ARTBOOK BLOGEventsStore NewsMuseum Stores of the MonthNew Title ReleasesStaff PicksImage GalleryBooks in the MediaExcerpts & EssaysArtbook InterviewsEx LibrisAt First SightThe Artbook 2021 Gift GuidesArtbook Featured Image ArchiveDATE 6/11/2022 Artbook @ MoMA PS1 presents the launch of Joy Ladin's 'Shekhinah Speaks'DATE 6/2/2022 Rizzoli Bookstore presents Matthew Brookes and Zack Raffin launching 'Into the Wild'DATE 6/1/2022 Celebrate LGBTQ Pride, June 2022!DATE 5/22/2022 The great American journey, captured in 'Real Photo Postcards'DATE 5/21/2022 Museum Store of the Month: MCA Store at MCA ChicagoDATE 5/20/2022 'Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound' is a New Release this week!DATE 5/18/2022 Celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month!DATE 5/17/2022 'Matisse: The Red Studio' is NEW from MoMA!DATE 5/15/2022 'Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards' is on view at Matthew MarksDATE 5/15/2022 Artbook @ MoMA PS1 presents Lauren O’Neill-Butler for the launch of 'Let’s Have a Talk: Conversations with Women on Art and Culture'DATE 5/14/2022 Artbook @ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Bookstore presents the launch of Christopher Soto's 'Diaries of a Terrorist'DATE 5/13/2022 ‘William Wegman: Writing by Artist’ is NEW from Primary Information!DATE 5/12/2022 1014 presents 'Plastic. Remaking Our World' with Jochen EisenbrandDATE 5/11/2022 In 'Charles Ray,' a physicality embedded in a mentalityDATE 5/9/2022 A new facsimile of 'Black Phoenix: Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture'DATE 5/8/2022 Happy Mother's Day!DATE 5/6/2022 Summertime Staff Picks, 2022DATE 5/5/2022 Hot Book Alert: 'Hilary Pecis' is a New Release this week!DATE 5/4/2022 Rizzoli presents 'Garmenting' with Alexandra Schwartz, Lydia Brawner and Enoch ChengDATE 5/4/2022 Stunning 'Graciela Iturbide: Heliotropo 37' is NEW from Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporainDATE 5/2/2022 Photography as a tool of resistance in 'Our Selves: Photographs by Women Artists'DATE 4/29/2022 Jonny Trunk’s ‘A–Z of Record Shop Bags’ is new from FUEL!DATE 4/26/2022 Visions of MotherhoodDATE 4/26/2022 ‘Lee Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse’ is on view at LACMA!DATE 4/25/2022 'Cy Twombly: Making Past Present' is NEW from MFA BostonDATE 4/23/2022 Readers and Lovers unite with Nicole Rudick's (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint PhalleDATE 4/20/2022 Celebrate Earth Day with the hyperreal feel of 'Landscape Painting Now'DATE 4/17/2022 Tapping into the joy of Cherry Blossom seasonDATE 4/16/2022 Museum Store of the Month: MoMA Design StoreDATE 4/15/2022 Food, art and exile in Michael Rakowitz's 'A House with a Date Palm Will Never Starve'DATE 4/15/2022 'Marisol and Warhol Take New York' opens at Pérez Art Museum!DATE 4/15/2022 Aquavella presents 'Unnatural Nature: Post-Pop Landscapes,' curated by Todd BradwayDATE 4/12/2022 Spring blossoms bring summer fruit in 'An Illustrated Catalog of American Fruits & Nuts'DATE 4/12/2022 Spring has sprung and we're book-foraging with 'John Cage: A Mycological Foray—Variations on Mushrooms'DATE 4/10/2022 'Afro-Atlantic Histories' opens at NGADCDATE 4/10/2022 Artbook @ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Bookstore presents David Horvitz signing new artist's booksDATE 4/8/2022 LJ Roberts: Carry You With MeDATE 4/7/2022 Join Artbook & MCA Chicago Store at EXPO CHICAGO 2022!DATE 4/6/2022 AfriCOBRA on our mindsDATE 4/4/2022 'City of Cinema: Paris 1850–1907' is NEW from DelMonico Books and LACMADATE 4/2/2022 Sandro Miller's 'Crowns: My Hair, My Soul, My Freedom' is NEW from SkiraDATE 3/31/2022 'Robert Houle: Red Is Beautiful' is NEW from DelMonico Books and Art Gallery of OntarioDATE 3/30/2022 Letterform Archive & Cooper Hewitt present 'Bauhaus Typography at 100' with Ellen LuptonDATE 3/30/2022 Bauhaus Typography, Still Thrilling after 100 YearsDATE 3/27/2022 'Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future' is Back in Stock!DATE 3/24/2022 'Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child' is NEW from Hatje CantzDATE 3/22/2022 '(Nothing but) Flowers' is NEW from Karma Books, New YorkDATE 3/22/2022 Spring Fever!DATE 3/19/2022 Arcana presents Richard Misrach signing 'Notations'DATE 3/19/2022 Museum Store of the Month: LACMA StoreDATE 3/19/2022 Museum Store of the Month: