Art Books

There has always been a raw immediacy to film posters: provoking and enticing, shocking and seducing audiences across the threshold of the movie theater. The artists tasked with communicating that have been at the forefront of design: groundbreaking visionaries such as Saul Bass and Paul Rand; Eastern European artists using poetic, surreal and often disturbing imagery in highly original and subversive concepts. Other poster artists have woven contemporaneous movements in art and popular culture into their designs, creating a time capsule of the obsessions and concerns of a different era.

Iconic posters for films such as Metropolis, The Man with the Golden Arm, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Goldfinger sit alongside more unexpected and lesser-known artwork for films such as 2001, Star Wars, Taxi Driver and The Birds. Nearly all cinematic movements are included, from early silent masterpieces through German Expressionism, film noir of the 1940s, 1950s science fiction, the psychedelic imagery of the 1960s, the gritty violence and retribution of the 1970s and 1980s, and then onward into the 21st century, where the stripped-back graphics nod back to the Bass minimalism of the 1950s.

An extraordinary visual compendium, 1001 Movie Posters is the final word on movie posters and a must for film lovers and anyone interested in the power of advertising and design.

Lee Friedlander: Real Estate presents 155 photographs spanning 60 years of the artist's exploration of the built environment in the American social landscape. Collectively, these photographs add to one of the broadest and most nuanced visual depictions of America. Individually, they evince the sly intellectual humor and keen observations for which Friedlander is justifiably celebrated. Along the way, of course, the photographer expands our idea of what constitutes real estate, just as he compels us to recognize photography's ability to reveal essential aspects of our lives over time.

Lee Friedlander was born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1934, and studied photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. In 1956 he moved to New York City, which quickly became both the setting and subject of the majority of his work. Friedlander was represented alongside Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand in the 1967 New Documents exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, now understood as a landmark event in American documentary photography. Friedlander still lives and works in New York, and is represented by the Fraenkel Gallery.

“The definitive book on the rise of sneaker fanaticism.” –Paper magazine

Twenty years after its first release, and a decade since the most recent edition, this timeless, definitive volume on sneaker culture is finally back in print. Lavishly illustrated and remarkably comprehensive, Where’d You Get Those? is an insider’s account that traces New York City’s sneaker culture back to its earliest days. Describing how a small and dedicated group of sneaker consumers in the 1970s and early ’80s proved instrumental in establishing current corporate giants such as Nike and Adidas, sneaker aficionado Bobbito Garcia writes with exactitude and affection.

Chronicling the rise of sneakers through the lean years of the ’60s, the bulk of the book examines nearly 400 sneakers released in the golden years of 1970–87, via information-packed entries for each model, including all color combinations available, nicknames of particular shoe models, relevant athlete endorsements, and running commentary and stories from a rogues’ gallery of fanatics who weigh in on the pros and cons of each sneaker. Through lifestyle chapters such as “Arts and Crafts” (which details the process of customizing sneakers) and “Thou Shalt Not” (“The No-Nos of New York Sneakers”), Where’d You Get Those? interrogates this enduring subculture from every angle. This 20th anniversary classic edition features the cover artwork from the first edition, as well as essays collected from the 10th anniversary edition.

New York City native Bobbito Garcia (born 1966) is a writer, DJ, photographer, filmmaker and basketball player. Often credited as the first sneaker journalist, Garcia penned his landmark Source article “Confessions of a Sneaker Addict” in 1990 and has been documenting the culture ever since.

An archival history of New York City’s most prolific artist collective, including Jimmy DeSana, Jenny Holzer, Kiki Smith and more.

This book traces the output of Collaborative Projects Inc. (aka Colab), the highly energetic gathering of young downtown New York City artists active from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s. Advocating a form of cultural activism that was purely artist-driven, the group created artworks, curated shows and engaged in discourse that responded to the political themes and predicaments of its time. With extensive documentation of the printed material and media steadily produced in the course of its collaborative undertakings, as well as many firsthand accounts, the book displays the diverse aesthetics and concerns of the group as it embarked on The Real Estate Show, The Times Square Show and other projects.

Edited by Printed Matter’s former executive director Max Schumann, the full-color publication presents a detailed view of Colab—both through the work created and in the artists’ own voices—and represents the fullest account of Colab’s output to date. This second printing comes at a time of renewed and heightened interest in a bygone era of New York City’s vibrant arts culture.

Artists include: Liza Béar, Jimmy DeSana, Jane Dickson, Bradley Eros, Barbara Ess, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Jenny Holzer, Ann Messner, Alan W. Moore, James Nares, Marcia Resnick, Judy Rifka, Christy Rupp, Kiki Smith, Reese Williams, Robin Winters.

Five decades of Yau’s diverse poetic collaborations with artists from Pat Steir to Richard Tuttle

The poetry of Chinese American poet John Yau (born 1950) is infused with humor and intelligence. Yau uses a variety of poetic forms to examine aspects of visual art, film and popular culture. His critical writing is celebrated for providing fresh insights about already codified artists and for situating diverse practitioners into historical contexts. Disguise the Limit features numerous works that Yau has created with visual artists during the past five decades. These include paintings, mixed-media drawings, print portfolios, artist’s books and letterpress broadsides. The result of friendships and shared sensibilities, these works reveal the poet’s embrace of both representation and abstraction as foils for language generation. Offering nimble turns of phrase, Zen koans, road sign warnings and fragmented poems, Yau is in his element when operating in the performative time and space that collaboration requires.

Artists include: Jake Berthot, Tom Burckhardt, Norman Bluhm, Pia Fries, Max Gimblett, Judy Ledgerwood, Suzanne McClelland, Malcolm Morley, Ed Paschke, Peter Saul, Pat Steir, Robert Therrien, Richard Tuttle, Chuck Webster.

The artistic polymath behind R.E.M. explores the potency of portraiture

Before his wildly successful foray into music—as frontman of the 1990s international sensation R.E.M.—Michael Stipe was a visual arts student at the University of Georgia in Athens. After the band dissolved in 2011, Stipe returned to his first love: generating illustrations, photography and sculptures. His diaristic photographs are perhaps his best known works, and he has previously published three photobooks with Damiani that largely consisted of portraits.
In this fourth publication, portraiture once again takes focus. This time, however, Stipe articulates the form through a plethora of mediums: including plaster, concrete, rotocast plastics, bookmaking, ceramics, video and darkroom photographic printing. The book privileges process over product, displaying a series of works in progress that continue an exploration of contemporary portraiture, instinct and abstraction. Classical and conceptual forms create a cohesive whole from seemingly disparate elements, culminating in an inclusive and complete vision, in which the familiar and unfamiliar are granted equal grounding. The volume is published in conjunction with Stipe’s solo exhibition of his artwork at the ICA Milano, which opened in December 2023 and will be up through March 2024.
The New York City–based artist Michael Stipe (born 1960) studied photography and painting before leaving school upon the formation of R.E.M. The sensibility that he began to develop during his time as an art student transferred to the spectrum of his work for R.E.M., from art directing all graphic, video and stage designs, to writing, composing and performance, and his iconoclastic personal style.

