| RECENT POSTS DATE 10/29/2020 DATE 10/28/2020 DATE 10/26/2020 DATE 10/25/2020 DATE 10/21/2020 DATE 10/21/2020 DATE 10/19/2020 DATE 10/17/2020 DATE 10/16/2020 DATE 10/16/2020 DATE 10/14/2020 DATE 10/13/2020 DATE 10/13/2020 DATE 10/9/2020 DATE 10/8/2020 DATE 10/8/2020 DATE 10/2/2020 DATE 10/1/2020 DATE 10/1/2020 DATE 10/1/2020 DATE 9/29/2020 DATE 9/26/2020 DATE 9/22/2020 DATE 9/22/2020 DATE 9/22/2020 DATE 9/19/2020 DATE 9/17/2020 DATE 9/16/2020 DATE 9/15/2020 DATE 9/14/2020 DATE 9/12/2020 DATE 9/11/2020 DATE 9/11/2020 DATE 9/10/2020 DATE 9/9/2020 DATE 9/8/2020 DATE 9/8/2020 DATE 9/7/2020 DATE 9/4/2020 DATE 9/2/2020 DATE 8/26/2020 DATE 8/24/2020 DATE 8/23/2020 DATE 8/22/2020 DATE 8/21/2020 DATE 8/19/2020 DATE 8/16/2020 DATE 8/15/2020 DATE 8/11/2020 DATE 8/11/2020 DATE 8/10/2020
| | | RECENT POSTSCORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/29/2020 This timely photograph—of Black Washington, DC-area citizens waiting in line to vote in the 1964 Presidential election—is reproduced from Black in White America: 1963–1965, Reel Art Press's new, expanded and redesigned edition of photographer Leonard Freed's seminal 1968 civil rights photo-essay. Other photographs capture such pivotal moments in the civil rights movement as the 1963 March on Washington and the Selma to Montgomery marches, in addition to ordinary scenes of bravery, fatigue, endurance and wit. In his Foreword, fellow Magnum photographer Eli Reed writes, "Leonard was one of the doorkeepers to the historical reality of the times.… The book was an honest directive that captured the realities of normal Black people. It was close to an ultimate inside view while dealing in real time seconds, minutes and hours of the highlights and difficulties day after day, well beyond belief. The photographs were a continual visual truth, leaving no doubt as to what was happening when Leonard’s camera shutter captured those moments in question."
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/28/2020 Featured image, of Republican troops departing for the Aragón front of the Spanish Civil War, August 1936, is reproduced from Death in the Making, Damiani and ICP's beautiful new facsimile edition of Robert Capa's 1939 photobook. The writing scrawled on the side of the train, just about to leave from Barcelona, reads, "UHP (Unión de Hermanos Proletarios; Union of Proletarian Brothers) swear on these letters before you die brothers rather than consent to tyrants.” Collecting Capa, Gerda Taro and David "Chim" Seymour's photojournalistic pictures of civilians and soldiers rising up against General Francisco Franco’s fascist insurrection against Spain’s democratically elected government in the 1930s, this volume is printed from gorgeous new scans of all the photographs in the original edition. It faithfully reproduces the original captions by Capa, preface by Jay Allen and layout by photographer André Kertész, and also includes a new afterword by ICP curator (and curator of the Robert Capa Archive at ICP), Cynthia Young.
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/26/2020 Featured image is reproduced from Tar Beach: Life on the Rooftops of Little Italy 1920–75, Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas' infectious new collection of mid-century found family photographs from the rooftops of New York's Little Italy. "The roof was many things," Martin Scorsese writes in his Introduction. "It was where people raised and trained pigeons, like Brando in the Kazan picture. It was where romances happened. There were even weddings on the roof. I tried to recreate one of them in the home movie section of Raging Bull, and the roof is there in Mean Streets and in my first feature, Who's That Knocking At My Door?
The roof was our escape hatch and it was our sanctuary. The endless crowds, the filth and the grime, the constant noise, the chaos, the claustrophobia, the non-stop motion of everything … you would walk up that flight of stairs, open the door, and you were above it all. You could breathe. You could dream. You could be."
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/25/2020"Self-Portrait" (1901) is reproduced from Picasso: Blue and Rose Periods, the exceptional new exhibition catalogue from Hatje Cantz and Fondation Beyeler. One of the first works to explore the full potential of the blue monochrome, the painting presents the artist "as a member of bohemian society, pale-faced and hollow-cheeked, deliberately made to seem older than his years, and enveloped in a thick overcoat that turns his body into an indistinct mass," Stéphanie Molins writes.
