This large-format scrapbook, compiling Wendell Castle's press clippings, invitations and ephemera, records both his acclaim and neglect during the golden years of the studio movement.

This special-edition scrapbook offers a unique opportunity for readers to immerse themselves in the world of Wendell Castle, icon of the American studio furniture movement and the twentieth century’s preeminent expert in sculptural woodworking.

Published to accompany an exhibition at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2012, this book focuses on Wendell Castle’s exceptional early works in wood and fiberglass, which transformed the way we look at furniture making.

American studio furniture icon Wendell Castle is one of the most important, influential, and celebrated designers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For more than 50 years, he consistently pioneered new territory in design and beyond. His visionary constructions and distinctive stacked-laminate woodworking process cross the boundaries between sculpture, design, and craft. These highly original works have influenced generations of furniture makers, designers, artists, sculptors, collectors, and design enthusiasts.

Renowned writer Alastair Gordon lucidly tells the exciting story of Castle’s impact and innovations through the defining works of his career. The text is accompanied by hundreds of drawings, press clippings, and never-before-seen images of Castle, his workspace, and process. Beautifully designed by award-winning Pandiscio Green and incorporating materials from Castle’s personal archives, this book is the definitive study of one of the most significant furniture designers working in the world today and one of America’s true cultural treasures.

Haunting and strangely provocative new installations by artist Gary Hill, celebrated worldwide in major museums and galleries, are introduced through a highly readable essay by two of the artist's long-time poet/artist collaborators. In a sort of lineup, seventeen day-workers, full-size, stare at you from the wall, eerily present by the magic of video-projection (Viewer). A solitary Native American stares you in the eyes, while he stares at himself from an adjacent wall-then the projections switch position: the watcher becomes the watched and the watched becomes the watcher (Standing Apart). This third in an ongoing series of the Quasha & Stein dialogue on Gary Hill is beautifully illustrated in full color to give a living sense of the actual installations.

This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Walter De Maria: The 5-7-9 Series at Gagosian, Rome.

By arranging forms according to mathematical sequences, De Maria worked at the intersections of Minimalism, Conceptual art, and Land art—drawing attention to the limits of gallery spaces, prioritizing bodily awareness, and locating the content of an artwork in the viewer. This volume is dedicated to three sculptures by the artist: The 5-7-9 Series (1992/1996), Large Rod Series: Circle/Rectangle 11 (1986), and 13-Sided Open Polygon (1984). Each work represents a major series for De Maria during the last fifty years.

The bilingual (English/Italian) publication includes a two-part essay by Lars Nittve, explanatory texts on each work, a short history of three twenty-seven-part sculptures by De Maria, and a selected exhibition history.

Best known as a founder of concrete poetry, Eugen Gomringer concentrates the visual element of his poems in geometrical structures. In his own words, Gomringer has noted, “Of all poetic structures based upon the word, the constellation is the simplest. It disposes of its groups of words as if they were clusters of stars. The constellation is a system, it is also a playground with definite boundaries. The poet sets it all up. He designs the play-ground as a field of force and suggests its possible workings. The reader accepts it in the spirit of play, then plays with it.”

Since 1992, the Dia Center for the Arts has presented the Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art, an example of Dia's ongoing commitment to cross-disciplinary critical discourse. This fourth volume of collected theoretical and critical essays focuses on Dia's exhibitions from 2001 through 2002, with contributions by Alexander Alberro, Jan Avgikos, Colin Gardner, Dave Hickey, Rosalind Krauss, Miwon Kwon, Ulrich Loock, Richard Shiff and Dirk Snauwaert. These writers analyze the work of artists such as Roni Horn, Alfred Jensen, Bruce Nauman, Max Neuhaus, Panamarenko, Jorge Pardo, Gerhard Richter, Bridget Riley, Diana Thater and Gilberto Zorio. Dia Center for the Arts, 2009 200 pp., illustrations Softcover, ISBN 9780944521793

This artist's book, with color illustrations and accompanying text by associate curator Annetta Massie, is the first publication focused on this intriguing artist. Krisanamis, a Thai artist who has lived in the United States since 1991, taught himself English by reading the newspaper and marking out all the words he knew. This created a patterned page that became the substructure for his painting and collage combinations. In later works, traditional art materials share pictorial space with tactile ready-mades including cast-off papers, tea, and noodles on blankets, sheets, towels, and other unexpected backings.

Urs Fischer’s work explores the genres of classical art history (still lifes, portraits, nudes, landscapes, and interiors) at the intersection with everyday life—in cast sculptures and assemblages, paintings, digital montages, spatial installations, mutating or kinetic objects, and texts. This volume includes fifty-five color illustrations from Urs Fischer’s Beds and Problem Paintings show that was exhibited at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles from February 23–April 7, 2012. This was the artist’s first major solo exhibition with the gallery. Beds and Problem Paintings was designed by the artist, and the images within the book include installation photos from the exhibition as well as photographs taken by the artist.

Work Book by James Wagner is a collaboration with artist Edgar Arceneaux and was published by Nothing Moments Press in the fall of 2007.

