Search results for ""museum of modern art""
University of Toronto Press Painting Place: The Life and Work of David B. Milne
This lavishly illustrated study tells the remarkable story of the work of one of Canada's great artists. David B. Milne (1882–1953) left rural Ontario for New York City in 1903. After training at the Art Students' League, he emerged as an exceptional modernist, one of the "American extremists" whose work was well-represented at the famous 1913 Armory Show and won a major prize at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition. Milne's studio at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue was a regular forum for artists to debate art and aesthetics. In 1916 Milne moved to Boston Corners, in upstate New York, devoting his whole time to painting. As he wandered over the years to the deserted battlefields of France and Belgium, to the Adirondacks, then back to Canada – Temagami, Palgrave, Muskoka, Toronto, Uxbridge, and Baptiste Lake – his work continued to evolve and change. Critics and other artists hailed him as one of the most original, intelligent, and innovative artists in Canada. His work is in the British Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and public galleries in Canada. Silcox's biography, based on many years of research for the Milne Catalogue Raisonné, has been described as "a near-perfect dialectic between biography and aesthetic analysis."It stands both as a definitive study of Milne and as a model for future biographies of Canadian artists. This gorgeous book, in a large format with 190 images in colour and 240 black-and-white illustrations throughout, will astonish and delight all those interested in art history, and in the life of a unique individual.
£51.29
Johns Hopkins University Press Collecting as Modernist Practice
In this highly original study, Jeremy Braddock focuses on collective forms of modernist expression - the art collection, the anthology, and the archive - and their importance in the development of institutional and artistic culture in the United States. Using extensive archival research, Braddock's study synthetically examines the overlooked practices of major American art collectors and literary editors: Albert Barnes, Alain Locke, Duncan Phillips, Alfred Kreymborg, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, Katherine Dreier, and Carl Van Vechten. He reveals the way collections were devised as both models for modernism's future institutionalization and culturally productive objects and aesthetic forms in themselves. Rather than anchoring his study in the familiar figures of the individual poet, artist, and work, Braddock gives us an entirely new account of how modernism was made, one centered on the figure of the collector and the practice of collecting. "Collecting as Modernist Practice" demonstrates that modernism's cultural identity was secured not so much through the selection of a canon of significant works as by the development of new practices that shaped the social meaning of art. Braddock has us revisit the contested terrain of modernist culture prior to the dominance of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the university curriculum so that we might consider modernisms that could have been. Offering the most systematic review to date of the Barnes Foundation, an intellectual genealogy and analysis of The New Negro anthology, and studies of a wide range of hitherto ignored anthologies and archives, Braddock convincingly shows how artistic and literary collections helped define the modernist movement in the United States.
£37.50
University of Texas Press Americans All: Good Neighbor Cultural Diplomacy in World War II
Cultural diplomacy—“winning hearts and minds” through positive portrayals of the American way of life—is a key element in U.S. foreign policy, although it often takes a backseat to displays of military might. Americans All provides an in-depth, fine-grained study of a particularly successful instance of cultural diplomacy—the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), a government agency established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 and headed by Nelson A. Rockefeller that worked to promote hemispheric solidarity and combat Axis infiltration and domination by bolstering inter-American cultural ties.Darlene J. Sadlier explores how the CIAA used film, radio, the press, and various educational and high-art activities to convince people in the United States of the importance of good neighbor relations with Latin America, while also persuading Latin Americans that the United States recognized and appreciated the importance of our southern neighbors. She examines the CIAA’s working relationship with Hollywood’s Motion Picture Society of the Americas; its network and radio productions in North and South America; its sponsoring of Walt Disney, Orson Welles, John Ford, Gregg Toland, and many others who traveled between the United States and Latin America; and its close ties to the newly created Museum of Modern Art, which organized traveling art and photographic exhibits and produced hundreds of 16mm educational films for inter-American audiences; and its influence on the work of scores of artists, libraries, book publishers, and newspapers, as well as public schools, universities, and private organizations.
£21.99
Distributed Art Publishers Ralph Gibson: Sacred Land: Israel before and after Time
Ralph Gibson's diptych portrayal of Israel, a land at once deeply modern and incredibly ancient The American photographer Ralph Gibson traveled throughout Israel and the surrounding region to create a portrait of a land where the past is vividly part of the present. He contrasts these in two-page spreads in which color and black-and-white images face one another: ancient language in a visual dialogue with contemporary human experience. As architect Moshe Safdie writes in his accompanying text: “This is the promise and paradox of Israel, a new country in an ancient land, modernity next to regression, with abundant and creative energy and cultural output. The high-tech world of invention next to Torah studies. It is still a young country, not even yet past its Centennial. With an optimistic eye, one sees the promise yet to be.” For this project, Gibson visited many of the well-known sites of the Holy Land, including the ancient city of Petra in Jordan as well as Masada and the Sea of Galilee flowing into the River Jordan. Sacred Land is a sumptuous study in the aesthetics of time. Ralph Gibson was born in Los Angeles in 1939. In 1956 he enlisted in the navy, where he began studying photography. Since he published his first photobook The Somnambulist in 1970, his work has been the subject of over 40 monographs. His work is widely exhibited and held in public collections around the world, such as the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He lives and works in New York.
£40.49
teNeues Publishing UK Ltd In Perfect Shape: Republic of Fritz Hansen
When you step into the headquarters of the Republic of Fritz Hansen in Allerød, northwest of Copenhagen, you are breathing in the spirit of a company that has made design history. The showroom, which is a mecca for design and architecture students, displays pieces that have become icons: the Series 7 chair, the Swan lounge chair, the Lissoni sofa. Again and again, the Danish furniture maker has teamed up with big-name visionary designers including Arne Jacobsen, Poul Kjærholm and Piero Lissoni. With these influxes of fresh energy and an unwavering commitment to the core values of Fritz Hansen-creativity, the finest craftsmanship, and careful attention to even the smallest details-the company has succeeded in placing its product into humanity's collective consciousness as well as the offices of the President of the UN General Assembly, the Crown Plaza Hotel in Bangkok, the Banquet Hall of Oxford's venerable St. Catherine's College, New York's Museum of Modern Art, and in private homes all over the world. With over 150 breathtaking photos, this thoughtfully-designed coffee table book tells you about the history of an exclusive brand, the marvellous pieces of furniture that has made it so revered, and provides examples of how a single piece of furniture can beautify an entire room or building and spur the imagination of the people who live there. After closing this book, you'll have a wealthy of new creative ideas and realise that before sustainability became a trendy buzzword, Fritz Hansen was already practicing it in its purest sense, true to its motto: "Crafting Timeless Design."
£40.50
Taschen GmbH Helmut Newton. SUMO. 20th Anniversary Edition
Helmut Newton (1920–2004) always showed a healthy disdain for the easy or predictable, so it’s no surprise that the SUMO was an irresistible project. The idea of a book the size of a private exhibition, with spectacular images reproduced to state-of-the-art origination and printing standards, emerged from an open, experimental dialogue between photographer and publisher. With the SUMO weighing in—boxed and shrink-wrapped—at 35.4 kg (just under 80 pounds), Newton created a landmark book that stood head and shoulders above anything previously attempted, both in terms of conceptual extravagance and technical specifications. Published in an edition of 10,000 signed and numbered copies, the SUMO sold out soon after publication and quickly multiplied its value. It now features in numerous collections around the world, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The legendary copy number one, signed by more than 100 of the book’s featured celebrities, broke the record for the most expensive book published in the 20th century, sold at an auction in Berlin on April 6, 2000 for 620,000 German marks—about 317,000 euros. Now, this XL edition celebrates 20 years of SUMO, the result of a project conceived by Helmut Newton some years ago. Revised by his wife June, the volume gathers 464 images and a booklet that takes us through the making-of this publishing venture—a spectacular tribute to the larger-than-life Helmut Newton, now in a friendly format.
