Books

In 1964, after three decades of living and working in Harlem, Bearden took up collage, cutting and combining found images and photographs to achieve new combinations defined by their fragmentation, texture, and layered depth. He used this approach to capture the complex facets of Black experience in the United States, often depicting scenes from everyday life in the rural South, which many African Americans left to move to northern cities during the Great Migration (1916–70), and scenes from Harlem. Throughout his career, Bearden reworked his own images in different mediums, including this collage, which is shown alongside a later photo reproduction.

The first monograph on the architectural sculptor and installation artist and long-time collaborator with the New York School poets

Best known for creating large-scale installation work inspired by American vernacular architecture, Dennis finds beauty in places shaped by ordinary people, which become repositories for memory and feelings. Her seemingly familiar yet often darkly mysterious sites evoke memories, encourage reflection, and allude to the transient nature of life. This book contextualizes Dennis’s work within contemporary art and the women’s movements and traces the arc of her career, tracing the evolution of her architectural sculpture over more than forty years, exploring her artistic collaborations with poets, and presenting her most recent work, a series of gouaches and dioramas, for the first time.

A conversation between Dennis and painter Rackstraw Downes brings to life the artist’s influences through her own words. With insightful text by feminist art scholar Helaine Posner, plus commentary from Dennis on the sources and process of creating the work, this book is an essential addition to the libraries of collectors and art historians interested in the architectural sculpture movement of the 1970s, and all those interested in feminism in art.

• Format: Hardback
• Size: 289 × 213 mm (11.5 × 9.5 in)
• Pages: 224 pp
• Illustrations: 250 illustrations

Brian Voll's Menu series is a collection of small books (5" x 7", 36 pages), that offer a charming combination of practicality, hospitality, and style, all in the form of, yes, a menu for dinner, with recipes, a shopping list, and a few thoughts on not being wasteful with ingredients while still offering your guests something out-of-the-ordinary.

The core ingredients for Menu No 5 are beef, mustard, fresh chilies, dried chilies, and butter. With some supplemental ingredients, time, and culinary effort, they become:

• Agave cocktail
• Tomato and crab soup with sweet potato and chiles
• Cornmeal molasses rolls
• Bloody beef with arugula, mint, and mustard
• Carrot mash with brown butter and spices
• Paste di Meliga (cornmeal sandwich cookies with Italian meringue buttercream)

The food isn't revolutionary; it's not meant to be. But it's smart and thoughtful and it might just get you out of a rut.

The third in an imaginative series of small books, each of which offers a charming dinner menu.  There is an emphasis on reducing food waste by thoughtful use of ingredients, and on careful preparation to prevent last minute fuss.

There are twelve different recipes in this small book (5" x 7", 36 pages). In addition to Voll's notes on shopping and cooking ahead, there is also a short rumination on preserving that may include the first reference to Homer we've seen prefacing a jam recipe.

Menu No. 3 offers recipes for

• Gin Cocktail
• Grilled Lobster with Parsley and Scallion Butter
• Charred Vegetables with Creamy Scallion Dressing
• Hush Puppies
• Green Salad
• Olive Oil Gelato with Tomato Jam
• a bonus

As for author Brian Voll, a self-taught, trial-and-error, home cook, he says,

I was born in Indiana to a mother who loved to cook and considered her kitchen a laboratory to try any and every interesting or unusual recipe that she came across. Her five children were her guinea pigs, and when a recipe turned out, we ate very well. When a recipe didn’t turn out, we ate a lot of pizza.

Since moving to New York ages ago, I’ve been recreating that dynamic among my chosen family in my little kitchen. Each of my cookbooklets is a distillation of a really good night when everybody ate very well, when the recipes I’d been tinkering with finally came together. The series is as much a memoir as it is a collection of recipes. Embedded within each page are the kinds of things I like to cook—inspired by travels around the world and New York City, rooted in my friends and family, and grounded in how I think about cooking: solving the puzzle for maximizing flavor and minimizing waste.

My hope is that these stories inspire people to take pleasure in home cooking with good friends.

Incorporating both formal details and welcoming elements, a sophisticated and balanced look tailored to a sense of home, as shown through the portfolio of Foley & Cox

Foley & Cox is a New York-based interior design firm renowned for serene spaces subtly layered with color and texture that create a sense of welcome and comfort. Taking creative cues directly from their clients–their perceptions, preferences, and passions–the firm creates serene interiors infused with personal style.

This elegant book presents 24 homes, ranging from elegant prewar apartments in Manhattan to retreats in the Hamptons and summer places along the coast of New England and in Europe, and even to a private jet and a yacht that cruises the Mediterranean. What unites these spaces is an overall balance and elegance, infused with luxurious fabrics in subtle tonal variations and a judicious use of highlight color, often in the artwork and accessories. Founder Michael Cox is a master at creating settings for art collections and selecting distinctive vintage pieces that add a sophisticated touch to the rooms.

Specifications:

• Format: Hardback
• Size: 304 × 241 mm (12 × 9.5 in)
• Pages: 248 pp
• Illustrations: 220 illustrations
• ISBN: 9781580936163

A vase is never merely a container. As Georges Braque once said, "the vase gives form to emptiness": ever since the earliest human civilizations, this object has had a purpose that is greater than its function and it perennially invites experimentation in shape and expression.
The 1,000 vases presented in this book offer an eloquent demonstration of this fact. They come from 35 different countries and more than 80% of them have been made by women or independent designers and artists born between 1988 and 1993—each of whom was invited to create a free interpretation of the same archetype, resulting in a spectrum of the infinite creativity inspired by the many possible versions of a single item. Made from an enormous range of materials (ceramic, terracotta, porcelain, metal, wood and glass, as well as natural fibers, industrial waste and recycled plastic), using techniques both ancient and ultramodern (3D printing) and belonging to different categories (from amphora to jar, jug to carafe), almost all sit on the borderline that simultaneously unites and separates art, design and craftsmanship.
Designers include: Yuta Segawa, Zhu Ohmu, Yonobi Studio, Angelika Kogevina, Anbar El Mokri, Andrea Maestri, Angelina Guez, Anna Jukova, Ariaana de Luca, Carey Lowell, Coco Brun, E Jockel, Gabriela Flores and many more.