A window into the life of a pioneering figure in the proliferation of East Coast surf culture since the 1960s

Tony Caramanico has lived many lives bound by a singular passion. A competitive surfer, TV producer, surf shop owner, astute traveler, apprentice and artist, few have experienced more phases of surfing’s development than Caramanico. Unlike more established sports, surfing’s pop cultural adoption began largely in the ’50s and ’60s; many of those who have played a key role in its cultural ascension, such as Caramanico, are still around to impart their wisdom.
This one-of-a-kind book chronicles Caramanico’s life in surf, presenting a considered selection from his thousands of journal entries. These entries provide an intimate purview into the day-to-day life of a traveling surfer in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, highlighting his work with the late photographer Peter Beard, from his experience living on Beard’s compound to the direct ties between their artistic practices. Punctuating Caramanico’s journal entries are photos of his highly lauded, 100-plus-piece surfboard collection, along with introductions and interviews conducted by LA-based editor Zack Raffin. Melding collage work, stream-of-consciousness writing and a plethora of surf/pop cultural references, Caramanico’s journals paint an intricate picture of freedom, joy and his undying passion for a surfing life.

Tony Caramanico (born 1950) caught his first wave in 1963 at his native Gilgo Beach, New York. Tony’s 60 years of surfing have spanned the breadth of the sport itself. Acutely aware of his exuberant existence, Tony began chronicling his daily life via his unique take on journaling in the early ’80s. After meeting renowned artist Peter Beard in Montauk, New York, Caramanico was invited to live and apprentice with Beard, using this time to guide his artistic process.

This new edition of landmark publication by avant-garde artist and cultural icon Yoko Ono combines never-before-published texts and invitation pieces written in 2016–2018 with drawings from the “Franklin Summer” series she started in 1994. Embodying her visionary philosophy, Yoko Ono’s latest artist’s book is a companion for life.

For Yoko Ono, words, artworks, and books still have the power to change the world we live in for the better. Thus she continuously shares with us her vision of and philosophy on life—one that is made of pivotal experiences, unstoppable optimism, and a love for the other. Coming after several volumes that have proved to be life companions to many, “Everything in the Universe Is Unfinished” reflects on her most recent feelings through a delicate interweaving of poems, aphorisms, short stories, and drawings.

Peace is power.

The first in-depth survey of Whitney’s endless experimentation with color.

The esteemed American painter Stanley Whitney has, for 50 years, created joyful, immersive abstractions characterized by a bold, experimental palette and unique rhythm. Over the last 20 years, he has structured his paintings as loose grids: a consistent framework that frees him to work through seemingly infinite painterly variations and allows viewers to focus not on each painting’s subject, but rather on our own response to color. These large-scale paintings are joined by improvisatory small paintings; drawings and prints, which constitute their own practice for Whitney; and the artist’s sketchbooks, which offer a view into Whitney’s engagement with the written word and politics.
This traveling North American exhibition is Whitney’s first museum survey, presenting 170 paintings and works on paper spanning from the 1970s to the present day. The catalog includes an introduction by exhibition organizer Cathleen Chaffee, scholarly explorations of the artist’s paintings and works on paper, a chronology and illustrations of all works in the exhibition.
Stanley Whitney was born in 1946 near Philadelphia. By the early 1970s, following studies with Philip Guston and Robert Reed, and influenced by artists including Jack Whitten, Josef Albers and Piet Mondrian, he had come to see “endless possibilities” in abstraction. Over the past five decades, he has honed a unique body of densely gridded, but endlessly variable, abstract paintings, as well as drawings and prints, reflecting his interests in art, architecture, textiles and music.

Images of fantasy and fairy tales by a Danish master of illustration.

The Danish artist Kay Nielsen’s luminous interpretations of fairy tales and legends from around the world are among the most celebrated book illustrations of the 20th century, unsurpassed in their dramatic intensity and intricate detail. This book is the first to put his achievements in the context of a career that took him from studies in Paris to the Copenhagen theater, to galleries in London and New York, to the Walt Disney Studios, presenting fresh insights into his life and work as well as his materials and techniques. Dazzling reproductions of original watercolors and drawings from one of the premier collections of Nielsen’s work invite viewers to enter the enchanted world of an imaginative and supremely gifted artist.

A sweeping cross-media survey of Ruscha’s six-decade career, from paintings and works on paper to photographs and artist's books, with essays by leading scholars

Spanning 65 years of Ed Ruscha’s remarkable career and mirroring his own cross-disciplinary approach, Ed Ruscha / Now Then features over 250 objects, produced from 1958 to the present, including paintings, drawings, prints, films, photographs, artist’s books and installations. Published to accompany the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work to date, and his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, this richly illustrated catalog highlights Ruscha’s most acclaimed works alongside lesser-known aspects of his practice.
Essays by an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine Ruscha’s work under a new light, beyond the categories of Pop and Conceptual art with which he has traditionally been associated, to present fresh perspectives on one of the most influential figures in postwar American art. Taken together, they underscore Ruscha’s singular contributions, including his material exploration of language, experiments with unconventional mediums—such as gunpowder, chocolate or chewing tobacco—and his groundbreaking self-published books. Supplemented by an illustrated chronology and exhibition history, this publication captures the ceaseless reinvention that has defined his prolific, six-decade career.

Barkley L. Hendricks is rightly known as one of the foremost American painters of the late 20th century. His six-decade artistic oeuvre encompasses not only portraits but also includes evocative landscapes, hard-edged geometric abstractions, lush watercolors on paper and singular photographs informed by his studies with Walker Evans. This final publication of a five-volume set dedicated to the artist is a 300-page monograph that captures his full evolution as a portraitist.
Solid! is a compilation of Hendricks’ acclaimed figurative paintings: large-scale canvases of distinctively dressed (or undressed) individuals, including several self-portraits, against solid-color backgrounds. Critical essays from curators and fellow artists provide further, often personal, insight into all aspects of Hendricks’ practice: probing his photographic experimentation as a forbear to contemporary street photography; celebrating his sensitivity as a colorist whose unique expertise seamlessly combines oil-based and water-based pigments; and highlighting the observational genuineness in his provocative and personal interpretations of women, of unapologetically visible queer identities and of his own beloved Black communities across the African Diaspora. The book closes with a conversation between Trevor Schoonmaker and Barkley’s widow, Susan Hendricks, in which she recounts their trips to Jamaica and Barkley’s process for creating landscape and fruit paintings outdoors.
Barkley L. Hendricks (1945–2017) was born in Philadelphia and trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and Yale. His life-size paintings of everyday Black Americans have inspired generations of artists. Hendricks gave up painting in favor of photography, but returned to oil portraits later in life. He taught at Connecticut College from 1972 until 2010.

