Books

A visual tribute to Agnès Varda’s three lives as a photographer, filmmaker and artist, with previously unseen archival materials, texts and personal reflections from Jane Birkin, Martin Scorsese, JR and more

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 definitive look at two decades of work by Austin-based artist Deborah Roberts (born 1962) with newly commissioned texts and a thorough dive into her archive, this monograph offers a comprehensive view of one of today’s most significant social observers. An extensive plate section is accompanied by a heartfelt foreword from Dawoud Bey on "the tragic mischaracterization of Black children"; an insightful essay from Ekow Eshun on the social and political histories of innocence, race and the fractured nature of the contemporary Black experience; a celebratory tribute from author and artist Carolyn Jean Martin on the musicality, humility and generosity of Roberts’ practice; and a free-ranging conversation between Roberts and cultural historian Sarah Elizabeth Lewis.
By using images from American history, Black culture, pop culture and Black history, Roberts critiques perceptions of ideal beauty and challenges stereotypes. She combines found and manipulated images with hand-drawn and painted details to create hybrid figures, often young girls and increasingly Black boys, whose well-being and futures are equally threatened because of the double standard of boyhood and criminality that is projected upon them at such a young age. Each child has character and agency to find their own way amid the complicated narratives of American, African American and art history.

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.

Dreamy, intimate portraits of the LGBTQ creatives energizing Mexico City’s art and design culture.

Through her reportage, fashion and portrait work, Israeli Moroccan photographer Mayan Toledano shares the stories of her queer community, exploring their interior lives with empathy and respect. Characterized by their colorful dreaminess, her portraits often capture her young subjects in their bedrooms.
Although Toledano is based in New York, she has found herself increasingly drawn to Mexico City, a place she considers a creative safe haven. No Mames pays tribute to the local LGBTQ artists, designers and creatives who are currently contributing to Mexican culture—many of whom are couples, roommates or childhood friends. The series’ portraiture follows a twofold process: first, she captures her subjects as they present themselves in everyday life; then, she photographs them as they would like to appear, facilitating the construction of their fantasy selves. This collaborative act of wish fulfilment sometimes coincides with real-life transformations: for instance, she follows one of her subjects, Havi, over the course of her gender transition, during which she underwent breast augmentation surgery.
From reportage to fashion to portraiture, the work of photographer Mayan Toledano is characterized by a strong sense of humanity, empathy, femininity and rebellion.

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.

Corita Kent, formerly Sister Mary Corita, is known for her exuberant, colorful serigraphs and her teaching, as evidenced in her lively art classes. As a Catholic nun from 1936 until 1968, Corita lived and worked in the Immaculate Heart of Mary community in Los Angeles. She taught lettering and layout, image finding, and art structure for 20 years in Immaculate Heart College’s art department. There, she screened multiple films simultaneously, hosted guest thinkers including Saul Bass, Buckminster Fuller and John Cage, and guided the making of large-scale collaborative projects with students. Corita regularly took her students out for looking sessions at a used car lot or an art exhibition. While constantly looking and discovering visually,

Corita shot thousands of 35 mm slides documenting references, the IHC milieu and the art department processes. For Corita, the vernacular environs of advertising, supermarkets and the city’s media landscape were a source of inspiration and raw material. Her slide collection encompasses a wide range of subjects: cookies, coke bottles, toys, presents, experiments, projects, Mary’s Day celebrations stemming from Corita’s classroom, flowers, magazines, seeds, puppets, visits with Charles and Ray Eames, street signs, trade fairs, folk art, boxes, billboards and kites. Drawing from the Corita Art Center’s vast slide collection, Ordinary Things Will Be Signs for Us embodies Corita’s philosophy of looking.