This 350+ page flexibound book is a revelatory guide to hundreds and hundreds of original seven-inch record cover sleeve designs—visual artifacts found at the heart of the most radical and anarchistic musical movement of the 20th century. The revolutionary do-it-yourself ethic of punk was applied to the aesthetic of design as much as it was to music, and record sleeves acted as lo-fi signifiers of anarchy, style, fashion, politics and more with an urban and suburban invective courtesy of the thousands of new bands—punk, post-punk, pre-punk, nearly punk and more—that emerged at the end of the 1970s.
This book is an exhaustive, thorough and exciting celebration of the stunning artwork of punk music—everything from the most celebrated and iconic designs through to the stark beauty of the cheapest do-it-yourself lo-fi obscurities.
Punk 45! is introduced and coedited by Jon Savage, author of the acclaimed definitive history of punk, England’s Dreaming, and features a new introduction by Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream. Contributors include Peter Saville, Richard Hell, Richard H Kirk, Seymour Stein, Geoff Travis, Martin Moscrop, Glenn Branca, Jamie Reid, Dave Robinson, Roger Armstrong, Martin Mills, Gee Vaucher, Savage Pencil, Dennis Morris and more.

Niki de Saint Phalle’s sensual Nanas—colorful, buxom female figures—laid the foundation for her international success beyond the art world. But the self-taught artist’s creative spectrum is much broader, and her unconventional oeuvre—ranging from painting and drawing to assemblages, performances, theater, film and architecture—is more subversive and critical of society than is widely assumed. Based in part on her efforts to process her own experiences, Saint Phalle addressed social and political issues, critically questioning institutions and role models in ways that are as relevant today as they have ever been. This publication sheds new light on the artist’s exceptional personality and uncovers an oeuvre that is always surprising and eccentric, emotional, dark and brutal, humorous and cheerful.

Cabinets of curiosities fascinated people of the 16th and 17th centuries. From crocodiles, minerals, and corals to paintings, ivory trophies, measuring instruments, and incredible automata, it was a glimpse into a world full of natural wonders and treasures that aimed to reflect the order of the universe. This magnificent volume takes us through the world’s most beautiful collections, into the Medici treasury or the Green Vault (Grünes Gewölbe) of Dresden, and offers no less than a brief cultural history of the miraculous.

This volume, the third in the artist’s first seven-part catalogue raisonné, contains the sketches and preparatory work af Klint made in anticipation of The Paintings for the Temple. af Klint traveled with these sketchbooks so as to be able to show her friends her work in a more accessible format.

Here is an intimate look at one of music’s greatest legends, as he turns 80, by an iconic photojournalist. From the delirium of early Beatlemania to the heady days of 1970s‑era Wings to his quiet rural life in the early 1990s,Paul follows the pop genius through the years with more than 100 rare photographs. Now available in a trade edition following last year’s sold out Collector’s Edition.

Yoshitomo Nara is among the most beloved Japanese artists of his generation. His widely recognizable portraits of menacing figures reflect the artist’s raw encounters with his inner self. Nara’s oeuvre takes inspiration from a wide range of resources—memories of his childhood, music, literature, studying and living in Germany (1988–2000), exploring his roots in Japan, Sakhalin and Asia, and modern art from Europe and Japan.

Spanning 35 years (1985 to 2020), this book—which accompanies the major career retrospective organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—presents the full range of Nara’s work. It also examines the artist’s work through the lens of his longtime passion—music—and features “liner notes” written by the artist about various albums in his personal collection of 1960s and 70s folk and rock albums, published in English for the first time.

The book features paintings, drawings, sculpture, ceramic figures, an installation that re-creates his drawing studio, and never-before-exhibited idea sketches that reflect the artist’s empathic eye, shining a light on Nara’s conceptual process. Readers will see the evolution of a dynamic artist who has become more contemplative with age.

A visionary creator and intrepid polymath, Wolfgang Tillmans unites formal inventiveness with an ethical orientation that attends to the most pressing issues of life today. While his work transcends the bounds of any single artistic discipline, he is best known for his wide-ranging photographic output. From trenchant documents of social movements to windowsill still lifes, ecstatic images of nightlife to cameraless abstractions, sensitive portraits to architectural studies, astronomical phenomena to intimate nudes, he has explored seemingly every genre of photography imaginable, continually experimenting with how to make new pictures and deepen the viewer’s experience.
Published in conjunction with a major exhibition of Tillmans’ work at the Museum of Modern Art, this copiously illustrated volume surveys four decades of the artist’s career. An outstanding group of writers offer diverse essays addressing key threads of his multifaceted practice, and a new text by Tillmans himself elucidates the distinctive methodology behind his system of presenting photographs. Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear grants readers new insight into the work of an artist who has not only changed the way photography is exhibited but pointed contemporary art in dynamic new directions.

This authoritative Virgil Abloh compendium, created by the designer himself, accompanies his acclaimed landmark 2019–23 touring exhibition and offers in-depth analysis of his career and his inspirations. More than a catalog, Figures of Speech is a 500-page user’s manual to Abloh's genre-bending work in art, fashion and design.
The first section features essays and an interview that examine Abloh’s oeuvre through the lenses of contemporary art history, architecture, streetwear, high fashion and race, to provide insight into a prolific and impactful career that cuts across mediums, connecting visual artists, musicians, graphic designers, fashion designers, major brands and architects. The book also contains a massive archive of images culled from Abloh’s personal files on major projects, revealing behind-the-scenes snapshots, prototypes, inspirations and more—accompanied by intimate commentary from the artist. Finally, a gorgeous full-color plate section offers a detailed view of Abloh’s work across disciplines.