In the popular imagination, cocaine appeared sometime in the 1970s, seemingly out of nowhere, as the ne plus ultra party drug for the disco generation; shortly thereafter, its destructive effects became impossible to ignore. But in fact, cocaine’s history of addiction dates back to the nineteenth century, when it was legal and sold over the counter to treat ailments ranging from stomachaches to cramps to teething pain in babies.

For millennia before that, however, the unprocessed coca leaf had been essential to the development of indigenous South American cultures. How did the sacred plant of the Incas become the addictive white powder that held in its grip—and nearly destroyed—prominent figures like Sigmund Freud and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, among countless others? And how did it get to wield the corrosive power depicted in films and television series such as Scarface and Narcos? This book tells that story.

Klein’s madcap romp of a photo-novel brilliantly translates his cult ’60s film into book form.

Based on the original images and dialogue of William Klein’s 1966 film Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, this fantastic photo-novel tells the adventures of Polly Maggoo, a star model played by Dorothy McGowan (model for Vogue in the 1960s). The plot unfolds across the fashion world of Polly Maggoo; the world of television (based around the character of director Jean Rochefort); and a magical kingdom of operetta whose crown prince (played by Sami Frey) is in love with the young model. Also featuring in this star-studded cast are Alice Sapritch, Delphine Seyrig, Philippe Noiret, Roland Topor and Jacques Seiler.
The publication ingeniously translates into book form the zany universe of the film. Klein’s masterful framing gives exquisite rhythm to its page composition and flow as we follow the crazy adventures of the extraordinary heroine in a madcap race through the streets and rooftops of Paris, all the way up to a distant palace lost in the snow.

A complete survey of Marshall's prints from the 1970s to the present, with many previously unseen works

Kerry James Marshall is famed for his beautifully executed paintings that address the under-representation of the Black figure in the Western pictorial tradition. Though best known as a painter, Marshall has throughout his career also produced a vast graphic oeuvre that has been seldom seen and rarely documented. Marshall spent his youth building his craft in drawing and painting, but also in wood engraving and printing; by his mid-twenties, he recalls, "I could do woodcuts, etchings, aquatints." Most of his prints have been produced not in professional print workshops but by the artist, working alone in his studio. They range from images the size of postcards to his 50-foot-long, 12-panel woodcut Untitled (1998-99), to iterations of his ongoing magnum opus Rythm Mastr. And while some have entered prominent museum collections, many exist only in private collections or the artist's archive and are unknown to the public. This catalogue raisonné offers the first public account of these important works and the first in-depth study of the role of printed images and print processes in Marshall's work as a whole.
Kerry James Marshall was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955, later moving to Los Angeles. He taught painting for many years at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2013, he was named for the Committee on the Arts and the Humanities by President Barack Obama. In 2017, Marshall was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. The National Cathedral in Washington, DC, is currently working with Marshall to create two new stained-glass windows. Marshall lives and works in Chicago.

The ultimate backstage pass: a photographic inside look at the making of the pioneering hip hop documentary Rhyme & Reason.

In the mid-1990s, documentary filmmaker Peter Spirer embarked on a three-year odyssey to create a realistic portrait of hip hop, interviewing over 80 artists. Spirer captured a seminal moment as the culture balanced on the cusp of the mainstream. As Ice-T comments in the introduction to the book, "Rhyme & Reason is one of the few films that was there to document us before hip hop truly exploded."
While filming, Spirer took stills using a medium-format Rolleiflex camera. These photographs form The Book of Rhyme & Reason. Spirer writes: "The Rollei allowed me to capture some amazing moments: Puffy getting a trim in his office while doing three tasks at once, Biggie opening record plaques on his couch, Ice-T and Mack 10 hanging with their homies, Heavy D at the barber, playing pool. There was the Jack The Rapper convention with Death Row making a statement, at a Disney World Hotel, that ended in chaos. There were magical moments such as Redman and Erick Sermon freestyling on the mic to amazed onlookers at a block party in Newark and watching Wu-Tang Clan chop it up on the block in Staten Island on a cold winter's day before they exploded."
This coffee-table volume features over 130 of Spirer's photographs from 1994 to 1997.

Our thoughts are known to us, and us alone. But for a brief period in the 1960s, Ted Serios (1918–2006) attempted to prove that his inner reality could be documented. Serios demonstrated an ostensibly psychic act termed “thoughtography,” involving the transfer of mental images onto undeveloped Polaroid film. In studies supervised by respected Denver-based psychiatrist Dr. Jule Eisenbud, Serios produced over 1,000 anomalous photographs, a feat that has never been fully dismissed or wholly verified. Existing as an uncomfortable knot in time, the details of the Serios phenomenon can’t be disentangled without questioning the social conditions that produced it in the first place.
Contextualizing Serios’ story within the twilight zone of 1960s America, Ted Serios: The Mind’s Eye considers the reaches and restraints of belief and explores the multiple dimensions at play in the Serios phenomenon, including interpersonal relationships, scientific methods, photographic technologies, state militaristic operations and popular culture. Rather than seeking absolute truth, the volume allows the reader to arrive at their own conclusions through a series of thematic essays, narrative photographic stories, select ephemera and contemporary cultural artifacts.

Covering 30 years of sculptures, paintings, works on paper, large-scale wall drawings, installations and site-specific works, this book presents the art of Gary Simmons, one of the most respected artists of his generation. Since the late 1980s, Simmons has played a key role in situating questions of race, class and gender identity within art discourse. He is notable for combining pop-cultural imagery with conceptual artistic strategies to expose and analyze histories of racism inscribed in US visual culture. Over the course of his career, Simmons has revealed traces of these histories in the fields of sports, cinema, literature, music, and architecture and urbanism while drawing on popular genres such as hip-hop, horror and science fiction. His approach is cool and unflinching in its interrogation of historical and cultural narratives, yet the results consistently deliver a strong emotional charge. This publication offers readers the opportunity to gain a holistic understanding of the complex, profoundly moving work of this influential artist.

Gary Simmons was born in 1964 in New York City, where he was raised. Today he lives and works in Los Angeles. He received a BFA in 1988 from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and an MFA in 1990 from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia; he also studied at Hunter College, New York. He has received numerous awards, including the Studio Museum in Harlem Joyce Alexander Wein Prize (2013), the George Gund Foundation USA Gund Fellowship (2007) and the National Endowment for the Arts Interarts Grant (1990).

Fifty years ago, New York–based photographer Eugene Richards (born 1944) worked as a VISTA Volunteer and then as a reporter in the Arkansas Delta. Even after the newspaper he helped found closed its doors, Richards kept revisiting the region. In early 2019 he returned to the small town of Earle, Arkansas, where, on a September night in 1970, peaceful protesters were attacked by a crowd of white men and women brandishing sticks and firing guns. Crossing the tracks from what had been the Black side of the town into the white side of the town, Richards happened upon an old appliance store. On the shadowy and cracked walls of the building were painted the faces of Jesus, Malcolm X, H. Rap Brown, Angela Davis, Dr. Martin Luther King and John Brown—the faces of revolution, reconciliation, change. In the months that followed, the old store became for Richards a kind of portal, a doorway into the region’s volatile history and into the lives of those who lived, struggled, raised families, grew old and died there.