LACMA Store | RECENT POSTS KRISTEN MUELLER | DATE 6/11/2022Artbook @ MoMA PS1 presents the launch of Joy Ladin's 'Shekhinah Speaks'Saturday, June 11, from 3–5 PM, Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore and Selva Oscura Press present a launch, discussion and signing of Joy Ladin's new book, 'Shekhinah Speaks.' Ladin will be in conversation with Gregg Bordowitz, moderated by Fred Moten. CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/2/2022Rizzoli Bookstore presents Matthew Brookes and Zack Raffin launching 'Into the Wild'Thursday, June 2 at 6 PM, Rizzoli Bookstore presents the launch of 'Matthew Brookes: Into the Wild,' published by Damiani Books. For this in-person event, photographer Matthew Brookes presents his exhilarating homage to the surf and van culture of the California coast, in conversation with lifelong surfer and surf journalist Zack Raffin.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/22/2022The great American journey, captured in 'Real Photo Postcards'Featured postcards—captioned “Seen in Chinatown, 1912 or later,” “Swimmers at Saltair, 1918” and “Man and woman in an automobile, 1918”—are reproduced from Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation, published to accompany the exhibition of early twentieth-century American postcards from the Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive currently on view at MFA Boston. “What attracted me most to U.S. real photos, and changed my collecting journey forever, was the thrill I got that realizing that everyone who had their picture taken for a postcard became a part of the great American journey,” Lauder writes. “Yes, these cards witness patriotism in times of war and exhilarating phases of the nation’s growth. But just as important for me, they reveal quieter daily moments that, without these cards, would have been lost to history, like parades and union picnics; the pride many individuals took in their work tools and in the new uniforms worn as a fireman or policeman; the economic mobility shown in someone’s crisp and stylish new Sunday best; and the heroic efforts of a community coming together to clean up after a flood or tornado.” CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/21/2022Museum Store of the Month: MCA Store at MCA ChicagoNews Flash! The MCA Store at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is our Museum Store of the Month! And in case you hadn't heard, Chicago is THE PLACE TO BE right now with 'Nick Cave: Forothermore' on view at MCA Chicago; the performative fashion experience 'The Color Is' with Jack Cave happening May 21, 22 and 23 at the Roundhouse at the DuSable Museum of African American History; and the Nick Cave video 'Ba Boom Boom Pa Pop Pop' projected onto the facade of theMART nightly through September 7.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/20/2022'Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound' is a New Release this week!In 1948, an Ivorian government clerk named Frédéric Bruly Bouabré received a “blue” vision that led him to invent a writing system centered around a new alphabet of 401 characters, each of which represented an aspect of his native Bété daily life. (Three of these characters are reproduced here.) He went on to make thousands of pencil and ballpoint pen drawings on many subjects both local and universal, from his own Bété culture to larger themes of fraternity, equality and global understanding. More than 450 of these drawings are collected in Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound, the catalog to the exhibition currently on view at MoMA—the first overview of the artist’s work in North America. CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/17/2022'Matisse: The Red Studio' is NEW from MoMA!Henri Matisse’s Le Luxe II (1907–08) is reproduced from Matisse: The Red Studio, published to accompany the landmark exhibition on view now at MoMA, which reunites for the first time all of the artworks depicted in the artist’s famous 1911 painting of the interior of his suburban studio just outside Paris. Le Luxe (II) appears in the upper right corner of the painting. “Le Luxe (II) is the second of a pair of paintings of the same subject, in which the modulated tonalities and visible brushstrokes of its predecessor are translated into flat planes of simple color,” Ann Temkin and Dorthe