£90.00
Johns Hopkins University Press Collecting as Modernist Practice
In this highly original study, Jeremy Braddock focuses on collective forms of modernist expression-the art collection, the anthology, and the archive-and their importance in the development of institutional and artistic culture in the United States. Using extensive archival research, Braddock's study synthetically examines the overlooked practices of major American art collectors and literary editors: Albert Barnes, Alain Locke, Duncan Phillips, Alfred Kreymborg, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, Katherine Dreier, and Carl Van Vechten. He reveals the way collections were devised as both models for modernism's future institutionalization and culturally productive objects and aesthetic forms in themselves. Rather than anchoring his study in the familiar figures of the individual poet, artist, and work, Braddock gives us an entirely new account of how modernism was made, one centered on the figure of the collector and the practice of collecting. Collecting as Modernist Practice demonstrates that modernism's cultural identity was secured not so much through the selection of a canon of significant works as by the development of new practices that shaped the social meaning of art. Braddock has us revisit the contested terrain of modernist culture prior to the dominance of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the university curriculum so that we might consider modernisms that could have been. Offering the most systematic review to date of the Barnes Foundation, an intellectual genealogy and analysis of The New Negro anthology, and studies of a wide range of hitherto ignored anthologies and archives, Braddock convincingly shows how artistic and literary collections helped define the modernist movement in the United States.
£25.00
The University of Chicago Press Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum
How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal--or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life, Fernando Dominguez Rubio delves into one of the most important museums of the world, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to explore the day-to-day dilemmas that museums workers face when the immortal artworks that we see in the exhibition room reveal themselves to be slowly unfolding disasters. Still Life offers a fascinating and detailed ethnographic account of what it takes to prevent these disasters from happening. Going behind the scenes at MoMA, Dominguez Rubio provides a rare view of the vast technological apparatus--from climatic infrastructures and storage facilities, to conservation labs and machines rooms--and teams of workers--from conservators and engineers to guards and couriers--who fight to hold artworks still. As the MoMA reopens after massive expansion and rearranging of its space and collections, Still Life not only offers a much-needed account of the spaces, actors, and forms of labor traditionally left out of the main narratives of art, but it also offers a timely meditation on how far we, as a society, are willing to go to keep the things we value from disappearing into oblivion.
£91.00
Columbia University Press Artaud the Moma
In 1996 Jacques Derrida gave a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on the occasion of Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper, one of the first major international exhibitions to present the avant-garde dramatist and poet's paintings and drawings. Derrida's original title, "Artaud the Moma," is a characteristic play on words. It alludes to Artaud's calling himself Momo, Marseilles slang for "fool," upon his return to Paris in 1946 after nine years in various asylums while playing off of the museum's nickname, MoMA. But the title was not deemed "presentable or decent," in Derrida's words, by the very institution that chose to exhibit Artaud's work. Instead, the lecture was advertised as "Jacques Derrida ...will present a lecture about Artaud's drawings." For Derrida, what was at stake was what it meant for the museum to exhibit Artaud's drawings and for him to lecture on Artaud in that institutional context. Thinking over the performative force of Artaud's work and the relation between writing and drawing, Derrida addresses the multiplicity of Artaud's identities to confront the modernist museum's valorizing of originality. He channels Artaud's specter, speech, and struggle against representation to attempt to hold the museum accountable for trying to confine Artaud within its categories. Artaud the Moma, as lecture and text, reveals the challenge that Artaud posed to Derrida-and to art and its institutional history. A powerful interjection into the museum halls, this work is a crucial moment in Derrida's thought and an insightful, unsparing reading of a challenging writer and artist.
£17.99
BAI NV Niki de Saint Phalle: Here Everything is Possible
Innovative and pioneering, French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) created an extensive and complex body of work over her five decade long career. Her work received international recognition as early as 1961 when her work was included in the important exhibition 'The Art and Assemblage' at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Since then Saint Phalle has been the subject of numerous exhibitions worldwide. Her bright and joyful Nana sculptures have become known as her signature artwork. The artist and her oeuvre however, cannot be solely understood through this one body of work. This catalogue, accompanying the artist's first comprehensive retrospective in Belgium at Beaux-Arts Mons (BAM), explores Saint Phalle's multi-faceted practice, examining how the artist worked across a wide-range of media - painting, assemblage, sculpture, performance, public sculpture and architectural projects, film and theatre. Providing an overview of Saint Phalle's entire career, it seeks to demonstrate how the artist used her boundless imagination and unique vision of the world to transcend the space typically reserved for women to become one of the twentieth century's most important artists. The title - "Here Everything is Possible" - is a statement made by Saint Phalle about her monumental sculpture park: The Tarot Garden in Tuscany, Italy. It should however, be read as a testimony to the artist's attitude to her entire artistic process - one of limitless possibility. This extensive, fully illustrated, catalogue includes new scholarly texts by Catherine Francblin, Alison Gingeras, Denis Laoureux, Camille Morineau, Kyla McDonald and Xavier Roland. The essays are accompanied by interviews with Daniel Abadie and Marcelo Zitelli, who both worked closely with the artist during her lifetime, and an illustrated biography.
£32.85
Black Dog Press On the Road: Parking Markings: An artist’s book by Allen Jones
Allen Jones RA’s 52-page book On the Road: Parking Markings takes the reader on a graphic visual journey… by road.“Since roads were first bisected by a white line, a pictorial language has evolved that, in classic parlance, is the first or Primitive phase in ever-developing visual vocabulary,” says Jones. “Parking markings were introduced during my final years as a student. Produced with stencils, these marks are enlivened by human error and chance.“Because of increasing traffic during the 1960s a change was needed. Yellow represented a new and Classical phase, telling us what we should NOT do,” the artist continues. “Familiarity breeds contempt and by the 1990s the problem required desperate measures. Red, the colour of danger, anger and hell marked a third, Baroque phase in the developing language of road marking.“During the 1950s we were asked politely – in white. During the 1960s we were told – in yellow. During the 1990s we were shouted at – in red. Now the air – is blue.”Jones was elected a Royal Academician in 1986. He is one of Britain’s most distinguished artists from the pioneering Pop Movement, whose paintings and sculptures are held in many important international collections, including: Tate Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Museum of 20th-Century Art in Vienna, the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.On the Road: Parking Markings is one of a collection of four artist’s books by Allen Jones that Black Dog Press is releasing in September 2022.
£17.95
Inventory Press LLC A New Program for Graphic Design
A *New* Program for Graphic Design is the first Communication Design textbook expressly of and for the 21st century. Synthesizing the pragmatic with the experimental, this volume builds upon mid- to late-20th-century pedagogical models to convey advanced principles of contemporary design in an understandable form for students of all levels. David Reinfurt, a graphic designer, writer, educator and one half of design collaboration Dexter Sinister, has developed a graphic design curriculum at Princeton University in which three courses provide a broad and comprehensive introduction to the field for undergraduate students coming from a range of other disciplines. These courses Typography, Gestalt and Interface are the foundation of this book. Through a series of in-depth historical case studies (from Benjamin Franklin to the Macintosh computer) and assignments that progressively build in complexity, A *New* Program for Graphic Design serves as a practical guide for designers looking to understand and shape the increasingly networked world of information and design. As a cofounder of O-R-G inc. (2000), Dexter Sinister (2006) and The Serving Library (2012), graphic designer and teacher David Reinfurt (born 1971) has been involved in several studios and collectives that have reimagined graphic design, publishing and archiving in the 21st century. His work is included in the collections of the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, but can also be accessed on a daily basis: he was the lead designer for the New York City MTA Metrocard vending machine interface, still in use today. Reinfurt teaches at Princeton University.
£22.00
University of Pennsylvania Press Do Museums Still Need Objects?
"We live in a museum age," writes Steven Conn in Do Museums Still Need Objects? And indeed, at the turn of the twenty-first century, more people are visiting museums than ever before. There are now over 17,500 accredited museums in the United States, averaging approximately 865 million visits a year, more than two million visits a day. New museums have proliferated across the cultural landscape even as older ones have undergone transformational additions: from the Museum of Modern Art and the Morgan in New York to the High in Atlanta and the Getty in Los Angeles. If the golden age of museum-building came a century ago, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Field Museum of Natural History, and others were created, then it is fair to say that in the last generation we have witnessed a second golden age. By closely observing the cultural, intellectual, and political roles that museums play in contemporary society, while also delving deeply into their institutional histories, historian Steven Conn demonstrates that museums are no longer seen simply as houses for collections of objects. Conn ranges across a wide variety of museum types—from art and anthropology to science and commercial museums—asking questions about the relationship between museums and knowledge, about the connection between culture and politics, about the role of museums in representing non-Western societies, and about public institutions and the changing nature of their constituencies. Elegantly written and deeply researched, Do Museums Still Need Objects? is essential reading for historians, museum professionals, and those who love to visit museums.