 CHEEYEON PARK | DATE 10/21/2020Sunday, October 25 at 3PM EST, Artbook @ MoMA PS1 and After 8 Books invite you to a special online book launch, discussion, and signing for 'Amy Sillman: Faux Pas, Selected Writings and Drawings.' The artist Amy Sillman will be in discussion with writer Lynne Tillman, who contributes the foreword.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/21/2020Featured images are reproduced from Tantra Song, back in stock from Siglio. Collected by the French poet Franck André Jamme, who died October 1 at the age of 73, these rare, anonymous abstract Tantra drawings from Rajasthan are designed to awaken heightened states of consciousness, and feel especially significant to us during this particularly absurd and chaotic time in world history. "We speak of beauty," Jamme writes. "Perhaps instead, they evoke a kind of truth. Surely because they reveal, in their very abstraction, certain kinds of thoughts—thoughts that have chosen, instead of words, to express themselves in lines, shapes and colors.
In one of his books, Ajit Mookerjee, referring to these pieces, speaks of a 'visual metaphysics'. …
Continue looking at them, untiringly, these images. They are somewhat rigid, a bit studious, almost too restrained. And yet, nearly all, tremble. But that too depends on who is looking at them. For any work, a kind of family is necessary. A mother and a father, at least. A mother: the painter; a father: the viewer.
Some are black, some red, some brown, some yellow, some multi-colored, that’s true. Yet if we had but one color to associate with them forever, it would be blue. Sky blue. The blue of consciousness. Azure.
Nothing extraneous. Nor the slightest impression of effort. No emphasis, no commentary.
Wild little things
That shine
Obstinately
To read publisher Lisa Pearson's remarks upon learning of Jamme's death earlier this month, continue to the Siglio website.
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/19/2020 Featured image, of Mick Jagger at home in 1966, is reproduced from Goin’ Home with the Rolling Stones ’66: Photographs by Gered Mankowitz, the new release from Led Zeppelin by Led Zeppelin and Queen: The Neal Preston Photographs publisher Reel Art Press. Collecting 100 previously unpublished photos, both sweet and strange, by the band's good friend and official photographer at the time, this book "is a rock version of the very best of the Hollywood issues of Architectural Digest," in the words of the Rolling Stones’ legendary manager, Andrew Loog Oldham. He continues: "I recall when Gered first suggested shooting the boys at home, not being that interested in the idea—if only because the idea of a comfy Stones ran a total opposite to the rock ’n’ roll Clockwork Orange episode we had been enjoying at the time. But the Stones were game and this work with Gered is a … great reminder of the time and the end of the innocence."
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/17/2020"Crime Suspect with Gun, Chicago, Illinois" (1957) is reproduced from Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957, back in stock at last. "In this short series for Life, shot over six weeks and consisting of a few dozen images, Parks deftly captured the processes of criminalization, policing, arrest, and imprisonment," Nicole Fleetwood writes. "His photos allowed readers in the 1950s (and permit contemporary audiences) to see the steps along these processes—complete with officers on their beat looking for suspicious activity, the shakedown of criminal suspects, the administrative procedures of arrest and fingerprinting, and finally the bars and walls of prison, in this case San Quentin in California… Parks’s photographs foreshadow what will unfold in the coming decades, as civil rights activists and social movements make greater demands for equal rights, access, and justice, and as policing grows more aggressive and prisons more punitive. Seeing these images, we might ask what lessons we can learn from The Atmosphere of Crime to address the massive and brutal prison system we have inherited."