Focusing on one of Murakami’s largest and most important works, In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow(2014), this book offers a lavish introduction to the work of one of Japan’s greatest artists. This publication provides a broad overview of Murakami's practice and features 12 works from The Broad's substantial collection of Murakami’s work, including his early sculpture DOB in the Strange Forest (Blue DOB) (1999), Flower Matango (b) (2001–6) and such notable later paintings and drawings as Hustle'n'Punch by Kaikai And Kiki (2009), Of Chinese Lions, Peonies, Skulls, and Fountains (2011) and Tan Tan Bo a.k.a. Gerotan: Scorched by the Blaze in the Purgatory of Knowledge (2018).
The main essay by Ed Schad is presented along with studio photography, archival material and illuminating illustrations of Murakami works from around Los Angeles and the world. Notably, the volume features a conversation between Murakami and Ed Schad on making art during times of crisis and in the wake of global events such as the 2011 tsunami in Japan and the global COVID-19 epidemic of 2020 and beyond.

The last decade of the 20th century into the first decade of the 21st represent a High Renaissance age of hip hop—an era in which rap music had reached critical mass and was exploding, and in which New York City itself witnessed the worldwide ascension and cultural domination of its powerful homegrown art form. In Rap Is Risen: New York Photographs 1988–2008, celebrated photographer Sue Kwon documents this era with a combination of incisive portraits and unposed, spontaneous images that capture the energy of these ascendant artists and the city itself.
With access to some of rap music’s biggest legends—some stars already, some at the cusp of their fame—Kwon’s work offers an intimacy rarely seen in the hip hop photography of the time. The Wu-Tang Clan, Biggie Smalls, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Big Pun, Eminem, Mobb Deep, the Beastie Boys, Big L, Ice Cube, De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest are all represented here, as well as dozens of other DJs and artists that communed with Kwon to produce these images. Method Man brushing his teeth, Fat Joe playing softball in the Bronx, Prince Paul kissing his baby son—the trust inherent between subject and photographer is evident in intimate, joyful shots like these.
Giving a rare glimpse into real rap culture, and featuring 300 photographs, most of which have never been published before, Rap Is Risen is a necessary offering to music history and the faithful followers of hip hop.

Organized into chapters that explore the many ways to express dissent (RESIST!, VOTE!, STRIKE!, TEACH! and LOVE!), Strikethrough presents more than 120 signs, posters, publications and ephemera in vivid imagery and incisive prose. From the colorful affiches of the Paris ’68 uprising to Memphis strike workers’ placards to the Black Panthers’ newspaper, this generously illustrated volume showcases the role of graphic design in a wide range of protest movements in the United States and abroad. Including selections from artists and art collectives such as Jenny Holzer, the Guerrilla Girls and Fierce Pussy, this book provides a broad and critical survey of the typographics of activism. Strikethrough also features 10 profiles on the designers behind the graphics—including Corita Kent, Emory Douglas and Ben Shahn—and a custom display typeface based on historical protest graphics by Tré Seals, plus an introduction by activist and design scholar Colette Gaiter and an essay on type by Stephen Coles.
Charting a typographic chant of resistance that spans more than 150 years, Strikethrough curators Silas Munro and Stephen Coles reveal how the message makes its way to the masses via marker, screen print, spray paint, collage and both physical and digital type, and how it calls on us all to craft our own demands for social change.
Artists and designers include: Atelier Populaire, See Red Women’s Workshop, Carlos Cortez, Emory Douglas, fierce pussy, Ganzeer, Milton Glaser, Guerrilla Girls, Jenny Holzer, Corita Kent, Aaron Douglas, Art Workers’ Coalition, OSPAAAL, Tibor Kalman, Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr., Herb Lubalin, Phase 2, Favianna Rodriguez, Ward Schumaker, Ben Shahn and Wes Wilson.

Few materials have experienced a similar reevaluation in contemporary art as clay has over the past few years. This timely publication accompanies a large-scale exhibition at Hayward Gallery, London, exploring how contemporary artists are using clay and ceramics in inventive and surprising ways, pushing the boundaries of the medium.
Featuring the work of over 20 international artists—from Grayson Perry to Woody De Othello—an introductory essay by curator Cliff Lauson, a text on the history of fine art and ceramics by writer and critic Amy Sherlock and a round-table discussion with artists from the exhibition, this catalog is an exciting contribution to the ongoing conversation about the relationship between art and craft.
Artists include: Salvatore Arancio, Leilah Babiryre, Jonathan Baldock, Lubna Chowdhary, Woody De Othello, Edmund de Waal, Emma Hart, Rachel Kneebone, Serena Korda, Klara Kristalova, Beate Kuhn, Takuro Kuwata, Jianhua Liu, Lindsey Mendick, Ron Nagle, Magdalene Odundo, Grayson Perry, Shahpour Pouyan, Ken Price, Brie Ruais, Betty Woodman and David Zink Yi.

This catalog traces the history of paper as an ancient material used from antiquity to the present day. Encompassing paper's manufacture, circulation and technical development, Stories of Paper highlights the many aspects of this humble material. The diversity of the artworks reproduced here—many of which are gathered from the collections of the Louvre, Musée Guimet, Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Centre Georges-Pompidou, Louvre Abu Dhabi, Sharjah Art Foundation, Goesan Museum and the Cultural Institute of Korea—inspires readers to consider paper as a medium for creativity and exchange across centuries and cultures.
Artists include: Abdullah Al Saadi, Achille Etna Michallon, Adam Frans Van Der Meulen, Adriaen Frans Boudewyns, Hui Neng, Muhammadi Haravi, Beatrice Casadesus, Bertrand Lavier, Charles Le Brun, Dana Awartani, Du Dashou, Edme Bouchardon, Etel Adnan, Fra Angelico, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Girolamo Muziano, Hassan Sharif, Henri Gissey and Isoda Koryusai.

Every year, the iconic luxury brand Hermès chooses a new theme to celebrate its creative direction for the upcoming year. This practice began in 1987, marking the brand's 150th anniversary, and has since become a beloved tradition—a way to combine the house's proud, storied heritage with its creative vision for the future.