£23.39
Phaidon Press Ltd Paul Graham
The ecstatic face of a disco dancer in Berlin; a rural panorama in Derry, where a country road has been made into a Pollock-like canvas of red, white and blue; an ashtray, framed by a lacy spray of blood in a Barcelona toilet. Paul Graham uses and abuses classic genres of photography - the portrait, the landscape, the still life - to map a cultural topography. His jewel-like colours and unsettling compositions reveal how social relations and political trauma are inscribed in the everyday. This book brings together for the first time all of Graham's successive series, from his journey along the A1 in Britain to intimate studies of Japan. Graham's work has been celebrated in exhibitions around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate Britain, London.Art historian Andrew Wilson has written extensively on contemporary European art and is the author of Gustav Metzger: Damaged Nature, Auto-Destructive Art. He charts the development of Graham's most significant series as defined by the journeys the artist has taken, weaving relations between an emerging aesthetic and the specifics of time and place. In the Interview, Paul Graham speaks with British artist Gillian Wearing, internationally renowned for her photographs and videos that explore the imaginary worlds of ordinary people. Focusing on a triptych from the New Europe series is the celebrated American writer Carol Squiers, Senior Editor at American Photo magazine and editor of The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography. In juxtaposition with this work, Graham has chosen texts by Japanese authors Kazuo Ishiguro and Haruki Murakami. A series of notes by the artist and an interview with Lewis Baltz provide further insight.
£25.16
Columbia University Press Lady in the Dark: Iris Barry and the Art of Film
Iris Barry (1895-1969) was a pivotal modern figure and one of the first intellectuals to treat film as an art form, appreciating its far-reaching, transformative power. Although she had the bearing of an aristocrat, she was the self-educated daughter of a brass founder and a palm-reader from the Isle of Man. An aspiring poet, Barry attracted the attention of Ezra Pound and joined a demimonde of Bloomsbury figures, including Ford Maddox Ford, T. S. Eliot, Arthur Waley, Edith Sitwell, and William Butler Yeats. She fell in love with Pound's eccentric fellow Vorticist, Wyndham Lewis, and had two children by him. In London, Barry pursued a career as a novelist, biographer, and critic of motion pictures. In America, she joined the modernist Askew Salon, where she met Alfred Barr, director of the new Museum of Modern Art. There she founded the museum's film department and became its first curator, assuring film's critical legitimacy. She convinced powerful Hollywood figures to submit their work for exhibition, creating a new respect for film and prompting the founding of the International Federation of Film Archives. Barry continued to augment MoMA's film library until World War II, when she joined the Office of Strategic Services to develop pro-American films with Orson Welles, Walt Disney, John Huston, and Frank Capra. Yet despite her patriotic efforts, Barry's "foreignness" and association with such filmmakers as Luis Bunuel made her the target of an anticommunist witch hunt. She eventually left for France and died in obscurity. Drawing on letters, memorabilia, and other documentary sources, Robert Sitton reconstructs Barry's phenomenal life and work while recasting the political involvement of artistic institutions in the twentieth century.
£22.00
Distributed Art Publishers Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight
Rarely seen installation works that exemplify this pioneering artist’s critical focus on Black identity and Black feminism Showcasing a lesser-known aspect of Saar’s art, Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight provides new insights into her explorations of ritual, spirituality and cosmologies, as well as themes of the African diaspora. Featured here are significant installations created by Saar from 1980 to 1998, including Oasis (1984), a work that will be reconfigured at ICA Miami’s Saar exhibition for the first time in more than 30 years. With compelling scholarship and rich illustration—combining new installation photography and archival material—the monograph provides a fresh look at this significant artist’s critical and influential practice. Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight reinforces and celebrates Saar’s standing as a visionary artist, storyteller and mythmaker, and the ongoing significance and relevance of her work to the most pressing issues in America today. Betye Saar (born 1926) is renowned for pioneering Black feminism and West Coast assemblage in her visionary artistic practice, through dense, complexly referential objects. For over six decades, Saar’s work has led dialogues on race and gender, reflecting changing cultural and political contexts. Most recently, solo presentations have been hosted by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Saar’s work was prominently featured in We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, and in Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern, London, which traveled to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Brooklyn Museum; The Broad, Los Angeles; and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
£39.60
teNeues Publishing UK Ltd In Perfect Shape
When you step into the headquarters of Fritz Hansen in Allerød, northwest of Copenhagen, you breathe in the spirit of a company that has made design history. The showroom, a mecca for students of design and architecture, displays pieces that have become icons, including the Series 7 chair, the Swan lounge chair, and the Lissoni sofa. A recurring theme in the history of the Danish furniture maker is its collaborations with big-name visionary designers like Arne Jacobsen, Poul Kjærholm, and Piero Lissoni. With these influxes of fresh energy and an unwavering commitment to Fritz Hansen’s core values of creativity, the finest craftsmanship, and the utmost attention to even the smallest details, the company has succeeded in placing its products in the collective consciousness of humanity as well as in the offices of the President of the UN General Assembly, the Crown Plaza Hotel in Bangkok, the Banquet Hall of Oxford’s venerable St. Catherine’s College, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and private homes all over the world. With over 150 breathtaking photos, this thoughtfully designed coffee table book recounts the history of an exclusive brand, the marvellous pieces of furniture that has made it so revered, and provides examples of how a single piece of furniture can beautify an entire room or building, and fire the imagination of those who live there. Whether you’re leaving the world of Fritz Hansen in Allerød or closing this book, it will be with a wealth of new creative ideas and the knowledge that before sustainability became a trendy buzzword, Fritz Hansen was already practicing it in its purest sense, true to its motto of “Crafting Timeless Design".
£55.11
Taylor & Francis Ltd Locating American Art: Finding Art’s Meaning in Museums, Colonial Period to the Present
How does museum location shape the interpretation of an art object by critics, curators, art historians, and others? To what extent is the value of a work of art determined by its location? Providing a close examination of individual works of American art in relation to gallery and museum location, this anthology presents case studies of paintings, sculpture, photographs, and other media that explore these questions about the relationship between location and the prescribed meaning of art. It takes an alternate perspective in that it provides in-depth analysis of works of art that are less well known than the usual American art suspects, and in locations outside of art museums in major urban cultural centers. By doing so, the contributors to this volume reveal that such a shift in focus yields an expanded and more complex understanding of American art. Close examinations are given to works located in small and mid-sized art museums throughout the United States, museums that generally do not benefit from the resources afforded by more powerful cultural establishments such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Works of art located at institutions other than art museums are also examined. Although the book primarily focuses on paintings, other media created from the Colonial Period to the present are considered, including material culture and craft. The volume takes an inclusive approach to American art by featuring works created by a diverse group of artists from canonical to lesser-known ones, and provides new insights by highlighting the regional and the local.
£145.00
The University of Chicago Press Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum
How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal--or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life, Fernando Dominguez Rubio delves into one of the most important museums of the world, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to explore the day-to-day dilemmas that museums workers face when the immortal artworks that we see in the exhibition room reveal themselves to be slowly unfolding disasters. Still Life offers a fascinating and detailed ethnographic account of what it takes to prevent these disasters from happening. Going behind the scenes at MoMA, Dominguez Rubio provides a rare view of the vast technological apparatus--from climatic infrastructures and storage facilities, to conservation labs and machines rooms--and teams of workers--from conservators and engineers to guards and couriers--who fight to hold artworks still. As the MoMA reopens after massive expansion and rearranging of its space and collections, Still Life not only offers a much-needed account of the spaces, actors, and forms of labor traditionally left out of the main narratives of art, but it also offers a timely meditation on how far we, as a society, are willing to go to keep the things we value from disappearing into oblivion.
