| RECENT POSTS DATE 2/1/2021 DATE 1/18/2021 DATE 1/15/2021 DATE 1/15/2021 DATE 1/15/2021 DATE 1/14/2021 DATE 1/11/2021 DATE 1/9/2021 DATE 1/8/2021 DATE 1/7/2021 DATE 1/6/2021 DATE 1/4/2021 DATE 1/1/2021 DATE 1/1/2021 DATE 12/31/2020 DATE 12/30/2020 DATE 12/27/2020 DATE 12/26/2020 DATE 12/24/2020 DATE 12/22/2020 DATE 12/20/2020 DATE 12/18/2020 DATE 12/16/2020 DATE 12/13/2020 DATE 12/11/2020 DATE 12/10/2020 DATE 12/9/2020 DATE 12/8/2020 DATE 12/8/2020 DATE 12/7/2020 DATE 12/4/2020 DATE 12/2/2020 DATE 12/2/2020 DATE 11/30/2020 DATE 11/27/2020 DATE 11/25/2020 DATE 11/23/2020 DATE 11/22/2020 DATE 11/20/2020 DATE 11/20/2020 DATE 11/19/2020 DATE 11/19/2020 DATE 11/19/2020 DATE 11/19/2020 DATE 11/18/2020 DATE 11/17/2020 DATE 11/17/2020 DATE 11/17/2020 DATE 11/16/2020 DATE 11/15/2020 DATE 11/14/2020
| | | RECENT POSTSCORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/18/2021 Featured image is reproduced from Leonard Freed: Black in White America, 1963–1965, Reel Art Press's remarkable and timely expanded reissue of the Magnum photographer's seminal 1968 civil rights photo-essay. "Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream," Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is quoted from his speech at the 1963 March on Washington. "It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream … that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: ' … that all men are created equal.' I have a dream that one day even in the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. … So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. But not only that. Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside. When we allow freedom to ring … we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old negro spiritual, 'free at last, free at last, great God a-mighty, we are free at last.'"
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/15/2021Friday, January 15 at 8PM EST, Printed Matter presents the second in a series of programs produced in advance of Printed Matter’s Virtual Art Book Fair (PMVABF), February 24–28, 2021. The Los Angeles-based, multidisciplinary Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo, who was originally invited to create a mural for the cancelled 2020 LA Art Book Fair, will be joined by curator Carla Acevedo Yates and artists gloria galvez and Lorena Mostajo, to address their respective strategies toward social and environmental justice.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/15/2021Featured images—stills from renowned Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo's 2018 single-channel HD video installation "Apariciones / Apparitions" (2018)—are reproduced from the new monograph/exhibition catalog from DelMonico Books and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, launching tonight at Printed Matter. "Like other works in Caycedo’s oeuvre, her Geochoreographies can also take on the valence of recuperation," Pilar Tompkins Rivas writes, "particularly in the way of lost, overlooked, or damaged histories. In addition to advocacy for the present and future, these works create spaces, movements and objects wherein the memories of lives and movements lost can be recovered and preserved. Nowhere is this more evident than in the video work "Apariciones / Apparitions," in which Caycedo contends with the erasures that have resulted through the processes and legacies of colonialism. Structured around a geochoreography that moves throughout the Huntington in San Marino, California, the piece reconceptualizes spaces within the institution’s gardens, library and museum by performing African and Indigenous spiritual and dance practices. Commissioned as part of a collaboration between the Huntington and the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College, Caycedo’s geochoreography functions to brown and queer the historically white spaces of the Huntington and implements decolonizing strategies to make bodies of color and non-binary bodies visible."