This book is a story about three interviews and description of jobs encountered. Reading it brings back the nervousness, the disappointment, the udder weirdness and the hopefulness we have all experiences applying for jobs. James Wagner is an American poet. The poet and critic Joyelle McSweeney wrote that the poems in his first collection, the false sun recordings, form a semi-coherent push-me/pull-you-type dialogue about stability and wholeness, by turns humorous... and serious. In recent works such as The Idiocy and Query/Xombies, Wagner focuses on the searching qualities of human existence, whether through logical argument (and its attendant pitfalls), or through the medium of the search engine, nominally the modern oracle. His third and most recent collection of poetry, Thrown, poems to paintings by Bracha L. Ettinger, was cited by poet Eileen Tabios for its imaginative intensity, ambition and lyrical prowess.

This is a catalog of exhibition, The Three Prophets: Stanley Fisher, Sam Goodman and Boris Lurie. The exhibition will present work by the three founders of the NO!art movement. This will be the first exhibition in Los Angeles to include these three revolutionary artists together, with the majority of this work never having been shown in LA. The NO!art movement was founded in 1959 in New York City by Fisher, Goodman and Lurie as a reaction to the commercialization of the art market that was just picking up steam in relationship to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Looking through the work of these three men, one is also impressed with their ability to express the pain and struggle of their lives. The approximate dates of the movement are 1959-1964. There were many artists involved with NO!, including John Fischer, Al D’Arcangelo, Gloria Graves, Wolf Vostell, Yayoi Kusama, Lil Piccard, Dorothy Gillepsie, Guenter Brus, Ferro, and Isser Aranovici (to name a few).

This is a catalog published alongside exhibition Yasumasa Morimura: Las Meninas Renacen de Noche (Las Meninas Reborn in the Night) at Luhring Augustine in 2014.

Morimura has been working as a conceptual photographer and filmmaker for more than three decades. Through extensive use of props, costumes, makeup, and digital manipulation, the artist masterfully transforms himself into recognizable subjects, often from the Western cultural canon. Morimura has based works on seminal paintings by Frida Kahlo, Vincent Van Gogh, and Édouard Manet, and he also uses images culled from historical materials, mass media, and popular culture in his practice. His reinvention of iconic photographs and art historical masterpieces challenges the viewer’s common associations with the subjects while also commenting on Japan’s complex relationship with and absorption of Western culture.

Introduced by Fred Hoffman, Tom Wesselmann: A Survey, 1959-1995 is an exhibition catalog of the eponymous exhibition. Thomas K. Wesselmann was an American artist associated with the Pop Art movement who worked in painting, collage and sculpture.

In 2004, artist Aleksandra Mir visited the Cincinnati home of collectors Andy and Karen Stillpass in a not so thinly veiled attempt to learn more about their twenty-year old daughter, Zoe. Through an extensive interview and unprecedented access to an archive of old documents, baby pictures and childhood ephemera, Mir crafts a portrait of Zoe through a lens distorted by “parental dreams and desires, the factual creation of their daughter, and the circumstances of her life” all without her concrete presence. The result is an eerie, unadulterated look at a child predisposed to grow into an image perhaps not completely her own.

The artist Thomas Schütte, born 1954 in Oldenburg and Gerhard Richter’s student at the Dusseldorf Art Academy from 1973 to 1981, is a moralist who uses his work to posit questions and trigger uncertainty. At the same time, however, he is also a romantic and a melancholiac who, with black humor and skepticism, creates a model of the world. In this publication, which goes back to the three-part, 18-month-long show at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, in chronological sequence the works of the last two decades are documented. “Scenewright” the first installation In New York from September 1998 to January 1999, showed, among other things, the 1977 installation Grosse Mauer (large wall), as well as the work groups of the 80s that thematized views of public buildings and imaginary places, as well as theater stage sets. “Gloria in Memoria” from February to June 1999 studied the theme of the monument and the anti-hero (Mohr’s Life, 1988) from the drawings to the installation. The third exhibition “In Medias Res” from September 1999 to June 2000 concentrated on the monumental sculptures of steel – female figures and self-portraits – and of ceramic: among others, oversized urns, monumental portraits of the gallerist Konrad Fischer, nine life-size clay figures in colorful robes Die Fremden (The Strangers) from 1992.

The understated design of this book allows the quiet elegance of Wes Mills’ drawings to captivate viewers. High quality reproductions of forty-eight drawings made between 1994 and 2003 float in the center of muted white pages. The titles and dates of each piece, printed in a warm transparent gray, manage to both pick up some of the delicate tonalities in the drawings and to disappear altogether. A complete index of the drawings is included at the back and essays by Hipólito Rafael Chacón and Ann Wilson Lloyd discuss the work’s aesthetic and art historical significance. Mills’ marks require a fine sustained attention, the kind of attention that this exquisitely made monograph can’t help but cultivate in a reader.

The photographs featured in Viscidity by Boris Mikhailov were completed and sequenced in Kharkov in 1982 but only now published as a book. Reproduced at their original scale, we have added translations from the Russian to English. In addition, the book features “I was walking through a field,” an original bilingual essay by Mikhailov illuminating the history of the work and written specially for this edition.

One of three early and critical image-text works, Viscidity was completed after Horizontal Pictures and Vertical Calendars (1978-1980) and shortly before Unfinished Dissertation (1984). As Mikhailov states: “At first the texts tautologically repeated what was visible in the image, as though they were simply drawing attention to the photograph (the first book)… gradually the texts changed and became poetic and deeper (the second book)… then I added quotations in addition to my own reflections on photography (the third book).”