The Day I Was Born interweaves full-bleed images of Earle with deeply personal narratives in the words of people who live there.

This volume collects David Wojnarowicz’s transatlantic correspondence to his Parisian lover Jean Pierre Delage between 1979 and 1982. Capturing a truly foundational moment for Wojnarowicz’s artistic and literary practice, these letters not only reveal his captivating personality—and its concomitant compassion, neuroses and tenderness—but also index the development of the visual language that would go on to codify him as one of the preeminent artists of his generation.

Through this collection, readers are introduced to Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud series, his band 3 Teens Kill 4, the publication of his first photographs, his early friendship with Peter Hujar, his participation in the then-emerging East Village art and music scenes, and the preparations for the publication of his first book. Included with these writings are postcards, drawings, xeroxes, photo­graphs, collages, flyers, ephemera and contact sheets that showcase some of the artist’s iconic images and work, such as the Burning House motif and Untitled (Genet, after Brassai).

Over the past two decades, Simone Leigh has created artwork that situates questions of Black femme-identified subjectivity at the center of contemporary art discourse. Her sculpture, video, installation and social practice explore ideas of race, beauty and community in visual and material culture. Leigh’s art addresses a wide swath of historical periods, geographies and traditions, with specific references to materials across the African diaspora, as well as forms traditionally associated with African art and architecture.This publication includes substantial new scholarship addressing Leigh’s work across mediums and topics. The volume, timed with the artist's first museum survey and national tour, includes contributions by her longtime collaborators, new scholars who add diverse insights and perspectives, and a conversation highlighting Leigh’s voice. Additionally, generous and lushly illustrated plates feature her critically acclaimed work for the 59th Venice Biennale and works made throughout her 20-year career. A special section featuring Leigh's research images gives access to Leigh’s research methodologies and encourages readers to fully engage with all aspects of Leigh’s work. This monograph provides a timely opportunity to gain a holistic understanding of the complex and profoundly moving work of this groundbreaking artist.

Few artists have managed to bridge the gap between high and low culture as seamlessly as KAWS has since his career took off in the 1990s: his iconic cartoon-inspired designs have graced fashion collections, vinyl figurines, and skateboards as well as canvases sold for millions of dollars. Frequently portraying familiar figures such as Mickey Mouse and Spongebob Squarepants with cauliflower ears and X’ed-out eyes, KAWS employs a sophisticated dark humor throughout his work, exploring the relationship between art and consumerism.

Famously the most politicized and intellectual of the Abstract Expressionists, Robert Motherwell (1915–91) evolved a form of austere gesturalism reflective of both the human psyche and the political realm. Robert Motherwell: Pure Paintingoffers an in-depth exploration of his oeuvre—the first publication to do so in many years. Leading art scholars Jennifer Cohen, Susan Davidson, Simon Kelly, Monica McTighe and Sarah Rich examine Motherwell’s turn from Surrealism to abstraction and consider the major series that developed over his 50-year career.

The catalog also studies the dialogue between Motherwell’s art and the 19th-century French painting tradition, and investigates his relationship to Spanish painting techniques and processes, with an emphasis on underlying political significance of this relationship (as expressed in his great series Elegies to the Spanish Republic). Another section looks at Motherwell’s unique use of ocher pigment, with its evocation of deep geological time and of avant-garde strategies.

Among the most radical and original photographers of his generation, Masahisa Fukase was famous for The Solitude of Ravens (1991), in which these birds of doom, in flocks or alone, blacken the pages of the book in inky, somber, calligraphic clusters; in 2010 it was voted the best photobook of the past 25 years by the British Journal of Photography. Fukase also has a lesser-known corpus of collages, self-portraits, photographs reworked as sketches, black-and-white prints, Polaroids and more. This book brings together all of his work for the very first time.

Over the course of more than 50 years, renowned American artist Ellsworth Kelly made approximately 400 postcard collages, some of which served as exploratory musings and others as studies for larger works in other mediums. They range from his first monochrome in 1949 through his last postcard collages of crashing ocean waves, in 2005.

Together, these works show an unbounded space of creative freedom and provide an important insight into the way Kelly saw, experienced and translated the world in his art. Many postcards illustrate specific places where he lived or visited, introducing biography and illuminating details that make these pieces unique among his broader artistic production. Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards is the most extensive publication of Kelly’s lifelong practice of collaged postcards.

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) was born in Newburgh, New York. In 1948 he moved to France, where he came into contact with a wide range of classical and modern art. He returned to New York in 1954 and two years later had his first exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized his first retrospective in 1973. Subsequent exhibitions have been held at museums around the world, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate in London, Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Published to celebrate the reopening of London’s National Portrait Gallery after a three-year redevelopment project, this engaging and inviting book takes the reader on a chronological journey through Britain’s history in portraiture from the Tudors to now, featuring the country’s most impactful and famous individuals―from Queen Elizabeth I to Mary Seacole, and Virginia Woolf to David Bowie.

The book is richly illustrated with beautiful paintings, photographs, sculptures, drawings and digital works. This selection of the most popular and recognizable portraits from the collection is accompanied by short chapter introductions that introduce key historical periods, their most exciting figures and their most important historical, political, social and cultural moments. This accessible structure allows the reader to dip into any of the beautiful portraits and their stories, and understand their place in British history.

Accompanying a groundbreaking exhibition originating at the Baltimore Museum of Art, this book captures the extraordinary influence of hip hop, which has driven innovations in music, visual and performing arts, fashion, and technology and grown into a global phenomenon since its emergence in the 1970s. It features approximately 70 objects by both established and emerging artists, design houses, streetwear icons and musicians working in a wide range of mediums to demonstrate hip hop’s proliferation from the street to the runway, the studio to the museum gallery, and countless sites in between. The exhibition also explores how hip hop has and continues to challenge structures of power, dominant cultural narratives, and political and social systems of oppression.

Since the 1970s, the medium of video has been closely associated with subcultural and countercultural movements. Art and music videos in particular have showed great subversive potential, as artists and musicians use the medium to explore and transgress social norms and gender stereotypes. The essays in this publication consider artistic strategies in the context of the history of punk and its offshoots, combining scholarly opinions from the fields of art history, queer theory, media studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies and cultural studies alongside field reports from the practice of alternative archives and visual essays.

Authors include: Kathrin Dreckmann, Marina Grzinic, Jack Halberstam, Josefine Hetterich, Angela McRobbie, Jennifer Ramme, Peter Rehberg, Marion Schulze, Elfi Vomberg and Katharina Wiedlack.