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/16/2020Featured spreads are from Oscar Wilde's Italian Dream 1875–1900, Renato Miracco's account of Wilde's largely previously undocumented grand tour of Italy following his incarceration in Reading Gaol and subsequent exile from England. "Cast out of London, shorn of his respectability and reduced to penury," Philip Kennicott writes in the Introduction, "Wilde wasn’t just an international scandal, he was face to face with the multiplicity of identities that he had, for some time, managed to suppress under the cloak of his provocative aestheticism." Archival photographs, letters and press clippings add heft to this welcome volume of original scholarship, launching virtually tonight with a discussion between Renate Miracco and Edmund White via 192 Books.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/16/2020Celebrate Oscar Wilde's birthday Friday, October 16 at 6PM ET with a virtual event presented by Paula Cooper Gallery and 192 Books! Renato Miracco will discuss his new book, 'Oscar Wilde's Italian Dream 1875–1900,' with Edmund White, live-streamed on PCG Studio. The discussion will be open to questions from the audience.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/14/2020"Heath" (2005) from Katharina Bosse's series A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mother, is reproduced from Female Photographers Org: The Body Issue, the first publication from a new, non-hierarchical collective of 20 female photographers engaging topics of gender portrayal, body image and the media. "In the 1980s, voices started to emerge that criticized the depiction of women’s bodies in the male-dominated world of photography," Elisabeth Biondi writes. "How-to guides for photographing the nude body only had female models. Men were the photographers and the authors. Women were in front of the lens and depicted like butterflies in a lepidopterological study and male superiority in the field was never questioned." This vibrant, provocative 144-page issue edited by Biondi with text by Emma Lewis gives voice to the discussion of the representation of the female body and includes work by guest artists Brandy Eve Allen, Brittney Casey Adams, Mary Chen, Tamara Dean, Yushi Li Dita Pepe, Lotte van Raalte, Laurie Simmons and Chanell Stone, as well as work by members of the collective, including Bosse, Bex Day, Haley Morris-Cafiero, Maggie Steber, Meklit Fekadu, Jennifer Greenburg, Jocelyn Lee, Lilly Urbat, Kirsten Becken, Claudia Holzinger, Jessica Barthel, Caro Siegl, Oriana Layendecker, Nora Lowinsky, Hanna Mattes, Veronika Faustmann, Katya Abedian, Paula Winkler, Marzena Skubatz and Qiana Mestrich.
 LACY SOTO | DATE 10/13/2020Tuesday, October 20 at 7PM EST, Artbook @ MoMA PS1 invites you to the east coast virtual launch of 'Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists.' Editor Antwaun Sargent will be in conversation with artist Jacolby Satterwhite to celebrate the launch of this highly anticipated publication.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/13/2020These days, small pleasures are key. To experience a brief, magical moment of that kind of joyful surprise you felt as a kid when you encountered something new or unexpected, but somehow also in your own control, we highly recommend Takahiro Kurashima’s newest interactive book object, Moirémotion, whose pages come to life when the reader moves a special semi-transparent foil across them. Analogue joy via digital tools. You'd be surprised how sweet it can feel.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/9/2020Featured spreads are from Amy Sillman: Faux Pas, Selected Writings and Drawings, releasing today from After 8 Books. This 272-page staff favorite essay collection is funny, insightful and honest—exactly what we want to read right now. Jason Farago mentions it today in a major New York Times feature on Sillman, whose work is on view through November 14 at Gladstone Gallery. "Indeed Ms. Sillman is in a thin crowd (with, let’s say, Andrea Fraser, Hito Steyerl, Matias Faldbakken, David Salle) of artists who can really write. The evidence is in Faux Pas, a just-published collection—her fourth—of her writings that display the same good humor and intelligence of her best paintings." Click here to read the full review or here for more information on the book.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/8/2020Thursday, October 29 from 4:30–6PM PST, Manetti Shrem Museum of Art in Davis, California, presents the west coast virtual launch of 'Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists.' Edited by writer Antwaun Sargent, the book accompanies the 'Young, Gifted and Black' exhibition, which will travel to the Manetti Shrem Museum in 2022. Join museum Associate Curator Susie Kantor for a Zoom conversation with collector Bernard Lumpkin, writer Antwaun Sargent and Matt Wycoff, curator of the Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/8/2020Featured images are reproduced from Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide, the newest addition to FUEL Publishing's series of books on the profound aesthetic and cultural mysteries of the Soviet world. In this case, researcher Darmon Richter goes beyond typical disaster tourist hotspots to photograph previously undocumented regions of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, where he once worked as a tour guide while making illegal "stalker" forays on the sly. In his Prologue, Richter writes, "Chernobyl today is a place of greenery and life, of branches sagging under overripe fruit, and of wild animals that in the decades of our absence have begun to lose their distrust of humans. Wild foxes will eat bread from the palm of your hand, while all around, symbols of the former regime crumble beneath the burden of flowers, berries and ants. It is a place where the humble might find infinite beauty, where the curious may glimpse nature’s future order in a posthuman world…"
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/2/2020Wednesday, October 28, from 7–8 PM, ICP and Damiani Books present Cynthia Young, curator and author of the republication of 'Robert Capa: Death in the Making,' for an evening celebrating the launch of the expanded edition of Capa’s classic photobook documenting the Spanish Civil War.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/1/2020Featured spreads are reproduced from Philip Guston Now, the definitive exhibition catalog published to accompany the traveling retrospective that has recently been postponed until 2024. "Be warned," NGADC curator Harry Cooper writes. "Guston's is not a sunny art. There is a moment on film where he uses the word 'happy' almost by accident and then repeats it in disgust, spitting it out. That he endured personal traumas and took the traumas of the twentieth century to heart is evident in most of the images in this volume, if you look closely. But even in its darkest moments and seen in the darkest light, his art can be beautiful and even hopeful. His refusal to withdraw, his insistence on bearing witness to what was happening inside himself and out, was a kind of faith… Guston's work seems to inhabit a present tense, addressing us in the moment. Whether it is the freshness of the paint itself, the directness of the handling, the power of the image, or something undefinable, we feel that the work could have been done yesterday. Or just now."