Viscidity was produced during a time of “deep political stagnation. Nothing is happening — nothing at all is interesting … There was a kind of certainty that society was at the threshold of something unknown, something everyone was anticipating. Many people felt this way.”

Mikhailov is best known for provocative self-portraits and politically charged color photographs, from the earliest works in Red Series (1968–75) to the gut wrenching yet seductive images of the homeless in the Soviet Union, published in Case Studies (Scalo, 1999). A prolific and experimental artist, Mikhailov’s work rests naturally beside the most respected conceptual artists of his generation. Photographs from Viscidity have been exhibited widely throughout his career, most importantly in 2004 in the critically acclaimed exhibition and accompanying catalogue at the Serralves Museum in Portugal by Margarita and Victor Tupitsyn, Verbal Photography: Ilya Kabakov and Boris Mikhailov and the Moscow Archive of New Art.

Artists have always used their imaginations to see beyond visible matter—to posit other physics, other energies, new ways of conceiving the visible and new models for art but the past century has seen an explosion of such investigations. In the fashion of a Wunderkammer, The Quick and the Dead takes stock of the 1960s and 70s legacy of experimental, or research art by pioneers like George Brecht, who posited objects as motionless events and asked us to consider an art verging on the non-existent, dissolving into other dimensions, and Lygia Clark, whose foldable sculptures sought to dissolve the boundary between inside and outside, each a static moment within the cosmological dynamics from which we came and to which we are going.

In a series of encounters with art made strange by its expansions, contractions, inversions and implosions in time and space, The Quick and the Dead surveys more than 80 works by a global, multigenerational group of 50 artists, scientists and musicians — among them James Lee Byars, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Harold Edgerton, Ceal Floyer, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Pierre Huyghe, The Institute for Figuring, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Stephen Kaltenbach, On Kawara, Christine Kozlov, David Lamelas, Louise Lawler, Paul Etienne Lincoln, Mark Manders, Kris Martin, Steve McQueen, Helen Mirra, Catherine Murphy, Bruce Nauman, Rivane Neuenschwander, Claes Oldenburg, Roman Ondák, Adrian Piper, Roman Signer and Shomei Tomatsu, among many others. Includes reprints of texts by diverse luminaries such as John McPhee, Jalal Toufic, Oliver Sacks, Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson.

Within the pages of their collaborative “Gay Love Comix,” Carlo Quispe, Mike Diana, and Shane Uht let their subconscious desires and fantasies roam freely, gleefully blurring distinctions between pleasure and pain, the public and the private, the sacred and the profane. Quickly-executed ink drawings, in which draftsmanship is sacrificed for rawness and spontaneity, give visual manifestation to situations rarely seen in comics of any kind: lovers arguing over their addictions and engaging in explicit sex acts involving razor blades, an “electric eel robot”, and - perhaps most shockingly - genuine and candidly-expressed affection for one another.

Between 1969 and 1973, Vito Acconci's creative output was focused on body pieces and performances, many of them seminal works now firmly lodged in the art historical canon of the time. Whether he was transforming space by masturbating under a platform extension of the gallery floor or transforming the body by tucking his genitals between his legs, Acconci promoted a radical, corporeal method of working with the human presence that has remained relevant in these less performative times. This publication traces the development of Acconci's early work through his own writings and documentations from that time. Rather than a critical study, it offers invaluable primary source materials: For each of the approximately 200 performances/works included, Acconci drafted meticulous notes, mapping out his ideas and describing the specifications of each piece. Many of the artist's works were ephemeral performances and actions, and these primary source materials are now the only extant artifacts from the work. Thus the book's contents come directly from Acconci's personal archives, and include his notes and documentations, plus photographs, where available. An introduction by Gregory Volk provides historical context and addresses the issues of body art and performance still relevant today.

Taking Freud's idea of the Uncanny as a starting point, artist Mike Kelley plays Sunday curator and presents work by Jasper Johns, Paul McCarthy, Jeff Koons, Tony Oursler, and others (reprinted from a 1993 catalogue), plus photos of chewing gum wrappers, postcards, record covers, and toys, all connected to ideas of youth and the Uncanny.

Mike Kelley, one of the most controversial, prolific and influential figures in contemporary art, was born in 1954 in Detroit, Michigan, and earned a Bachelors degree from the University of Michigan and a Masters from California Institute of the Arts. His work, often wickedly humorous and drawing on both high art and the vernacular with distinctively American iconography, ranges across media such as drawing, painting, sculpture, music, performance, writing and video projects, the last often in collaboration with artists such as Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon and Tony Oursler. In 1993, The Whitney Museum of American Art held a major retrospective of his work. He lives in Los Angeles, and is a member of the graduate faculty at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena.