Meditations on Picabia across seven decades, from the acclaimed American realist painter. In the 1950s, American painter Philip Pearlstein completed his MA thesis, "The Paintings of Francis Picabia 1908-1930." When his research coincided with Picabia's death in 1953, Pearlstein briefly became the authority on Picabia and his influence, writing three subsequent essays: "The Symbolic Language of Francis Picabia" for Arts magazine (1956); "Hello & Goodbye, Francis Picabia" for Art News (1970); and "When the Dada Daddies Got Real, or How I Turned Picabia Inside Out" for Brooklyn Rail (2017). Pearlstein's articles present a fascinating comparison between Picabia, Duchamp and Pearlstein himself.
Picabia Inside Out brings together Pearlstein's articles in full, including a facsimile of the 1955 MA thesis presented as a historical document showing all the nuances of his typewriter. A foreword by Robert Storr highlights Pearlstein's importance as a precursor to what became known as postmodernism.
Philip Pearlstein (born 1924) is an American painter best known for his modernist realist nudes. Pearlstein has written many articles for major art journals, and his contribution to contemporary art is acknowledged by his many awards and honors.

Prepare for an immersive journey beneath the waves with Ocean Wanderlust. Dive into the world of submarines, mythology, exotic marine species, and ocean-inspired fashion. Our signature Assouline style expands the horizons of travel, blending abstract interpretations like fashion, art, and architecture with the real and scientific aspects of underwater exploration.

In the deep blue, endless mysteries await, sparking boundless imagination. Legendary writers like Jules Verne and Herman Melville, as well as visionary filmmaker James Cameron, have harnessed the creative potential of the underwater world, producing unparalleled artistic output.

Yet, it's crucial to safeguard this vast marine habitat from the threats of climate change and human progress, preserving the delicate ecosystem balance. Dive into the pages of Ocean Wanderlust, and you'll discover the compelling case for protecting the ocean's beauty.

Venetian art connoisseur, interior designer, and hotelier Francesca Bortolotto Possati knows the intricacies of Venice. To have her as a guide is to experience firsthand her passion for the private side of the mythic city whose daily visitors outnumber its population. Join her to visit artists’ studios, elegant Venetian friends, and palaces’ secrets. Everywhere one wanders, a sense of history saturates the buildings and landscapes, harking back to the artists of the Renaissance and the chic masquerade balls of centuries past.

The discerning eye of photographer Robyn Lea makes this book a revelation of the Venice of dreams, which will surely allow readers to see this iconic destination through new eyes.

A sentimental foreword by Jeremy Irons perfectly complements this stunning volume.

The British photographer Yevonde was a businesswoman and tireless creator; as an innovator committed to color photography when it was not considered a serious medium, her work is significant in the history of portrait photography. Yevonde’s portraits embody glorified tradition countered with a desire for the new; her most renowned body of work is a series of women dressed as goddesses posed in surreal tableaux from the 1930s. Yevonde championed photography during a time when there were few women photographers working professionally, and this book tells the story of her life, her works and her 60-year career.

Yevonde: Life and Colour brings the photographer’s works together for the first time in 20 years. With an abundance of reproductions, and featuring previously unpublished works, the book showcases her experimentation with a range of techniques and genres including color photography, portraiture, still lifes, solarization and the Vivex color process, and repositions her as a key modern artist of the 20th century. It also provides in-depth context for Yevonde’s images, considering their aesthetic and mythic references.

Yevonde (1893–1975), also known as Madame Yevonde, was a London-based photographer of portraits and still lifes whose motto was "be original or die."

The first retrospective volume on the photography of the internationally acclaimed Nigerian filmmaker, photographer and music video director Andrew Dosunmu, Monograph looks back at 20 years of previously unpublished and sumptuously colorful portraiture and more, including stills from music videos and the 2022 Netflix film Beauty.

Dosunmu has published his photography with iconic music and fashion magazines such as The Face, Vibe, Fader, Vogue Hommes, Paper and Interview, and has been commissioned by international brands such as Nike and Adidas. Throughout his career, Dosunmu has developed a prolific personal body of work that until now has never been published, though it has been sought after by private collectors and museums. The images compiled in Monograph portray uniquely stylish individuals in Dakar, Mumbai and Cartaghena. United by Dosunmu’s acute instinct for color into a compelling aesthetic vision, these portraits celebrate global culture with tremendous sensuality. The book includes a conversation between Dosunmu and Arthur Jafa.

Andrew Dosunmu is a Nigerian photographer and filmmaker who came to prominence in the US with music videos for various acclaimed artists. He is the director of Hot Irons, Restless City, Mother of George, Where Is Kyra? and Beauty, all of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Dosunmu lives between New York City and Lagos, Nigeria.

