operator of Greenwood Press, located in the San Francisco Bay Area. After receiving a box of discarded wood type in 1966, Stauffacher began playing with the mismatched letterforms as a break from his daily work. His resulting typographic experiments, often featuring bold layers of letters in black, bright blue or red, are a testament to type’s more expressive capabilities. Stauffacher’s refined yet graphic sensibility brought him acclaim in the worlds of both traditional fine printing and modern art. Examples of his wood and metal type designs can be found in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This set of notecards and envelopes, each pair unique, displays Stauffacher’s abstract yet exquisite treatments of typography.

An edifying immersion into Vicuña's creative wellspring as well as her decolonization and ecofeminist ideals

Beautifully designed, with a special reverence for her humanitarian heart, Dreaming Water is the most thorough monograph dedicated to the work of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña to date. Vicuña coined the term "Arte Precario" in the mid-1960s as a new category for her works composed of debris and structures that disappear in the landscape, and which also include her quipus ("knot" in Quechua), envisioned as poems in space. Dreaming Water brings together over 200 works--including paintings, drawings, screenprints, collages, textiles, videos, photographs, installations, poetry, artist books and performances--created throughout the artist's remarkable career. It also features several stimulating texts--a lengthy epistolary piece by curator and editor Miguel A. López as well as new essays by anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli, curator Catherine de Zegher and art historian José de Nordenflycht. Vicuña herself contributes two texts, reflecting on her drawings from the "Palabrarmas" project and the activism of the group Artists for Democracy, which she cofounded in 1974. A rousing conversation between Vicuña, anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena and curator Camila Marambio also figures in the book, blending the artist's voice with those who are experts in fields pertinent to her practice.

Limbs twist and fold around each other in this delightfully queer cyanotype alphabet made up of nude male bodies

For this playful and intimate artist's book, American artist Peter McGough shaped nude male models into sculptural renderings of each letter of the English alphabet, creating 26 lush, deeply queer cyanotype images of their poses. The cyanotype, a slow and cameraless photographic process--and one of the oldest ways of making photos--engages light only in the spectrum of ultraviolet and blue, creating spectral, painterly images that reflect what cannot be perceived by the naked eye. The result is an inky photo transfer, which appears much like a black-and-white image, but on a bluescale. The 26 images in McGough's Alphabet draw on Hellenistic sculpture, queer histories and the material quality of the cyanotype to create a graphic language all McGough's own.

An impressive and wide-ranging showcase of mostly women and gender-expansive artists whose work intertwines fluid ideas of embodiment with capacious models of abstraction

This stunningly illustrated exhibition catalog looks closely at how abstraction in art is often intimately tied with shifting ideas of the bodily. Bringing together seemingly unalike categories such as figurative/abstract, self/other and exotic/banal into newly fused configurations, the publication shows how artists have often conceived of these categories as inextricably intertwined. The catalog is divided into three thematic sections. “Mirror” explores the ways artists have honed in on the forms of the face and head as a distorted mirror. “Matter” looks at how artists draw on the metaphorical resonances of the body in ways that suggest mutable morphologies, especially in relation to socially constructed definitions of gender, race and sexuality. “Metamorphosis” examines how artists have used abstraction as a means to transform the human body into different modes of being: new identities, other animals and spiritual or cosmological entities. An introductory essay by Lanka Tattersall, Laurenz Foundation curator, maps the historical precedents from a feminist, queer and Afro-diasporic art historical perspectives, while a prologue by poet and artist Precious Okoyomon and a reflection by Lambda Literary Award finalist Cyrus Dunham open up new forms of language for questions around gender and abstraction.

For Fuller, nature is the most exquisite technology we know; and what underlies all of his work is the quest to uncover nature’s fundamental principles—in order to foster their manifestation as a pattern integrity 'for successfully regenerating all life aboard our planetary spaceship.'" –Jaime Lawrence Snyder, Lars Müller Fuller Series Editor

A Los Angeles Times 2021 holiday gift guide pick

The work of R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) is among the most extraordinary and inventive in 20th-century design and architecture, not least for its incorporation of a range of intellectual and technical disciplines. Fuller described himself as an “engineer, inventor, mathematician, architect, cartographer, philosopher, poet, cosmogonist, comprehensive designer and choreographer.''

R. Buckminster Fuller: Pattern-Thinking is a major reassessment of Fuller’s legacy in the context of design, examining his singular vision of new conceptual models for design and architecture, alongside his ideas on their potentially world-altering consequences. Drawing extensively on his archive and with over 300 images, the book follows Fuller’s explorations of geometry, language and intellectual property in their relation to design principles and pedagogy, organizing its survey of Fuller’s work through parallel conceptual threads rather than in a linear chronology of his career.

The design gallery's latest triennial celebration of US-made objects that straddle art, design and craft

R & Company’s landmark triennial exhibition and accompanying publication, Objects: USA, returns in 2024, featuring 55 makers from across the United States whose works blur the traditionally understood boundaries of art, design and craft. The exhibition’s curators and the book’s authors, Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy and Kellie Riggs, have organized these works into archetypes that engage with makers’ intentions and driving interests rather than categories related to medium, proposing a new conceptual framework for understanding 21st-century objecthood. The book includes a preface by R & Company principals Evan Snyderman and Zesty Meyers, an introduction by curator Glenn Adamson, an essay by the authors and richly illustrated profiles for each of the featured artists.
Artists include: Venancio Aragon, Richard Chavez, Jason McDonald, Ryan Decker, Wally Dion, Nik Gelormino, Joyce Lin, Linda Lopez, Luam Melake, Anina Major, Kim Mupangilaï, Jordan Nassar, Jolie Ngo, Cammie Staros, Matthew Szösz, Norman Teague, Lonnie Vigil, Mallory Weston.