This volume presents sketches and textile designs by the great Russian French modernist artist Sonia Delaunay alongside her paintings and interior and fashion designs. It demonstrates how she transferred her color philosophy of “Simultanism,” which she developed in her painting, to the mediums and surfaces of modern life. Maison Sonia Delaunay also explores the international textile companies with whom she collaborated, and shows how she explored the relationship between art and industry, and the ways in which she used her many abilities to design a visionary modern life. The book includes the first scholarly essays on Delaunay's collaborations with silk industrialist Robert Perrier and couturier Jacques Heim, who were among her most important collaborators.

Born in Odessa, Ukraine, Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979) migrated to Paris in 1906 and became a key figure in the city’s avant-garde scene. During these early years, her paintings underwent a formal shift influenced by the vivid colors of Fauvism. She soon met her husband, fellow artist Robert Delaunay, and the couple pioneered a fusion of Cubism and Neo-Impressionism that they termed Simultanism—abstract painting that uses color in a manner comparable to the use of sound and rhythm in music. In 1964, Delaunay became the first living woman artist to have a retrospective at the Louvre.

Just Above Midtown, or JAM, was an art gallery and self-described laboratory for experimentation led by Linda Goode Bryant that foregrounded African American artists and artists of color. Open from 1974 to 1986, it was a place where an expansive idea of contemporary art flourished and debate was cultivated. The gallery offered early opportunities for artists recognized as pivotal figures in late-20th-century art—including David Hammons, Butch Morris, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O’Grady and Howardena Pindell—as well as a nonhierarchical approach to art that welcomed artists without stylistic proscription.

Published in conjunction with the first museum exhibition to focus on this visionary gallery and its ongoing impact, Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces showcases rarely seen material from JAM’s history—artworks, ephemera and photographs—that collectively document the gallery’s communal and programmatic activities. This richly illustrated, jacketed paperback catalog includes essays that contextualize JAM and consider its legacy, a conversation between Goode Bryant and Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, a complete exhibition chronology written by MoMA and Studio Museum staff with nearly 50 annotated entries, and excerpts from oral histories with JAM staff and artists conducted especially for this project.

This new edition of the Cahiers d’Art Revue was published to accompany Ai Weiwei’s (born 1957) 2019 exhibition at the Galerie Cahiers d’Art on rue du Dragon in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The issue features a series of unpublished works on paper made from rust, documentation of Ai Weiwei's gigantic Amazon rain-forest project, a long interview with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist, an essay by art historian Ingrid D.

Rowland on Ai Weiwei and archaeology, a tribute to the artist’s father, the famous writer Ai Qing, and a text by the collector Uli Sigg. The issue sheds light on the concerns that lie at the heart of Ai Weiwei’s work: antiquity and contemporaneity, East and West, traditional arts and conceptual art, conservation and destruction. As the artist says, “We can replace everything except the past.” Also featured are recent works and projects by Andrea Eriksson, Jonya Ishigami and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian.

At the beginning of 2020, just as global COVID-19 restrictions were coming into force, David Hockney was at his new house, studio and garden in Normandy. From there, he witnessed the arrival of spring, and recorded the blossoming of the surrounding landscape on his iPad, a method of drawing he has been using for over a decade.

Drawing outdoors was an antidote to the anxiety of the moment for Hockney; “we need art, and I do think it can relieve stress,” he says. This uplifting publication―produced to accompany a major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts―includes 116 of these new iPad drawings and shows to full effect Hockney's singular skill in capturing the exuberance of nature. The book begins with an interview with the show's curator, Edith Devaney, in which Hockney discusses his heralding of the spring. It also features augmented reality, an exciting technology that enables smartphones and tablets to recognize printed images and play a related film or animation.

David Hockney (born 1937) is one of the most significant British artists of the 20th century. He attended the Royal College of Art in London and exhibited in one of the first British Pop art shows. In 1964 he moved to Los Angeles, where he lived for many years before returning to his native Yorkshire for a time. In addition to painting, Hockney has pursued photography, collage and printmaking as well as digital illustration. He lives and works in Normandy, France.

Kehinde Wiley’s acclaimed World Stage series inserts into the language of old master portraiture the very ethnicities and ethnic iconography that western art has most excluded from it, or that western art has portrayed solely in colonial, Orientalist terms. Among the countries and continents he has previously depicted in this ambitious traveling epic are Brazil, Africa, China, India and Sri Lanka.

The rhetoric of Wiley’s paintings is powerful in its compositional candor, color palette and playfulness with constructions of visual meaning; as Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky) notes, “Wiley’s canvas surfaces are a mirror reflection of America’s unceasing search for new meanings from the ruins of the Old World of Europe and Africa.” This volume includes a selection of new World Stage portraits, focusing on contemporary youth from Jewish-Ethiopian-Israeli, Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Israeli communities.

Slow, deliberate and deceptively simple, the music of Boston-based band Galaxie 500 was wonderfully at odds with the prevailing underground sounds of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Formed in 1987, the band split up in 1991 after releasing three acclaimed albums―Today, On Fire and This Is Our Music―as well as a Peel Sessions recording.
The primary contributors to this long-unavailable history of the band are the three band members―bassist/vocalist Naomi Yang, drummer Damon Krukowski and guitarist/vocalist Dean Wareham―but dozens of people were interviewed in all, including fellow musicians, record business folks, music critics and scenesters.
Galaxie 500: Temperature's Rising provides a complex, sometimes contentious account of the band's rise to indie stardom and their acrimonious breakup. It also includes dozens of rare and never-before-seen photographs, as well as posters and other ephemera from the personal collection of Naomi Yang, who provides a running commentary to the images. This is the definitive book about Galaxie 500 and a crucial chapter in the story of indie rock.

This three-volume publication explores three distinct phases in the history of the legendary French fashion house founded in 1946. The first volume presents 33 black-and-white images of Dior’s original designs, staged by French photographer Sarah Moon at the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris during the summer of 2021. It interweaves almost abstract photographs of the Fondation with vivid portrayals of the models. The second volume contains 43 images documenting a selection of garments designed by the various artistic directors of Dior between 1958 and 2015: Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano and Raf Simons. The third and final volume presents 38 photographs taken since the arrival of Dior’s current artistic director, Maria Grazia Chiuri.

Sarah Moon (born 1941) grew up between France and England. As a young woman, she started working as a model which plunged her into the world of fashion, a world that would later propel her toward photography, which became her ultimate passion. By 1970, she had devoted herself exclusively to photography and her work was published in numerous magazines. Robert Delpire hired her to make photographs for his advertising agency and they subsequently became lifelong romantic partners. Moon is famous for her blurred aesthetic, use of Polaroids, halftone photos and erasure of faces.

Created in his off-hours on the weekend and in part inspired by the modern artists of his day, Jack Stauffacher’s exquisite prints demonstrate what wood type can do when released from its role in traditional communication and instead used to explore letters as pure form. In the resulting abstract, dynamically composed, often lushly layered prints, Stauffacher reclaims typography as a subject fit for the gallery wall.
Featuring 500 images (most of which have never appeared in a publication before) and essays by collaborators from the worlds of art and typography, Only on Saturday is the first trade book to document the work of one of the past century’s great typographers and printers―and offer the compelling backstory behind its creation.