£31.49
MW Editions Carrie Mae Weems: The Shape of Things
A grand panorama of race and civil unrest in America’s past and present Carrie Mae Weems has often confronted the uncomfortable truths of racism and race relations over the course of her nearly 40-year career. In The Shape of Things she focuses her unflinching gaze at what she describes as the circuslike quality of contemporary American political life. For this new work, Weems created a seven-part film projected onto a Cyclorama—a panoramic-style cylindrical screen that dates to the 19th century—where she addresses the turmoil of current events in the United States and the “long march forward.” Drawing on news and TV footage from the civil rights era to today, elements of previous films such as The Madding Crowd (2017) and new film projects that bring us into our tumultuous present, the films in The Shape of Things combine documentary directness with poetic rhythm to create an enveloping experience. The films are narrated by Weems, and the layering of her resonant voice with these images articulates the dangerous mounting resistance to the “browning of America.” As Weems shows in these powerful works, America is irreversibly changed and changing. Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953) has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships, and is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Weems lives in Brooklyn and Syracuse, New York.
£46.80
Distributed Art Publishers William Klein: Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?
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. Born in New York, William Klein (1926–2022) was a multidisciplinary artist whose practice revolutionized photography, particularly fashion and street photography. His fashion work was the subject of several iconic photobooks, including Life Is Good and Good for You in New York (1957) and Tokyo (1964). In the 1980s, he turned to film projects. His works are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.
£99.00
Weiss Publications Faith Ringgold: Politics / Power
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. Faith Ringgold (born 1930) is a painter, mixed-media sculptor, performance artist, teacher and writer best known for her narrative quilts. In 2020, the New York Times described 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.” 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. Ringgold lives and works in Englewood, New Jersey.
£35.99
Black Dog Press Anton van Dalen: Community of Many
Anton van Dalen: Community of Many chronicles the historic artist Anton van Dalen’s lifelong visual investigation informed by the influences of war, religion and migration, his devotion to nature, and his dedication to documenting the technological and cultural evolutions within our society across a variety of mediums, from drawing and sculpture to collage and painting. Born in the Netherlands in 1938 to a conservative Calvinist family, Anton witnessed first-hand the terrors of both technological and human destruction during the Second World War. Since he immigrated to New York in 1966 and settled in the East Village, Anton has served as witness, storyteller and documentarian of the dramatic cultural shifts in the neighbourhood through his masterfully honed and singular iconography. Featuring critical essays by John Yau and Tiernan Morgan, this heavily illustrated publication is the first comprehensive monograph on Anton van Dalen’s work that provides a language by which to discuss the consequences of human brutality towards nature and our entanglement with technology. Anton has been included in group exhibitions at notable institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New Museum, New York; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; and the New-York Historical Society. He has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at Temple Contemporary, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, Philadelphia; University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Exit Art, New York. His Avenue A Cut-Out Theatre has toured since 1995 both nationally and internationally and has been shown at numerous institutions including The Drawing Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and The New-York Historical Society.
£31.46
Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd Ori Gersht: History Repeating
The first comprehensive survey of the photographs, films, and videos of Ori Gersht, this richly illustrated book presents the best of Gersht's achingly beautiful work and explores how he intertwines spectacles of painterly and narrative imagery with personal and collective memory, metaphysical journeys, contextualized spaces, and the history of art and photography. Pushing the camera to the limits of what it can record, Gersht engages an aesthetic that reflects both a highly researched and instinctive approach to his chosen media. Be it the scars left on the sunlit yet war-torn interiors of buildings in Sarajevo, the white noise of a modern-day train journey to Auschwitz, or the clearing of trees in a forest that once stood witness to mass murder in the Ukraine, Gersht's vision bridges a history that is full of violent horror and a world of emergent, transcendent beauty. Ori Gersht was born in Israel in 1967 and is currently based in London. A conduit between the past and present, his large-scale photographs and videos wed old masters to new technologies, quoting from such sources as Spanish and Dutch still- life painting and the Hudson River Valley School. Gersht's interest in history also goes beyond the visual arts, encompassing the political history that has shaped his personal identity and that of all of us scarred by violence in our contemporary world. His work has been acquired and commissioned by major art institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, London, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
£49.50
August Editions Uncrating the Japanese House: Junzo Yoshimura, Antonin and Noémi Raymond, and George Nakashima
Midcentury modernism meets Japanese design in three revolutionary American buildings—the products of a unique, sustained, cross-cultural collaboration In 1953, Japanese architect Junzo Yoshimura designed a now-classic Japanese house and garden that he called Shofuso. It was built in Nagoya, Japan, and shipped to New York in 1954, where it was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and then relocated to Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. The curators of MoMA’s House in the Garden exhibition highlighted its synthesis of historic Japanese architecture with modern architecture: the clarity of the house’s post and beam structure, its flexibility of use and the close relationship of indoor and outdoor spaces. This extensively illustrated volume centers on Yoshimura’s design for Shofuso and two allied sites located in New Hope, Bucks County, Pennsylvania: Raymond Farm (1939–41), a live-work residence built by Antonin and Noémi Raymond within the fabric of an existing 18th-century Quaker farmhouse; and Nakashima Studios, a complex of structures designed by George Nakashima over three decades (1947–77) to serve his furniture-making business and as his family’s home. Each site, in its own way, is the embodiment of the personal relationships and cross-cultural collaborations among this group of architects and designers. The Raymonds, along with Yoshimura, Nakashima and others, came to understand Japan’s changing environment through the act of building, through collaboration and travel. Together, they extended these lessons into the furniture and furnishings of modern living in both Japan and the United States. This volume documents an exhibition of objects and ephemera mounted at Shofuso. New York–based architectural photographer Elizabeth Felicella captures each site in a portfolio of newly commissioned images. Essays by Ken Tadashi Oshima and William Whitaker, illustrated with historical photographs, family snapshots and architectural drawings, further elucidate this important chapter in the history of modern architecture and design.
£42.30
Eakins Press,N.Y. Whitfield Lovell: Deep River
Lovell’s poetical installations invoke the lost voices of African American ancestry Whitfield Lovell is internationally renowned for his installations that incorporate masterful Conté crayon likenesses of African Americans from between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement. Using vintage photography as his source, Lovell often pairs his subjects with found objects, evoking personal memories, ancestral connections and the collective American past. Whitfield Lovell: Deep River compiles stunning likenesses of anonymous African American citizens from Lovell’s celebrated Deep River installation, which pays homage to “Camp Contraband”—a Union Army site near Chattanooga, Tennessee, that served as a refuge for runaway slaves escaping the Confederate South during the Civil War. The book includes a preface by Kellie Jones and an accompanying essay by the scholar Julie L. McGee, which provides the historical context for these deeply resonant portraits highlighted in this publication. McGee writes: “Lovell’s artistry is a vessel for those ancestral spirits that remain near and communicate with those who are able to make the past tangible, accessible and acutely meaningful.” The work of New York–based artist Whitfield Lovell has been exhibited and collected worldwide. The current traveling exhibition, Whitfield Lovell: Passages, will open on June 17 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in Richmond, Virginia, and will travel to four additional venues. Major installations have been featured at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC; the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York; University of Wyoming in Laramie; the Columbus Museum in Georgia; and the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, among others. His work is in museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art; the Brooklyn Museum; Whitney Museum of American Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
£50.40
Goose Lane Editions Ken Danby: Beyond the Crease
Ken Danby (1940-2007) was one of Canada's foremost practitioners of contemporary realism. Rooted in the Canadian psyche, nourished by his Ontario rural roots, Danby's subject matter was broad and expansive, yet it was the images of Canadian landscapes and life that captured the public's attention. At the Crease, a 1972 egg tempera painting depicting a nameless hockey goalie viewed from ice-level, was his best-known work, and for many, it defined him as an artist. An accomplished painter, watercolourist, printmaker, and commercial artist, Danby's career began to unfold with a modernist narrative in the 1960s and 1970s. It intersected with the fervent nationalism expressed in the music of Ian and Sylvia Tyson, Gordon Lightfoot, and Joni Mitchell. According to art historian Patrick Hutchings, Danby's paintings bring us "face to face with a moment of our own time." Ken Danby: Beyond the Crease, the first major book on Ken Danby's creative practise in two decades, examines the depth and breadth of Danby's work. Designed to accompany a major retrospective exhibition organized by the Art Gallery of Hamilton, it features an essay by art historian Ihor Holubizky, a detailed chronology by Christine Braun, more than sixty reproductions of Danbys major paintings, including At the Crease, Lacing Up, Pancho, and Pulling Out, and dozens of archival photographs, as well as Danby's own words about his life and work drawn from an unpublished autobiographical essay that he completed shortly before his death. Danby's work is highly collectable and can be found in numerous private and public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Canada; the Musée des beaux arts, Montreal; the Art Gallery of Vancouver; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Brooklyn Museum. Ken Danby became a member of the Order of Canada in 2001.