Two paintings from Krasner’s very first solo exhibition, reunited here after 70 years, provide a window into the artist’s rarely examined early geometric abstractions

The early works of Abstract Expressionist pioneer Lee Krasner (1908–84), in her first solo exhibition in 1951, emphasized geometric relations. But during this same period, Krasner would often destroy or paint over her canvases to create new works. In a special and ambitious exhibition, Kasmin reunites the only two surviving paintings from her first solo show, displayed together for the first time in over 70 years. Replete with 18 color plates, related archival material and newly commissioned texts, The Edge of Color foregrounds a rarely examined chapter of Krasner’s five-decade career. Beyond the scope of an exhibition catalog, the book takes its reader behind Krasner’s paintings to provide never-before-published visual evidence regarding these early paintings. It positions these works, realized in the upstairs bedroom at the artist’s home in Springs, NY, in relation to Krasner’s contemporaries including Jackson Pollock and Piet Mondrian.

A photographic travelog of Meyerowitz’s yearlong journey across postwar Europe

In 1966, at the age of 28, photographer Joel Meyerowitz embarked on a journey that would take him to the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, France, Germany, Eastern Europe, Turkey and Greece. In total, he drove 20,000 miles through 10 countries and ended up taking 25,000 photographs. This trip was a transcendental experience and formative in shaping Meyerowitz's instinctive and brilliant identity that he is known for today. Europa 1966–1967 compiles a selection of photographs taken by Meyerowitz on his yearlong trip through Europe, offering an exciting glimpse of the “New Old World” that, having lately overcome the trauma of World War II, opened itself to modernity and progress. Meyerowitz witnessed societies in transition, stuck between dictatorship and economic blossoming. Yet he also documented unshakable cultural traditions, such as when he lived with a flamenco-performing family in Francoist Spain for six months. The strength and freshness of Meyerowitz’s gaze and the new codes that were captured in these pictures inspired the next generation of photographers.

The largest-ever display of Hockney’s paper-based works

British artist David Hockney is renowned for his distinctive paintings, mostly portraiture and landscape, but also for his approach to works on paper and printmaking, which mirrors the vibrancy and diligent indexing seen in his broader body of work. Hockney’s prints often showcase a dynamic interplay of color, form and perspective, reflecting his keen eye for visual storytelling of intimate elements of his own life. Throughout his career he has experimented with various printmaking techniques, including etching, lithography, screenprinting and more recently iPads, each method revealing his diligence in manipulating the medium—without ever experiencing, in his own words, “a feeling of failure.” Like much of his oeuvre, Hockney’s prints draw from extensive art historical study of the optical devices of Old Master paintings.

A wide-ranging selection of works from Calder’s most prolific period highlights the role of time in his groundbreaking sculptural practice

Francisco Goya claimed in 1801 that “time also paints.” More than 200 years later, this quote, now turned maxim, could refer to the way in which time modifies how we relate to art. A more conceptual interpretation could also be held where time itself is the medium. Taken in this last interpretation, few artists have understood this notion better than Alexander Calder.

Sculpting Time explores time as a medium in Calder’s work: both as an integral part of his kinetic sculpture and as an external factor vis-à-vis the grand developments of the 20th century. This is best exemplified in his earliest sphériques as well as the Constellations (a term coined by Marcel Duchamp and James Johnson Sweeney in 1943) he created out of wood and wire during World War II, when sheet metal was not available. By introducing motion into a static art form, Calder implies the passage of time; thus, time also sculpts. This handsome clothbound volume, printed on Tatami paper, is filled with contemporary images of works from the 1930s to the 1970s, as well as archival photographs of Calder’s studio.

A unique book embracing the verticality of Sheila Hicks’ work

For decades, Sheila Hicks has engaged with color, texture and verticality, using textiles as her medium of choice. Her unique approach is informed by her interest in architecture, space, historical weaving traditions and innovations in fiber technology. This new bilingual publication (English and French) focuses on her cascading multicolored columns. Building on her earlier work and occupation with verticality, the columns have extended to new and spectacular settings, notably outdoors, refusing any traditional limitations, adapting to various environments, from the Art Gallery of New South Wales to the rocky hills of the French countryside and medieval castles.
Hicks’ work has always been published in innovative formats, a result of her creative collaborations with designers. The book reflects the verticality that is crucial to Hicks’ towering fiber structures. It features stunning reproductions of the columns created by the artist over the last 10 years. The selection culminates in Hicks’ most recent installation, Vers des horizons inconnus in front of the Institut de France during Paris + in 2023. Radical Vertical Inquiries is an eye-popping, design-forward companion to Hicks’ work that shines on its own.

Food as social ritual, personal liberation and spiritual alchemy: from Alison Knowles and Adrian Piper to Agnes Denes and Andy Warhol

In More Than the Eyes, writer Ellen Mara De Wachter considers the ways in which food, when used as a material in contemporary art, confronts, subverts and ultimately brings us to our senses. Focusing on artists working between 1960 and 2000, the book shows how we have become restricted by a hierarchy that values sight and reason above other senses, and how encounters with food in art can help us break this bind. By putting food at the center of the highly visual art world, the artists in this book quicken a range of sensations beyond visual perception, helping us access and liberate aspects of our experience that have been ignored or suppressed. Topics include Carolee Schneemann’s performance pieces using meat; the way in which Hannah Wilke rejects the imperative for women to be “sweet”; Zoe Leonard’s exploration of decomposition as process; Adrian Piper’s conceptual work incorporating hamburgers; the SoHo artists’ restaurant FOOD; Agnes Denes’ wheat field near Wall Street; and how other artists, such as Sarah Lucas and Andy Warhol, introduce the iconography, foods and desires of the working class into the rarefied environment of the gallery and museum.

