ARTBOOK BLOG

RECENT POSTS

DATE 4/25/2024

The Strand presents Joshua Charow launching 'Loft Law'

DATE 3/31/2024

Behold the photographic work of Jay DeFeo, born OTD in 1929

DATE 3/30/2024

Seminary Co-op presents the Chicago launch of Danny Lyon's 'This Is My Life I'm Talking About'

DATE 3/15/2024

A gorgeous and compelling new exploration of bodega culture from rising star, Tschabalala Self

DATE 3/15/2024

Vintage girl power in ‘Las Mexicanas’

DATE 3/14/2024

Celebrate Pi Day with 'Einstein: The Man and His Mind'

DATE 3/12/2024

Kindred Stores presents Anita N. Bateman on 'Where is Africa'

DATE 3/12/2024

Hot book alert! ‘God Made My Face’ is NEW from Dancing Foxes Press and Brooklyn Museum

DATE 3/11/2024

Artbook @ MoMA PS1 presents the launch of 'Richard Nonas'

DATE 3/7/2024

Letterform Archive Press presents 'The Complete Commercial Artist: Making Modern Design in Japan, 1928–1930' with Gennifer Weisenfeld

DATE 3/7/2024

Visions of the Black figure in ‘The Time is Always Now’

DATE 3/7/2024

Rizzoli Bookstore presents Chloe Sherman and Noelle Flores Théard on 'Renegades: San Francisco, The 1990s'

DATE 3/6/2024

Yelena Yemchuk to launch 'Malanka' at Dashwood Books


RECENT POSTS

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/25/2024

The Strand presents Joshua Charow launching 'Loft Law'

Thursday, April 25 at 7 PM, the Strand Book Store presents documentary filmmaker and photographer Joshua Charow discussing his debut photobook, 'Loft Law: The Last of New York City's Original Artist Lofts.' This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/31/2024

Behold the photographic work of Jay DeFeo, born OTD in 1929

Featured spreads are from surprising and enlightening staff favorite Jay DeFeo: Photographic Work, published by DelMonico Books and the Jay DeFeo Foundation. Collecting almost 200 photo collages, photograms, photographs and photocopies—many published here for the first time—by the legendary Bay Area artist, this beautifully produced hardcover features writing by an all-star cast including Leah Levy, Judith Delfiner, Corey Keller, Justine Kurland, Dana Miller, Catherine Wagner and Hilton Als, who writes, “And what would we do without Jay DeFeo, who is only partly alive because she dares us to look at the work and make sense of that sofa covered in netting, or the empty picture frame with the broken wire, or the telephone with the white bulb that burns brightly in the imagination? What can any of these images mean? Are they images of DeFeo’s idea of sculpture, or sculptural elements? What can she mean by those teeth, that shoe? Let us enter her pictures subtly and swiftly together and take from them what we will, freely, as we revel in the eye of DeFeo the beholder. Behold.”

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/30/2024

Seminary Co-op presents the Chicago launch of Danny Lyon's 'This Is My Life I'm Talking About'

Saturday, March 30, at 3 PM CDT, Seminary Co-op presents photographer Danny Lyon discussing his memoir 'This Is My Life I’m Talking About,' published by Damiani Books. A Q&A and signing will follow the event.

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/15/2024

Vintage girl power in ‘Las Mexicanas’

Featured spreads are from new release Las Mexicanas, RM’s small but mighty paperback album of found photographs of Mexican women in positions of power, play and perhaps even seduction from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s. How we love it! Essayist Brenda Navarro writes, “What is Mexico without the women who have been born in this land? What would be of this country without many of them, who have birthed the Manichaean concept of a nation that has been obliged to live beneath the heavens, in which every person seems to be destined to be a soldier? As Agota Kristof wrote in her novel, The Notebook (1987), women are the ones who carry the weight of wars: ‘Have we seen nothing? Idiot! We women have all the work and all the worries: children to feed, wounded to tend… You men, once the war is over, are all heroes. The dead: heroes. The survivors: heroes. The maimed: heroes. That’s why you invented war. It’s your war. You wanted it, so get on with it—heroes my ass!’”