£31.49
Skira Art Carpets: Cleto Munari and Friends
The first book to exclusively present Cleto Munari’s latest creations in the field of the applied arts: a unique collection of art carpets. Cleto Munari was born in Gorizia and he lives and works in Vicenza. After meeting Carlo Scarpa in 1973, who encouraged him in his work, he decided to focus his attention on the area of industrial design, and began to work for some of the most important companies in the world. Constantly in search of original ideas, over the years he has tirelessly been engaged in analyzing and experimenting with both forms and material. In 1985 he opened a laboratory-studio-jeweler’s, where, together with a group of worldclass architects, he designs and produces silver jewelry and other objects for avant-garde collections that truly represent historical revolutions in jewelry both in Italy and abroad, and have also led to the production of watches, pens and furniture. Cleto Munari’s objects have entered the permanent collections of some of the world’s top museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This book is the first to exclusively present Cleto Munari’s latest creations in the field of the applied arts. After his jewelery, silverware, watches and furnishings, the great designer has involved ten other designers and artists in the creation of a unique collection of art carpets. Signed by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Dario Fo, Mario Botta, Alessandro Mendini, Javier Mariscal, Ettore Mochetti, Deisa Centazzo, Sandro Chia, Mimmo Paladino and by Cleto Munari himself, these creations are full-fledged works of art and represent the high point of the skills and expertise of one of the greatest creative designers in the world, who has been designing and producing for over forty years.
£31.46
Liverpool University Press Waiting at the Shore: Art, Revolution, War and Exile in the Life of the Spanish Artist Luis Quintanilla
Waiting at the Shore chronicles the extraordinary life of the Spanish artist Luis Quintanilla, championed by Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Elliot Paul, and many other American and European writers and artists. In 1912, at the age of 18, he ran off to Montmartre where, under the influence of his fellow countryman Juan Gris, he began his artistic career as a Cubist. Returning to Madrid before the war he befriended prominent Spaniards, including Juan Negrin, the Premier during the Spanish Civil War. In April 1931 he and Negrin participated in the peaceful revolution which ousted the monarchy and installed the Second Spanish Republic. When civil war broke out Quintanilla helped lead troops on Madrid's Montana Barracks, which saved the capital for the Republic. "Because great painters," as Hemingway put it, "are scarcer than good soldiers," the Spanish government [Negrin] ordered Quintanilla out of the army after the fascists were stopped outside Madrid. The artist completed 140 drawings of the various fronts of the war which were exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art, with a catalogue by Hemingway. After the Republic lost the war Quintanilla was forced into an exile which lasted several decades. Living in New York and in Paris he strove to perfect his art, shunning the modernist vogues of the time. Although a celebrity when he first arrived in the United States he eventually fell into obscurity. This volume, which is heavily illustrated, brings him out of the shadows of neglect, and provides the compelling story of an artist who led not just an extraordinary life but left a legacy of paintings and drawings which, in both their skill and great imaginative variety, should be known to all art lovers.
£32.50
Duke University Press Inventing Film Studies
Inventing Film Studies offers original and provocative insights into the institutional and intellectual foundations of cinema studies. Many scholars have linked the origins of the discipline to late-1960s developments in the academy such as structuralist theory and student protest. Yet this collection reveals the broader material and institutional forces—both inside and outside of the university—that have long shaped the field. Beginning with the first investigations of cinema in the early twentieth century, this volume provides detailed examinations of the varied social, political, and intellectual milieus in which knowledge of cinema has been generated. The contributors explain how multiple instantiations of film study have had a tremendous influence on the methodologies, curricula, modes of publication, and professional organizations that now constitute the university-based discipline. Extending the historical insights into the present, contributors also consider the directions film study might take in changing technological and cultural environments.Inventing Film Studies shows how the study of cinema has developed in relation to a constellation of institutions, technologies, practices, individuals, films, books, government agencies, pedagogies, and theories. Contributors illuminate the connections between early cinema and the social sciences, between film programs and nation-building efforts, and between universities and U.S. avant-garde filmmakers. They analyze the evolution of film studies in relation to the Museum of Modern Art, the American Film Council movement of the 1940s and 1950s, the British Film Institute, influential journals, cinephilia, and technological innovations past and present. Taken together, the essays in this collection reveal the rich history and contemporary vitality of film studies. Contributors: Charles R. Acland, Mark Lynn Anderson, Mark Betz, Zoë Druick, Lee Grieveson, Stephen Groening, Haden Guest, Amelie Hastie, Lynne Joyrich, Laura Mulvey, Dana Polan, D. N. Rodowick, Philip Rosen, Alison Trope, Haidee Wasson, Patricia White, Sharon Willis, Peter Wollen, Michael Zryd
£25.19
University of Texas Press Color: American Photography Transformed
Capturing the world in color was one of photography’s greatest aspirations from the very beginnings of the medium. When color photography became a reality with the introduction of the Autochrome in 1907, prominent photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz were overjoyed. But they quickly came to reject color photography as too aligned with human sight. It took decades for artists to come to understand the creative potential of color, and only in 1976, when John Szarkowski showed William Eggleston’s photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, did the art world embrace color. By accepting color’s flexibility and emotional transcendence, Szarkowski and Eggleston transformed photography, giving the medium equal artistic stature with painting, but also initiating its demise as an independent art.The catalogue of a major exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, which holds one of the premier collections of American photography, Color tells, for the first time, the fascinating story of color’s integration into American fine art photography and how its acceptance revolutionized the practice of art. Tracing the development of color photography from the first color photograph in 1851 to digital photography, John Rohrbach describes photographers’ initial rejection of color, their decades-long debates over what color brings to photography, and how their gradual acceptance of color released photography from its status as a second-tier art form. He shows how this absorption of color instigated wide acceptance of a fundamentally new definition of photography, one that blends photography’s documentary foundations with the creative flexibility of painting. Sylvie Pénichon offers a succinct survey of the technological advances that made color in photography a reality and have since marked its multifaceted development. These texts, illuminated by seventy-five full-page plates and more than eighty illustrations, make this book a groundbreaking contribution to photographic studies.
£60.30
Distributed Art Publishers Modern Mystic: The Art of Hyman Bloom
“Hyman is awesomely consistent, brilliant, ascetic—more and more people say he is the best painter in America, and so he is.” –Robert Lowell This important publication, the first of its kind, presents the paintings and drawings of an aesthetic and mystical searcher in the tradition of William Blake, Albert Pinkham Ryder and Odilon Redon, who strove for the moment when, in his own words, “the mood is as intense as it can be made.” Hyman Bloom’s work, influenced by his Jewish heritage (whose impression on his painting he described as a “weeping of the heart”) and Eastern religions, touches on many of the themes of 20th-century culture and art: the body, its immanence and transience, abstraction and spiritual mysticism. Bloom was admired by leading figures in the art world of his time, including Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Dorothy Miller; Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning hailed him as “the first Abstract Expressionist.” The poet Robert Lowell praised Bloom, writing in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop, “Hyman is awesomely consistent, brilliant, ascetic—more and more people say he is the best painter in America, and so he is.” The book’s illustrations include ten previously unpublished masterworks, plus images of the figure as powerful and provocative as the paintings by Francis Bacon that were once exhibited alongside them. Hyman Bloom (1913–2009) was born in Lithuania, now Latvia. He and his family immigrated to the United States in 1920, escaping anti-Semitic persecution. He lived and worked in the Boston area until his death. His work is held in many public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Whitney Museum of American Art and others.