A record of the rise and fall of the BMC farm that foregrounds the voices of a new cast of characters

Black Mountain College (BMC) was a wellspring of 20th-century creative unorthodoxy. From its founding in 1933 and over its celebrated 23-year history, the small liberal arts school in rural North Carolina attracted a remarkable number of famous and soon-to-be famous artists, writers and visionaries including Anni and Josef Albers, Ruth Asawa, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Ray Johnson, Charles Olson and M.C. Richards. The exploits of these BMC cultural luminaries have been recounted time and time again.

David Silver’s fascinating new book offers a very different perspective. The farm was vital to BMC. Throughout the Depression and World War II it provided vital sustenance, while serving as a testing ground for self-sufficiency, communal living and collaboration—the most precious and precarious ingredient at the college.

Through deep original research, The Farm at Black Mountain College follows renegade students, faculty and farmers as they establish a campus farm in the 1930s, build a better farm in the 1940s and watch it all collapse in the 1950s. We meet a new cast of BMC characters whose stories have seldom, if ever, been explored, and whose adventures in agriculture illuminate what exactly happened at BMC across the decades, from optimistic community building to its plunge into substance-addled scarcity. In these engrossing pages, we encounter the extraordinary folk whose endeavors on the land helped shape the Black Mountain College of myth and extraordinary reality.

An exquisitely somber portrait of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery across the seasons

In March 2020, after suffering from a severe bout of Covid, Eugene Richards sought out a safe place to walk and recuperate, and became entranced with Brooklyn’s much-loved Green-Wood Cemetery. Founded in 1837 and proclaimed a National Historic Landmark in 2006, the 487-acre burial ground and arboretum is the final resting place of more than 550,000 people. Over the subsequent years, Richards made nearly 100 visits to Green-Wood, photographing both poetical details and grand vistas in rich color, across the seasons and in all weather, creating lyrical images of snowbound headstones, grand mausoleums, intimate epitaphs, the encroachments of moss on stone and the wear of time on all things. The photographs in Remembrance Garden were taken between April 2020 and September 2023. Richards intersperses his images with names and dates inscribed on grave markers and deeply personal memories, creating a grand and moving portrait of the legendary cemetery.

Celebrating the storied career of a beloved letterpress printer whose posters spread messages of racial justice

Detroit-based letterpress printer Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. is celebrated for his type-driven messages of social justice and Black power, emblazoned in rhythmically layered and boldly inked posters made for the masses. Citizen Printer tells Kennedy’s inspiring story and contextualizes his important work―and offers readers tools for lifting their voices, too. A vital monograph on a trailblazing contemporary Black artist, Citizen Printer features 800 reproductions representing the breadth of Kennedy’s posters and prints, plus original portraiture of the artist at work, a powerful artist statement and a foreword by New York Times bestselling author Austin Kleon, all presented in a dynamic type-forward design from American Institute of Graphic Arts medalist Gail Anderson and Joe Newton.

A front-row view of Andy Warhol’s relentless rise from a cult New York Pop artist to a 20th-century icon, documented by legendary photojournalist Steve Schapiro in more than 120 photos. From working at the Factory to art openings and hanging out with his entourage, including the Velvet Underground in Los Angeles, witness Warhol at the peak of his creativity, cool, and cultural influence.

Hardcover in acrylic slipcase, with tipped-in plates of Warhol artworks, 10.4 x 14.7 in., 18.70 lb, 236 pages

From Paper Tube Emergency Shelters and his Nomadic Museum built with containers to the Swatch/Omega Campus and the Centre Pompidou-Metz, discover the altruistic practice of the Pritzker Prize–winning architect Shigeru Ban, who is lauded for his “curiosity, commitment, endless innovation, infallible eye, and acute sensibility.”

Arthur E. Waite, a modern mystic, created together with Pamela Colman Smith the most influential Tarot deck. With a selection of more than 800 images and texts, the pioneer of Tarot history, Johannes Fiebig contextualizes this unique deck. The kit includes facsimiles of the 1910 original edition of the cards and of A. E. Waite’s Key to the Tarot.

Women Making Waves is a celebration of the sisterhood of surfing, featuring extraordinary women from the United States, Mexico, Australia, Senegal, Japan, France, the Philippines, and beyond. Lara Einzig profiles twenty-six inspiring female surfers from around the globe—from activists to artists—who are breaking new ground on land and finding healing, joy, and community in the water. 

Take a raucous romp through the essential stages of fashioning cocktails and learn the hows and whys of bartending with acclaimed mixologist Toby Maloney and the team from The Violet Hour. When the pioneering cocktail bar opened in Chicago in 2007, it set a high standard with an innovative training program that teaches not just how to replicate classic cocktail recipes flawlessly, but how to embrace ingenuity, make smart decisions, and create original, inspired recipes from rote.

Like cooks who can peer into their pantry and whip up dinner on the fly, no recipe needed, those who follow the methods in The Bartender's Manifesto will have the technical foundation and confidence to take their cocktail skills to the next level and fabricate a drink from any ingredients at hand.   First, dive deep into the mechanics of creating cocktails with the right balance, texture, aroma, and temperature. From there, Toby goes well beyond the fine-tuned

There has always been a raw immediacy to film posters: provoking and enticing, shocking and seducing audiences across the threshold of the movie theater. The artists tasked with communicating that have been at the forefront of design: groundbreaking visionaries such as Saul Bass and Paul Rand; Eastern European artists using poetic, surreal and often disturbing imagery in highly original and subversive concepts. Other poster artists have woven contemporaneous movements in art and popular culture into their designs, creating a time capsule of the obsessions and concerns of a different era.

Iconic posters for films such as Metropolis, The Man with the Golden Arm, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Goldfinger sit alongside more unexpected and lesser-known artwork for films such as 2001, Star Wars, Taxi Driver and The Birds. Nearly all cinematic movements are included, from early silent masterpieces through German Expressionism, film noir of the 1940s, 1950s science fiction, the psychedelic imagery of the 1960s, the gritty violence and retribution of the 1970s and 1980s, and then onward into the 21st century, where the stripped-back graphics nod back to the Bass minimalism of the 1950s.