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/15/2024

A gorgeous and compelling new exploration of bodega culture from rising star, Tschabalala Self

“Bayo” (2017) is reproduced from hot new release Tschabalala Self: Bodega Run, edited by Sascha Bonét, designed by Pacific and published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. A remarkable publication that has been flying off shelves since the moment it arrived in our warehouses, this clothbound hardcover with zine insert features paintings, sculpture and installation works related to Self’s multiyear examination and celebration of the bodega—underrecognized “hood institution” of NYC Black and Brown communities. Self writes, “There are many inspiring and positive aspects of bodega culture, mainly the fact that these small, versatile businesses are, and always have been, owned by people of color to serve communities of color. The bodega also functions as a multicultural space within the Black diaspora, a space where individuals of African descent, from the Americas and abroad, share both social and financial interactions. … The bodega is both positive and problematic, and through this complexity its significance arises. The culture of the bodega is a reflection of so many aspects of Black and Brown city life. For this reason, the bodega is the perfect avatar by which to speak on the community at large."

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/14/2024

Celebrate Pi Day with 'Einstein: The Man and His Mind'

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." So said Albert Einstein, born on this day in 1879. Both this quotation and this rare 1947 print signed by photographer Philippe Halsman are reproduced from Einstein: The Man and His Mind—Damiani's stunning visual biography, featuring a wealth of signed photographs, letters, manuscripts and more from the collection of Gary S. Berger. According to the editors, Halsman's iconic photograph has become one of the most recognizable images of the twentieth century. "It appeared on a 1966 US postage stamp and was featured on the cover of the December 31, 1999, edition of Time magazine, which honored Einstein as the 'Person of the Century.' … In his book Philippe Halsman: A Retrospective, Halsman explained the circumstances of the photo: 'I admired Albert Einstein more than anyone I ever photographed, not only as the genius who single-handedly had changed the foundation of modern physics but even more as a rare and idealistic human being. Personally, I owed him an immense debt of gratitude. After the fall of France, it was through his personal intervention that my name was added to the list of artists and scientists who, in danger of being captured by the Nazis, were given emergency visas to the United States.'"

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/12/2024

Hot book alert! ‘God Made My Face’ is NEW from Dancing Foxes Press and Brooklyn Museum

At last, editor Hilton Als’s highly anticipated tribute to the singular American writer and truth-teller James Baldwin, as told through the artworks and essays of some of the greatest, and most relevant, voices of our time, including Diane Arbus, Beauford Delaney, Alice Neel, Kara Walker, Teju Cole, Barry Jenkins and Darryl Pinckney, to name a few. Jamaica Kincaid writes, “When we make art, we don’t know how it will work out, what it will mean. The writing, the novels, the essays: He did them in a place and in a time, in a country, that has no real love of certain people and certain things and no real love of literature, no real love of Black people doing anything, really, that can’t be appropriated. We must remember that there are a great many things that African Americans have done, making something out of the despair and the horror of the mess they found themselves in, and that they’ve been simply lifted up out of their culture. The blind faith he had in just saying these things, writing these things, doing, living this life and not knowing how it would go. Would it be remembered? Would it vanish? He got inspiration, it seems to me, from the essential life that was going on in the country at the time, the essential life of America, which is something Americans would like to forget. The essential existence of America is the African American. Toni Morrison said that Baldwin was her brother and her ancestor, and that’s what he is for all of us.”

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/12/2024

Kindred Stores presents Anita N. Bateman on 'Where is Africa'

Tuesday, March 12 at 6:30 PM, Kindred Stories presents 'Where Is Africa' author Anita N. Bateman at the Kindred Stories Reading Garden. If you're in Houston, come celebrate this multidisciplinary, illustrated reader unpacking imperialist representations of Africa.

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/11/2024

Artbook @ MoMA PS1 presents the launch of 'Richard Nonas'

Monday, March 11, from 4–5:30 PM, Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore presents the launch of 'Richard Nonas.' Please join us for a public discussion between Dieter Schwarz and Allyson Spellacy surveying the artist’s pioneering influence on the downtown New York art scene in the 1970s and his relevance to the founding of PS1 as an ambitious platform for radical vision and experimental action.