In the 1990s, queer youth, outcasts and artists flocked to San Francisco to experiment with art, self-expression, style and gender and to find community. Rent was affordable, paving the way for queer bars, clubs, tattoo shops, galleries, cafés, bookstores and women-owned businesses to emerge. A new wave of feminism embraced gender fluidity, and butch/femme culture flourished. The Mission district was the center of this queer cultural renaissance, and the feeling of community there was palpable.
Chloe Sherman was both a member of this community and an ardent visual chronicler.

Her documentary photographic work on 35mm film stems from a commitment to capturing the vibrancy, tenderness, individuality, resilience and joy within this subculture that was derided by mainstream society. Distilling the spirit of the time, her debut monograph is a candid portrait of a vibrant era that connects current and future generations to the pulse of San Francisco at a pivotal chapter in queer history.

Chloe Sherman (born 1969) arrived in San Francisco in 1991 and earned her BFA in Photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited internationally and featured in magazines such as Rolling Stone and Interview.

This monograph on the legendary and influential artist Jay DeFeo features over 150 photographic works—many never before published—most reproduced at the size the artist printed them. After the completion of her monumental masterpiece The Rose in 1966, DeFeo moved from the heart of artistic activity in San Francisco to a small house in Marin County, California. There she embarked on a focused and rigorous exploration with the camera. For much of the 1970s, she used the camera as a tool to look and think with, creating a wide range of black-and-white photographs she processed in her darkroom. The artist used experimental photographic techniques to produce extraordinary artworks, alongside documentary images of her studio and paintings in process. Her contact sheets, some of which are reproduced here, are often filled with multiple views of one object, revealing the way DeFeo looked and sketched with the lens. In 1972 she wrote: "My interest in photography has always paralleled my expression as a painter."

Essays by Hilton Als, Judith Delfiner, Corey Keller, Justine Kurland, Dana Miller and Catherine Wagner survey the rich materiality, sculptural layering and illusionistic devices of DeFeo’s playful and enigmatic photographic works, illuminating her astonishing range and daring experimentation with the medium.

Jay DeFeo (1929–89) was a Bay Area artist who created an original and provocative body of work, including the iconic painting The Rose (1958–66). In the 1970s and 1980s, DeFeo continued her visionary work in a range of mediums, including works on paper, photography, collage and photocopies. Among many other exhibitions, a retrospective of her work was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2012.

In this memoir, Harlem-born trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah recounts decades of national and international touring with the Sun Ra Arkestra and charts the rise of the New York loft jazz scene, offering a fascinating portrait of advanced music in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan from the 1970s through the 1990s, including thrilling stories about the politically important Bed-Stuy venue The East and the author's tutelage under composer and long-time Archie Shepp collaborator Cal Massey. Along the way, Abdullah covers his spiritual development as a Buddhist, battles with addiction, tribulations as a father, lessons from Sun Ra and working life as an educator and cab driver.

Trumpeter and educator Ahmed Abdullah was born in Harlem in 1947. An important figure in the New York loft jazz movement, in 1972 he formed a group called Abdullah, two years before joining the Sun Ra Arkestra, with whom he played for more than 20 years. He is a founding member of the bands Melodic Art-Tet, The Group and NAM, and of the Central Brooklyn Jazz Consortium. Abdullah is the music director at Sistas’ Place in Brooklyn, and teaches music at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan and an elementary school in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.

Born and raised in Mississippi and Tennessee, photographer William Eggleston began taking pictures in the early 1960s after reading Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment. After switching from black-and-white film to color film in 1966, he occasionally used a two and one quarter inch format for photographs. This collection of square snapshots from 1966 to 1971 invokes the intimate quality of Eggleston’s work, while maintaining the vibrance and skill that led Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski to call him “the first color photographer.” This attractive clothbound, square-shaped hardcover volume includes 45 four-color plates with text by Los-Angeles based novelist and screenwriter Bruce Wagner. Now in its eighth edition, 2 ¼ adds more classic Eggleston images to the canon of color photography.