An extraordinary visual compendium, 1001 Movie Posters is the final word on movie posters and a must for film lovers and anyone interested in the power of advertising and design.

First published in 2009, All City Writers: An Oral History in Times of Change set a new standard for books on graffiti writing. With a revolutionary approach, the book reconstructed the story of the “graffiti diaspora”: how writing spread from New York City across the globe, to mix with new cultures and produce greater variants in street art. Even today, the youth-led counterculture, which had seemingly peaked in the mid-’80s, is far from dead. On the contrary, old dogmas are overturned, new formal languages become popular and artists continue to experiment with techniques and inventions. Now in a fresh graphic guise, this expanded second edition of All City Writers features 50% more pages than the original, including 190 pages of new content and a 13-page extended timeline. It shines a light on the evolution of graffiti writing from the ’90s to the 2020s through interviews, stories and critical essays by researchers including Jacob Kimvall, Robert Kaltenhäuser, François Chastanet, Javier Abarca and Eric Hannerz. Using case studies from cities around the world, these contributors delve deeper into the cultural transformations that graffiti writing is still undergoing to this day, nearly 60 years after its birth. The easy-to-handle softcover book is further enriched by its sturdy binding, folded dust jacket and hot foil logo prints.

Color photography lovers, rejoice! Steidl has released a new photobook from American master, Joel Sternfeld. Collecting photographs taken while Sternfeld was contemplating a major health crisis, they capture Nags Head, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, in peak, unself-conscious, Summer-of-1975 form. “Delaying surgery,” Sternfeld writes, “I had come to Nags Head, an old beach town floating in time, seeking a sense of temporal and spatial fluidity, a sense of oneirism. After about six weeks of intense work, my idyll was broken by a phone call: my brother Gabriel had died in an automobile accident in Colorado. I returned to New York; I never went back to Nags Head. Two out of my three brothers were now gone.” He grieved and stopped making photographs.

Eventually, he found his way to Rockaway Beach in Queens. “And then something happened: a different sense came over me, a heightened color awareness engendered perhaps by all the looking and thought I had given to color. At once, the ugly scene appeared beautiful to me.

The hues of the sand and the apartments were the perfect complements to the dusty blue of the sky. Seemingly disparate parts fused into a coherent whole. I made a photograph. Long ago, I had read of a phenomenon which might be described as ‘clear seeing in a clear light.’ Although I cannot now identify the source of this notion, I believe this was such a moment for me. At the time, I had no way of knowing it, but that photograph, made in despair, would eventually shape my entire practice.”

Lee Friedlander: Real Estate presents 155 photographs spanning 60 years of the artist's exploration of the built environment in the American social landscape. Collectively, these photographs add to one of the broadest and most nuanced visual depictions of America. Individually, they evince the sly intellectual humor and keen observations for which Friedlander is justifiably celebrated. Along the way, of course, the photographer expands our idea of what constitutes real estate, just as he compels us to recognize photography's ability to reveal essential aspects of our lives over time.

Lee Friedlander was born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1934, and studied photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. In 1956 he moved to New York City, which quickly became both the setting and subject of the majority of his work. Friedlander was represented alongside Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand in the 1967 New Documents exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, now understood as a landmark event in American documentary photography. Friedlander still lives and works in New York, and is represented by the Fraenkel Gallery.

A meditation on loss, death and nothingness, Salvation is a previously unpublished artist's book by Jimmy DeSana (1949–90), which he conceptualized shortly before his death from AIDS-related illness. While he was unable to fully realize Salvation in his lifetime, he dictated instructions to his longtime friend, the artist and photographer Laurie Simmons, for completing the publication on his deathbed. Due to her recuperative efforts, DeSana’s last major work is now available for the first time.

The volume displays 44 of the artist’s late photographic abstractions, images of relics, body parts, flowers and fruits altered through collage and darkroom manipulations. Both intimate and otherworldly, the works in Salvation function as a quiet counterpoint to the majority of the work generated in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which tended to favor bold political statements.

Five decades of Yau’s diverse poetic collaborations with artists from Pat Steir to Richard Tuttle

The poetry of Chinese American poet John Yau (born 1950) is infused with humor and intelligence. Yau uses a variety of poetic forms to examine aspects of visual art, film and popular culture. His critical writing is celebrated for providing fresh insights about already codified artists and for situating diverse practitioners into historical contexts. Disguise the Limit features numerous works that Yau has created with visual artists during the past five decades. These include paintings, mixed-media drawings, print portfolios, artist’s books and letterpress broadsides. The result of friendships and shared sensibilities, these works reveal the poet’s embrace of both representation and abstraction as foils for language generation. Offering nimble turns of phrase, Zen koans, road sign warnings and fragmented poems, Yau is in his element when operating in the performative time and space that collaboration requires.

Artists include: Jake Berthot, Tom Burckhardt, Norman Bluhm, Pia Fries, Max Gimblett, Judy Ledgerwood, Suzanne McClelland, Malcolm Morley, Ed Paschke, Peter Saul, Pat Steir, Robert Therrien, Richard Tuttle, Chuck Webster.

The first in-depth survey of Whitney’s endless experimentation with color.

The esteemed American painter Stanley Whitney has, for 50 years, created joyful, immersive abstractions characterized by a bold, experimental palette and unique rhythm. Over the last 20 years, he has structured his paintings as loose grids: a consistent framework that frees him to work through seemingly infinite painterly variations and allows viewers to focus not on each painting’s subject, but rather on our own response to color. These large-scale paintings are joined by improvisatory small paintings; drawings and prints, which constitute their own practice for Whitney; and the artist’s sketchbooks, which offer a view into Whitney’s engagement with the written word and politics.
This traveling North American exhibition is Whitney’s first museum survey, presenting 170 paintings and works on paper spanning from the 1970s to the present day. The catalog includes an introduction by exhibition organizer Cathleen Chaffee, scholarly explorations of the artist’s paintings and works on paper, a chronology and illustrations of all works in the exhibition.
Stanley Whitney was born in 1946 near Philadelphia. By the early 1970s, following studies with Philip Guston and Robert Reed, and influenced by artists including Jack Whitten, Josef Albers and Piet Mondrian, he had come to see “endless possibilities” in abstraction. Over the past five decades, he has honed a unique body of densely gridded, but endlessly variable, abstract paintings, as well as drawings and prints, reflecting his interests in art, architecture, textiles and music.