£40.50
Walker Art Centre,U.S. Allen Ruppersberg - Intellectual Property 1968-2018
The artist as collector and champion of the American vernacular Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968–2018 accompanies a major retrospective exhibition on one of conceptual art’s most inventive and acclaimed practitioners. Emerging in late-1960s Los Angeles, Ruppersberg was among that city’s first generation of conceptual artists to espouse a working method that privileges ideas and process over conventional aesthetic objects. Deploying posters, books, postcards and even a café and hotel, his projects have consistently had at their center a focus on the American vernacular—its music, popular imagery and ephemera—mining the nuances of culture through its unsung conventions. From his earliest works, the artist has also welcomed the involvement of the viewer as participant, inviting an immersive experience of his work through language, visual density, accumulated elements and ideas. This fully illustrated catalog is the most comprehensive publication to date on Ruppersberg’s work, featuring a wealth of scholarly content and critical writing connecting Ruppersberg’s work to the larger contemporary art field. Produced by the Walker’s award-winning design studio and in close collaboration with the artist, the book presents a holistic view of Ruppersberg’s wide-ranging, 50-year practice. Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1944, Allen Ruppersberg has been the subject of more than 60 solo shows. His only other US retrospective, The Secret of Life and Death, was presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1985. His work is in the collection of public institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Le Fonds Ronal d’Art, among many others. Ruppersberg lives and works in Los Angeles, Cleveland and New York.
£47.70
Pindar Press Rethinking Malevich: Proceedings of a Conference in Celebration of the 125th Anniversary of Kazimir Malevich's Birth
"Rethinking Malevich" is an English-language collection of sixteen innovative essays by leading international scholars that document new and intriguing aspects of Kazimir Malevich's art and biography. This latest research on the Russian modern artist appears after more than seventy years of political and cultural difficulties - including the East-West bifurcation of his artistic and written legacy - that impeded the study and understanding of his work. For the first time, the greater portion of Malevich's work and writings was available for the scholarly research and study undertaken here. The result is a wealth of new details about this pioneer of abstraction, including: explorations of his early art education; the differences in the reception of his abstract art by Western and Russian audiences; the appearance of his work in 1936 at the Museum of Modern Art; the artist's special relationship with Ukraine. The development of his art is considered alongside that of Vasily Kandinsky and Giorgio De Chirico, and his philosophy is examined in comparison with the ideas of Nikolai Fedorov and Ortega-y-Gasset. The history of Russian and Soviet art in the 1920s and 1930s is intricately interwoven with the revolutionary social changes taking place throughout the country. Here are details of the political maneuverings Malevich went through in Russia to protect his art and his friends, and his reaction to Lenin's death in 1924 and the subsequent growth of the "Lenin myth." Rethinking Malevich reveals the complex early interweaving of Suprematism and Constructivism, considers little-researched aspects of the artist's Post-Suprematist period, and the history of Malevich's literary legacy. Not least, it demonstrates the various ways in which Malevich's art continues to stimulate the highly unusual work of contemporary Russian artists.
£75.00
Duke University Press Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker
One of the youngest recipients of a MacArthur “genius” grant, Kara Walker, an African American artist, is best known for her iconic, often life-size, black-and-white silhouetted figures, arranged in unsettling scenes on gallery walls. These visually arresting narratives draw viewers into a dialogue about the dynamics of race, sexuality, and violence in both the antebellum South and contemporary culture. Walker’s work has been featured in exhibits around the world and in American museums including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney. At the same time, her ideologically provocative images have drawn vociferous criticism from several senior African American artists, and a number of her pieces have been pulled from exhibits amid protests against their disturbing representations. Seeing the Unspeakable provides a sustained consideration of the controversial art of Kara Walker.Examining Walker’s striking silhouettes, evocative gouache drawings, and dynamic prints, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw analyzes the inspiration for and reception of four of Walker’s pieces: The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven, John Brown, A Means to an End, and Cut. She offers an overview of Walker’s life and career, and contextualizes her art within the history of African American visual culture and in relation to the work of contemporary artists including Faith Ringgold, Carrie Mae Weems, and Michael Ray Charles. Shaw describes how Walker deliberately challenges viewers’ sensibilities with radically de-sentimentalized images of slavery and racial stereotypes. This book reveals a powerful artist who is questioning, rather than accepting, the ideas and strategies of social responsibility that her parents’ generation fought to establish during the civil rights era. By exploiting the racist icons of the past, Walker forces viewers to see the unspeakable aspects of America’s racist past and conflicted present.
£21.99
University of Kentucky Art Museum Ralph Eugene Meatyard: Stages for Being
How Meatyard made a stage set of his native Kentucky to portray his circle of friends and compose his eerie tableaux Stages for Being examines the photography that Ralph Eugene Meatyard created in and around Lexington, Kentucky, where he found abandoned houses in the countryside to use as sets, and directed friends and family members in scenes that suggest both ritual and theater. Establishing mood with natural lighting, he used masks, dolls and found objects as unsettling props and mined architectural detail for abstract compositional elements. Meatyard culled inspiration from a wide variety of sources. An autodidact in areas as diverse as jazz, painting, literature, history and Zen Buddhism, his voracious reading sparked endless ideas for his carefully constructed photographs. His process was also informed by consistent dialogue with a robust group of Kentucky peers, including the writer, environmental activist and farmer Wendell Berry; photographers Van Deren Coke and Robert C. May; the Trappist monk Thomas Merton; the painter Frederic Thursz; and the writer, poet and philosopher Guy Davenport, all of whom worked in the region but were engaged with contemporary ideas and practice in their fields. Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925–72) attended Williams College as part of the Navy's V12 program in World War II. Following the war, he married, became a licensed optician and moved to Lexington, Kentucky. When the first of his three children was born, Meatyard bought a camera to make pictures of the baby. Photography quickly became a consuming interest. He joined the Lexington Camera Club, where he met Van Deren Coke, under whose encouragement he soon developed into a powerfully original photographer. Meatyard's work is housed at the Museum of Modern Art, George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, the Smithsonian Institution and many other important collections.
£36.00
Distributed Art Publishers William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows
Thirty-five years of South African artist William Kentridge’s dynamic, cross-genre art, with essays by Ann McCoy, Zakes Mda, and Ed Schad, a conversation between the artist and Walter Murch, and an unpublished lecture by Kentridge. This far-reaching book presents Kentridge’s dynamic art practice, which originates in charcoal drawing and expands into intersections with film, sculpture, opera and theater performances, printmaking and many other mediums. The volume is organized chronologically and thematically, emphasizing Kentridge’s destabilizing of South African and global narratives through openness to uncertainty, the generative power of the artist’s studio and perpetual change, all as conditions for illuminating repressed and silenced voices in historical records. An essay by curator Ed Schad is presented along with studio photography, archival material and illuminating illustrations of Kentridge’s work, joining essays by globally recognized literary figures and thinkers Zakes Mda and Ann McCoy. Notably, the volume features a conversation between Kentridge and the famous film and sound editor Walter Murch, as well as a never-before-published lecture by the artist. The work of William Kentridge (born 1955) has been seen in museums and galleries around the world since the 1990s, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Musée du Louvre in Paris, Whitechapel Gallery in London, Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen, the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid, the Kunstmuseum in Basel and Zeitz MOCAA and the Norval Foundation in Cape Town. Opera productions include Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Shostakovich’s The Nose and Alban Berg’s operas Lulu and Wozzeck. In 2016 Kentridge founded the Centre for Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, a space for responsive thinking and making through experimental, collaborative and cross-disciplinary art practices. The center hosts an ongoing program of workshops, public performances and mentorship activities.