William Eggleston (born 1939) encountered photography and abstract expressionism while studying at Vanderbilt and the University of Mississippi. Inspired by the work of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eggleston began working with color film in the 1960s and is credited with popularizing its use among artistic photographers. His work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Known for pushing the boundaries of good taste, John Waters (born 1946) has created a canon of high-shock-value, high-entertainment movies that have cemented his position as one of the most revered and subversive auteurs in American independent cinema. Featuring misfit muses, tributes to his hometown of Baltimore and themes of fetish, obsession and celebrity culture, his renegade films—including Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974), Desperate Living (1977), Hairspray (1988), Serial Mom (1994) and A Dirty Shame (2004)—are irreverent, laugh-out-loud comedies that lovingly draw inspiration from William Castle, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Russ Meyer, Andy Warhol and Pier Paolo Pasolini alike. 

John Waters: Pope of Trash accompanies a landmark exhibition at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the first dedicated solely to Waters’ films. The book presents costumes, props, handwritten scripts, concept drawings, correspondence, promotional gimmicks, production photography and other original materials from all of the filmmaker’s features and shorts. Spotlighting many of his longtime collaborators, it also features a new interview with Waters and texts by curators Jenny He and Dara Jaffe, film historian Jeanine Basinger, film critic and cultural theorist B. Ruby Rich, and author-writer-producer David Simon that explore how Waters’ movies have redefined the possibilities of independent cinema.

“Every cowboy can instantly call up with fondness … the smell of cattle carried on a dusty wind across sagebrush and juniper, and the feeling of a good horse underneath you as you work together to keep a herd moving,” writes American photographer John Langmore. Langmore began cowboying in 1975 at the age of 12, the same year that his father, Bank Langmore, published the preeminent photo book The Cowboy. John spent 12 summers working across the west before transitioning to a more regulatory career.

Then, in 2012, John began a six-year project photographing 14 of the nation’s largest and most famous ranches in Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oregon, Montana and Wyoming. Of all those who have photographed the American cowboy, John is one of the few who came to it first as a colleague and then as a photographer. This large landscape book features 90 tritone plates along with Langmore’s own poetic recollections of working as a cowboy. Open Range offers an unrivaled chance to witness a way of life that many dream of, but few experience.

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).

The dynamic geometrical patterns of Emilio Pucci; the dazzling trompe-l’œil effects of Roberta di Camerino; the pop sensibilities of Gianni Versace and Franco Moschino; the bold street-style prints of Iuter and Sunnei—these and countless other innovations have made Italian design a leading force in the history of 20th-century textiles.
This volume documents the history of Italian textiles from the beginning of the 20th century through to the present day, exploring their evolution in relation to the dominant styles of various periods. This is a history deeply interwoven with the birth of the totemic “Made in Italy'' concept, as textiles have significantly contributed to Italy’s international reputation as a bastion of high-quality fashion and design. Numerous Italian artists, fashion designers, product designers and companies have pioneered and popularized a vast range of manufacturing processes that incorporate local fabrics and innovative techniques.

Featuring sumptuous illustrations of finished fabrics, preparatory drawings and photographs, Italian Textiles compiles the country’s most notable design coups. Among the thematic sections in the book are those dedicated to scarfs, skirts, shirts, ties, wallpapers, tablecloths and various other fabricated objects.

ntricate and appealing, curious and uncanny, miniature works of art exert surprising power. Over thousands of years and across cultures, artists and artisans have created small objects for many purposes: tiny gold amulets of ancient Egyptian gods to protect the wearer; portable European medieval shrines made of precious materials to hold the relics of saints; English and American miniature painted portraits to keep loved ones close; Dutch dollhouse furnishings to display the maker’s skill and the owner’s social standing; pocket-size tools and globes from the age of exploration; Japanese netsuke carved in the shape of auspicious animals; and everyday objects transformed into statement jewelry by contemporary makers.

Tiny Treasures looks closely at more than 75 fascinating miniature objects from across the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, exploring their meaning and purpose along with their often dazzling workmanship, and showing that the human impulse to create on a small scale can produce compelling masterpieces.