ABOVE: Stills from "Apariciones / Apparitions," 2018. With: Marina Magalhaes (Choreography), Isis Avalos, Samad Guerra, Celeste Tavares, Bianca Medina, Jose Aviles, and Natali Miciche. Cinematography: David de Rozas. Sound Mix: Simon Guzmán.  CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/15/2021Friday, January 15, at 5PM EST, Printed Matter presents a Zoom conversation on 'Seth Siegelaub: Better Read Than Dead: Writings and Interviews 1964–2013' with co-editors Lauren van Haaften-Schick and Jo Melvin, along with artist James Hoff.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/14/2021Thursday, January 14 from 6–7pm, the Brooklyn Museum presents András Szántó, author of 'The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues,' in conversation with Sandra Jackson-Dumont and Marie-Cécile Zinsou, followed by a discussion between Anne Pasternak, Victoria Noorthoorn and Franklin Sirmans.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/11/2021Leonora Carrington's c. 1955 rendering of the zero tarot card, "The Fool," is reproduced from Fulgur Press's highly-anticipated new release, The Tarot of Leonora Carrington—the first presentation of the noted Surrealist writer and painter's recently discovered deck. Featuring a full-size facsimile of Carrington's Major Arcana—the most recognizable and impactful 22 cards of the deck—alongside an introduction by her son, Gabriel Weisz Carrington, and a heavily illustrated essay by art historians Tere Arcq and Susan Aberth, this is one of the hottest titles on our newly-announced Spring 2021 list. Of this particular card, Weisz Carrington writes, "A trickster, one might surmise, is an experiment with a magical self—also found as the court jester, or court dwarf… The trickster is bitten by a ferocious cat or lynx. This character is unaware of the cat biting his leg, he is the incarnation of the unconscious and is oblivious to where he is heading. Obviously, he relates, as many other characters do, to the hidden aspects of the self in each of us."
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/8/2021January 12–19, please join Artbook | D.A.P. in the Aesthetic Movement Showroom from 10am–6pm daily at the Atlanta Gift Market to view a curated selection of new books on art and culture! Please note, capacity is limited and appointments are strongly advised.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/7/2021“I feel it is my moral obligation as a black artist to try to graphically document what I feel socially,” David Hammons said in 1969, one year before he made this haunting double self-portrait. Titled “Black First, America Second” (1970), this body print and silkscreen on paper presents one version of the self that “clings to the stars of the national flag,” according to Soul of a Nation originating curators Mark Godfrey and Zoé Whitley, “while the other self appears almost painfully cleaved by its stripes… [It] is an image both timely and resolutely of its time.” This work and 235 others are featured in Soul of a Nation—a crucial reference at a moment when both the presidential and senatorial elections have literally been decided by Black voters, even as white supremacist insurgents were allowed yesterday to storm the Capital as part of President Trump's historically shameful last act.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/6/2021Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's extraordinary "Citrine By The Ounce" (2014) is reproduced from Fly In League With The Night, reviewed this week in Hyperallergic. Featuring 120 color reproductions alongside writing by Isabella Maidment, Andrea Schlieker, Elizabeth Alexander and Yiadom-Boakye herself, this is without doubt one of the most inspiring art books of 2021. As Elizabeth Alexander writes, "These paintings make you want to stand in front of them again and again and return to the souls residing within. The bottomlessness of these paintings is like the bottomlessness of intimacy."
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/4/2021 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 parallel to today's bizarre news of attempted election tampering, 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."
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/1/2021"Group 8, No. 2" (1913) is reproduced from Hilma af Klint: Artist, Researcher, Medium, published to accompany a major exhibition at Malmö’s esteemed Moderna Museet. “In order to liberate oneself from prevailing truths and opinions, one has to dare to leave safe ground,” curator Iris Müller-Westermann writes. “Time and again throughout her life af Klint was prepared to take that risk. Although she kept copious notes in which she tried to put what she experienced into context, it is the images that constitute the essential message that she has left behind. They are powerful, remarkable, radical images. At first glance, many of them seem very simple, but in interaction with each other they reveal their complexity. It would be pointless to directly translate the symbols and letters that appear in af Klint’s work into verbal meaning. They always have to be seen in relation to the whole. Symbols are like doors to other dimensions. Hilma af Klint’s fascinating images that generate such a great deal of interest today, one hundred years after their creation, invite us to go on a journey into another dimension—an inward journey, which is simultaneously also a journey outwards, beyond.”