A nuanced profile, in image and text, of the great Black Power leader at the exhilarating moment of the movement’s ascendancy

Gordon Parks’ 1967 Life magazine essay “Whip of Black Power” is a nuanced profile of the young, controversial civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Carmichael gained national attention and inspired media backlash when he issued the call for Black Power in Greenwood, Mississippi, in June 1966. Parks shadowed him from the fall of 1966 to the spring of 1967, as Carmichael gave speeches, headed meetings and promoted the growing Black Power movement. Parks’ photos and writing addressed Carmichael’s intelligence and humor, presenting the whole man behind the headline-making speeches and revealing his own advocacy of Black Power and its message of self-determination and love.
Stokely Carmichael and Black Power delves into Parks’ groundbreaking presentation of Carmichael, with analysis of his images and accompanying text about the charismatic leader. Lisa Volpe explores Parks’ complex understanding of the movement and its leader, and Cedric Johnson frames Black Power within the heightened political moment of the late 1960s. Carmichael’s own voice is represented through a reprint of his important 1966 essay “What We Want.”

Traffic signs, sandwich boards and posters: Friedlander’s portrait of words in the world

For more than five decades, Lee Friedlander has repeatedly been drawn to the signs that inscribe the American landscape, from hand-lettered ads to storefront windows to massive billboards. Incorporating these markings with precision and sly humor, Friedlander’s photographs record a kind of found poetry of desire and commerce.

Focusing on one of the artist’s key motifs, Lee Friedlander: Signs presents a cacophony of wheat-paste posters, Coca-Cola ads, prices for milk, road signs, stop signs, neon lights, movie marquees and graffiti. The book collects 144 photographs made in New York and other places across the US, and features self-portraits, street photographs and work from series including The American Monument and America by Car, among others. Illegible or plainspoken, crude or whimsical, Friedlander’s signs are an unselfconscious portrait of modern life.

Rarely-seen color work from the preeminent master of postwar American street photography

This monograph stands as a groundbreaking tribute to the early color work of renowned American photographer Garry Winogrand. While he is most recognized for his candid and lively black-and-white street photography, Winogrand's portfolio also includes an impressive collection of over 45,000 color slides captured between the early 1950s and the late 1960s. Using two cameras strapped to his chest―one loaded with color film and the other with black-and-white film―he extensively documented his surroundings between commercial assignments, developing and refining a distinct and progressively daring body of personal work.
From the bustling streets of Manhattan to the shaded underside of Coney Island’s boardwalk to the expansive landscapes and open roads of the American West, Winogrand Color unveils a tender portrait of a version of the country that feels at once bygone and timeless. His snapshots of strangers exude an unparalleled sense of intimacy, offering poetic glimpses into everyday postwar America. Presenting 150 photographs selected from the archives at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, this is the first monograph dedicated in full to Winogrand’s vivid color photography.

A newly expanded edition of Sternfeld’s popular portrayal of the High Line’s early days

With nine additional photos, a larger format and an expanded, up-to-date timeline, this is the new and revised edition of Joel Sternfeld’s Walking the High Line, which documents the overgrown elevated freight rail line above New York’s West Side before it was transformed into the cherished High Line public park in 2009.

In the dark days following the September 11 attacks in New York in 2001, Joel Sternfeld came to Gerhard Steidl with the hope of quickly making a book. For the previous two years Sternfeld had been photographing the abandoned railroad and working with a group, the Friends of the High Line, that wanted to save it and turn it into a park. Powerful real estate and political interests seeking to tear it down and commercially develop the land beneath it were using the chaos of the period to rush forward their plans. Steidl agreed―six weeks later there were finished books in New York. It was a small volume but it played a crucial role in allowing New Yorkers to see for the first time the beauty of a secret railroad in all the seasons.

A gorgeous compendium of printed herbals describing medicinal plants and their uses

With sumptuous reproductions, Seeds of Knowledge highlights the extraordinary collection of 15th- to 17th-century European printed herbals of the contemporary Liechtenstein collector Peter Goop. Herbals were highly illustrated books that included both the folkloric and medicinal uses of plants, and were critical texts for doctors and lay caregivers. The text and illustrations were repeatedly refined as the medicinal benefits of a plant’s use were more clearly understood and the style of illustration tended toward higher degrees of naturalism. These books were working manuals and frequently annotated by readers with notes of herbal recipes/medicines or other uses not found in the printed text. Goop’s collection is one of the most extensive in private hands.
Using the Morgan’s 10th-century manuscript of Dioscurides’ De materia medica as a centerpiece, Seeds of Knowledge explores developments in the understanding of the healthful and healing properties of plants, as Europe moved away from medicinal folklore toward an increased understanding of the natural world.

The most comprehensive publication on Richter’s drawings of the last 20 years, offering a first look at new drawings and watercolors made in 2020–21

Following in the steps of Gerhard Richter’s catalogue raisonné of drawings, published 20 years ago, this new monograph on Richter’s recent drawings illustrates 80 works produced between 1999 and 2021. Drawings 1999–2021 highlights a recent period of extraordinary creativity and inventiveness that includes expansive series of graphite drawings on paper, vivid watercolors and overpainted photographs of forests. Like the accompanying exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, this publication offers a rare chance to study the most intimate aspect of Gerhard Richter’s work.