Born in 1920 in San Mateo, California, Jack Stauffacher was a printer, typographer and fine-book publisher whose delicate yet graphic sensibility landed his work first in library rare book collections and then in museums such as SFMOMA and LACMA, who sought out his typographic prints. A printer of exceptional skill who began his apprenticeship at the age of 16, Stauffacher created books for his Greenwood Press off and on for eight decades.

He taught typography at Carnegie Mellon and the San Francisco Art Institute, and served as typographic director at Stanford University Press. But it was his later wood type prints that ushered his career into the realm of fine art. Stauffacher created these innovative and elegant prints from 1966 until his death in 2017 at the age of 96. In recognition of his contributions to typography and design, he was awarded an AIGA Medal in 2004.

This volume chronicles the rise of a globally significant art movement, as told from the perspective of the Yolngu people of northeastern Australia. It presents more than 90 iconic paintings on eucalyptus bark, many of which have never been seen outside of Australia.

For millennia, Yolngu people around Yirrkala in northern Australia have painted their sacred clan designs on their bodies and ceremonial objects. These designs―called miny’tji―are not merely decorative: they are the sacred patterns of the ancestral land itself. Yolngu people describe them as madayin: a term that encompasses both the sacred and the beautiful. With the arrival of Europeans in the 20th century, Yolngu people turned to the medium of painting on eucalyptus bark with ochres. The result was an outpouring of creativity that continues to this day as artists find new and innovative ways to transform their ancient clan designs into compelling contemporary statements that are chronicled in this singular publication.

Authors include: Andrew Blake, David Burrumarra MBE, Steve Fox, Gunybi Ganambarr, Manydjarri Ganambarr, Yinimala Gumana, Jason Guwanbal Gurruwiwi, Djambawa Marawili AM, Nonggirrnga Marawili, Dhuwarrwarr Marika, Wanyubi Marika, Baluka Maymuru, Paul Wutjin Maymuru, Naminapu Maymuru-White, Frances Morphy, Howard Morphy, Barayuwa Mununggurr, Marrnyula Mununggurr, Rerrkirrwanga Mununggurr, Wäka Mununggurr, Buwathay Munyarryun, Eleanore Neumann, Will Stubbs, Dhukumul

Imagined as an extended mushroom-foraging expedition, John Cage: A Mycological Foray gathers together Cage’s mushroom-themed compositions, photographs, illustrations and ephemera. Indeterminacy Stories and other writings by Cage are interwoven throughout the first volume within a central essay examining Cage’s enduring relationship with mycology. Also included is a transcript of Cage’s 1983 performance, MUSHROOMS et Variationes. The second volume is the inaugural reproduction of Cage’s 1972 portfolio, Mushroom Book, authored in collaboration with illustrator Lois Long and botanist Alexander H. Smith. Readers are thus drawn through the landscape of Cage’s mycologically centred oeuvre and interests, discovering assorted works, images, compositions, philosophies and ephemera, as one might encounter assorted fungi and flora while foraging.

Inspired from a rare hand-colored original, The Cabinet of Natural Curiosities gathers all of Albertus Seba's extraordinary illustrations of strange and exotic plants, snakes, corals, as well as “double-headed monsters”, dragons, and many more.

The iconic book cover is reimagined here as a charming watercolor.  This series adds instant-charm to a gallery wall, or displayed on a bookcase or mantel as a special keepsake.

-5" x 7"
-Archival quality giclée print on fine art bright white paper

Spanning nearly 1,000 years of artistic creativity, this wide-ranging volume brings together 206 artworks that exemplify both exquisite aesthetics and rich cultural histories. The majority of the collection is from the American Southwest―19th-century Navajo weavings, ancestral and historical Pueblo pottery, Hopi and Zuni carved figures, and Yavapai and Apache basketry―along with art from the Pacific Northwest and the first Plains ledger drawings to enter the museums' collections.

This book, which features new research and specially commissioned essays and extended captions, developed in collaboration with cultural advisors, reflects the complex and multilayered nature of the artworks in the field of Native American art. Contributions from more than 80 authors from different disciplines and cultural backgrounds, including scholars, culture-bearers, artists, collectors and museum professionals, illuminate details about the living histories of the works. With striking new photography and full-color reproductions, this is a cornerstone publication in the field of Native American art history.

If you were there, even just for some of it―Hawaii, California, surfing, the ’70s―the memories and stories will flow freely from these photographs. Jeff Divine was there for all of it, and these images have been culled from an enormous personal archive. Divine was shooting for Surfer, the monthly magazine that was the bible of the scene. His photos from this archive show the precommercialized era in surfing when the hippie influence still held sway. Surfers had their own slang-infused language and were deep into a world of Mother Ocean, wilderness and a culture that mainstream society spurned. Surfboards were handmade in family garages, often made for a specific kind of wave or speed, for paddling, ease of turning, and featured all kinds of psychedelic designs. Some were even hollowed out to smuggle hash from Morocco.

The color and black-and-white photographs collected here, taken throughout California on the coastlines at Baja, Dana Point, Laguna Beach, La Jolla, Malibu, San Clemente and Oahu, give a vivid image of this close-knit culture and the incredible athletic feats of its heroes and heroines.

Raised in La Jolla, California, Jeff Divine (born 1950) started photographing the surfing world in 1966. He held jobs as photo editor for 35 years with Surfer magazine and Surfer’s Journal. His works have been displayed worldwide in museums and galleries, as well as in books, magazines and media. In 2019 he was inducted into the Huntington Beach Surfing Walk of Fame for his contribution to surf culture in a career lasting 50 years.

From 2011 to 2015, Brooklyn-based photographer Ash Kolodner (born 1987) traveled across the United States photographing hundreds of LGBTQ+ individuals of all ages. They made two consecutive portraits of each of their subjects, photographing them twice during the same sitting: once with eyes closed and then with eyes open. These diptychs symbolize the vulnerability many have felt at the outset of discovering their personal identities, and then the realization and self-actualization manifest in the intimate and profound process of coming out.

Through more than 180 color portraits, along with subject interviews and contributing texts by filmmaker Kimberly Peirce and Tony award-winning producer Jordan Roth, and icon and performer, RuPaul, Gayface reflects the beauty, intimacy and sometimes the pain of a community kept in the shadows for decades. Ultimately these pictures and this handsome volume represent a revelatory statement on the profound humanity we all share.

Published to accompany a major international exhibition, David Hockney: Drawing from Life features Hockney’s drawings from the 1950s to the present day, and focuses on his depictions of himself and a small group of sitters close to him: his muse, Celia Birtwell; his mother, Laura Hockney; and his friends, the curator, Gregory Evans, and master printer, Maurice Payne. In his portrait drawings of these figures, Hockney tries out new stylistic experiments and expresses his admiration for his artistic predecessors, from Holbein to Picasso.