Hermès' Year Theme for 2018 is "Let's Play," and the brand is celebrating in style with this new, deluxe pop-up book. Featuring a selection of 14 of the house's iconic square scarf designs, both old and more recent, this book brings the designs alive with exhilarating ingenuity. Delicate paper constructions bring out the depth and volume within the scarf designs; zebras rear up, delicately arching trees grow from the page and painterly strokes detach themselves from the paper surface. This is the Hermès carré as you've never seen it before.

For Hermès, a brand associated with the highest quality luxury materials and design, "play is movement, freedom, imagination, fantasy, seduction, lightness." Impeccably produced, Hermès Pop Up gives readers the chance to play around in the brand's archives.

The radical cultural transformations that occurred in New York in the three years between January 1962 and December 1964 ramified across the world. In addition to a whole host of creative innovations across disciplines, the period also saw a shift in the center of artistic gravity from Europe to the United States and the rise of a new leadership in the arts—curators, gallerists and other impresarios. Modeled on the scale and format of Life magazine (one of the most widely read publications of the era), this lavishly illustrated oversized paperback traces a detailed itinerary of artists and curators, experimental exhibitions and museums, as well as historical and political events that transformed society during this explosive moment. From the New Realists exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery in 1962 to Robert Rauschenberg’s unexpected win of the International Grand Prize in Painting at the 1964 Venice Biennale, every groundbreaking event from this incredible three-year period is documented.
Organized chronologically, the book is teeming with images of artworks and archival photographs, and artist interviews conducted by the late great curator Germano Celant.
Artists include: Diane Arbus, Lee Bontecou, Chryssa, Merce Cunningham, Jim Dine, Melvin Edwards, Dan Flavin, Lee Friedlander, Nancy Grossman, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Yayoi Kusama, Norman Lewis, Roy Lichtenstein, Marisol, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Claes Oldenburg, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Faith Ringgold, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, Miriam Schapiro, Carolee Schneemann, George Segal, Jack Smith, Harold Stevenson, Marjorie Strider, Mark di Suvero, Bob Thompson and Andy Warhol.

Early work from Lee Friedlander capturing a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement

 On May 17, 1957, through the generosity of Bayard Rustin, Lee Friedlander was given full access to photograph the participants of the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom in Washington, D.C. This extraordinary event, organized by Mr. Rustin, as well as A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., brought together many of the great thinkers and leaders of the period, and was a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement.

 Friedlander's photographs depict the famous individuals at the event―Mahalia Jackson, Ruby Dee and Harry Belafonte, among many other luminaries of the African-American community―but they also pay particular attention to the 25,000 men, women and children who gathered to give voice and energy to the ideas embattled by the movement.

 The 58 previously unpublished photographs gathered here are among Friedlander's earliest work. Also included in this publication is the typescript of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Give Us the Ballot" speech and additional ephemera from the march produced in facsimile.

The first comprehensive book on the surreal, queer and humorous photographic art of Jimmy DeSana, a central figure in New York's art and music scenes of the 1970s and '80s

 This is the first overview of the work of Jimmy DeSana, a pioneering yet underrecognized figure in New York's downtown art, music and film scenes during the 1970s and 1980s. The book situates DeSana's work and life within the countercultural and queer contexts in the American South as well as New York, through his involvement in mail art, punk and No Wave music and film, and artist collectives and publications.

 DeSana's first major project was 101 Nudes, made in Atlanta during the city's gay liberation movement. After moving to New York in 1973, DeSana became immersed in queer networks, collaborating with General Idea and Ray Johnson on zines and mail art, and documenting the genderqueer street performances of Stephen Varble.
By the mid-1970s, DeSana was a fixture in New York's No Wave music and film scenes, serving as portraitist for much of the period's central figures and producing album covers for Talking Heads, James Chance and others. His book Submission, made with William S. Burroughs, humorously staged scenes out of a S&M manual that explored the body as object and the performance of desire. DeSana was also an early adopter of color photography, creating his best-known series, Suburban, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This body of work explores relationships between gender, sexuality and consumer capitalism in often humorous, surreal ways. After DeSana became sick as a result of contracting HIV, he turned to abstraction, using experimental photographic techniques to continue to push against photographic norms.

The first book on Basquiat's ingenious uses of found objects and unconventional materials

 Bringing together a range of unconventional painted supports and found-object sculptures, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art and Objecthood provides an innovative, in-depth look into the artist's sculptural practice. In addition to painting and drawing on everything within his domestic spaces--refrigerators, chairs, cabinets--Basquiat made use of discarded windows and doors, mirrors, wood boards and subway tiles in his earliest creations. In a 1985 interview with Becky Johnston and Tamra Davis, he explained: "The first paintings I made were on windows I found on the street. And I used the window shape as a frame, and I just put the painting on the glass part and on doors I found on the street."

 Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art and Objecthood borrows its title from the influential 1967 essay by renowned art historian Michael Fried, who critiqued Minimalism for its dogmatic separation between "art" and "object," arguing that its presentation of isolated objects as art was theatrics rather than a true art, which for Fried implied the unity of art and object. Invoking Fried's stance, this book invites viewers to consider the debate on art and objecthood as a lens through which to consider Basquiat's uses of objects. The book also demonstrates the extent to which these uses reveal his dedication to the struggle against social inequality and his profound engagement with the politics of race in the US.

The first book to focus exclusively on Hokusai's landscapes, by one of the world's leading ukiyo-e specialists

 The best known of all Japanese artists, Katsushika Hokusai was active as a painter, book illustrator and print designer throughout his 90-year lifespan. Yet his most famous works--the color woodblock landscape prints issued in series--were produced within a relatively short time, in an amazing burst of creative energy that lasted from about 1830 to 1836.

 Hokusai's landscapes revolutionized Japanese printmaking and became icons of world art within a few decades of the artist's death. Hokusai's Landscapes focuses exclusively on this pivotal body of the artist's work, the first book to do so. Featuring stunning color reproductions of works from the incomparable Japanese art collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (the largest collection of Japanese prints outside Japan), Hokusai's Landscapes examines the magnetic appeal of Hokusai's designs and the circumstances of their creation.

