Weekly New Releases

Graphic designers, typographers and Francophiles, rejoice! Letterform Archive has published the book you didn’t know you needed, but without which you will no longer be able to live. Collecting twelve gorgeous vintage alphabet albums used by 19th and 20th-century French sign painters during the golden age of hand-painted storefront signage, this oversized compendium functions as both a history lesson and a treasure-trove of templates for contemporary use. Originally published for tradesmen only, most of these familiar, yet ever so exotic abecedaria have never been published before. Expert sign painter and historian Morgane Côme writes: “As models, the plates from these portfolios are just waiting to be reused, revisited and adapted to the expectations of the twenty-first century. Designers may look to them as a valuable sourcebook for past styles or find jumping-off points to make something new. Digital-type revivals and experiments, perhaps even new tools for public lettering, could grow from the inventive letterforms and compositions that lie within. For those of us involved in sign painting, a trade that once almost vanished in France, these plates help anchor the practice in history. Now is an exciting moment. Although our numbers remain small (perhaps a hundred professionals, compared to five thousand in 1980), today we inherit a craft less closely tethered to decoration and more open to invention.”

Architectural Association presents the UK launch of 'Archigram: The Magazine'

Wednesday, February 11, from 6:30–8 PM, London's Architectural Association School of Architecture presents the UK launch of 'Archigram: The Magazine' with an audiovisual presentation by Dan Crompton, Dennis Crompton’s son, and contributions from Director of the Zaha Hadid Foundation, Aric Chen; facsimile co-editor, Thomas Evans; Programme Director of the World Architecture Festival, Paul Finch; professor and author, David Grahame Shane; and architect and Columbia GSAAP assistant professor, Amelyn Ng. Peter Cook and David Greene of Archigram will speak and sign copies. [In-person event sold out; click through to sign up for livestream.]

Center for Co-Architecture Kyoto presents 'Archigram: Making a Facsimile – How to make an Archigram magazine'

Thursday, January 29, through Sunday, February 15, 2026, the Architecture Center CoAK presents the exhibition 'Archigram: Making a Facsimile,' which was jointly organized and exhibited by D.A.P. and Designers & Books and The Cooper Union in New York in October of 2025. This exhibition at Kyoto City's Center for Co-Architecture will be the first exhibition of this material in Japan.

At this moment in American history, Corita Kent’s 1966 serigraph for emergency use soft shoulder is more welcome than ever. We are in that emergency. Reproduced from new release Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent—actually a reprint of the long out-of-print monograph on the artist, activist and Catholic nun that remains the most comprehensive book on her work to date—it embodies both Kent’s “formal innovation and an acute engagement with social issues,” in the words of essayist (and original exhibition organizer) Michael Duncan. “The works of the great communicator and formal activist Corita Kent transcend the simple captioning of most politically based photo-text work, offering a life-enhancing alternative to self-congratulatory and solipsistic works found within the cacophony of today’s art-world. They set a precedent for more sophisticated styles of communication, ones that offer aesthetic, flexible, and poetic ways of looking at the printed word. … She reflects and refracts the essence of our consumer-based desires, so to lift the spirits of her media-broadsided, spiritually numbed audience.”

This week, as all the world watches the Twin Cities, we are pleased to feature a work by Minneapolis-based Lakota artist Dyani White Hawk, whose work is on view now at the Walker Art Center in the landmark mid-career survey, Love Language. “I think about how I want my work to operate in the world,” White Hawk is quoted. “What do I want it to do? What do I want it to do for Native audiences? What do I want it to do for non-Native audiences? What do I want it to do beyond my lifetime, as I send it forward? For me personally, the goal is healing.” Pictured here, Round Dance (2023), is comprised of acrylic, oblong glass beads and synthetic sinew on aluminum panel. “One can view White Hawk’s work as beautiful and grand from a Western cultural perspective,” essayist Heather Ahtone writes. “But one can also choose to engage in the conversation she is offering, a gift from one culture to another, that asks us as participants within the art world to consider our responsibilities as we carry on using the historic values that continue to harm our shared planet and resources. What if we choose to value the earth’s resources responsibly? What if we choose to care for one another over profits? These questions are offered as a gift through the work. White Hawk is asking us to think of our lineage and what we will leave behind to the next generation. Can we value kinship as much as gold?”

Just in time for two New York City shows (at Throckmorton Fine Art and Ruiz-Healy), and closely following the ICP’s recent retrospective, Graciela Iturbide: Heliotropo 37 is back in stock from Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris. Featuring a tipped-on cover image and smyth-sewn exposed binding, this luxurious volume presents the influential Mexican photographer’s most iconic black-and-white works alongside previously unpublished photographs and a series of specially-commissioned color photographs. “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.”