Featuring 150 beautifully reproduced works from public and private collections across the world, this publication traces the trajectory of Hockney’s drawing practice by examining how he has revisited these five figures throughout his career. Highlights include a series of new portraits, colored pencil drawings created in Paris in the early 1970s, composite Polaroid portraits from the 1980s and a selection of drawings from an intense period of self-scrutiny during the 1980s when the artist created a self-portrait every day for two months.

This magnificent volume features a remarkable collection of largely unseen photographs of the Beat Generation by renowned Magnum photographer Burt Glinn. This amazing, untouched treasure trove of images was discovered when Reel Art Press was working with Burt Glinn’s widow, Elena, on a larger retrospective of Glinn’s work. Archived with the negatives was a short essay by Jack Kerouac entitled "And This Is The Beat Nightlife of New York," which is published here alongside the photographs. The book features black-and-white shots, and also—uniquely, for images of this era—more than 70 in color. An extremely rare find, these photographs capture the raw energy of the Beat Generation in a way that has never been seen before in print.

The photographs were shot between 1957 and 1960 in New York and San Francisco and feature nearly everyone involved in the scene, including writers and artists such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, LeRoi Jones, Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick and many more. Glinn was celebrated for his extraordinary talent as a social documentary photographer, and during his time with the Beats his camera captured the spirit of the counterculture—writers, musicians and artists meeting in cafes, bars and parties pursuing a truth and future the mainstream would and could not acknowledge.

This exquisite tome is an intimate and fresh insight into the lives of the legendary and influential bohemians and a celebration of Glinn’s inimitable talent.

Bringing together the sensibilities of two remarkable artists, Peter Hujar Curated by Elton John provides striking proof of how one artist’s eye can shed light on another. Though known worldwide as one of the most revered performers of our era, Elton John is also a seasoned collector of photographs, with an acute and personal understanding of Hujar’s achievement.

Through a selection of 50 photographs, the book presents a wide-ranging survey of Hujar's career. John writes: “Hujar's humanity, depth and sensual insights aren't for everyone, and don't need to be, but once his pictures get into your bloodstream they are impossible to shake.” The publication includes works spanning nearly two decades, featuring portraits of Hujar's eclectic circle of friends, his landmark nudes, atmospheric landscapes, portraits of performers (Stevie Wonder, Peggy Lee and Edgar Winter) and a moving image of the artist with his mother.

“Life must be lived as play,” said Plato, and this book will help you rediscover the wonder in the weekly grind, and the extraordinary in the ordinary. Throughout history, philosophers, artists and writers have found liberation in taking play seriously. Everyday Play shows you how you can use creativity, games and the imagination to transform your life.

Learn how to be someone else for a day; explore how to draw a poem, paint a book and reorient your library; enjoy writers using constraints or languages they don’t understand; play the Edible Book Game or become a living sculpture; become a writer and play word games to find new ways of saying what you mean.

In recent years renowned artist David Hockney has returned to England to paint the landscape of his childhood in East Yorkshire. Although his passionate interest in new technologies has led him to develop a virtuosic drawing technique on the iPad, he has also traveled outdoors with a traditional sketchbook, an invaluable tool as he works quickly to capture the changing light and fleeting effects of the weather.

Executed in watercolor and ink, these panoramic scenes have the spatial complexity of finished paintings--the broad sweep of sky or road, the patchwork tapestry of land--yet convey the immediacy of Hockney's impressions. For those who know the East Yorkshire Wolds, the location of the sketches is unmistakable; for those who don't, its features will come to life in these pages.

People in polar-bear costumes on the beach, at pubs and fairs, arm in arm with toddlers, men, women: it can only be another gem from the collection of Hamburg-based photophile Jochen Raiss, whose flea-market finds of photos depicting women in trees have already won the enthusiasm of photography fans (Women in Trees and More Women in Trees). Here he reveals yet more treasures from his trove in this new and mysterious series of people posing with polar bears.

This is the first major survey of artist and fashion designer Cinzia Ruggeri (1942–2019), a unique figure of Italian postmodernism who moved freely across disciplines. From clothing and accessories to furniture and lighting—as well as sculptural installations often including these objects—Ruggeri created worlds that were continually imaginative, provocative, elegant and unpredictable. Ruggeri founded her own fashion line in 1977 and immediately became known for her use of architecture and geometry, such as the ziggurat and representations of the shape of Italy. During her lifetime she also worked and collaborated with Brian Eno, Occhiomagico, Alessandro Mendini, Casa Vogue, Maison Carven and Studio Alchimia. This catalog offers the most complete overview of Ruggeri’s career, thanks to research conducted by MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome) in collaboration with the Archivio Cinzia Ruggeri in Milan.

Between 1973 and ’76, Mitch Epstein (born 1952) photographed in American cities—New York, Los Angeles and New Orleans, among others. He was initially shooting in black and white as a student of Garry Winogrand, when he asked his teacher, “Why not color?” With Winogrand’s blessing, Epstein shot his first rolls of Kodachrome. Silver + Chrome is a chronicle of his three years alternating between color and black and white, before eventually committing to color.

This book contains Epstein’s earliest work, virtually none of which has been seen before. In these kinetic tableaux, the artist’s exuberance is tamed, just barely, by his formal intelligence. He depicts American city life as it undergoes taboo-shattering sexual liberation, economic crises and the repercussions of a boondoggle war in Vietnam, immersing us in the urban chaos of this complicated time.

In recent years, the art and fiction of Surrealist painter and author Leonora Carrington have received much mainstream recognition, but—until now—there has been no authoritative overview of her work. Divided into 10 sections, Revelationintroduces Carrington’s singular artistic universe, displaying an extensive array of her wide-ranging creations (including paintings, drawings and tapestries) and fusing a chronological narrative of her life with a study of the most prominent themes in her work—from her training and early influences in England and Florence to her contact with the Surrealists in Paris, through her time in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche, her traumatic experiences in Spain, her immigration to New York and her new homeland in Mexico. Punctuating the reproductions are archival materials, book excerpts and documentary photographs.

From January 15 to February 12, 1977, more than 15,000 artists, intellectuals and performers from 55 nations worldwide gathered in Lagos, Nigeria, for the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, also known as FESTAC’77. Taking place in the heyday of Nigeria’s oil wealth and following the African continent’s potent decade of decolonization, FESTAC’77 was the peak of Pan-Africanist expression. Among the musicians, writers, artists and cultural leaders in attendance were Ellsworth Ausby, Milford Graves, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Samella Lewis, Audre Lorde, Winnie Owens, Miriam Makeba, Valerie Maynard, Queen Mother Moore and Sun Ra.

While serving as the photographer for the US contingent of the North American delegation, Brooklyn-based photographer Marilyn Nance made more than 1,500 images throughout the course of the festival―one of the most comprehensive photographic accounts of FESTAC’77. Drawing from Nance’s extensive archive, most of which has never before been published, Last Day in Lagos chronicles the exuberant intensity and sociopolitical significance of this extraordinary event.