The book includes all published prints of the artist's eight major landscape series: Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1830-32), A Tour of Waterfalls in Various Provinces (1833-34), Snow, Moon and Flowers (1833), Eight Views of the Ryukyu Islands (1832-33), One Thousand Pictures of the Ocean (1832-33), Remarkable Views of Bridges in Various Provinces (1834), A True Mirror of Chinese and Japanese Poetry (1833) and One Hundred Poems Explained by the Nurse (1835).

The second installment in an epic and authoritative seven-volume Hilma af Klint catalogue raisonné the pioneering abstractionist's beloved The Paintings for the Templeseries

 Between 1906 and 1915, Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) created 193 paintings that she would title The Paintings for the Temple. Colorful, mostly abstract, with biomorphic imagery, these works expressed af Klint's mediumistic vision of spiritual reality, which she hoped would ultimately be installed in a round temple for true spiritual comprehension and enlightenment. Since the internationally acclaimed Guggenheim exhibition of 2018-19, these works have come to number among her most popular, defining and beloved.

 This handsomely produced clothbound volume collects these paintings in the second of a projected and collectible seven-volume catalogue raisonné that will present the entirety of af Klint's work in its dazzling totality for the first time. Produced in cooperation with the Axel and Margaret Ax: son Johnson Foundation, it features introductions by Daniel Birnbaum, former head of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, and architect of the grand af Klint exhibitions between 2013 and 2019, and Kurt Almqvist, President of the Axel and Margaret Ax: son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit.

Ringgold's most formative and influential political works are gathered in this beautifully designed clothbound volume

Alongside reproductions of key works made between 1967 and 1981, Faith Ringgold: Politics / Power provides an overview of Ringgold's seminal artistic and activist work, and its historical context during these years, including accounts by the artist herself.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Ringgold, a dedicated and impassioned civil rights advocate, established her voice as a feminist and within the Black Arts Movement. Her influential work expressed her in-depth knowledge of art history and contemporary art, as well as her activism. Spanning mediums such as painting, cut paper works, posters, collage and textile art, the works presented in this publication foreground the artist's explicitly political pieces, for which she deployed new material and formal processes, and developed a radical aesthetics and vocabulary.
Organized chronologically, the book allows readers to retrace the artist's foundational creative approaches to contemporaneous social, political and artistic questions. It includes illustrations of individual artworks together with previously unpublished work and archival materials.

How design can help foster the conditions for global peace: an intersectional visual conversation between activists, designers, architects and theorists

How might we collectively put our creative forces together to envision a future we want to live in and take action to create it now? Designing Peace is an intersectional snapshot of the actions—culturally diverse and wide-ranging in scale—that are currently in play around the world.

Offering perspectives on peace through essays, interviews, critical maps, project profiles, data visualizations and art, this book conveys the momentum that design can gain in effecting a peace-filled future. From activists, scholars and architects to policymakers and graphic, game and landscape designers, Designing Peace flips the conversation: peace is not simply a passive state signifying the absence of war, it is a dynamic concept that requires effort, expertise and multidimensional solutions to address its complexity.

Designers engage with individuals, communities and organizations to create a more sustainable peace—from creative confrontations that challenge existing structures to designs that demand embracing justice and truth in a search for reconciliation. This publication aims to expand the discourse on what is possible if society were to design for peace.

An reimagining of the Grimm fairytales, bringing together the well-known and the less familiar, all in David Hockney's inimitable style

The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm according to David Hockney are like no other version you will have read before. Although inspired by earlier illustrators of the tales, from Arthur Rackham to Edmund Dulac, Hockneys etchings re-imagine these strange and supernatural stories for a modern audience.
David Hockney (b. 1937) is an internationally acclaimed artist. He studied at Bradford School of Art from 1953 to 1957 and at the Royal College of Art, London, from 1959 until 1962. He has lived in Los Angeles since 1963 but now splits his time between the United States and East Yorkshire, where he grew up.

Simplified renderings of the iconic British artist's works: a coloring book for all ages

Damien Hirst: Colouring Book features the British artist's most iconic works rendered as simple line drawings. Coloring fans of all ages can immerse themselves in themes and motifs found within some of the artist's most enduring series, including anatomical models, butterflies, medicine cabinets, spin paintings, color charts and kaleidoscope paintings. Featuring Hirst's most popular images, including The Incomplete Truth, Myth, Loving in a World of Desire, Hymn, For the Love of God, Benevolence and more, the volume brings some of the most controversial and groundbreaking work of contemporary art to a witty coloring-book format.

Australian-born, California-based sister artists Margaret and Christine Wertheim draw on a unique fusion of mathematics, marine biology, traditional handicraft methods and collective art practice to create large-scale coralline landscapes both beautiful and blighted. Responding to anthropogenic crisis, their soft sculptures and wall-mounted reliefs simulate living reefs using crochet techniques to mimic in yarn the curling, crenelated forms of actual marine organisms. Initiated in 2005, the Crochet Coral Reefproject has been exhibited at the 58th Venice Biennale, Helsinki Biennial, Andy Warhol Museum, The Smithsonian Institution and other international venues. In addition to their own reefs, the Wertheims have collaborated with communities in 50 cities and countries to create local Satellite Reefs, to which more than 20,000 people have contributed, constituting one of the largest, longest running participatory art happenings on the planet.

This publication accompanies a museum-wide retrospective at Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, Germany, which gathers the Wertheims' work over the past 17 years alongside a new Baden-Baden Satellite Reef, the largest to date, encompassing over 40,000 individual coral pieces. With commissioned essays about the scientific, social, environmental, mathematical and communal dimensions of the project, the book provides a critical in-depth look at a stunning example of the power of art and community in the face of climate change. Collaborative, figurative, material, conceptual, artistic, feminist and playful, the Wertheims' Crochet Coral Reef alerts us to the reality that life on Earth is nothing if not entangled.