The world’s most famous painter focuses on the depiction of natural environments, from sunsets to seascapes to suburban streets

Gerhard Richter’s paintings combine photorealism and abstraction in a manner that is completely unique to the German artist. A master of texture, Richter has experimented with different techniques of paint application throughout his career. His hallmark is the illusion of motion blur in his paintings, which are referenced from photographs he himself has taken, obscuring his subjects with gentle brushstrokes or the scrape of a squeegee, softening the edges of his figures to appear as though they had been captured by an unfocused lens.

This publication concentrates on the theme of landscape in Richter’s work, a genre to which he has remained faithful for over 60 years, capturing environments from seascapes to countryside. With a selection of Richter’s paintings, some of which are previously unreproduced, this volume provides both a history of Richter’s development as an artist and valuable insight into the subject of nature in contemporary art.

"Ebenstein, founder of the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, finds her peculiar subject at the intersection of science and art in 18th-century Florence." –Publishers Weekly

An ingenious and collectible book-as-poster documenting Prince’s half-century of image appropriation

For aficionados of Richard Prince (born 1949) and of the possibilities of the book form, this unique exhibition catalog is an exclusive three-in-one kind of publication. Designed in the dimensions of a 12-by-12-inch LP record and housed in a plastic sleeve, when unfolded it transforms into a two-sided (one English, one Danish) poster with a richly illustrated collage of works by Prince from across his career (including his famous "rephotographs"), plus two in-depth texts on Prince’s oeuvre by the curators Nancy Spector and Anders Kold.

A defining figure of the Pictures Generation, Prince is famed for his radical acts of appropriation, which have taken many turns across the course of his five-decade career. His visual world, encapsulated in this innovatively designed volume, offers a remarkably consistent portrait of late 20th-century America.

A deeply personal meditation on and around modern Black expression, curated by the acclaimed London-based designer

This volume, Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm―Visions of Sound and Spirit in the MoMA Collection, is an artist’s book created by the acclaimed London-based designer Grace Wales Bonner as “an archive of soulful expression.” Through an extraordinary selection of nearly 80 works from The Museum of Modern Art’s collection and archives, this unique volume draws multisensory connections between pictures and poems, music and performance, hearing and touch, gestures and vibrations, and bodies in motion. Photographs, scores and films by artists such as Dawoud Bey, Mark Bradford, Roy DeCarava, Lee Friedlander, David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Steve McQueen, Lorna Simpson and Ming Smith, among others, are juxtaposed with signal texts by Black authors spanning the past century, including Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Robin Coste Lewis, Ishmael Reed, Greg Tate, Jean Toomer, Quincy Troupe and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Artist’s Choice: Grace Wales Bonner―Spirit Movers, this resplendent publication is a deeply personal meditation on and around modern Black expression that echoes Wales Bonner’s own vibrant, virtuosic designs.

A collaborative portrait of the renowned American ballet dancer

A New York Times Book Review 2023 holiday gift guide pick

Henry Leutwyler is certainly no stranger to the art of ballet―for many years he photographed on stage and behind the scenes at the New York City Ballet, culminating in his book Ballet, since published by Steidl in two editions. Yet Misty Copeland pushes Leutwyler’s vision into a new direction: neither a strict portrait of the renowned ballerina nor a mere documentation of her exceptional craft, this is an intimate collaboration between photographer and subject that explores the subtleties of Copeland as a performer, person, persona and idol.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised in San Pedro, California, Copeland’s biography has all the arc of a fairy tale: she was living in a shabby hotel room, struggling with five siblings for a place to sleep on the floor, when she began ballet studies at the late age of 13. She soon proved a prodigy: within three months of her first class she was dancing en pointe, in just over a year she was performing professionally. In 2015 she became the first African American woman appointed principal dancer at the prestigious American Ballet Theater in the 75 years of its existence. In Copeland’s own words: “The path to your success is not as fixed and inflexible as you think.”

Going Dark brings together a multigenerational group of contemporary artists who engage the "semi-visible" figure—representations that are partially (or fully) obscured, including, in some cases, literally darkened—and suggests that the concept of going dark is a tool that has been used by artists for decades to probe enduring questions surrounding both the potential and the discontents of social visibility. Across mediums—painting, photography, sculpture, video and installation—Going Dark names, charts and makes meaning of the semi-visible figure, arguing for its significance in contemporary art as a genre of unique conceptual and formal power. Approximately 120 works in all of these mediums by more than 25 artists are featured.
Essays by such curators as Legacy Russell and Jordan Carter, and professor Abbe Schriber, among others, contextualize the histories that inspired these works. In addition, four award-winning poets and three acclaimed graphic designers have contributed works.
Artists include: American Artist, Kevin Beasley, Rebecca Belmore, Dawoud Bey, John Edmonds, Ellen Gallagher, David Hammons, Lyle Ashton Harris, Tomashi Jackson, Titus Kaphar, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Joiri Minaya, Sandra Mujinga, Chris Ofili, Sondra Perry, Farah Al Qasimi, Faith Ringgold, Doris Salcedo, Lorna Simpson, Sable Elyse Smith, Stephanie Syjuco, Hank Willis Thomas, WangShui, Carrie Mae Weems and Charles White.

Klein’s madcap romp of a photo-novel brilliantly translates his cult ’60s film into book form.

Based on the original images and dialogue of William Klein’s 1966 film Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, this fantastic photo-novel tells the adventures of Polly Maggoo, a star model played by Dorothy McGowan (model for Vogue in the 1960s). The plot unfolds across the fashion world of Polly Maggoo; the world of television (based around the character of director Jean Rochefort); and a magical kingdom of operetta whose crown prince (played by Sami Frey) is in love with the young model. Also featuring in this star-studded cast are Alice Sapritch, Delphine Seyrig, Philippe Noiret, Roland Topor and Jacques Seiler.
The publication ingeniously translates into book form the zany universe of the film. Klein’s masterful framing gives exquisite rhythm to its page composition and flow as we follow the crazy adventures of the extraordinary heroine in a madcap race through the streets and rooftops of Paris, all the way up to a distant palace lost in the snow.