Evelyn Hofer was a highly innovative photographer whose prolific career spanned five decades. Despite her extraordinary output, she was underrecognized during her lifetime and was notably referred to by New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer as “the most famous unknown photographer in America.” She made her greatest impact through a series of photobooks, published throughout the 1960s, devoted to European and American cities, including Florence, London, New York, Washington and Dublin, and a book focused on the country of Spain.
Comprising more than 100 photographs in both black and white and color, Eyes on the City accompanies the artist’s first major museum exhibition in the United States in over 50 years and is organized around her photobooks. The photographs feature landscapes and architectural views combined with portraiture, conveying the unique character and personality of these urban capitals during a period of intense structural, social and economic transformations after World War II.

In Joan Didion: What She Means, the writer and curator Hilton Als creates a mosaic that explores Didion's life and work and the feeling each generates in her admirers, detractors and critics.
Arranged chronologically, the book highlights Didion's fascination with the two coasts that made her. As a Westerner transplanted to New York, Didion was able to look at her native land, its mores and fixed rules of behavior, with the loving and critical eyes of a daughter who got out and went back. (Didion and her late husband moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1964, where they worked as highly successful screenwriters, producing scripts for 1971's The Panic in Needle Park and 1976's A Star Is Born, among other works, before returning to New York 20 years later.) And from her New York perch, Didion was able to observe the political scene more closely, writing trenchant pieces about Clinton, El Salvador and most searingly the Central Park Five.

The book includes more than 50 artists ranging from Brice Marden and Ed Ruscha to Betye Saar, Vija Clemins and many others, with works in all mediums including painting, ephemera, photography, sculpture, video and film. Also included are three previously uncollected texts by Didion: “In Praise of Unhung Wreaths and Love” (1969); a much-excerpted 1975 commencement address at UC Riverside; and “The Year of Hoping for Stage Magic” (2007).

The meticulous depictions of tattoos by prison guard Danzig Baldaev are reproduced in facsimile, authenticated by his signature and stamp, alongside his handwritten notes on the reverse. The paper has yellowed with age, giving the exquisite drawings a visceral temporality, almost like skin. Sergei Vasiliev’s photographs portray inmates in startling intimacy.

He achieves a remarkable level of trust within the closed criminal society, a strict hierarchy, where outsiders are viewed with hostile suspicion. Arkady Bronnikov’s collection of photographs are shown in the albums in which they were collected. Used exclusively to aid police in their investigations, they depict a motley lineup of assorted body parts.

Tamara Shopsin’s classic 5 Year Diary 

Designed by Shopsin--whose illustration work is regularly featured in The New York Times--and produced by The Ice Plant and Shopsin’s General Store, the pint-sized 5 Year Diary helps you keep track of the next 60 months of your life in just a few lines a day. Each page of the diary is devoted to one day of the year and subdivided into five sections (each with its own space for notes), so that, as time goes by, past entries can be read as the new ones are written.

Handsomely clothbound with a red ribbon bookmark, the diary can be started on any day of any year--even a leap year. In the back of the diary are pages to record the books you’ve read and places you’ve traveled. As New York magazine’s Kendall Herbst noted, the 5 Year Diary is an ideal gift for anyone, anytime, as well as the perfect way to “trace your life’s highlights and trim out the minutiae… Think of it as a sort of CliffsNotes to your life."

Agnès Varda (1928–2019) explored various mediums throughout her lifetime, moving from photography to film to multimedia installation. Despite Varda’s highly revered status globally, her third creative period is not widely known. The Third Life of Agnès Varda, published in conjunction with an exhibition at Silent Green in Berlin, pays homage to this underexplored period, which began in 2003 at the Venice Biennale. After this first installation, Patatutopia, Varda dove head first into the medium, producing genre-bending installations throughout her final years that engaged her poetic, abstract realism and her sensitive observations of sociopolitical issues.
The Third Life of Agnès Varda features ample installation shots and texts by the artist, in addition to film stills, personal photographs and an interview between Varda and curator Philippe Pigue.

Adam Silverman creates ambitious ceramic work with site-specific materials that engage their places of origin. Similar to a chef cooking with local ingredients, his works are infused with the history, culture, issues and spirit of a place. In the fall of 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic swept the globe, Silverman began a project to address the political and cultural divisions in America. Silverman collected materials (clay, wood ash and water) from every state and inhabited US territory and combined them into a single, new, fully integrated material. This material was then used to create 56 ceremonial vessels that celebrate the nation’s diversity and the idea of radical inclusivity. A series of 56 Ikebana arrangements made by teachers and students at Sogetsu Ikebana Los Angeles are placed in Silverman’s vessels, creating a powerful pairing of American materials and symbols with Japanese traditions.

In ONYX, photographer Adrienne Raquel explores the intensity and escapism of the strip club experience, documenting performers at Houston’s famed Club Onyx. Raquel’s photography is usually editorial, with high-powered celebrities such as Megan Thee Stallion, Lil Nas X and Travis Scott as subjects. Now, for this project commissioned by Fotografiska New York, she turns her lens toward a community of underrepresented artists in her hometown. At Club Onyx, strippers display their bodies and seductiveness, but there’s a virtue to this particular space: “they don’t get naked” is a common description of the club’s ambiance. Performers there negotiate what “stripper” means to them on their own terms.

Joel Meyerowitz is one of the pioneers of color photography, street photography, large-format photography and portraiture. The Pleasure of Seeing offers a look behind the scenes of his life and career. In conversation with historian and photographer Lorenzo Braca, Meyerowitz describes meeting Robert Frank; photographing on the streets of New York City with Tony Ray-Jones and Garry Winogrand; traveling across America and Europe; learning from John Szarkowski; working on exhibitions and publications; photographing at Ground Zero in 2001 and 2002; and producing his most recent still lifes and self-portraits.

This book presents Anatsui as a visionary of incomparable imagination, also situating his work within a broader historical context—specifically, the postcolonial modernism of midcentury African artists and writers, the cultural ferment of post-independence Ghana and the intellectual environment of the 1970s Nsukka School. By recovering these histories, the authors show how and why Anatsui became one of the most formidable sculptors of our time.

Our lives are increasingly lived on screens, and every one of our electronic interactions is mediated by a designed interface, which can be buggy and incomprehensible or inviting and accessible. Like other ubiquitous everyday tools, these interfaces are seldom recognized as objects of design—and even less as objects of interactive design. In video games, however, users are acutely aware of their relationship with the interface, making video games compelling examples of this important field of contemporary design.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Never Alone: Video Games as Interactive Design explores the impact of interactive design by examining 35 video games created between 1972 and 2018—from Space Invaders (1978) and Pac-Man (1980) to The Sims (2000) and Minecraft (2011). An overarching essay by curators Paola Antonelli, Anna Burckhardt and Paul Galloway presents the pioneering criteria by which MoMA has selected these video games for its collection, as well as the protocols for their acquisition, display and conservation

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the fabric works from the last two decades in the career of legendary artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010). “I’ve always had a fascination with the needle,” s