In 2002, Kara Walker was selected to represent the United States at the prestigious São Paulo Art Biennial. Curator Robert Hobbs wrote extended essays on her work for this exhibition, and also for her show later that year at the Kunstverein Hannover. Because these essays have not been distributed in the US and remain among the most in-depth and essential investigations of her work, Karma is now republishing them in this new clothbound volume.

Among the most celebrated artists of the past three decades, with over 93 solo exhibitions to her credit, including a major survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker is known for her tough, critical, provocative and highly imaginative representations of African Americans and whites reaching back to antebellum times. In his analysis, Hobbs looks at the five main sources of her art: blackface Americana, Harlequin romances, Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, Stone Mountain’s racist tourist attraction and the minstrel tradition.

Robert Hobbs (born 1946) has written more than 50 books and catalogs, focusing on such artists as Milton Avery, Alice Aycock, Lee Krasner, Robert Smithson and Kehinde Wiley. Since 1991 he has held the Rhoda Thalhimer Endowed Chair of American Art in the School of Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University. Since 2004 he has served as a visiting professor at Yale University.

Known around the world for his powerful art and activism, Ai Weiwei (born 1957) does not differentiate between disciplines: his practice glides across art, architecture, design, film, collecting and curating. Richly illustrated with over 200 images, Ai Weiwei: Making Sense is the first major publication to present Ai’s work as a commentary on design and what it reveals about our changing values. It presents a selection of Ai’s collected objects, from ancient stone axe heads to porcelain teapot spouts, from Neolithic tools to modern mass-produced products, as well as new works created specifically for the Design Museum.

These collections draw from the artist’s fascination with historical Chinese artifacts, placing their craftsmanship in dialogue with China’s more recent history of demolition and urban development. Also featured are essays by leading experts covering dominant themes in Ai’s work, such as craft, collecting and the urbanization and industrialization of China. It concludes with an interview between renowned British Israeli architect Eyal Weizman and Ai himself.

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.

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.

Through more than 200 photographs, this luxurious volume presents Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide’s most iconic works alongside an important selection of previously unpublished photographs and a series of color photographs specially commissioned by the Fondation Cartier.

Working mainly in black and white, Iturbide has explored the cohabitation between ancestral traditions and Catholic rites in Mexico, humanity’s relationship with death and the roles of women in society. In recent years, her photographs have emptied themselves of human presence, revealing the enigmatic life of objects and nature. In addition to her stark images of her homeland, this book also includes images from her series in India, the United States and elsewhere. Heliotropo 37, named for the photographer’s address in Mexico City, also contains an interview with the photographer by French essayist Fabienne Bradu, an original short story by Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon and a photo-portrait of Iturbide’s studio by Mexican photographer Pablo López Luz.

One of the most influential photographers active in Latin America today, Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide (born 1942) began studying photography in the 1970s with legendary photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Seeking “to explore and articulate the ways in which a vocable such as 'Mexico' is meaningful only when understood as an intricate combination of histories and practices,” as she puts it, Iturbide has created a nuanced and sensitive documentary record of contemporary Mexico. She lives and works in Mexico City.

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.

Recalling a charcoal she made in 1916, Georgia O'Keeffe later wrote, “I have made this drawing several times―never remembering that I had made it before―and not knowing where the idea came from.” These drawings, and the majority of O’Keeffe’s works in charcoal, watercolor, pastel and graphite, belong to series in which she develops and transforms motifs that lie between observation and abstraction. In the formative years of 1915 to 1918, she made as many works on paper as she would in the next 40 years, producing sequences in watercolor of abstract lines, organic landscapes and nudes, along with charcoal drawings she would group according to the designation “specials.” While her practice turned increasingly toward canvas in subsequent decades, important series on paper reappeared―including charcoal flowers of the 1930s, portraits of the 1940s and aerial views of the 1950s.
Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, this richly illustrated volume highlights the drawings of an artist better known as a painter, and reunites individual sheets with their contextual series to illuminate O’Keeffe’s persistently sequential practice.

Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) first received critical attention when her breakthrough charcoal drawings were exhibited in New York in 1916. Two years later, she moved to the city to work full time on her art. Beginning in 1929, O’Keeffe spent summers in New Mexico, where she would relocate in 1949. The most famous female artist of her age, she thought of herself not as “the best woman painter” but as “one of the best painters.”