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.

Celebrate “the Raphael of flowers,” Pierre-Joseph Redouté. This elegant catalogue gathers all engravings from his masterful volumes Rosesand Selection of the Most Beautiful Flowers, alongside the most astounding pieces from The Lilies. Astonishing with his admixture of accuracy and beauty, Redouté transports the reader to the magnificent greenhouses and gardens of a bygone Paris.

With his 1543 herb manual, botanical pioneer Leonhart Fuchs created a masterpiece of Renaissance botany and publishing. This edition is based on Fuchs’s personal, hand-colored original and features over 500 illustrations, including the first visual record of New World plant types such as maize, cactus, and tobacco.

Racinet’s Costume History is a landmark in the study of clothing and fashion. This reprint presents Racinet’s exquisitely precise color illustrations, as well as his delightful descriptions and witty commentary. This is an unrivalled encyclopedia for students, designers, artists, illustrators, and historians, and anyone interested in style.

Renowned for his politics as much as for his art based on social intervention, a new approach to the readymade, and Chinese traditional crafts, Ai Weiwei’s fame extends beyond the art world. This monograph explores 30 years of work, from his exile in 80s New York to the art as social campaign that led to his detention.

This illustrated biography tells the story of Gropius's life, beginning with his shattering experiences in World War One, his turbulent marriage to the notorious Alma Mahler, the establishment of the Bauhaus, and the tragic death of their daughter Manon.

After Gropius's agonized decision to leave Nazi Germany in 1933, the book explores his life in exile in London and then his move to America in 1937, where he lived and worked until his death in 1969.

Features more than 375 illustrations including letters, telegrams, sketches, drawings, photographs, posters, brochures, and other ephemera. The authors present the life of Walter Gropius as not just a key figure of 20th-century architecture, but as an extraordinarily generous person - a connector, protector, and benefactor who improved the lives and careers of all those with whom he came into contact.

This is the first comprehensive illustrated biography of one of Modern architecture's most important figures.

Specifications:

• Format: Hardback
• Size: 305 × 238 mm (12 × 9 3/8 in)
• Pages: 320 pp
• Illustrations: 377 illustrations

This dazzling tribute to Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s 1974 boxing match in Kinshasa, Zaire, brings together the best of Norman Mailer’s classic commentary The Fight with color and black-and-white photographs from the two men who captured Ali like no one else: Neil Leifer and Howard L. Bingham.

First published as a signed Collector’s Edition, now available in an unlimited edition.

Hardcover, 11 x 13.3 in., 5.98 lb, 260 pages

Annie Leibovitz began working as a photographer in the early 1970s, which was a volatile and frenetic time in America. The lines had yet to be drawn between journalists and the people they covered, so she had access that would now be considered unusual. This unique collection provides a vivid account both of Leibovitz’s development as an artist and of a pivotal era.

Hardcover, 8.5” x 10.6”, 182 pages

This encyclopedia explores the hidden meanings of visual symbols across time and geography, from the sun to whales and the human hand. Spanning different eras and cultures, over 800 beautiful images combine with expert illuminations of symbol history, meanings, and psychic associations, offering readers a precious and fascinating resource for thoughtful interpretations of life, art, and spirituality.

Hardcover, 6.6” x 9.4”, 808 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.

Honoré de Balzac's 1830 Treatise on Elegant Living was a keystone text on dandyism, preceding Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's Anatomy of Dandyism (1845) and Charles Baudelaire's “The Dandy” (in The Painter of Modern Life, 1863), and marking an important shift from the early dandyism of the British Regency to the intellectual and artistic dandyism of nineteenth-century France. The Treatise is the first true philosophical expression of dandyism, and is full of well-crafted aphorisms: “Elegant living is, in the broad acceptance of the term, the art of animating repose,” runs one classic definition of dandyism, and “One must have studied at least as far as rhetoric to lead an elegant life” asserts the importance of verbal pirouette and dexterous quipping to the dandy. Further embellished with anecdotes and historical and personal illustrations, Balzac's Treatise even features a fictitious encounter with the original dandy himself, Beau Brummell. Never before translated into English, this witty tract makes for an illuminating cornerstone to Balzac's Human Comedy (which was originally to have included a never-completed four-part philosophical “Pathology of Social Life”). Above all, it represents a decisive moment in the history of dandyism, and an entertaining exposition on the profundities of what lies deepest within all of us: our appearance.

This collection of 30 photographs by American photographer Peter Kayafas (born 1971) depicts people swimming in the ocean at Coney Island, a location that has long served as a source of inspiration and fascination for artists. Made over the course of many summers and one particular winter during which Kayafas was a member of Coney Island’s legendary Polar Bear Club (the oldest winter bathing club in the United States) in the 1990s and 2000s, the photographs are filled with energy, movement, grace and a surprising intimacy.
Using a waterproof camera, hidden just below the ocean’s surface, Kayafas captures candid snapshots of unsuspecting beachgoers. His focus on the swimmers over a period of two decades provides an extended insight into the elemental relationship humans have with water.

Compiled by famed nostalgia enthusiast Jonny Trunk (owner of record label Trunk Records, and author of The Music Library, Own Label and Wobbly Sounds), and with a foreword by Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, Wrappers Delight is crammed with more than 500 examples of British candy-wrapper designs from the 1960s to the 1980s—the first and only overview of Britain’s drinks and confectionery industry during this period.

The book catalogs the amazing collection of a man named John Townsend, who collected candy cigarette boxes, wax gum papers, potato-chip bags, soda cans, rock labels, stamps, transfers, coupons, recipe cards, tickets, odd boxes, badges, cards, stickers and much more. All these items have been carefully documented, presented in alphabetical order by manufacturer and reproduced here in the highest quality. Among the confections and manufacturers to be found here are Cider Barrel, Cresta, Tip Top, Pacemakers, Lollygobblechocbomb, Kung Fueys, Fizz Bang, UFO sweet cigarettes and other TV tie-ins, Furry Friends and Fingammies.