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/7/2024

Rizzoli Bookstore presents Chloe Sherman and Noelle Flores Théard on 'Renegades: San Francisco, The 1990s'

Thursday, March 7, from 6–8 PM, Rizzoli Bookstore presents photographer Chloe Sherman in conversation with 'New Yorker' digital photo editor Noelle Flores Théard about Sherman's new monograph 'Renegades: San Francisco, The 1990s,' a tender, joyous portrait of the thriving lesbian subculture in 1990s San Francisco, published by Hatje Cantz.

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/7/2024

Letterform Archive Press presents 'The Complete Commercial Artist: Making Modern Design in Japan, 1928–1930' with Gennifer Weisenfeld

Thursday, March 7, from 6–7:30 PM, Letterform Archive Press presents 'The Complete Commercial Artist: Making Modern Design in Japan, 1928–1930' author Gennifer Weisenfeld in conversation with Letterform editor Chris Westcott. Weisenfeld will share art from the original volumes and explore the global exchange of ideas and practices that informed designers’ new approaches to lettering, illustration, design and display.

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/7/2024

Visions of the Black figure in ‘The Time is Always Now’

Kerry James Marshall’s 2009 “Untitled (Painter)” is reproduced from new release The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure, published to accompany the critically acclaimed survey on view now at National Portrait Gallery, London. Called “tremendous” and “stunning from first to last” by The Guardian, this must-see exhibition brings together 22 contemporary African diasporic artists, including Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Jordan Casteel, Noah Davis, Lubaina Himid, Titus Kaphar, Wangechi Mutu, Lorna Simpson and Henry Taylor, to name a few. “Through the arts, we are dignified with the entire range of emotions experienced by every other human being on the planet, when we have often been treated as less than fully human because demeaning and reductive concepts of Blackness have been constructed, categorized, perceived and perpetuated in majority white societies for centuries,” Bernardine Evaristo writes. “Through the arts, we throw it all up into the air. We write our poems, plays, scripts. We dance, design. We compose and create music. We make art from our cultures, communities, individuality, imagination. Our creativity strives to burst free from the edicts of those who police its borders, because our aliveness recognizes no borders. It is its own free state.”

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/6/2024

Yelena Yemchuk to launch 'Malanka' at Dashwood Books

Wednesday, March 6 from 6 to 8 PM, Dashwood Books will host Ukrainian American visual artist Yelena Yemchuk for the signing of her new book, 'Malanka,' published by Edition Patrick Frey.

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/6/2024

Ancient custom, from darkness to light, in 'Yelena Yemchuk: Malanka'

Featured spreads are from Ukranian American visual artist Yelena Yemchuk's most recent photobook, Malanka, documenting "Old New Year," a heavily incantatory, night-long, pre-christian, folklore ritual that takes place on January 14 every year. It is celebrated by ethnic Romanians in western Ukraine. For this project, Yemchuk traveled to Crasna (aka Krasnoilsk) in 2019 and 2020, photographing the celebration meant to drive out winter and stimulate spring into existence—an ancient custom reminiscent of Persephone’s return in Greek mythology. ⁠
Through Yemchuk’s gaze, spaces blur to create dreamscapes and metamorphoses. As with all of her work, Malanka is a personal, feminine, surrealist and magical project—in this case including a poetic essay by Romanian cultural journalist Ioana Pelehatăi, who traveled to Ukraine in 2023, as war raged to the east. She writes, “The locals shudder at the term ‘carnival,’ but we’ll circle back to that later. For now, I just want to point out that the origins of the term come from carne levare, or ‘remove flesh.’ Shrove Tuesday. Mardi Gras. The right time and place to renounce the old and bring in the new, to flip hierarchy on its head, to laugh in the face of hegemony. Malanka. Carnival. Maybe. … The Malanka chases out evil spirits and brings in the wealth of the new year. Here, in the old world’s east, death isn’t a boogeyman; it’s an acquaintance. It shows up, and you give it a place at the big table because you can’t make it leave. You respect death, but you don’t love it. Death is a strict mother, or a grandma who raised you.”

