Artbook Image Gallery

“Blue Forms” (1942) by Florence Miller Pierce is reproduced from Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, the highly-anticipated new release from DelMonico Books and the Crocker Art Museum, published to accompany the traveling exhibition opening this week in Albuquerque. The first book devoted to this underrecognized group of artists from the Southwest who promoted abstraction in pursuit of enlightenment and spiritual illumination, Another World, collects 175 images by Emil Bisttram, Ed Garman, Robert Gribbroek, Lawren Harris, Raymond Jonson, William Lumpkins, Agnes Pelton, Horace Towner Pierce, Dane Rudhyar and Stuart Walker, in addition to Miller Pierce. “Contemporary abstraction, broadly, now seems to be grasping for styles and concepts that break from the formal restrictions of the past century,” curator and editor Michael Duncan writes. “Aimless doodles, random tracings, scribbles and daubs have proliferated on canvases for several decades now. Given the dire state of the world today, we need something more. The TPG provides a model for how, today, more than eighty years later, nonobjective art might once again regain its mojo, rekindle the spirit and nourish the soul.”

For the cool collector Dad: 'Marred for Life! Defaced Record Covers from the Collection of Greg Wooten'

It was impossible to choose a single image from our Father's Day favorite Marred for Life!, collecting 275 out of approximately 1500 anonymously vandalized vintage record covers from the collection of west coast musician and design purveyor Greg Wooten. They're all so good! "I spend a lot of my free time making the rounds in the L.A. record shop scene, "Wooten writes. "I like the dual mission of looking for the cleanest, best examples of rare spiritual Jazz LPs while simultaneously scouring the dollar bins, hoping to find a Carpenters' record where some kid I'll never know decided to black-out some of their teeth! I often wonder, but will never know, how each of these defaced covers, found in the world, came to be. Once I jumped into the defaced hole, I realized that the range of defacing was wide—so many subcategories, from really thought-out and artful to just blatantly disrespectful. Bloodshot eyes, blackened teeth, mustaches, tattoos, reviews, love letters, collage, psychedelia, pornography, etc. Sometimes over-the-top and other times wonderfully subtle—and often, really funny too! I can't help but see these as anonymous and personal folk art of some sort."

On Juneteenth, we celebrate the everyday heroes of Mario Moore’s portraiture

Featured spreads are from The Work of Several Lifetimes, Detroit native Mario Moore’s new collection of portraits of the Black blue-collar workers who keep Princeton University running behind the scenes. “I knew that whatever I created for this series would walk a tight line between the expectation of how Black people are seen in blue-collar jobs versus the true representation of them—making them visible,” Moore writes. “Generally, portraits at elite institutions are created to represent owners, donors, deans, presidents and scholars. But I wanted to ask the question: Which positions garner such attention and how could painting contribute to conversations about who deserves to be recognized? My hope is that the work I created has explored a sense of power and individuality. I believe that all of the work offers insight into each individual that is more complex, more nuanced than at first glance.”

IMAGE GALLERY

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