£49.50
Ridinghouse John Stezaker: Film Still
An overview of John Stezaker’s film still collages, this book showcases the evolution of the artist’s relationship with a specific material. Leading British collage and appropriation artist John Stezaker began his ongoing series of film still collages in 1979 – the result of a period that marked a crucial change in the direction of the artist’s work, which had previously been centered around a text-based ‘conceptualism’. The series moves with Stezaker’s changing interests, using stills from classic American-period Hitchcock films as raw material before shifting towards the undistinguishable mass of 1940s and early 1950s low-budget studio films. Featuring collages based on a combination of film still excisions and superimpositions, this ongoing series is catalogued comprehensively for the first time in this volume, which brings together Stezaker’s earliest film still collages with his most recent. Full-colour illustrations are accompanied by an essay by David Campany and a conversation between the critic and the artist. John Stezaker (b.1949, Worcester) is one of the leading artists in contemporary photographic collage and appropriation. Employing vintage photographs, old Hollywood film stills, travel postcards and other printed matter, Stezaker creates small-format collages that bear qualities of Surrealism, Dada and found art. Stezaker studied at the Slade School of Art and has taught at the Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins School of Art, London. In 2012 he was awarded the Deutsche Börse photography prize following a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. His work has been exhibited internationally since the 1990s and is held in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Arts Council England; and Tate.
£18.00
Harvard Business Review Press X-Teams, Updated Edition, With a New Preface: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate, and Succeed
An essential work on teams—now updated with new research and tools and a new preface—X-Teams shows how an externally focused team model is the key to fueling innovation and your organization's success.You build a team around top-notch talent. The team members work well together; they're committed to the mission and are highly motivated to perform. Yet the results are disappointing. You're not seeing creativity and flexibility. You're not getting breakthrough ideas."Good" teams build camaraderie, confidence in their abilities, and a solid process for working together. But these internal dynamics—while positive in themselves—can create a wall between the team and the outside world. And that wall can prevent the team from adapting to change and delivering value to the organization.In this updated, streamlined edition, with a new preface and practical tools, Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman describe an externally focused team model—the x-team—that is even more relevant today than when it was first introduced. With their distinctively flexible membership and leadership structure, x-teams continuously reach outward to fuel the innovation process.With new examples and research from organizations such as Microsoft, Takeda, and the Museum of Modern Art, Ancona and Bresman show you how to build x-teams that: Keep pace with shifts in markets, technologies, cultures, and your competition Innovate by moving quickly from generating ideas to executing and diffusing them throughout your organization Employ "distributed leadership" to unlock crucial information, expertise, and new ways of working together—wherever these qualities reside, whether within or outside your company In an increasingly complex and ever-changing world, where adaptability and creativity are paramount to an enterprise's success—and even its survival—X-Teams is your handbook for winning.
£20.70
New York University Press America in the Twenties and Thirties: The Olympian Age of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
In this, the third volume of an interdisciplinary history of the United States since the Civil War, Sean Dennis Cashman provides a comprehensive review of politics and economics from the tawdry affluence of the 1920s throught the searing tragedy of the Great Depression to the achievements of the New Deal in providing millions with relief, job opportunities, and hope before America was poised for its ascent to globalism on the eve of World War II. The book concludes with an account of the sliding path to war as Europe and Asia became prey to the ambitions of Hitler and military opportunists in Japan. The book also surveys the creative achievements of America's lost generation of artists, writers, and intellectuals; continuing innovations in transportation and communications wrought by automobiles and airplanes, radio and motion pictures; the experiences of black Americans, labor, and America's different classes and ethnic groups; and the tragicomedy of national prohibition. The cast of characters includes FDR, the New Dealers, Eleanor Roosevelt, George W. Norris, William E. Borah, Huey Long, Henry Ford, Clarence Darrow, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, W.E.B. DuBois, A. Philip Randolph, Orson Welles, Wendell Willkie, and the stars of radio and the silver screen. The first book in this series, America in the Gilded Age, is now accounted a classic for historiographical synthesis and stylisic polish. America in the Age of the Titans, covering the Progressive Era and World War I, and America in the Twenties and Thirties reveal the author's unerring grasp of various primary and secondary sources and his emphasis upon structures, individuals, and anecdotes about them. The book is lavishly illustrated with various prints, photographs, and reproductions from the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
£29.99
Louisiana Ragnar Kjartansson: Epic Waste of Love and Understanding
Surveying the films, installations and performances of the superstar Icelandic artist Widely recognized as one of the most exciting and significant voices of contemporary art, Icelandic performance and multimedia artist Ragnar Kjartansson takes a loving yet critical look at Western culture. His longform video installations explore the dynamics of repetition, often through music, and develop into feats of endurance, both physical and emotional. The Guardian deemed his 2012 work The Visitors “the best artwork of the 21st century.” Combining quintessential videos such as Me and My Mother and Bliss with lesser-known paintings and sculptures, the retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presents three new pieces made for the exhibition (including the title work with the plywood flames burning on the catalog cover) and captures the litany of senses Kjartansson has embraced without hesitation in his 20-year career. New work created for the anthology includes a painted plywood monument to “an epic waste of love and understanding” and a new performance piece titled Scaredman. The richly illustrated catalog includes personal contributions and dialogues in response to each of the artist's works on display by leading contemporary artists and scholars. Curator Tine Colstrup discusses A Lot of Sorrow with Marina Abramović, and reflects on Terrible, Terrible with Pussy Riot activist Maria Alyokhina. The book proves itself an invaluable guide to Kjartansson’s examination of love, identity, melancholy, masculinity and power. Ragnar Kjartansson (born 1976), a native of Reykjavik, Iceland, studied at the Iceland Academy of the Arts and the Royal Academy of Arts, Stockholm. He represented Iceland at the 53rd Biennale di Venezia in 2009 and participated in the 2013 Encyclopedic Palace of the World at the 55th Biennale di Venezia in 2013.
£42.30
Gregory R Miller & Company Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty
Minter’s art skews glamour with consumerist critique Marilyn Minter is famed for her glossy, hyper-realistic paintings, photographs and video works—seductive images that borrow the language of fashion and advertising photography, exploring the boundaries of desire, sensuality and body anxiety in the age of consumption. Close-up imagery of mouths, feet, splashes and puddles, rendered in high-gloss enamel on sheets of metal, subversively questions the pathology of glamour. Produced in conjunction with the first major museum retrospective on her work, Pretty/Dirty examines every period of the artist's 40-year career, from her beginnings with the controversial porn paintings, initially rejected by the critical establishment, to her later large-scale photorealistic works. Essays from the exhibition's curators examine the trajectory of Minter's development and her engagement with debates over the representation of the female body. Texts from musicians, artists, writers and curators speak to Minter's wide-ranging influence: reflections from the likes of artist K8 Hardy, musician and author Richard Hell, and poet Eileen Myles, as well as an artist interview with writer Linda Yablonsky. Illustrated with hundreds of full-color reproductions, and with a complete biography and bibliography, Pretty/Dirty charts a new perspective on the career of this exciting and continually evolving artist. Marilyn Minter (born 1948) has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, at venues including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005, the Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, in 2009 and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, in 2010. Her video "Green Pink Caviar" was exhibited in the lobby of MoMA for over a year, and was also shown on digital billboards on Sunset Boulevard in LA, and the Creative Time MTV billboard in Times Square, New York.
£40.50
Distributed Art Publishers Jay DeFeo: Photographic Work
A revelatory trove of innovative photo collages, photograms, photographs and photocopies—many never before published—most reproduced at the size DeFeo printed them This monograph on the legendary and influential artist Jay DeFeo features over 150 photographic works—many never before published—most reproduced at the size the artist printed them. After the completion of her monumental masterpiece The Rose in 1966, DeFeo moved from the heart of artistic activity in San Francisco to a small house in Marin County, California. There she embarked on a focused and rigorous exploration with the camera. For much of the 1970s, she used the camera as a tool to look and think with, creating a wide range of black-and-white photographs she processed in her darkroom. The artist used experimental photographic techniques to produce extraordinary artworks, alongside documentary images of her studio and paintings in process. Her contact sheets, some of which are reproduced here, are often filled with multiple views of one object, revealing the way DeFeo looked and sketched with the lens. In 1972 she wrote: "My interest in photography has always paralleled my expression as a painter." Essays by Hilton Als, Judith Delfiner, Corey Keller, Justine Kurland, Dana Miller and Catherine Wagner survey the rich materiality, sculptural layering and illusionistic devices of DeFeo’s playful and enigmatic photographic works, illuminating her astonishing range and daring experimentation with the medium. Jay DeFeo (1929–89) was a Bay Area artist who created an original and provocative body of work, including the iconic painting The Rose (1958–66). In the 1970s and 1980s, DeFeo continued her visionary work in a range of mediums, including works on paper, photography, collage and photocopies. Among many other exhibitions, a retrospective of her work was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2012.