LACY SOTO | DATE 3/2/2024

Artbook at Hauser & Wirth LA Bookstore presents Pippa Garner in conversation with P. Staff and Sara O'Keeffe

Octogenarian and self-described “senior slut,” Pippa Garner’s lusty practice spans mail-order catalogs, classified ads, garments with cutouts, custom cars, tattoos and performances on the streets and on television. From the early aughts to the present, as Garner’s vision has waned, she has maintained a practice of producing a t-shirt a day, using iron-on letters to tinker with popular phrases in ways that reclaim their lusty potential and thumb her nose at assimilationist narratives. Saturday, March 2 at 3 PM, join the legendary Misc. Pippa with artist P. Staff and curator Sara O'Keeffe as they discuss how to wreak havoc on the world as we know it.

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/1/2024

Let’s hear it for the female gaze!

Featured photograph, of a 1950s mother and daughter, city unknown, is from Ruth Orkin: Women, a book that celebrates not only the work of one of the great midcentury female fashion and photo journalists, but women themselves. There’s something very different, independent and special about the way Orkin relates to her subjects, and the way that they respond to her lens. “Do women see differently than men?” she asks. “Of course we do, because we’re different people. Everybody sees differently from everybody else. Partly it’s because you’re tall or short, or because you’re a minority or a non-minority … all the things that make up a person make their view of the world, and part of your person is your sex.”

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/28/2024

Heart, humor and humanity in ‘Barkley L. Hendricks: Solid!’

Just in time for Black History Month, leap-year edition, Barkley L. Hendricks: Solid! has arrived! Collecting the influential American figurative painter’s iconic portraits alongside his increasingly prized landscapes, geometric abstractions, watercolors and photographs, this is the major and must-have monograph on the artist. Featured here is his 1979 painting, Have You Met Ms. Jones, from editor Zoé Whitley’s essay, “For the Love of You: Barkley L. Hendricks’s Reasons for Painting.” In it, Whitley cites Toni Morrison’s noted 2019 essay on “The Source of Self-Regard” in Black culture, which Morrison traced in music, lyrics, “the literature, the language, the custom, the posture…” and other evolutions in how “the possibility of personal freedom, and interior imaginative freedom […] could be engaged.” “Like Morrison,” Whitley concludes, “Barkley L. Hendricks took in all of these aspects and translated physical bodies into a body of work too often reduced to cool surfaces, but in reality teeming with heart, humor and humanity.”

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/27/2024

192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery presents Robert Slifkin, Elizabeth Smith and Jacob Proctor on 'The New York Tapes'

Tuesday, February 27 at 7 PM, 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery present art historian and author Robert Slifkin and Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Executive Director Elizabeth Smith discussing 'The New York Tapes: Alan Solomon’s Interviews for Television, 1965–66,' moderated by Jacob Proctor, Gilbert and Ann Kinney New York Collector and interviewer for the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art.

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/26/2024

A gorgeous new book on the woodblock virtuosos of the Edo period

Ohara Koson’s 1926 polychrome woodblock print “Scops Owl in Flight under Cherry Blossom and Full Moon” is reproduced from Utamaro, Hokusai, Hiroshige: Geisha, Samurai and the Culture of Pleasure, Skira’s scholarly yet beautifully-produced survey of 460 of the Edo period’s greatest woodblock prints—some elegant, some delicate and others brazenly erotic. Poetic landscapes, flowers and birds, Kabuki dramas, the female universe, the art of love, warriors and heroes all make appearances in prints that exemplify the concept of ukiyo-e, or the floating world, which seventeenth-century Japanese novelist Asai Riyoi described as “living only for the moment, savoring the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves, singing songs, drinking wine and diverting oneself in simply floating, unconcerned by the prospect of imminent poverty, buoyant and carefree like a gourd carried along with the current of the river…”

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/24/2024

Save 75–85% at our 2024 LA Showroom Sample Sale!

Visit us Saturday, February 24 from 11AM–4PM! Our Los Angeles Showroom is celebrating the new year with a blowout Winter Sample Sale featuring an amazing selection of books on Art, Photography, Design, Fashion, Architecture, Music, Film and Popular Culture—all at up to 85% off!