The first comprehensive survey of Moffett's investigations into art history, paint, and form, Donald Moffett: The Extravagant Vein provides viewers with insight into the artist's practice over the past twenty years. As a painter, Moffett extends the traditional two-dimensional frame, converting flat planes into highly textured reliefs in oil painting, or into intricate illuminations through video projection onto canvas. The subject matter of his paintings–from landscape and nature to politics and history–is poetic, provocative, and even at times humorous. Moffett has remained engaged with issues surrounding the presence of gays in historical and contemporary culture that resonate today, as well as more timeless questions of love, loss, alienation, and death. Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2011 10.6 x 8.6 inches, 224 pp., illustrations Hardcover, ISBN 0847837270

Documenting an exhibition at Dia by Tracey Moffatt, Free-Falling, October 9, 1997–June 14, 1998. Contents: Preface by Michael Govan; Only Angels Have Wings by Isaac Julien with Mark Nash; A Photo-Filmic Odyssey by Lynne Cooke; and Dust by Sam Shepard.

Free-falling includes two newly commissioned works: a suite of twenty-five photographs called Up in the Sky (1996) and a video installation, Moffatt's first in this medium. The subject of this video piece is a surfer, a figure close to the heart of Australia's contemporary self-image. By contrast, Up in the Sky, which was shot near Broken Hill in the Outback, draws on imagery and a landscape that have long been central to the Australian mythos. In addition, the exhibition will include Guapa (Goodlooking), a series of twelve monochrome photographs loosely based on the theme of the roller derby, which Moffatt made in 1995 while on a residency at ArtPace in San Antonio, and Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1990), her early but prophetic short film. Guapa explores the intersection of violence with eroticism as sanctioned under the umbrella of sport. Silhouetted against neutral backdrops, the carefully choreographed female contestants create formally compelling images recalling at times sculptural groupings from the art of the past: artifice is as intrinsic to this sport as it is to Moffatt's aesthetic.

Published in 2001 on the occasion of the exhibition "Wim Delvoye: Cloaca", organized by Dan Cameron and presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Januyar 24 - April 14, 2002. Essays by Georges Bataille, Dan Cameron, Salvador Dalí, Milan Kundera, Domique Laporte, Gerardo Mosquera, Dieter Roelstraete, Peter Sloterdijk and Peter Bexte.

“Many people today, despite the evidence, will not believe―don't want to believe―that such atrocities happened in America not so very long ago. These photographs bear witness to . . . an American holocaust."

–John Lewis, US Congressman

The Tuskegee Institute records the lynching of 3,436 Black Americans between 1882 and 1950. Many times, a photographer was present to capture these events. Without Sanctuary preserves these harrowing, death-marked depictions, saving them so that we may recognize the terrorism unleashed on America’s African American community. Editor James Allen, an American antique collector, includes nearly 100 images of lynchings in America from his own collection, including battleground cases such as the 1911 murders of Laura and Lawrence Nelson in Okemah, Oklahoma the lynching of Rubin Stacy in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1935, and the infamous 1915 execution of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank in Marietta, Georgia. These images are accompanied by Allen’s own notes, as well as texts from the late US congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis, the late slavery and Reconstruction historian Leon Litwack, and writer and theater critic Hilton Als, professor at University of California in Berkeley and Columbia University. Now in its 17th printing, Without Sanctuary remains a singular testament to the camera’s ability to make us remember what we often choose to forget.

James Allen (born 1954) is an American collector best known for his vast collection of photographs of lynchings in America. Some of his collected items are now located in the Smithsonian and the High Museum of Art.

Leon Litwack (1929–2021) was a professor of American History at the University of California in Berkeley from 1964 to 2007. He specialized in the Reconstruction Era and the aftermath of slavery in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His 1979 book Been in the Storm So Long won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Francis Parkman Prize and the National Book Award.

Hilton Als (born 1960) is a writer and theater critic. He holds professorial positions at the University of California in Berkeley and Columbia University, and serves as a staff writer and theater critic for the New Yorker. In 2017 he won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Als has also curated several group art exhibitions including Forces in Nature at Victoria Miro Gallery and Alice Neel: Uptown at David Zwirner Gallery.

John Lewis (1940–2020) became involved in the Civil Rights movement when he was still a teenager. He was introduced to both Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., and participated in the 1960 Nashville sit-ins as well as the 1961 Freedom Rides. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1963 to 1966, he was one of the “Big Six” civil rights leaders who coordinated the March on Washington. He represented Georgia’s 5th District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1987 until his death in 2020.

Lexicon is a facsimile cloth edition of an antiquarian Latin-Greek dictionary which the internationally celebrated South African artist William Kentridge (born 1954) has embellished with black ink drawings of what might seem at first to be animal silhouettes. In reproducing the work (which is uncollected elsewhere), this beautifully designed artist's book mischievously pits the model of the flipbook against the fragility of the antiquarian original, and flipping its pages animates Kentridge's lively, spiky drawings into a continuously morphing image that transforms from a cat to a coffee pot over the course of the book's 160 pages. This image is based on a disintegrating sculpture that reflects the artist's interest in the instability of objecthood. Lexiconis accompanied by a DVD containing a short film in which Kentridge flips the pages himself.

In 2017, curator and art historian Anita N. Bateman and architect and professor Emanuel Admassu initiated research on the traditional positioning and mispositioning of the arts across the African continent. Where Is Africa has been an extended set of exchanges with contemporary artists, curators, designers, and academics who are actively engaged in representing the continent—both within and outside its geographic boundaries. By examining artist collectives, new currents in art history and the rise of contemporary art festivals in and about Africa from the past 10 years, the project unpacks the imperialist foundations of cultural institutions and their anthropological fascination with African objects, people, and places.