This book will come as a delightful revelation (or a happy reminder) for graphic designers and nostalgia aficionados everywhere.

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.

In We Learn at Home, Miriam Elia’s follow-up to last year’s hit We Go to the Gallery, Mummy takes John and Susan out of their local school to be reeducated at home—though not before tagging the walls of St. James’ Primary with the words “Fascist Scum.” In order to introduce their young minds to a new, alternative worldview, Mummy will ground all learning in a feelings-based outlook, free of any actual facts or skills, and reevaluate core subjects such as mathematics, religion, philosophy and art. John and Susan burn the Union Jack, debate and learn to paint their inner children. Key vocabulary for young readers includes terms such as “Marx” and “Buddha.”

Pocket-sized, printed in bold colors and written in clear, simple English, the Dung Beetle Learning series pays tribute to and skewers the much-loved British Ladybird early learning children’s books of the 1960s, with our child protagonists learning about contemporary art and politics rather than helping their parents around the house. In We Go to the Gallery, Susan found that the decay of Western civilization smells like rubbish, John learned that some toys are only for venture capitalists and the siblings discovered that God is dead. What new lessons will Mummy teach?

A 75th-anniversary facsimile edition of one of the most significant photobooks ever published

More than any other artist, Walker Evans invented the images of essential America that we have long since accepted as fact, and his work has influenced not only modern photography but also literature, film and visual arts in other mediums. The original edition of American Photographs was a carefully prepared letterpress production, published by The Museum of Modern Art in 1938 to accompany an exhibition of photographs by Evans that captured scenes of America in the early 1930s. As noted on the jacket of the first edition, Evans, “photographing in New England or Louisiana, watching a Cuban political funeral or a Mississippi flood, working cautiously so as to disturb nothing in the normal atmosphere of the average place, can be considered a kind of disembodied, burrowing eye, a conspirator against time and its hammers.” This seventy-fifth anniversary edition of American Photographs, made with new reproductions, recreates the original 1938 edition as closely as possible to make the landmark publication available for a new generation. American Photographs has fallen out of print for long periods of time since it was first published, and even subsequent editions--two of which altered the design and typography of the book in small but significant ways--are often available only at libraries and rare bookstores. This version, like the fiftieth-anniversary edition produced by the Museum in 1988, captures the look and feel of the very first edition with the aid of new digital technologies.

Walker Evans (1903–1975) took up photography upon his return to New York in 1927, following a year in Paris when his aspiration to become a writer withered in the shadow of Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Joyce. In 1935, Evans was commissioned by the Farm Security Administration to photograph the effects of the Great Depression in the Southeast. During this time he took many of the photographs that appeared in his collaboration with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a book which has become a defining document of that era. Evans joined the staff of Time magazine in 1945 and shortly thereafter became an editor at Fortune, where he stayed for the next two decades. In 1964, he became a professor at the Yale University School of Art, where he taught until his death in 1975.

In The Spectacle of Illusion, professional magician-turned experimental psychologist Dr. Matthew L. Tompkins investigates the arts of deception as practised and popularised by mesmerists, magicians and psychics since the early 18th century. Organised thematically within a broadly chronological trajectory, this compelling book explores how illusions perpetuated by magicians and fraudulent mystics can not only deceive our senses but also teach us about the inner workings of our minds. Indeed, modern scientists are increasingly turning to magic tricks to develop new techniques to examine human perception, memory and belief. Beginning by discussing mesmerism and spiritualism, the book moves on to consider how professional magicians such as John Nevil Maskelyne and Harry Houdini engaged with these movements – particularly how they set out to challenge and debunk paranormal claims. It also relates the interactions between magicians, mystics and scientists over the past 200 years, and reveals how the researchers who attempted to investigate magical and paranormal phenomena were themselves deceived, and what this can teach us about deception. Highly illustrated throughout with entertaining and bizarre drawings, double-exposure spirit photographs and photographs of spoon-bending from hitherto inaccessible and un-mined archives, including the Wellcome Collection, the Harry Price Library, the Society for Physical Research, and last but not least, the Magic Circle’s closely guarded collection, the book also features newly commissioned photography of planchettes, rapping boards, tilting tables, ectoplasm, automata and illusion boxes. Concluding with a modern-day analysis of the science of magic and illusion, analysing surprisingly weird phenomena such as ideomotor action, sleep paralysis, choice blindness and the psychology of misdirection, this unnerving volume highlights how unreliable our minds can be, and how complicit they can be in the perpetuation of illusions.

A Chicago Tribune 2020 holiday gift guide pick

In Tar Beach, photographer and Little Italy resident Susan Meiselas (born 1948) brings together found pictures that were made, kept and gathered by various families who handed them down from 1940 to the early 1970s. Reflections from the community offer perspectives of multiple generations, as local author Angel Marinaccio says: “If you had an accomplishment—communion, confirmation, wedding, graduation or birthday, you‘d dress up in your best outfit and go to the rooftop to take pictures and celebrate with your family.”

The introduction to Tar Beach is written by renowned filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who grew up on the streets portrayed in this collection. He writes: “The roof was our escape hatch and it was our sanctuary. The endless crowds, the filth and the grime, the constant noise, the chaos, the claustrophobia, the non-stop motion of everything … you would walk up that flight of stairs, open the door, and you were above it all. You could breathe. You could dream. You could be.”

Meiselas, along with two of her neighbors, Angel Marinaccio and Virginia Bynum, collected and curated these vernacular photographs and memories to convey the feeling of this special place and time in the daily lives of Italian immigrants as they made their way to becoming part of American culture.

Since 1985, photographer Phyllis Galembo has traveled extensively to photograph sites of ritual dress in Africa and the Caribbean. In her latest body of work, collected in this new publication, Galembo turns to Mexico, where she captures cultural performances with a subterranean political edge. Using a direct, unaffected portrait style, Galembo captures her subjects informally posed but often strikingly attired in traditional or ritualistic dress.