£60.30
McGraw-Hill Education Can Your Customer Service Do This?: Create an Anticipatory Customer Experience that Builds Loyalty Forever
Today’s most sought-after “customer service sleuth” and turnaround expert unlocks the secrets to transforming customer service and building unshakeable customer engagement and loyaltyCustomer service done right is one of today’s most powerful competitive advantages. In Can Your Customer Service Do This? Micah Solomon—who has worked with brands from Auberge Resorts to Audi of America, from Cleveland Clinic to the NFL Players Association—shares everything he knows about creating a world-class customer experience and building sustainable bottom-line success. With wit and clarity, Micah shares real-life customer service detective examples and the customer service transformation that follows.• Micah Solomon is one of the top customer service trainers, training designers, keynote speakers, and authors on the subjects of customer service, customer experience, and hospitality. • This comprehensive guide and toolkit builds on Solomon's 3 decades’ experience of building and rebuilding customer service at some of the great companies and brands of our time.• The author's clients include Microsoft, Audi of America, Merck Pharmaceuticals, Cleveland Clinic, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and some of the leading Five-Star (Forbes-rated) hotels and resorts in America and around the world. Solomon helps readers to learn the art of anticipatory customer service—getting inside the heads of the customer, empathizing with their dissatisfaction, examining processes and procedures that are antiquated or not competitive enough, and learning to be innovative about modifying or optimizing various different modes of customer service and the methods available today, and he also shares the customer service training he uses to transform customer service performance across multiple industries, including his well-known “MAMA Method” of working successfully with upset customers. Whether your business is an established brand or just starting out, Micah Solomon offers step-by-step secrets that will one-up the competition and build sustainable bottom line success through lasting customer engagement and loyalty.
£21.59
Princeton University Press Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock
"What is abstract art good for? What's the use--for us as individuals, or for any society--of pictures of nothing, of paintings and sculptures or prints or drawings that do not seem to show anything except themselves?" In this invigorating account of abstract art since Jackson Pollock, eminent art historian Kirk Varnedoe, the former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, asks these and other questions as he frankly confronts the uncertainties we may have about the nonrepresentational art produced in the last five decades. He makes a compelling argument for its history and value, much as E. H. Gombrich tackled representation fifty years ago in Art and Illusion, another landmark A. W. Mellon Lectures volume. Realizing that these lectures might be his final work, Varnedoe conceived of them as a statement of his faith in modern art and as the culminating example of his lucidly pragmatic and philosophical approach to art history. He delivered the lectures, edited and reproduced here with their illustrations, to overflowing crowds at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in the spring of 2003, just months before his death. With brilliance, passion, and humor, Varnedoe addresses the skeptical attitudes and misunderstandings that we often bring to our experience of abstract art. Resisting grand generalizations, he makes a deliberate and scholarly case for abstraction--showing us that more than just pure looking is necessary to understand the self-made symbolic language of abstract art. Proceeding decade by decade, he brings alive the history and biography that inform the art while also challenging the received wisdom about distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, and minimalism and pop. The result is a fascinating and ultimately moving tour through a half century of abstract art, concluding with an unforgettable description of one of Varnedoe's favorite works.
£46.80
Yale University Press Wright and New York: The Making of America’s Architect
A dazzling dual portrait of Frank Lloyd Wright and early twentieth-century New York, revealing the city’s role in establishing the career of America’s most famous architect“Traces the transitive relationship of the architect and the city, as well as the genesis of the bohemian culture of the East Village."—Patti Smith, New York Times Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) took his first major trip to New York in 1909, fleeing a failed marriage and artistic stagnation. He returned a decade later, his personal life and architectural career again in crisis. Booming 1920s New York served as a refuge, but it also challenged him and resurrected his career. The city connected Wright with important clients and commissions that would harness his creative energy and define his role in modern architecture, even as the stock market crash took its toll on his benefactors. Wright denounced New York as an “unlivable prison” even as he reveled in its culture. The city became an urban foil for Wright’s work in the desert and in the “organic architecture” he promoted as an alternative to American Art Deco and the International Style. New York became a major protagonist at the end of Wright’s life, as he spent his final years at the Plaza Hotel working on the Guggenheim Museum, the building that would cement his legacy. Anthony Alofsin has broken new ground by mining the recently opened Wright archives held by Columbia University and the Museum of Modern Art. His foundational research provides a crucial and innovative understanding of Wright’s life, his career, and the conditions that enabled his success. The result is at once a stunning biography and a glittering portrait of early twentieth-century Manhattan.
£27.50
Steidl Publishers David Goldblatt + Nadine Gordimer: On the Mines
On the Mines is a re-designed and expanded version of David Goldblatt’s influential book of 1973. Goldblatt grew up in the South African town of Randfontein, which was shaped by the social culture and financial success of the gold mines surrounding it. When these mines started to fail in the mid-sixties Goldblatt began taking photos of them, which form the basis of On the Mines. The book features an essay on the human and political dimensions of mining in South Africa by Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, whose writing has long influenced Goldblatt. The new version of the book maintains the original three chapters “The Witwatersrand: a Time and Tailings”, “Shaftsinking” and “Mining Men”, but is otherwise completely updated, in Goldblatt’s words, “to expand the view but not to alter the sense of things”. There are thirty-one new mostly unpublished photos including colour images, eleven deleted images, a postscript by Gordimer to her essay, as well as a text by Goldblatt reflecting on his childhood and the 1973 book. On the Mines is the first of many titles in an ambitious collaboration between the photographer and Steidl that will publish Goldblatt’s life work in a series of re-prints and new books. David Goldblatt is a definitive photographer of his generation, esteemed for his dispassionate depiction of life in South Africa over a period of more than fifty years. Born in Randfontein in 1930, Goldblatt worked in his father’s menswear business until 1963 when he took up photography full time. Goldblatt’s work concerns above all human values and is a unique document of life during and after apartheid. His photographs are held in major international collections, and his solo exhibitions include those at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1998, and the Fondation Henri Cartier- Bresson in Paris in 2011. In 1989 Goldblatt founded the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg to teach visual literacy and photography especially to those disadvantaged by apartheid.
£43.20
HarperCollins Publishers Dr. B.
The former director of the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm makes his literary debut with this dramatic and riveting novel of book publishing, émigrés, spies, and diplomats in World War II Sweden, based on his grandfather’s life In 1933, after Hitler and the Nazi Party consolidated power in Germany, Immanuel Birnbaum, a German-Jewish journalist based in Warsaw, is forbidden from writing for newspapers in his homeland. Six years later, just months before the German invasion of Poland that ignites World War II, Immanuel escapes to Sweden with his wife and two young sons. Living as a refugee in Stockholm, Immanuel continues to write, contributing articles to a liberal Swiss newspaper under the name Dr. B. He becomes increasingly entangled with British intelligence agents who plan several acts of sabotage on the orders of Winston Churchill. But when the Swedish postal service picks up a letter written in invisible ink, clearly by Dr. B. himself, the Allied plotters are exposed. But could a Jew living in exile and targeted for death by the Nazis have wanted to tip them off? Illuminated by the wartime experiences of the author’s grandfather, Dr. B. is a riveting story of émigrés, spies and diplomats that shines a light on a forgotten corner of World War II history. ‘A superb thriller, a cross between Tom Stoppard’s Travesties and The Thirty-Nine Steps … You can’t put it down. This is an astonishing debut and Daniel Birnbaum is clearly a talent to look out for’ The Jewish Chronicle ‘If you’re looking for a ridiculously brilliant story, you can stop looking … He’s got the world’s best story – he’s got Dr B’ Svenska Dagbladet ‘An astonishing thriller-novel … reminiscent of both Hjalmar Söderberg’s Doctor Glass as well as the dreamy melancholy in The Rings of Saturn by W.G Sebald’ Aftonbladet ‘A moving evocation of a life beset by conflicts in a troubled time’ Kirkus Reviews
£13.49