The interviews in Where Is Africa examine African and African-diasporic identities and spaces through questions of positionality in relation to specific disciplinary, cultural, and political contexts. The texts address Afro-diasporic aesthetic practices and the curatorial, museological, and artistic matrices that confront epistemologies of dominance and exclusion. The commissioned essays and images offer concise methodologies that expand or complicate issues addressed by the interviewees.

Where Is Africa is a conceptual project that accompanies a conceptual place, driven by the desire to dislodge Africa from categorical fixity and the representational logics of nation-states. Africa can never be fully enclosed by the residue of colonial violence or the totalitarian gaze of neoliberalism; instead, it creates infinite malleability, where place and concept are untethered from each other.

Carroll Dunham (b. 1949, New Haven, CT) has eschewed the conventions of abstract and figurative painting, establishing a trademark style and vast body of work that are both deeply original and enormously influential. His early works, painted on wood veneer, used the existing textures of the knotted grain to create elaborate compositions recalling both fantastic organic forms and the popular imagery of cartoons. Mining the unconscious and variously pursuing psychologically charged themes, these psychedelic depictions evolved over the years from primordial amoeba-like forms to quasi-figurative biomorphisms. A formalist by nature, Dunham’s paintings and drawings are studies in control—his line has become a protagonist in itself—nothing is accidental, whether executed in gentle pencil shading, audacious crayon scribble, or painterly ink and gouache.

This is an exhibition catalog of the eponymous exhibition at Galerie Barbara Farber at Amsterdam in 1992. Antony Scherman (August 13, 1950 – February 28, 2023) was a Canadian painter. He was known for his use of encaustic and portraiture to depict events of historical, cultural and popular significance.

The Great Expectation by Rachel Kushner is a collaboration with artist Colin Roberts and was published by Nothing Moments Press in the fall of 2007. This is a collection of stories that investigate all aspects of exploration, the search for grants, travel and the encounter of land unknown.

Rachel Kushner is an American writer, known for her novels Telex from Cuba (2008), The Flamethrowers (2013), and The Mars Room. After completing her MFA, Kushner lived in New York City for eight years, where she was an editor at Grand Street and BOMB. She has written widely on contemporary art, including numerous features in Artforum.

In the late eighties, Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist skyrocketed to international fame with her intriguingly cryptic and provocative videos. Since then, she has received numerous awards for her works—suggestive mixtures of visual and musical elements, overlapping images, acceleration and deceleration, and frequently psychedelic colorful effects—such as the Premio 2000 at the Venice Biennale.

Presenting Rist’s entire oeuvre from 1986 to the present, this monograph publishes many works for the first time. Intriguing essays shed light on central aspects of her work, which the artist herself describes in an extensive interview.

The Spectacular of Vernacular addresses the role of vernacular forms in the work of 26 artists who utilize craft, folklore and roadside kitsch to explore the role of culturally specific iconography in the increasingly global world of art. Drawing inspiration from such sources as local architecture, amateur photographs and state fair banners, their work runs the spectrum from the sleek to the handcrafted. Inspired by Mike Kelley's observation that the mass culture of today is the folk art of tomorrow, these artists embrace the totems and neon signs of roadside America. Thus, alongside the visibly handcrafted works of Matthew Day Jackson and Dario Robleto we find the dense and day-glo paintings of Lari Pittman, the glittering trophy heads of Marc Swanson and the urban relics of Rachel Harrison. These works and others suggest a long road trip through the emblems and eyesores of tourist destinations and outmoded hotels. The photography component includes work by William Eggleston, whose color-saturated images gravitate toward the tawdry palette of faded billboards and road signs.

This fully-illustrated catalogue includes an essay by exhibition curator Darsie Alexander exploring artists' interest in the vernacular as a means to address aspects of folk ritual, amateur craft and sense of place in their work; a reprint of John Brinckerhoff Jackson's Vernacular from his seminal 1984 reader Discovering the Vernacular Landscape; and a reflection by artist and curator Andy Sturdevant on the evolution of roadside vernacular, and attendant histories of heartland America where it is so abundant. Also included is a reading list gathered from a cross section of art criticism and cultural studies.

Since 2001, Swedish-born artist Nathalie Djurberg (born 1978) has honed a distinctive style of video animation. Set to music and sound effects by her collaborator Hans Berg, Djurberg's handcrafted cinematic tales explore revenge, lust, submission, gluttony and other primal emotions through the conventionally innocent technique of “Claymation,” which in her hands becomes a medium for nightmarish yet wry allegories of human behavior and social taboo. Increasingly, Djurberg's practice has blurred the cinematic and the sculptural in environments that integrate moving images and related set pieces. This publication accompanies the artist's largest presentation in an American museum to date. The catalogue weaves documentation of her sculptures and stills from her recent films with texts (both original and found) that trace the historical, scientific and literary threads running through her practice.

This catalog was published as a companion to his 2005 Luhring Augustine exhibition, Yasumasa Morimura: Los Nuevos Capricios. It details a group of photographs based on the artwork of the Spanish Master Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes.