Masking is a complex tradition in which the participants transcend the physical world and enter the spiritual realm. Masks, costumes and body paint transform the human body and encode a rich range of political, artistic, theatrical, social and religious meanings on the body. In her vibrant color photographs, Galembo highlights the artistry of the performers, how they use materials from their immediate environment to morph into a fantastical representation of themselves and an idealized vision of a mythical figure. In a gorgeous, fascinating photographic survey of Mexico’s masking practices, Galembo captures her subjects suspended between past, present and future, with their religious, political and cultural affiliations—their personal and collective identifications—displayed on their bodies.

Photographer Phyllis Galembo (born 1952) received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1977, and was Professor in the Fine Arts Department of SUNY Albany from 1978 to 2018. A 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, Galembo has photographs in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library. Her photographs of ritual masks in Africa, the Diaspora and beyond have been the subject of several monographic publications, including Maske(Aperture, 2016).

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.

By 1944, Gordon Parks had established himself as a photographer who freely navigated the fields of press and commercial photography, with an unparalleled humanist perspective. That year, Roy Stryker—the former Farm Security Administration official who was now heading the public relations department for the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey)—commissioned Parks to travel to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to document the Penola, Inc. Grease Plant.
Employing his signature style, Parks spent two years chronicling the plant’s industry—critical to Pittsburgh’s history and character—by photographing its workers. The resulting photographs, dramatically staged and lit and striking in their composition, showed the range of activities engaged in by Black and white workers, divided as they were by roles, race and class. The images were used as marketing materials and made available to local and national newspapers, as well as corporate magazines and newsletters. However, they served as much more than documentation of industry, enduring as an exploration of labor and its social and economic ramifications in World War II America by one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
Featuring more than 100 photographs, many previously unpublished, this is the first book to focus exclusively on Parks’ photographs for the Standard Oil Company, illuminating an important chapter in his career prior to his landmark career as a staff photographer for Life.
Gordon Parks was born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912. 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. In addition to his tenures photographing for the FSA (1941–45) and Life magazine (1948–72), Parks evolved into a modern-day Renaissance man, finding success as a film director, writer and composer. He died in 2006.

The iconic black-and-white photographs of Hamburg-born photographer Frank Habicht (born 1938) reflect the spirit of the Swinging Sixties in London. In the 1960s, the conservative postwar years in England gave way to a period of upheaval, with a younger generation dreaming of an unconstrained life, one full of free love, peace and harmony. On the streets of the British capital, Habicht began photographing the profound social and political changes that were underway.

Habicht, who has lived in New Zealand since 1981, has produced photographs for many international magazines and newspapers, such as the Guardian, Die Welt, Camera Magazine and Twen. His photographs were recently exhibited at the Barbican in London, and he has made portraits of music and film greats such as Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, Jane Birkin, Christopher Lee and Vanessa Redgrave.

Frank Habicht: As It Was collects Habicht’s photos from the 1960s in an opulent book. A unique collection of images of the swinging, groovy, hippie and psychedelic ‘60s in London, it offers an eye-opening contribution to the history of a country that is currently undergoing yet more social transformation.

In his latest book, the great American fashion photographer Arthur Elgort presents photographs of women that he has taken throughout his career, in homage to their power, their beauty, their joy and their strength. Depicting a variety of subjects, from young ballerinas at the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet in St. Petersburg to snapshots of fashion’s most influential women, this collection portrays many aspects of femininity across generations. Designed in the style of his classic 1994 book Arthur Elgort’s Models Manual (by the same designer, Steve Hiett), and printed on sumptuous matte paper with a vinyl cover, this book combines text and photographs in one seamless flow, deploying a rich range of color with graphic snap. Featured here are idols such as supermodels Gia Carangi, Cindy Crawford, Karen Elson, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington, and legendary editors such as Franca Sozzani, the former editor-in-chief of Vogue Italia, and Polly Allen Mellen, a former editor at Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Allure.

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; his most recent publication is Jazz (2018).

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.

Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji has delighted readers for more than 1,000 years and inspired writers to create numerous parodies. Artists have responded with a rich parallel tradition illustrating the courtly intrigues, love affairs and shifting alliances of the epic novel, as well as its retellings. This lavishly illustrated volume explores interpretations of the original story and its spinoffs by Japanese master printmakers such as Kunisada, as well as Hiroshige, Suzuki Harunobu and Chobunsai Eishi, bringing the characters to life in dazzling woodblock prints from the peerless collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
With insightful commentary from a leading Japanese print scholar, this book invites readers to explore the colorful world of The Tale of Genjiand its visual afterlife.

Lauded internationally for her narrative quilts and her colorful paintings of African American life, New York artist Faith Ringgold has explored and sabotaged perceptions of identity and gender inequality through her experiences in the feminist and civil rights movements.
This catalog is published for her international traveling exhibition organized by the Serpentine, London, which traveled to Bildmuseet, Sweden, in 2020 and opens at Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland, in 2021. Focusing on several series of paintings, story quilts and political posters from the 1960s to today, the book includes two texts by Michele Wallace that interweave Ringgold’s biography with the chronology of works in the exhibition. In an extensive interview, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ringgold discuss her life in Harlem, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, her inspirations and her passion for storytelling and exercising her freedom of speech. The book also documents the expanded scope of the exhibition at the Glenstone Museum, which includes key examples of Ringgold’s soft sculpture and rare experiments with pure abstraction.
Faith Ringgold (born 1930) is a painter, mixed-media sculptor, performance artist, teacher and writer best known for her narrative quilts. As an avid civil rights and gender equality activist, Ringgold’s work is highly political; in 2020, the New York Timesdescribed her as an artist “who has confronted race relations in this country from every angle, led protests to diversify museums decades ago, and even went to jail for an exhibition she organized.” She has had solo shows at Spectrum Gallery (1967), Studio Museum in Harlem (1984) and, most recently, a five-decade retrospective at the Serpentine (2019). Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art, among others.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee with the Muhammad Ali tribute GOAT: Greatest Of All Time, an epic edition including expert essays, interviews, and thousands of images.

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