 SHARON HELGASON GALLAGHER | DATE 10/1/2020The catalog 'Philip Guston Now,' co-published and distributed by D.A.P., has been released and is now on sale in bookstores and museum shops worldwide. D.A.P. fully stands behind the book and believes that this work speaks powerfully to our times.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/29/2020Featured spreads are from In Search of African American Space: Redressing Racism, the highly anticipated new release from Lars Müller Publishers. A 256-page anthology drawing on architecture, performance art, history and visual theory, this well illustrated volume explores the creative relationship between the African diaspora and social space in America. "If the African American experience emerges from the structure of slavery," editor Jeffrey Hogrefe asks in his Introduction, "how does architecture speak to that experience, and how can the African American person respond to such an architecture that traditionally serves to fortify the state? This is a question that we ask in the face of escalating state violence toward Black people, which is occurring at the same time as the emergence of a Black aesthetics that has repositioned blackness as central to a politics of transformation… For the most part, architecture has been designed to regulate, survey, punish, and erase the Black person, which is why, until recently, the African American experience of space has remained largely outside of the study and practice of architecture. This is remarkable, considering that slavery, a key material practice in the European colonization of the western hemisphere, was carried out in the carceral spaces of the slave ship, slave plantation cabin and urban 'slum/ghetto.' From these architectural typologies, African Americans have self-fashioned other uses and meanings by appropriating space for resistance through everyday practices."
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/26/2020Sable Elyse Smith's "Coloring Book 33" (2019) is reproduced from Colored People Time, the ICA Philadelphia's text-heavy, multifaceted exploration of the ways that dominant notions of time have been used to control and condemn Black people. This 50x60-inch work on paper is from a series that sources imagery from found coloring books meant to teach children how to interface with court systems. The accompanying text explains: "Woven into a series of connect-the-dots and maze games ('Can you help Pat to the metal detector?') is an implicit message about who does and doesn’t belong in a courtroom, presenting criminality as a foregone conclusion to children who receive such a book. Within these pages is the source for Smith’s "Coloring Book 33," a nearly blank page with the text 'Draw your own picture,' a line that reads as an uncanny invitation to exercise freedom within a document meant to foreclose access to it. Here, Smith’s intervention fills the space with evidence of her own hand. By combining child-like mark making with a text of refusal Smith effectively counteracts the sinister visual and textual language of everyday structures that feed into the carceral state."
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/22/2020 Featured spread is from Cardboard Landscapes (Paesaggi di cartone), MoMA's new facsimile of conceptual photographer Luigi Ghirri's singular hand-pasted album of chromogenic color prints, which he gifted to John Szarkowski—then the head of the Museum's Photography Department—in the 1970s. "In all essential details, the original album and this facsimile edition are identical," Sarah Hermanson Meister writes in her endnote (the only change to the original): "both are bound between Florentine-paper covers laced with bronze metallic skeins and set against rough oatmeal linen spines; they share the same, nearly square dimensions and present 111 prints arranged in the same sequence over the course of fifty pages. In the facsimile as in the original, the only words that appear were inscribed by Ghirri himself, in blue ballpoint pen."