Co-published with Second Aeon Publications, Typewriter Poems gathers together twenty-two practitioners of the art of the typewriter poem–which relies on the limitations imposed by the machine to produce its form–in this slim volume of experimental letters. Featuring the work of British poets Thomas A. Clark, Bob Cobbing, Michael Gibbs, and many others.

Tom Friedman (b. 1965, Saint Louis, MO) makes work that explores ideas of perception, logic, and possibility. His often painstakingly rendered sculptures and works on paper inhabit the grey areas between the ordinary and the monstrous, the infinitesimal and the infinite, the rational and the uncanny. His work is deceptive, its handmade intricacy masked by a seemingly mass-produced or prefabricated appearance. Luhring Augustine 2012 11.25 x 9.75 inches, 272 pages, illustrations Hardcover, ISBN 978-0-9771150-6-8

Of Tom Slaughter, Henry Geldzahler, the first curator of twentieth-century art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, commented: “The quality of freshness, the familiar world re-seen, from the water towers of New York City to the rural pleasures of boating, is the most immediately arresting aspect of Tom Slaughter’s art...Bold bright colors swiftly laid down echo with resonances: Léger and Stuart Davis, Raoul Dufy and Roy Lichtenstein.” Slaughter’s work, with its seemingly effortless whimsy rendered with a strong sense of line, color, and rhythm, has also been compared to Matisse. His Pop-inflected drawings, prints, paintings, and illustrations convey his love of life as he relentlessly explored the complexities of the urban scene or the simple pleasures of boating. The Artist Book Foundation is pleased to announce the publication of Tom Slaughter, an extensive monograph of the artist’s enormous body of work that celebrates his enduring optimism, personal and artistic honesty, and charming brashness in a landscape of pure joy.

Known for his large scale paintings and photographs, renowned artist Chuck Close interviews 27 artists whose portraits he has painted over the years. This volume brings together the voices of three generations of American artists, including conversations between Close and artists Nancy Graves, Richard Serra, Philip Glass, Joe Zucker, Robert Israel, Leslie Close, Klaus Kertess, Mark Greenwold, Georgia Close, Arne Glimcher, Lucas Samaras, Alex Katz, Cindy Sherman, Elizabeth Murray, Judy Pfaff, Eric Fischl, April Gornik, William Wegman, Janet Fish, John Chamberlain, Richard Artschwager, Joel Shapiro, Kiki Smith, Roy Lichtenstein, Dorothea Rockburne, Lorna Simpson, Paul Cadmus.

In The Institute for Other Intelligences, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian brings speculative fiction and media studies to bear on an imagined future where machine intelligences convene annually for curriculum on algorithmic equity. The book presents a transcript from one of these conferences in which a community of "AI agents" gather at a school for oppositional automata to deliver lectures on the human biases and omissions encoded in their training data. The resulting manuscript, published on the occasion of the Institute's millennial anniversary, revisits sociotechnical systems from its founding in the 21st century. Drawing on feminist, queer, and critical media scholarship, the trainings collected in the book aim to optimize the operations of future generations of intelligent machines toward just outcomes. Hakopian uses these speculative exchanges to invite the reader to consider how critical approaches to nonhuman intelligence might reroute our current path toward destructive technofutures and allow us to conceive of another way forward.

Edited by Ana Iwataki and Anuradha Vikram for X Topics, The Institute for Other Intelligences includes an introduction by Vikram and diagrammatic illustrations by Fernando Diaz, a scientist whose work focuses on the quantitative evaluation and algorithmic design of information access systems.

Luke Abiol's project Winters Berlin is a series of large format photographs made over a period of seven years while living in Germany. These photographs look into the history that saturates Berlin's structures and streets.

Abiol is particularly interested in the layers of the city that - when peeled away - introduce the viewer to countless traces of Berlin's inhabitants. Stories are derived from space and histories are formed.

Luke Abiol was born in San Francisco, came of age in New York, started a family in Berlin and now finds himself back in San Francisco. Luke observes the traces that industry, war, nature and time have left upon our urban spaces–then leaves his own traces to be read by others.

Edited by Phil Mariani and Brian Wallis, Wedge was a seminal periodical combining artists’ projects and critical and theoretical writings that ran during the early to mid 1980’s. Essays on the importance of sexuality in women’s lives today and througout history. Gender roles are examined and in the spirit of the issue’s theme “re/positions” these roles.

Introducing English-speaking readers to one of the most unusual and original voices in contemporary French culture, The Stampographer traverses the fantastic, anarchic imagination of Parisian artist Vincent Sardon, whose dark, combative sense of humor is infused with Dadaist subversion and Pataphysical play. Using rubber stamps he designs and manufactures himself, Sardon commandeers a medium often associated with petty and idiotic displays of bureaucratic power, then uses those stamps not to assert authority, but to refuse it. He scours the Parisian landscape as well as the world at large, skewering the power-hungry and the pretentious, reveling in the vulgar and profane. In The Stampographer, there are insults in multiple languages, strange Christmas ornaments, and a miniature Kamasutra. Sardon also wields the stamp as satirical device, deconstructing Warhol portraits into primary colors, turning ink blots into Pollock paint drips, and clarifying just what Yves Klein did with women’s bodies. Yet Sardon’s razor-sharp wit is tinged with the irony of his exquisite sense of beauty. The stamps are rarely static—they have an animating magic, whether boxers are punching faces out of place or dragonflies seemingly hover over the page. Sardon’s work is provocative in its subject matter as well as in its process and dissemination: he not only stands defiantly outside the art world’s modes of commerce but his artworks (the rubber stamps themselves) are actually the means with which anyone can make a work of their own. Vincent Sardon is a radically independent artist in Paris who makes and sells his work in a little shop and studio near the Père Lachaise cemetery in the eleventh arrondissment. He began his career as political cartoonist for the left-wing Libération then, disillusioned, he set out on his own to make rubber stamps, of which he’s now made hundreds. He has an ardent cult following in France following the illustrious comic book press L’Association publication of Le Tampographe, a four-year journal narrating his artistic life and work, which is now in its third printing.