Soul Jazz Records' new release Black Fire! New Spirits! Explores deep, radical and spiritual jazz in the USA in the period between 1957-75. In the 1960s and into the 1970s, jazz music in the USA was in an almost constant state of revolution, with the music and lives of African-American artists radicalised by the advent of the civil rights movement, Black Power, and a new spiritual awakening. For over 20 years now Soul Jazz Records have been exploring this rich area of deep and spiritual jazz music with an array of albums such as Freedom, Rhythm and Sound, Universal Sounds of America, New Thing, Soul Jazz Love Strata East and more. Soul Jazz Records have also released a steady stream of reissues of lost and classic deep jazz releases over the years from artists such as Art Ensemble of Chicago, Steve Reid, Pharaoh Sanders and others.

This new album features groundbreaking and revolutionary artists such as Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, The Last Poets and Yusef Lateef as well as many rare and deep lost tracks from lesser known artists such as Creative Artists Ensemble, Granchan Moncur, Lloyd McNeill, Tyrone Washington and others. The album coincides with the recent book 'Black Fire! New Spirits! Images of A Revolution: Radical Jazz in the USA 1960-75', published by Soul Jazz Books.

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.

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

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.

Love Songs brings together series dating from 1952 to 2022 by established and emerging contemporary photographers that explore love, desire and intimacy in all their complex and contradictory ways.

Among the major series reproduced here are Nan Goldin's seminal 1986 photobook The Ballad of Sexual Dependency; Nobuyoshi Araki's Sentimental Journey (1969) and Winter Journey (1989-90), which present the beginning and end of the relationship with his wife Yoko, from their honeymoon to her death; RongRong&inri's tender and poetical Polaroid series Personal Letters (2000); and Leigh Ledare's Double Bind (2010), a complex account of a love triangle between himself, his ex-wife and her new husband. These and the other series in Love Songs together make a portrait of love in all its risk, complexity, sensuality and tenderness.

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.

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.

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.

Ralph Ellison is a leading figure in American literature, hailed for his seminal novel Invisible Man (1952), a breakthrough representation of the American experience and Black everyday life. Lesser known, however, is his lifelong engagement with photography. Photographer is the first book dedicated to Ellison’s extensive work in the medium, which spans the 1930s to the ’90s.
Throughout his life, photography played multiple roles for Ellison: a hobby, a source of income, a note-taking tool and an artistic outlet. During his formative years in New York City in the 1940s, he keenly photographed his surroundings—at times alongside fellow photographer Gordon Parks—with many images serving as field notes for his writing. In the last decades of his life, as he grappled with his much-anticipated second novel, Ellison turned inward, and he studied his private universe at home with a Polaroid camera. At all times his photography reveals an artist steeped in modernist thinking who embraced experimentation to interpret the world around him, particularly Black life in America.

In a 1956 letter to fellow writer Albert Murray, Ellison underscored photography’s importance to his creative process: "You know me, I have to have something between me and reality when I’m dealing with it most intensely." Accompanying the photographs in this book are several essays situating Ellison’s work within his broader career as a writer, as well an excerpt from his 1977 essay "The Little Man at Chehaw Station: The American Artist and His Audience."

Over the course of her 40-year career, acclaimed American photographer Tina Barney has illuminated the inner lives of her subjects, observing the generational repetition of familial traditions and rituals as played out in domestic settings. In the summer of 2020, at the height of Covid and quarantine restrictions, Barney began to sort through her archive, which contained thousands of 35mm negatives taken between 1976 and 1980. Finding these long-forgotten images engendered a rediscovery of some of her most intimate memories as a young artist: “the photographs in this book seem like X-rays of my mind and thoughts through the summers I spent with family and friends on the East Coast and in Sun Valley, Idaho.”

Revisiting her work from decades prior, Barney found herself meditating on who and where she was at the time, as well as why and how she approached specific subjects. What was the impetus to capture these moments? The Beginning encompasses Barney’s nostalgic exploration of her earliest work in the medium, and further reflects a self-examination of this formative period through a critical lens.