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/31/2020 We can think of no better image to express everything we've gone through in 2020—and all that we dream of in 2021—than D'Angelo Lovell Williams' "The Lovers" (2017). Reproduced from Young, Gifted and Black—named one of the Best Holiday Gift Books of the Year by Vogue, Essence, New York Magazine's The Strategist and The New York Times, among many others—this image seems to simultaneously presage all of the pain and longing of the pandemic, the unstoppable rise of Black Lives Matter, and the overthrow of a corrupt government that asked us to wear blinders and accept lies. Originally intended to appropriate and subvert the iconic 1928 Magritte painting of the same name, "The Lovers" was, in fact, made as a "blunt expression of black gay love," according to the artist. Viewed now, in light of the astonishing year that we have all endured together, it truly is "about so much more than we can express in a lifetime."
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/30/2020 "Cape Cod Morning" (1950) is reproduced from Edward Hopper: A New Perspective on Landscape, the beautifully produced exhibition catalog from Hatje Cantz and Fondation Beyeler, and a fitting book for this time of unusual social distancing and global isolation. "Hopper's silence was famous; recalcitrance was his method," Ulf Küster writes. "Throughout his life, Hopper, who took German in school, carried around a piece of paper with a quotation from a letter by Johan Wolfgang von Goethe to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Aside from indicating his profound knowledge of Goethe's works, it also documents his subjective approach to art… 'See, dear friend, what is the beginning and end of all writing, the reproduction of the world around me, through the inner world in which everything is held, bound up, remade, kneaded, and in peculiar form and manner again set forth; which remains eternally secret, God be thanked, and neither will I reveal it to gapers and chatterers.'"
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/27/2020 Featured photograph, captioned "Statue of Liberty, 1974," is reproduced from Godlis Streets, Reel Art Press's riveting new collection of 70s and 80s Boston and NYC street photography by David Godlis. Featuring texts by Godlis, Luc Sante and Chris Stein, this is seedy, stylish and celebratory old-school time travel at its best. "Godlis’s pictures show people uneasily enacting half-forgotten rituals, wearing vestigial dress-up clothes and timidly asserting spatial autonomy, in a city that seems to have been erected and abandoned by another, larger species," Sante writes. "Time moves haltingly, hesitantly, and seems to loop back on itself even as it draws inexorably toward death.… The subjects who notice his camera are wary at best, wondering whether he is a spy, or perhaps harvesting their souls, or maybe they wish he’d been there to take their pictures when they still looked good and the world made sense."
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/26/2020Featured image is reproduced from William Eggleston: Polaroid SX-70, Steidl's superb facsimile of the small black leather album the photographer created to collect the only Polaroids he ever made. Mississippi street lamps, billboards, parking lots and gas stations are among the subjects in the photographs, all of which were made outdoors. "The images may be instant, but they’re as masterfully considered as the rest of Eggleston’s output," Dais Woodward writes in Another Magazine, "proof, if any was needed, of his innate ability to elevate anything to high art by the mere angling of a lens."
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/24/2020 After the formidable, seemingly never-ending year we've almost—finally!!—seen to its bitter end, we're taking pure, unadulterated inspiration from this simple 1945 photograph of Charles and Ray Eames lighting candles on a Christmas tree they'd just made from molded plywood chair legs. It is reproduced from Essential Eames: Words and Pictures, published by Vitra Design Museum. This is a book that reminds us to love, to play and to create. Charles and Ray Eames were, above all, irrepressible problem solvers. Great models for 2021.