In honor of the 2026 Oscar nominations, announced today, we are featuring a few spreads from Bong Joon Ho: Director's Inspiration—a recently released staff favorite, published by DelMonico Books and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Featuring stills and materials from Okja (2017), Parasite (2019) and Mickey 17 (2025), these spreads only hint at the treasures within, gathered from the director’s personal archive and elucidated upon by Bong himself. “The absurdity of Korean society in itself excites me cinematically,” he writes. “It’s bewildering. When you depict it cinematically, it may look like comedy at first, but it’s actually the most realistic portrayal.” Further along, he is quoted, “My films generally seem to have three components: fear, anxiety and a sense of humor.… At least when we laugh, there’s a feeling that we’re overcoming some kind of horror.”

Taken circa 1973, Ming Smith’s America Seen Through Stars and Stripes, New York City, NY is reproduced from Black Photojournalism, the catalog to the landmark exhibition on view through Monday, January 19—Martin Luther King Jr. Day—at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Spanning from 1945 through 1984, this powerful 400-page compendium features work by 57 Black photographers, both well known (like Smith, Kwame Brathwaite and Gordon Parks) and overlooked (until now). “One of the most persistently powerful means of resistance that Black photographers have employed is to simply show us as we are,” Deborah Willis writes, “in our full humanity as families, workers, friends, lovers, artists and leaders. These photographers were on the frontlines, focusing their cameras on both the beautiful and the most painful moments in Black neighborhoods and communities…”

Featuring more than 100 artists working from the mid-twentieth century to today—covering decolonialization and the civil rights period across the Diaspora—Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination is an essential examination of the role of portrait photography in the construction of Africa as a political idea. But “Ideas of Africa dispenses with the burden of representation that dominates the popular discourse about the African continent,” MoMA curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo writes, instead highlighting “the full range of creative capacity embedded within the photographic process. … What remains undertheorized in the public sphere—and particularly suited to curatorial forms of meaning-making—is the treatment of political imagination through photographic portraiture. As such, this exhibition aims to unfix the portrait as solely an index of identity. With this approach, Ideas of Africa is indebted to the work of Jennifer Bajorek, who argues that, in the case of city dwellers in Dakar and Bamako, ‘Africans’ embrace of photography was a key factor in expanding the existing spaces of political imagination . . . . [I]n the middle decades of the twentieth century, west Africans took full advantage of this expanded imaginative field. They used photography to open new routes and relays of communication; they creatively exploited its infinite capacities for recirculation and resignification; and they used its remarkable plasticity, lack of fixity, and aesthetic and referential open-endedness to reimagine, and remake, their world.” As we continue to witness transformative shifts in the global geopolitical order, it is useful to revisit a moment in history that saw the disintegration of colonial territories and the formation of transnational solidarity across the African continent and the African Diaspora. Ideas of Africa locates dazzling modes of Pan-African possibility in images made by inventive photographers who registered and beckoned new worlds.”

More than a decade before William Eggleston made his first color photograph, German-born medical photographer Fred Herzog emigrated to Canada and began walking the streets of Vancouver, documenting the people, the places, and the color compositions that they created together. At a time when art photography existed exclusively in black-and-white, he quietly traveled by foot around his adopted hometown, making forays into the United States, Barbados, Curaçao, Guatemala and Mexico, producing an astonishing body of color photographs that were not known to the world until he was 76 years old, in 2007, when The Vancouver Art Gallery held the first major retrospective of his work. Pictured here, “Mom and Son, Halifax” (1969) from new release Fred Herzog: A Color Legacy.

Untitled (Many-Eyed Form) (1945) is reproduced from new release The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans, published to accompany the exhibition on view now at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. The first major survey of Evans’ divinely inspired works on paper since the 1990s, this is, amazingly, the only book in print on this important self-taught artist. “In March 1971,” curator Katherine Jentleson writes, “Minnie Evans sat for a rare interview with Celestine Ware, a Black feminist author and activist. At the time, Ware was producing a radio series on Black women artists, and she’d become fascinated by the work of Evans, who was still four years shy of her breakthrough solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art but increasingly well known outside her home¬town of Wilmington, North Carolina. ‘What is the lost world of Minnie Evans?’ Ware asks near the end of the interview. Initially, Evans appears reluctant to answer: ‘I don’t know about that,’ she demurs. But Ware continues to press, and eventually, Evans relents, explaining that she has been experiencing visions her entire life, including ones involving the Great Flood described in the Book of Genesis. ‘Nations have been destroyed,’ she says. ‘And a lot of [the] pictures that God has given me [he’d] brought back from different nations […] according to the Bible there is thousands of nations that’s been destroyed and nobody knew anything about them.’”

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