A complete survey of Marshall's prints from the 1970s to the present, with many previously unseen works

Kerry James Marshall is famed for his beautifully executed paintings that address the under-representation of the Black figure in the Western pictorial tradition. Though best known as a painter, Marshall has throughout his career also produced a vast graphic oeuvre that has been seldom seen and rarely documented. Marshall spent his youth building his craft in drawing and painting, but also in wood engraving and printing; by his mid-twenties, he recalls, "I could do woodcuts, etchings, aquatints." Most of his prints have been produced not in professional print workshops but by the artist, working alone in his studio. They range from images the size of postcards to his 50-foot-long, 12-panel woodcut Untitled (1998-99), to iterations of his ongoing magnum opus Rythm Mastr. And while some have entered prominent museum collections, many exist only in private collections or the artist's archive and are unknown to the public. This catalogue raisonné offers the first public account of these important works and the first in-depth study of the role of printed images and print processes in Marshall's work as a whole.
Kerry James Marshall was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955, later moving to Los Angeles. He taught painting for many years at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2013, he was named for the Committee on the Arts and the Humanities by President Barack Obama. In 2017, Marshall was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. The National Cathedral in Washington, DC, is currently working with Marshall to create two new stained-glass windows. Marshall lives and works in Chicago.

Our thoughts are known to us, and us alone. But for a brief period in the 1960s, Ted Serios (1918–2006) attempted to prove that his inner reality could be documented. Serios demonstrated an ostensibly psychic act termed “thoughtography,” involving the transfer of mental images onto undeveloped Polaroid film. In studies supervised by respected Denver-based psychiatrist Dr. Jule Eisenbud, Serios produced over 1,000 anomalous photographs, a feat that has never been fully dismissed or wholly verified. Existing as an uncomfortable knot in time, the details of the Serios phenomenon can’t be disentangled without questioning the social conditions that produced it in the first place.
Contextualizing Serios’ story within the twilight zone of 1960s America, Ted Serios: The Mind’s Eye considers the reaches and restraints of belief and explores the multiple dimensions at play in the Serios phenomenon, including interpersonal relationships, scientific methods, photographic technologies, state militaristic operations and popular culture. Rather than seeking absolute truth, the volume allows the reader to arrive at their own conclusions through a series of thematic essays, narrative photographic stories, select ephemera and contemporary cultural artifacts.

Meditations on Picabia across seven decades, from the acclaimed American realist painter. In the 1950s, American painter Philip Pearlstein completed his MA thesis, "The Paintings of Francis Picabia 1908-1930." When his research coincided with Picabia's death in 1953, Pearlstein briefly became the authority on Picabia and his influence, writing three subsequent essays: "The Symbolic Language of Francis Picabia" for Arts magazine (1956); "Hello & Goodbye, Francis Picabia" for Art News (1970); and "When the Dada Daddies Got Real, or How I Turned Picabia Inside Out" for Brooklyn Rail (2017). Pearlstein's articles present a fascinating comparison between Picabia, Duchamp and Pearlstein himself.
Picabia Inside Out brings together Pearlstein's articles in full, including a facsimile of the 1955 MA thesis presented as a historical document showing all the nuances of his typewriter. A foreword by Robert Storr highlights Pearlstein's importance as a precursor to what became known as postmodernism.
Philip Pearlstein (born 1924) is an American painter best known for his modernist realist nudes. Pearlstein has written many articles for major art journals, and his contribution to contemporary art is acknowledged by his many awards and honors.

The life and work of Côte d'Ivoire–based fashion designer Pathé’O, famed for dressing Nelson Mandela

This book traces, for the very first time, the extraordinary life and brand of Côte d'Ivoire–based fashion designer Pathé’O (born 1950). Known for his connection to former South African president Nelson Mandela, for whom he designed a number of shirts, Pathé’O’s creative lifework will inspire readers in every corner of the world.

The first retrospective volume on the photography of the internationally acclaimed Nigerian filmmaker, photographer and music video director Andrew Dosunmu, Monograph looks back at 20 years of previously unpublished and sumptuously colorful portraiture and more, including stills from music videos and the 2022 Netflix film Beauty.

Dosunmu has published his photography with iconic music and fashion magazines such as The Face, Vibe, Fader, Vogue Hommes, Paper and Interview, and has been commissioned by international brands such as Nike and Adidas. Throughout his career, Dosunmu has developed a prolific personal body of work that until now has never been published, though it has been sought after by private collectors and museums. The images compiled in Monograph portray uniquely stylish individuals in Dakar, Mumbai and Cartaghena. United by Dosunmu’s acute instinct for color into a compelling aesthetic vision, these portraits celebrate global culture with tremendous sensuality. The book includes a conversation between Dosunmu and Arthur Jafa.

Andrew Dosunmu is a Nigerian photographer and filmmaker who came to prominence in the US with music videos for various acclaimed artists. He is the director of Hot Irons, Restless City, Mother of George, Where Is Kyra? and Beauty, all of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Dosunmu lives between New York City and Lagos, Nigeria.

Cleanliness is a core value of societies around the globe. With beautiful photography and short, poetical observations, acclaimed author and designer Kenya Hara explores and illustrates the concept of cleaning in all of its aspects: sweeping, dusting, blowing, beating, washing, wiping, smoothing, raking, grooming, purifying, scrubbing, scraping, erasing, scooping, removing and clearing.

From the sorting process a child applies to its toys and the meticulous attention a clockmaker pays to their creations to the impressive feat that is deep-cleaning a ship, each process is treated with the same gentle fascination. The portable book format invites readers to take this publication into the world as they look at these everyday processes with fresh eyes.