In 1972, artist Garth Evans welcomed the opportunity to create a public sculpture in Cardiff, Wales, as part of the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation’s City Sculpture Project. Concerned that the increasing demand for his work served only to reinforce the political, social, and economic status quos, Evans hoped to unsettle this dynamic by making a sculpture that would connect with an audience outside of the art world. The morning after the installation of his sculpture, Evans recorded the responses of passersby. The Beckettian transcript of the Cardiff interviews is presented here, framed by Evans’s introduction and reflection. Art historian Jon Wood contextualizes The Cardiff Tapes within contemporaneous debates about sculpture and public space. These writings explore ideas about the social responsibilities of art and artists and make a cogent argument for the value of “difficulty” in sculpture.

Garth Evans (b. 1934, Manchester, UK) has exhibited widely across the UK and United States since the 1960s. He has received numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, the British Council Exhibitions Abroad Grant, and residencies at Yaddo and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation. In 2013, artist Richard Deacon curated the survey exhibition Garth Evans at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, which coincided with the release of Garth Evans: Sculpture Beneath the Skin, edited by Ann Compton (Philip Wilson Publishers, 2013), a major publication reviewing his career to date. His work is represented in major public and private collections, including Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the British Museum. Evans currently lives and works in northeastern Connecticut and teaches in New York, where he is head of sculpture at the New York Studio School.

Jon Wood is research curator at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. In 2007, he compiled and edited The Modern Sculpture Reader, an anthology of twentieth-century writings on sculpture, with Alex Potts and David Hulks. He is presently compiling a collection of essays, in collaboration with Ian Christie, looking at the changing relationship between sculpture and film and writing a book called Sculpture Now, for Tate Publishing.

New York-based artist Áda Ruilova's videos combine classical cinematic devices with a distinctively low-tech sensibility, quick cuts and rhythmic, jarring soundtracks to create works that exist in the space between sound and image. Drawing equally from B-movie aesthetics and classic montage cinema, Ruilova creates dark, moody narratives that ruminate on psychology and memory. Ruilova is part of a generation of artists who employ media in innovative ways with a do-it-yourself aesthetic, often drawing upon contexts–from cinema to music to popular culture–that exist outside the art world. This catalogue was published in conjunction with the Aspen Art Museum's 2008 exhibition, which surveyed work Ruilova made since 1999; it was her first solo museum presentation. The catalogue contains several essays, along with color stills and written descriptions of each video.

”There are eight million stories in the naked city,” says the narrator in Jules Dassin’s 1948 noir classic Naked City. This sense of the bustling American metropolis as a vast reservoir of untapped stories has moved numerous photographers to surf the urban sprawl with an open-ended attention to chance encounters and unexpected visual serendipities. After watching the documentary film A Fire in the East: A Portrait of Robert Frank in the early 1990s, Los Angeles–based photographer Chrissy Piper wrote a fan letter to Frank, and traveled to New York to meet him. Frank’s work and their eventual friendship inspired Piper to continue shooting on the street. The pictures gathered in this book were taken mostly on the streets of New York City, but also in other locales across America, during various road trips with friends.

Published by Cultureel Ambassadeur van Vlaanderen, 1999. Catalogue documenting Wim Delvoye's various artistic practices involving pigs, with a section devoted to his tatooing of pigs and pig skins and another on his faux-marble works using a variety of cold cuts. Essays by Luis Camnitzer, Barbara Braun, and Stijn Huijts. Hardcover; 117 pages; 125 color plates; 8 5/8 x 11 1/4 inches.

This publication departs from three video works by the artist Hu Wei, exploring the possibilities of devising new scripts within the manifold connections between materials for creative works, images, and texts. The first part of the publication transcribes and recompiles the narrations in his videos into three sets of juxtaposed scripts. Each of these textual fragments showcases an “anatomical section of an era” from disparate geopolitical contexts: a family letter from Sabah, a set of Rashomonian testimony, and an anecdote about the anonymous. The second part is a notebook-like atlas that unfolds following the clues of three keywords: “Fabrication,” “Anonymity,” and “Boundary.” Within this section, different types of images and texts, including factual materials, embodied research and survey records, as well as fabricated documents, interlace with each other. They serve as an interrogation, extension, reconstruction, and reassemblage of three muted histories or events.

This book documents an exhibition in three parts, extending from Fall 2016 to Spring 2017 in which the artist used bronze wool to burnish the walls of Karma’s Amagansett, Long Island space, creating ethereal clouds and their shadows in the gallery. Includes essays by the architect Jack Self; the composer Roberto Toscano, and the metallurgist Brad Wearstler.

