Preview our FALL 2026 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
BLUNK BOOKS/DENT–DE–LEONE
JB Blunk
Edited by Mariah Nielson, Åbäke. Foreword by Mariah Nielson. Text by Lucy R. Lippard, Louise Allison Cort, Fariba Bogzaran, Isamu Noguchi, Alyssa Ballard, Rene Bustamante, Glenn Adamson, Rick Yoshimoto. Interview by Rita Lawrence.
The ceramics and sculptures of beloved Californian artist JB Blunk, in a handsome foil-stamped hardcover volume
This is the first publication to explore the entire oeuvre of the great American sculptor JB Blunk, with previously unseen examples of his work in stone, clay, painting and jewelry. The design beautifully combines archival images of Blunk’s work in situ and at his home and his studio, with color plates of newly photographed pieces. In an essay, Lucy R. Lippard discusses Blunk’s reverence for ancient art and places, while Smithsonian Curator of Ceramics Louise Allison Cort details Blunk’s formative years in Japan. Glenn Adamson, Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art, contributes an essay that explores the essence of Blunk himself along with his artwork.
Blunk maintained a Midwestern sensibility of hard work and plainspokenness throughout his career, with little regard for the distinction between art, craft and design. Rather, he was guided by the materials with which he worked to create large sculptural pieces that seem to exude their own powerful energy unique to organic matter.
Born in Kansas, James Blain Blunk (1926-2002) was a California-based sculptor who worked primarily with wood and clay. His 1969 piece The Planet, a seating installation created from the remains of a two-ton redwood burl, now resides permanently in the lobby of the Oakland Museum of California. Following a period of apprenticeship in Japan, Blunk settled near the Marin County town of Inverness, California, where he built his own studio, and developed a lifelong friendship with the painter Gordon Onslow Ford. In addition to woodwork and ceramics, Blunk also worked with jewelry, painting, furniture-building, bronze and stonework.
Featured image is reproduced from 'JB Blunk.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
T Magazine
Samuel Rutter
The book is laid out to reflect Blunk’s approach: Images of sculptures of wood and stone sit alongside those of early ceramic works and items of gold jewelry, many of which served as studies for the sculptures.
Wallpaper*
Harriet Lloyd-Smith
The book traces Blunk’s fluid practice, charged with anthropology, mythology, science fiction and poetry anchored by an innate sense of curiosity and affinity with the natural world.
C Magazine
Melissa Goldstein
Plumbs Blunk’s entire oeuvre, from stone to clay and painting to jewelry.
Cultured
Katherine McGrath
Offers a multidimensional look at the artist. [...] Made with tenderness and delicate attention.
Featured spreads are reproduced from the gorgeous, foil-stamped first monograph on California sculptor and ceramicist JB Blunk, whose sublime, organic and all-encompassing work is only now getting the recognition it has long deserved. "Artists can ignore borders, ask impolite questions, and reveal unknown connections," Lucy Lippard writes. "As in nature itself, acknowledgement of a vast and invisible tangle of origins is crucial. JB Blunk understood this. His ceramics studies, his training in Japan, his friendships with sculptor Isamu Noguchi and Surrealist Gordon Onslow Ford and, above all, his profound love of place, led him out of the gates from the limited ‘world’ of art to a wide-open field influenced by cultures in which there is no ‘art’ in the contemporary sense, where art and life and spirituality are fully merged." continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 8.25 x 10.25 in. / 226 pgs / 71 color / 73 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $55.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $77 ISBN: 9781907908552 PUBLISHER: Blunk Books/Dent–de–Leone AVAILABLE: 5/12/2020 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA LA AU/NZ AFR ME
Published by Blunk Books/Dent–de–Leone. Edited by Mariah Nielson, Åbäke. Foreword by Mariah Nielson. Text by Lucy R. Lippard, Louise Allison Cort, Fariba Bogzaran, Isamu Noguchi, Alyssa Ballard, Rene Bustamante, Glenn Adamson, Rick Yoshimoto. Interview by Rita Lawrence.
The ceramics and sculptures of beloved Californian artist JB Blunk, in a handsome foil-stamped hardcover volume
This is the first publication to explore the entire oeuvre of the great American sculptor JB Blunk, with previously unseen examples of his work in stone, clay, painting and jewelry. The design beautifully combines archival images of Blunk’s work in situ and at his home and his studio, with color plates of newly photographed pieces. In an essay, Lucy R. Lippard discusses Blunk’s reverence for ancient art and places, while Smithsonian Curator of Ceramics Louise Allison Cort details Blunk’s formative years in Japan. Glenn Adamson, Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art, contributes an essay that explores the essence of Blunk himself along with his artwork.
Blunk maintained a Midwestern sensibility of hard work and plainspokenness throughout his career, with little regard for the distinction between art, craft and design. Rather, he was guided by the materials with which he worked to create large sculptural pieces that seem to exude their own powerful energy unique to organic matter.
Born in Kansas, James Blain Blunk (1926-2002) was a California-based sculptor who worked primarily with wood and clay. His 1969 piece The Planet, a seating installation created from the remains of a two-ton redwood burl, now resides permanently in the lobby of the Oakland Museum of California. Following a period of apprenticeship in Japan, Blunk settled near the Marin County town of Inverness, California, where he built his own studio, and developed a lifelong friendship with the painter Gordon Onslow Ford. In addition to woodwork and ceramics, Blunk also worked with jewelry, painting, furniture-building, bronze and stonework.