Aagesen write. “For the second version of Le Luxe, Matisse shifted his medium from oil to distemper, which produces a thin and even matte surface. The rendition of Le Luxe (II) in The Red Studio, on the other hand, is heavily worked, with visible brushstrokes and layering of paint. It also represents the most dramatic color shift from the painting on which it is modeled: Matisse has transformed the pale skin of the three nudes, rendering it in the same red as the studio itself, with the result that the painting appears more “in” than “on” the red wall. The change recasts the women as dark-skinned, at a moment in which avant-garde art was raising charged questions around concepts of racial difference and European ideals of beauty. The red-brown earth of Le Luxe (II) has become a rich ocher, and the other colors of the landscape are accordingly intense, the water a deeper green and the sky a darker blue than in the original painting.” KRISTEN MUELLER | DATE 5/15/2022Artbook @ MoMA PS1 presents Lauren O’Neill-Butler in conversation with Katy Siegel for the launch of 'Let’s Have a Talk: Conversations with Women on Art and Culture'Sunday, May 15 from 3–5 PM Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore and Karma Books present a conversation held on the occasion of Lauren O’Neill-Butler’s book 'Let's Have a Talk: Conversations with Women on Art and Culture'—a massive volume comprising nearly 90 dialogues, from Adrian Piper to Yoko Ono, published across a thirteen-year span. For this in-person event, O’Neill-Butler will be in conversation with art historian and curator Katy Siegel, followed by a drink special hosted by Mina’s restaurant.  CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/15/2022'Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards' is on view at Matthew MarksEllsworth Kelly lovers, rejoice! Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards is Back in Stock, right in synch with the exhibition on view now through June 25 at Matthew Marks gallery in Chelsea. “With his fragmented intrusions, Kelly simultaneously re-embodied the postcard scene and flattened out the spatial depth observed in the postcard window,” Tricia Y. Paik writes. “His approach and method emerged from the fragmented vision of the mid-twentieth century, yet Kelly paradoxically achieved the opposite. While contemporaries such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist reveled in multiplicity and layers, Kelly arrived at an expansive simplicity and singularity. Kelly’s postcard archive reveals specific snapshots of his intuitive and transformative vision, as he searched for moments of ‘rightness.’ From the start of his childhood, Kelly mined ‘the sights of his lifetime,’ endeavoring to capture for himself and for future audiences that one glimpse of perception, a flash of recognition transformed into a singular shape and hue.”
 LACY SOTO | DATE 5/14/2022Artbook @ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Bookstore presents the launch of Christopher Soto's 'Diaries of a Terrorist'Saturday, May 14 at 2 PM, Artbook @ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Bookstore presents a book signing and launch with 'Diaries of a Terrorist' author Christopher Soto, who will be joined by Jacob Tobia, Justin Torres, Vickie Vértiz, Jos Charles and UCLA Cops Off Campus.  CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/13/2022‘William Wegman: Writing by Artist’ is NEW from Primary Information!Sure, he’s been photographing his Weimeraner dogs in funny, perplexing costumes and poses since the early 1970s. And yes, his videos for Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live have been seen and loved by millions. But Conceptual artist William Wegman is, and always has been, much more than a dog photographer. Featured spreads are from William Wegman: Writing by Artist, Primary Information’s highly anticipated 348-page collection of Wegman’s ingenious writings and sketchbook artworks from the early 1970s until now.  CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/12/20221014 presents 'Plastic. Remaking Our World' with Jochen EisenbrandThursday, May 12 from 6:30–8 PM, New York's 1014 cultural space presents Jochen Eisenbrand, Chief Curator at the Vitra Design Museum, speaking on the current exhibition and forthcoming catalog, 'Plastic: Remaking Our World.' Featuring Lola Ben-Alon, Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP, and designer Charlotte McCurdy. CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/11/2022In 'Charles Ray,' a physicality embedded in a mentalityFabricated from handmade paper, Charles Ray’s 2020 self-portrait “Return to the One” is reproduced from the catalogue to the double exhibition currently on view at the Centre Pompidou and Bourse de Commerce in Paris—two of four major art venues hosting shows on the artist, including Glenstone Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the United States. Featuring 300 color images, this volume dives deep into Ray’s uncompromising, formally intricate and often uncanny sculptural work, and includes a wealth of both scholarly essays and subtly brilliant texts by the artist. In his closing essay, 57,000 Pounds, Ray concludes, “Thank you for viewing my art show at the Bourse and Pompidou. The total weight of both exhibitions is 57,000 pounds. Too heavy to leave earth’s gravity. But what I share with you and the sculptures is a physicality embedded in a mentality. This equation cannot run the other way around.” CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/9/2022A new facsimile of 'Black Phoenix: Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture'Featured spreads are from Primary Information’s new facsimile of the anti-racist, anti-imperialist, late-70s UK-based international art journal Black Phoenix, whose three uncompromising issues anticipated both the British Black Arts Movement and future progressive views of diasporic and colonial histories. “The problems of contemporary art in the Third World today are part of its socio-economic and political predicaments, resulting from colonialism and its present relationship with the West,” co-founder and co-editor Rasheed Araeen wrote in his introduction to the first issue, “We must therefore go beyond formal and aesthetic considerations and look into the historic factors which influenced or suppressed artistic developments in the last few centuries, as well as those forces which are today predominant, in the Third World.” Contributors include art critics, scholars, artists, poets and writers, including Rasheed Araeen (Pakistan) and Mahmood Jamal (Pakistan), Guy Brett (United Kingdom), Kenneth Coutts-Smith (United Kingdom), Ariel Dorfman (Chile), Eduardo Galeano (Uruguay), N. Kilele (Tanzania), Babatunde Lawal (Nigeria), David Medalla (Philippines), Ayyub Malik (Pakistan), Susil Siriwardena (Sri Lanka) and Chris Wanjala (Kenya). CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/8/2022Happy Mother's Day!“Cold or warm, present or absent, everyone has a mother. The archetypal mother, the female figure as a symbol of life and fertility, exists across all times and cultures. Our physical and cultural origin, she ushers us into the world. Even if she is lost or absent, we are all sons and daughters.” So writes Marie Laurberg, co-curator of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art’s deluxe survey, Mother! Origin of Life—our 2022 Staff Pick for Mother’s Day. Collecting 160 artworks presenting mother as motif—from prehistoric fertility goddesses to the Madonna and Child to contemporary representations of the queer mother—this volume features works by artists including Sophie Calle, Mary Cassatt, Rineke Dijkstra, Laure Prouvost, Frida Orubapo, Tracey Emin, Alberto Giacometti, Mary Kelly, René Magritte, Pablo Picasso and Alice Neel, whose 1975 painting, “Ginny and Elizabeth,” is reproduced here. CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/5/2022Hot Book Alert: 'Hilary Pecis' is a New Release this week!Featured spreads are from Hilary Pecis, the staff favorite new release published by Gregory R. Miller & Co.. The first major monograph on the artist, it launches with a signing at Rachel Uffner gallery—where the work is currently on view—this Friday, May 6, from 4:30–6PM. In her catalogue essay, Johanna Fateman writes: “‘Being clever was never my strong suit,’ [Pecis] reflects, when describing how she arrived at her current representational style and subject matter. She frames her practice—still lifes and landscapes, broadly defined—as a retreat from relevance (whatever that means) or as a reprieve from trying to attain it (and thus an art career) under near-impossible conditions: Pecis has an almost nine-year-old son. When he was three, she thought she wouldn’t be showing anymore. Motherhood’s haunting reputation as an enemy to both creativity and professional achievement, plus a child’s real material and energetic demands, as well as a day job (she was a registrar at a gallery), had her reconsidering her struggle, dwelling on the MFA-program axiom that almost no one makes it as an artist. Maybe not being an artist would be fine. ‘I thought, I’m just going to go through my photos and make some paintings.’ The simplicity of the idea and the enjoyment she found in those first smallish paintings, made at home, tricked her into making it as an artist.” CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/4/2022Stunning 'Graciela Iturbide: Heliotropo 37' is NEW from Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporainFeatured spreads are from Graciela Iturbide: Heliotropo 37, the iconic new monograph from Fondation Cartier featuring tipped on cover image and Smyth Sewn exposed binding. “Photography is not the truth,” Iturbide says in the published interview with Fabienne Bradu. “The photographer interprets reality, he builds his own reality according to what he knows and his emotions. It’s sometimes complicated because it is a slightly schizophrenic phenomenon. Without the camera, you see the world one way, and with it, another way; through this little window, you compose, you dream reality, as if the camera allowed you to synthetize what you are and what you’ve learned about the place. Then, you create your own image, you interpret. The same thing happens to the photographer and the writer alike: it’s impossible to capture life’s truths.” CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/4/2022Rizzoli presents 'Garmenting' with Alexandra Schwartz, Lydia Brawner and Enoch ChengThursday, May 19 at 6PM, Rizzoli Bookstore presents the launch of 'Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art,' published to accompany the exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Arts and Design. Curator Alexandra Schwartz, artist Enoch Cheng and Museum of Arts and Design Deputy Director for Education Lydia Brawner will discuss the exhibition and book with moderator Alida Jekabson, Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Arts and Design.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/2/2022Photography as a tool of resistance in 'Our Selves: Photographs by Women Artists'Tatiana Parcero’s “Interior Cartography #35” (1996) is reproduced from new release Our Selves: Photographs by Women Artists, a survey exploring the connections between photography, feminism, civil rights, Indigenous sovereignty and queer liberation, published to accompany the exhibition currently on view at MoMA. In her essay, “What is a Feminist Photograph,” curator Roxana Marcoci touches on “the ecofeminist connection between the exploitation of nature and the oppression of women under a patriarchal system of ownership,” citing Parcero’s photomontage, which “superimposes imagery taken from Amerindian codices, astrological charts, flora and fauna associated with Aztec mythology and handwritten script onto the surfaces of the artist’s face and hands. Parcero’s overlay of Indigenous knowledge on the female body creates a map of self-governance linked to animist, anticolonial and natural histories—a feminist reclamation of land and a mobilization of cultural identity as resistance against colonialism’s legacy.” CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/29/2022Jonny Trunk’s ‘A–Z of Record Shop Bags’ is new from FUEL!British record store bags, from the 1940s through the 1990s. 550 of them. That’s what you get—alongside smart, funny histories of the idiosyncratic stores and staff that produced them—in Jonny Trunk’s remarkable new 240-page compendium. “These mostly square-shaped slivers of paper and plastic are artifacts from a lost age: a music economy based on physical objects that could only be bought, in person, from physical outlets,” noted British music journalist Jon Savage writes. “In the first 30 or 40 years of British pop culture, the shop was the place: the agora, the arena where committed fans and casual buyers would meet and spend time, perhaps even talk to each other or hear something they might not previously have known. How many times have you bought something you first heard playing in a shop? |