LACY SOTO | DATE 2/24/2024

Artbook at Hauser & Wirth LA Bookstore presents 'Exquisite Dreams: The Art and Life of Dorothea Tanning' with Amy Lyford and Amelia Jones

Join Artbook at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Bookstore at 3 PM on Saturday, February 24 for the Los Angeles book launch of 'Exquisite Dreams: The Art and Life of Dorothea Tanning' published by Reaktion Books. Author Amy Lyford will be in conversation with Amelia Jones, with book signing to follow. Join in-person or livestream on Instagram at @artbookhwla.

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/23/2024

In Walter Pfeiffer's 'Chez Walti,' a playful, captivating dream world

Featured spreads are from new release Chez Walti, Edition Patrick Frey’s vivid and incorrigible 418-page collection of Walter Pfeiffer photographs, made 2000–2022. In regards to photography, he says, “everything depends on the model. Is he or she funny and playful? Or are they just lame ducks? Worst-case scenario: they really do aspire to become a professional model. I have to enjoy photographing them, otherwise it doesn’t work. It’s the same with a still life or a landscape. I can’t plan it in advance, any more than with people. I have to be there and see it for myself. A still life can, admittedly, be a little embellished, so to speak. But when it comes to landscape, I can immediately look at it and think: That’s it!” In regards to his drawing practice, he says, “I need change, and I always need new people. As long as I can, I’ll just keep on fishing and sometimes somebody will take the bait. People who are captivating, and independent-minded, are a great source of inspiration for me. … There are very few of these one-off individuals. … I’m interested in creating a kind of dream world.”

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/20/2024

The elusive practice of bootlegging, alive and well in the creative fields

Featured spreads are from new release Unlicensed: Bootlegging as Creative Practice, NYC-based graphic designer Ben Schwartz’s playful, 432-page investigation of the practice of bootlegging in the creative world. From Virgil Abloh’s Off-White logo (borrowed from the Glasgow International Airport) to Dwayne Johnson's "The Rock" stunt double, Jeff Koons’ 2008–2012 “Balloon Venus” (borrowing from the “Venus of Willendorf,” c. 25,000 BP) or even nature’s own Caligo Owl Butterfly, Schwartz drops a lens on the ambiguous practice of borrowing, quoting, sampling, copying—or stealing, depending on how you look at it—via in-depth discussions with 21 creative practitioners, including BLESS, Experimental Jetset, Printed Matter (Jordan Nassar and Christopher Schulz), Hassan Rahim, SHIRT and Oana Stanescu, among others. “By its very nature, a bootleg defies definition,” Schwartz writes. “It travels in black markets and hides in unmarked record sleeves; it communicates in the errors of cheap production and escapes into the loopholes of property law. It cares little for the stability a definition might offer. To define a bootleg would be to contain it. It creates order where mess is much more welcome. Definitions, language, and names clarify, but they also tend to pin things down. A bootleg’s survival is dependent on its ambiguity. Maybe we can talk about a bootleg while resisting the urge to define it. Maybe we can open it up, explore its edges, extend them outward, or destroy them altogether.”

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/18/2024

Artbook at Hauser & Wirth LA Bookstore presents Lisa Lapinski and Bennett Simpson launching 'Miss Swiss'

Join Artbook at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Bookstore at 3 PM on Sunday, February 18, for the launch of 'Lisa Lapinski: Miss Swiss,' published by Inventory Press and Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Artist Lisa Lapinski will be in conversation with MOCA curator Bennett Simpson, with book signing to follow. Join in-person or livestream on Instagram.

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/17/2024

Artbook at Hauser & Wirth LA Bookstore presents Karen Lofgren & Carmina Escobar launching 'emBRUJAda'

Join Artbook at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Bookstore at 3 PM on Saturday, February 17 for the Los Angeles book launch of 'emBRUJAda: Charms for the Living,' published by Set Margins' Publications. Artist and author Karen Lofgren will be in conversation with experimental vocalist Carmina Escobar, with book signing to follow. Join in-person or livestream on Instagram.