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/22/2020 "DNA:Study:Zero" (2014, courtesy The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection) is reproduced from staff favorite new release, McArthur Binion: DNA, published by DelMonico Books. Collecting the artist's minimalist DNA paintings collaged over copies of personal documents and photographs, this volume explores the series through the lenses of art history, labor, music and writing. "Part of the satisfaction of engaging with the DNA series derives from the kinship the works have with musical improvisation," Grace Deveney writes. "The subtleties and quiet variations of the visual tactile pleasure they offer necessarily exceed the language created to describe them because of their dynamic relationship between rigid structures and free play. This pleasure also derives from the possibility that there is something in these works that defies expectations about the very nature of repetition and the practice of everyday life. The result feels directly related to the outcomes of improvisation in jazz and experimental music, or the new grammars of poetry that are touchstones for Binion. When the artist arrives at the studio to add to the DNA series, he cocreates with the past—the network of contacts from his address book, his familial origins evoked by his birth certificate, and finally, with the limits of his hand and the forms and materials he has engaged with since the 1970s. The DNA series gestures to both the internal facets of each painting, as well as the world beyond the studio."
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/20/2020 "Untitled" (1982) and "Boombox" (1983), both by Futura, are reproduced from Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation, the superb catalog to the blockbuster exhibition on view at MFA Boston now. One of our Staff Pick Holiday Gift Books for Art Lovers, 2020, this is also a must-have historical document for anyone following the artist's career, suddenly aflame again after a 30 year hiatus, with two shows up in New York and a recent collection out with the inimitable Japanese fashion label, Comme des Garçons—all included in a recent profile by Max Lakin in the New York Times. "Graffiti had found the speed at which it needed to be seen," Futura is quoted in Writing the Future. "To keep in step with the fast pace of communication and information sharing." How right he was, and how fresh his work looks now.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/18/2020Music lovers rejoice! Cuba: Music and Revolution releases this week from Soul Jazz Books! Collecting 400 original vinyl album covers produced 1960–85, this super-dynamic 256-page hardcover is the first book ever produced on the subject. From rumba to mambo, son and salsa, the albums also reflect all of the radical graphic design styles that came into vogue during the Revolutionary period. Pictured here is the cover for old-guard Trova singer, guitarist, and composer Carlos Puebla's 1968 album, Hasta Siempre Comandante, designed by Eduardo Potrillé.
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/16/2020 "Snow at Argenteuil" (c. 1874) is reproduced from Monet: Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, back in stock after selling out almost immediately upon first delivery. "In late 1871 the artist, along with his wife, Camille, and young son Jean, moved to Argenteuil, a town less than eight miles from the center of Paris, where they would stay until 1878," author Katie Hanson writes. "During the winter of 1874–75, Monet painted eighteen snow scenes. Here, the limited color palette evokes the bleakness of the cold weather, with its silvery gray atmosphere recalling paintings of Corot. Monet was perhaps also inspired by Japanese prints of falling snow that he admired. The veil of white dots activates and energizes the scene. Monet and his Impressionist cohort were fascinated by the effects of light and weather, and by the ways seasonal and atmospheric changes rendered a familiar location strange, allowing it to be seen anew…"
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/13/2020Napoleon Jones-Henderson's 1970 tapestry, "TCB," is reproduced from AfriCOBRA: Messages to the People, edited by Dr. Jeffreen Hayes and hot off the press from Gregory R. Miller & Co. and the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. One of our must-have Holiday Gift Books for Art Lovers, 2020, this is an essential publication on the radical collective whose name stands for "African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists"—founded by Jeff Donaldson, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu and Gerald Williams in Chicago, 1968, and still active today. "It’s NATION TIME and we are searching," Donaldson is quoted. "Our guidelines are our people—the whole family of African people, the African family tree. … Our people are our standard for excellence. We strive for images inspired by African people. … Art for the people and not for critics whose peopleness is questionable."