Catalogue published jointly by Sperone Westwater and Manchester City Galleries on the occasion of the exhibition “Wim Delvoye: Gothic Works,” presented at Sperone Westwater, New York, 13 September – 26 October 2002. Essays by Edwin Carels, Birgit Sonna, Catherine Francblin and Philip Hoare. Hardcover; 152 pages; full color plates; 11 4.5 x 9 inches.v

An exploration of queer sexuality, technology, mental illness and history. The story takes place in a highly stylized surreal world and follows the exploits of two young queer characters navigating feelings of alienation and gender confusion. The characters experience existential dread during anonymous Grindr hookups, work menial jobs, have ketamine fueled disassociations, discuss dysphoria in desolate parking lots, get harassed on their way to the leather bar and search for intimacy within the self-absorbed echo chamber of a social media saturated world.

Published on the occasion of the Focus Series exhibition Todo Cambia, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, October 5, 1997 – February 8, 1998.

Commissioned from the young Cuban artist Kcho, this large-scale installation (the title of which translates as "Everything Changes") had two components: a grouping of sculptures, including a barrel, a raft, an oar, a kayak, a surfboard and a small boat, resting on small tables formerly used in studio art classes at the Superior Institute of the Arts in Havana, and a room-size boat constructed from bookshelves found in open-air book markets throughout Havana, with shelves filled by the types of books that Cuban citizens read.

The Signing is a facsimile reproduction of the gallery sign-in book from the artist’s 2007 exhibition Abstraction at Luhring Augustine. Hardbound in black cloth to resemble the sketchbook on which is based, the book consists of the signatures and notes left by visitors both famous and unknown. This deluxe edition includes a replicated handwritten note to Smith by Luhring Augustine’s associate director Sophie Aschauer.

A catalog produced for the 2008 exhibition Animals by Tom Sachs. In ANIMALS, Sachs continues to explore his signature appropriation of popular consumer objects, iconography, and signage. Logos, such as Spyderco, Bösendorfer, and Raytheon, along with images of the U.S. dollar bill, are boldly inserted into his paintings and sculptures. In Assaulting (2007), a punitive warning is transformed into a formal composition. Also on view are a number of white foamcore 'paintings' reconstituted from smashed models of the popular animated characters Hello Kitty, Miffy, and My Melody. In discussing his work ethic with critic, Germano Celant, Sachs says: '…I often build things in the 'wrong' way. […] There is an honesty and a soulfulness to doing it yourself.' Design by Tom Sachs with glossary by Mark van de Walle. Sperone Westwater, 2008

This catalog features black and white photographs by Wynn Bullock from 1940 to 1973. Bullock's career showed a deep connection with nature in and around the Central Coast of California. His photographs demonstrate a deep understanding of light, not only as a source of illumination, but also as a symbol of the energy of life. This catalogue includes an essay by Keith F. Davis.

In 1970, galvanized in part by the musical experiments of John Cage, Gavin Bryars, and Cornelius Cardew, students at Portsmouth College of Art formed their own symphony orchestra. Christened the Portsmouth Sinfonia, the primary requirement for membership specified that all players, regardless of skill, experience, or musicianship, be unfamiliar with their chosen instruments. This restriction, coupled with the decision to play “only the familiar bits” of classical music, challenged the Sinfonia’s audience to reconsider the familiar, as the ensemble haplessly butchered the classics at venues ranging from avant-garde music festivals to the Royal Albert Hall. By the end of the decade, after three LPs of their anarchic renditions of classical and rock music and a revolving cast of over one hundred musicians—including Brian Eno and Michael Nyman—the Sinfonia would cease performing.

The World’s Worst: A Guide to the Portsmouth Sinfonia, the first book devoted to the ensemble, examines the founding tenets, organizing principles, and collective memories of the Sinfonia, whose reputation as “the world’s worst orchestra” underplays its unique accomplishment as a populist avant-garde project. While seemingly a niche musical anecdote, the story of the Portsmouth Sinfonia engenders wide-ranging conversations that touch upon the legacy of interdisciplinary art pedagogy, the power of popular music, the investment necessary in order to work and learn together, and the effects of destabilizing canonization. The unorthodox journey of the orchestra unfolds here through interviews with original members and their publicist/manager, photographs, previously uncollected archival material including ephemera and internal documents, an essay by co-editor, Christopher M. Reeves, a foreword by Gavin Bryars, and more.

"Sarfati’s work is defined through an opposition to the editorial urge to fix narratives to her subjects. Her images create a loose, layered and intensely rich visual project triggering emotions and thoughts that move well beyond her ostensible subjects. Sarfati’s importance in today’s debates about the role and visual languages of socially engaged photography also rests in her resistance to fully objectify the subjects that compel her to make imagery. The American Series represents one of those rare experiences for photographers where the photographs almost—just—happened. Sarfati did not overly choreograph her subjects; she also created the psychological space for them, in turn, to act upon her and to act up—or down—for the camera. This perhaps accounts for Sarfati’s success in re-presenting American young people as, simply, individually and universally the carriers of states of minds." — Clare Grafik, Photographers Gallery, London

Text by Olga Medvedkova