Kenya Hara (born 1958) is a Japanese graphic designer, author, curator, professor at the Musashino Art University in Tokyo and art director for MUJI. He has been awarded many prizes, including the Japanese Cultural Design Award. Hara is the author of White, 100 Whites, Designing Design and Designing Japan.

“Every cowboy can instantly call up with fondness … the smell of cattle carried on a dusty wind across sagebrush and juniper, and the feeling of a good horse underneath you as you work together to keep a herd moving,” writes American photographer John Langmore. Langmore began cowboying in 1975 at the age of 12, the same year that his father, Bank Langmore, published the preeminent photo book The Cowboy. John spent 12 summers working across the west before transitioning to a more regulatory career.

Then, in 2012, John began a six-year project photographing 14 of the nation’s largest and most famous ranches in Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oregon, Montana and Wyoming. Of all those who have photographed the American cowboy, John is one of the few who came to it first as a colleague and then as a photographer. This large landscape book features 90 tritone plates along with Langmore’s own poetic recollections of working as a cowboy. Open Range offers an unrivaled chance to witness a way of life that many dream of, but few experience.

Covering 30 years of sculptures, paintings, works on paper, large-scale wall drawings, installations and site-specific works, this book presents the art of Gary Simmons, one of the most respected artists of his generation. Since the late 1980s, Simmons has played a key role in situating questions of race, class and gender identity within art discourse. He is notable for combining pop-cultural imagery with conceptual artistic strategies to expose and analyze histories of racism inscribed in US visual culture. Over the course of his career, Simmons has revealed traces of these histories in the fields of sports, cinema, literature, music, and architecture and urbanism while drawing on popular genres such as hip-hop, horror and science fiction. His approach is cool and unflinching in its interrogation of historical and cultural narratives, yet the results consistently deliver a strong emotional charge. This publication offers readers the opportunity to gain a holistic understanding of the complex, profoundly moving work of this influential artist.

Gary Simmons was born in 1964 in New York City, where he was raised. Today he lives and works in Los Angeles. He received a BFA in 1988 from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and an MFA in 1990 from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia; he also studied at Hunter College, New York. He has received numerous awards, including the Studio Museum in Harlem Joyce Alexander Wein Prize (2013), the George Gund Foundation USA Gund Fellowship (2007) and the National Endowment for the Arts Interarts Grant (1990).

ntricate and appealing, curious and uncanny, miniature works of art exert surprising power. Over thousands of years and across cultures, artists and artisans have created small objects for many purposes: tiny gold amulets of ancient Egyptian gods to protect the wearer; portable European medieval shrines made of precious materials to hold the relics of saints; English and American miniature painted portraits to keep loved ones close; Dutch dollhouse furnishings to display the maker’s skill and the owner’s social standing; pocket-size tools and globes from the age of exploration; Japanese netsuke carved in the shape of auspicious animals; and everyday objects transformed into statement jewelry by contemporary makers.

Tiny Treasures looks closely at more than 75 fascinating miniature objects from across the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, exploring their meaning and purpose along with their often dazzling workmanship, and showing that the human impulse to create on a small scale can produce compelling masterpieces.

In 2002, Kara Walker was selected to represent the United States at the prestigious São Paulo Art Biennial. Curator Robert Hobbs wrote extended essays on her work for this exhibition, and also for her show later that year at the Kunstverein Hannover. Because these essays have not been distributed in the US and remain among the most in-depth and essential investigations of her work, Karma is now republishing them in this new clothbound volume.

Among the most celebrated artists of the past three decades, with over 93 solo exhibitions to her credit, including a major survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker is known for her tough, critical, provocative and highly imaginative representations of African Americans and whites reaching back to antebellum times. In his analysis, Hobbs looks at the five main sources of her art: blackface Americana, Harlequin romances, Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, Stone Mountain’s racist tourist attraction and the minstrel tradition.

Robert Hobbs (born 1946) has written more than 50 books and catalogs, focusing on such artists as Milton Avery, Alice Aycock, Lee Krasner, Robert Smithson and Kehinde Wiley. Since 1991 he has held the Rhoda Thalhimer Endowed Chair of American Art in the School of Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University. Since 2004 he has served as a visiting professor at Yale University.

Known around the world for his powerful art and activism, Ai Weiwei (born 1957) does not differentiate between disciplines: his practice glides across art, architecture, design, film, collecting and curating. Richly illustrated with over 200 images, Ai Weiwei: Making Sense is the first major publication to present Ai’s work as a commentary on design and what it reveals about our changing values. It presents a selection of Ai’s collected objects, from ancient stone axe heads to porcelain teapot spouts, from Neolithic tools to modern mass-produced products, as well as new works created specifically for the Design Museum.

These collections draw from the artist’s fascination with historical Chinese artifacts, placing their craftsmanship in dialogue with China’s more recent history of demolition and urban development. Also featured are essays by leading experts covering dominant themes in Ai’s work, such as craft, collecting and the urbanization and industrialization of China. It concludes with an interview between renowned British Israeli architect Eyal Weizman and Ai himself.

Famously the most politicized and intellectual of the Abstract Expressionists, Robert Motherwell (1915–91) evolved a form of austere gesturalism reflective of both the human psyche and the political realm. Robert Motherwell: Pure Paintingoffers an in-depth exploration of his oeuvre—the first publication to do so in many years. Leading art scholars Jennifer Cohen, Susan Davidson, Simon Kelly, Monica McTighe and Sarah Rich examine Motherwell’s turn from Surrealism to abstraction and consider the major series that developed over his 50-year career.

The catalog also studies the dialogue between Motherwell’s art and the 19th-century French painting tradition, and investigates his relationship to Spanish painting techniques and processes, with an emphasis on underlying political significance of this relationship (as expressed in his great series Elegies to the Spanish Republic). Another section looks at Motherwell’s unique use of ocher pigment, with its evocation of deep geological time and of avant-garde strategies.