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/22/2020 Featured image is reproduced from Peter Saul: Professional Artist Correspondence, 1945–1976, launching virtually Wednesday, September 23 (click here for details.) An excerpt from a typical letter, dated February 1967, reads, "Because as it becomes obvious to me that my work is written off as 'bad' or unimportant—and there’s no reason to believe that these highly thoughtful and intelligent people are wrong and that my work will be liked better later—then I must really get worse, less important, if I’m going to continue to pick up the small change that is reserved for 'the wrong kind of thing,' the 'side issue.' Just like the important artists have to become more important or look for a job. My progress is part personal, part practical. I’m going to get worse as fast as any of them can get better. In any case this country doesn’t deserve any further cultural embellishment because of its criminal actions—if it were in its power to have any cultural embellishment—which it’s not, except in our opinion, which is fading out as our way of life holds less and less attraction for people in the rest of the world."
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/19/2020Featured spreads are from photographer Michael Turek's new book, Siberia. Made over three years, the first of which was spent traveling the region with The Lost Pianos of Siberia author Sophy Roberts, the photographs in this collection side-step the clichés of simply being "cold, cruel, impenetrable, abandoned, scored with desperate romance and ill-fated rebellions," she writes. Turek avoids forming conclusions, allowing for photographs that are "totally without pretension. They linger on the pause between words, the silence of a snowstorm and the stillness between trees… Turek’s images create the space for us to question our fixed assumptions about what Siberia is and isn’t, was and wasn’t, then and now. Above all, his work reflects an elusive region with accuracy and profound sensitivity." She concludes, "I was there for nearly every step of Turek’s journey. His Siberia is not always the same Siberia I saw—but the broad themes are shared: the dark and light, surprise and predictability, savage nature and intimate domesticity."
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/17/2020 Featured drawing is reproduced from Poor Richard by Philip Guston, the artist's legendary political satire of the second most egregious President in recent American history. For anyone looking for a graphically absorbing diversion from today's overwhelmingly confusing election politics, this book is perfection. "Nixon critics tend to associate his name not just with lying and abuse of power," Sebastian Smee writes in the Washington Post, "but also with maudlin sentimentalism and elaborate excuse-making. A half-century later, as we approach the end of the first term of a president who, for many people, has taken these same characteristics to a new and rarefied level, Guston’s Nixon drawings look freshly relevant."
 LACY SOTO | DATE 9/16/2020Wednesday, September 23 at 7PM EST, join Artbook @ MoMAPS1 Bookstore and Bad Dimension Press for an online book launch, discussion, and signing with artist Peter Saul, who will be in conversation with Aaron Curry and Dan Nadel, discussing his new book 'Peter Saul: Professional Artist Correspondence, 1945–1976.' This event is free with registration. Order your signed copy today!
DATE 11/5/2019  They're cute, they're small, they're surprising and affordable. Here are 15 staff picks for the stockings on your list » DATE 11/4/2019  The must-have art books of 2019 » DATE 11/7/2019  A few of our favorite 2019 monographs and surveys by Modern and contemporary photographers » DATE 11/10/2019  Gifts for design devotees: your guide to the top new architecture and design books for the 2019 holidays » DATE 11/10/2019  Whether you love to cook, eat or ponder the politics of food, here are our staff pick food and cooking gift books of 2019 » DATE 11/17/2019  Our staff favorite 2019 books on black art and history » DATE 11/9/2019  Impress your favorite armchair astronomers with wonderful gift books on the cosmos » DATE 11/8/2019  Our staff favorite holiday fashion gift books for 2019 » DATE 11/6/2019  Five must-have 2019 reading books for the literature lovers on your list » DATE 11/14/2019  Our staff feels love for these top film and music books of 2019 » DATE 11/16/2019  Our staff favorite 2019 books on or by LGBTQ artists » DATE 11/10/2019  This is a year of escape fantasy for many Americans, and we've got just the right book for every world traveler on your list » DATE 4/7/2020  This week, Ridinghouse releases 'The Outwardness of Art: Selected Writings of Adrian Stokes,' the first comprehensive selection of writings by the noted British art theorist known for his synthesis of aesthetics and psychoanalysis. Edited by Thomas Evans, it is the first broad introduction in almost half a century. DATE 3/7/2019  We will miss Carolee Schneemann, fearless performance artist, painter, filmmaker, feminist and innate breaker of taboos. She died this week at the age of 79. In memoriam, we present an excerpt from 'Carolee Schneemann: Uncollected Texts,' published by Primary Information.
DATE 5/9/2018  This week, Lars Müller of Lars Müller Publishers was honored at the 2018 Storefront for Art and Architecture Benefit at the New York Public Library. As the North American distributor of Lars Müller's extraordinary list of books on art, architecture, design and theory, we are ourselves honored to reproduce his acceptance speech here. |
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