 KRISTEN MUELLER | DATE 12/11/2020Sunday, December 13 from 3–3:45 PM EST, Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore invites you to celebrate the publication of Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood's 'Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration.' Dr. Fleetwood, author of 'Marking Time' and curator of the eponymous MoMA PS1 exhibition, now on view, will be signing the book and taking questions over Zoom.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/10/2020This charming 1961 battery-operated Japanese toy Moon Patrol Vehicle is reproduced from Space Fantasies 1:1, Vitra Design Museum's gorgeous new oversized limited edition collecting 146 remarkable vintage aerospace-related toys from the collection of Rolf Fehlbaum, the museum's founder. "Space toys were meant to be toys, of course, but what attracts our interest is their surprising originality and sculptural quality," Fehlbaum and co-editor Fifo Stricker write. "While robots and astronauts are based on the human figure, differing in size and details but not in their basic structure, the space toys comprise a wide variety of objects. They range from miniature replicas of rockets to humorous inventions such as space dogs, space elephants, and even a space whale. Sometimes the space vehicles are manned by humans, sometimes by robots. Robots remain disconcerting and enigmatic, springing from a philosophical debate about mechanical servants and the dialectics of master/slave. Space toys, by contrast, evoke an optimistic belief in the progress and technologies that give us access to the universe of space exploration." Indeed, this volume captures all of the optimism that space exploration—and toys—carried in the post-war era. A welcome reprieve from today's urgent discussions around global warming and overpopulation of the planet. See more Holiday Gift Books for the Luxury Collector here.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/9/2020Wednesday, December 9 at 5PM EST, Printed Matter presents a conversation between Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué, co-editor of 'An Excess of Quiet: Selected Sketches by Gustavo Ojeda, 1979–1989,' and writer, curator and critic Jarrett Earnest. Ojeda-Sagué and Earnest will discuss queer archives, the subject of “private work,” horizontal approaches to art, the reconstitution of artistic lineages and legacies and other current and related research.
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/8/2020 "Untitled" (1988) is reproduced from Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Photostats, a new release from Siglio Press and one of our Staff Pick Holiday Gift Books, 2020. A small, clothbound book that is meant to be read front-to-back and flipped upside-down, back-to-front—so that one can either see the artworks on reflective paper, as if framed on the wall behind glass, or read the artist's words as short collaged texts, printed white on black matte paper—this volume carries a heavy, prescient weight, calling out events, entities, epidemics and entertainments that "appear as coded messages awaiting decipherment," in the words of Mónica de la Torre. "Unlike the stars, we do not write, luminously, on a dark field (Mallarmé)," she writes. "Yet Gonzalez-Torres’s inscriptions do act as constellations, as celestial alphabet. Events worth remembering, the count of years—they are light beams orienting us as we go on forgetting. Each cluster of dates and references displays its own oblique associative logic. The larger narrative it may or may not point to can be searingly legible or obscure to varying degrees. Regardless, those gaps between elements in each of the clusters are openings inviting us to fill in the blanks by bringing in our own associations, personal histories, and biases…"
Image above: “Untitled”, 1988, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, copyright Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Courtesy Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. DATE 11/15/2020  They're cute, they're small, they're surprising and affordable. Here are 10 staff picks for the stockings on your list » DATE 11/14/2020  The must-have art books of 2020 » DATE 11/13/2020  A few of our favorite 2020 monographs and surveys by Modern and contemporary photographers » DATE 11/12/2020  Gifts for design devotees: your guide to the top new architecture and design books for the 2020 holidays » DATE 11/10/2020  Whether you love to cook, eat or ponder the politics of food, here are our staff pick food and cooking gift books of 2020 » DATE 11/9/2020  Our staff favorite 2020 books on or by LGBTQ artists » DATE 11/8/2020  From Cecil Beaton's 1920s photos of the "Bright Young Things" to the opulent jewels of Van Cleef & Arpels, five books for the Fashion Forward » DATE 11/7/2020  Our staff feels love for these top music books of 2020 » DATE 11/6/2020  From the NYC Noir of Weegee to Susan Meiselas' found photographs of Little Italy's Tar Beaches, our favorite holiday gift books for those who will always ❤️New York DATE 11/5/2020  Whether for a book collector or a lover of limited editions, these deluxe publications make wonderful gifts for those with a taste for the finer things » 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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