Blake Rayne’s paintings stem from the generative duplicity of words like Script, Folder, Application, Dissolve and Screen. These operative terms situate the work between forms of linguistic description and the history of reflexive material practices in art. He begins from an orientation that considers the terms “painter” and “painting” as fictions. They have no stable material definition, but rather are shaped by evolving social, institutional and physical relations. Rayne’s mode of abstract painting is irrevocably marked by Conceptual art. Here, context is constitutive. Conceived as a work, this monograph covers the last ten years of the artist’s output and culminates in his first survey exhibition at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, Texas.

Shifting sequences of varying material treatments guide us through the linguistic, institutional and physical relations that have shaped Rayne’s painting practice. The book is united under the structuring sign of cinema, with each section existing like a shot in a film, if you will, that is necessarily informed by and in dialogue with those that come before and after it:

• an opening sequence of particular series and individual paintings, moving through different operative terms, such as Crumple, Cut or Fold, that produce a dialectic between word and painterly gesture;

• an accounting of specific exhibitions and works through a series of pamphlets;

• an autonomous magazine dedicated to Rayne’s Almanac (2013), itself a hard cover, hand-bound book of eight felt double page spreads with an ‘a’ line cut that collapses under its own weight;

• documentation of Rayne’s Blaffer Art Museum exhibition produced by a group of twenty-nine area high school students;

• a closing sequence of installation views from the survey show.

The main essays by John Kelsey and Jaleh Mansoor respectively situate Rayne’s art within the urban cultural circumstances of New York during the last decade, and his specific position as a painter in relation to other painters of his generation, such as Cheyney Thompson. Mansoor further skillfully places the artist in a wider historical context. Shorter texts by gallerist David Lewis, artists Laura Owens and Sean Paul, as well as curator Javier Sánchez Martínez, illuminate other aspects of Rayne’s work, and weave together a range of ideas and tones, from the history of corporate design to the rise of automation; from a lighthearted intervention about “The Rule of Blake” to a museum catalogue introduction.

An insider's history of the "Beat" movement and its personalities through the personal photographs of one of its principle figures. Pointing his camera randomly at the counterculture around him, the poet created a unique visual record of his friends and companions covering a period of almost forty years. His subjects include Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Robert Frank, Paul Bowles, Timothy Leary, and dozens of other writers, painters, friends, as well as several revealing self-portraits. Beneath each photograph are Ginsberg's handwritten reminiscences of the circumstances, people, and places relating to the photograph.

"It kills me to look at my old photographs of myself and my friends. We were such beautiful, sexy kids but we always felt bad because we thought we were ugly at the time. It was because we were such outcasts in high school and so unpopular. We believed what other people said. If any one of us could have seen how attractive we really were we might have made something better of our lives. I'm the only guy that I know who wanted to run away to be a prostitute." — Mark Morrisroe

A book that accompanied an exhibition of the same name at Queens Museum (June 26-November 6, 2005) that offers a critical history of their and other artists' garden work from the 1940s to the present, and verdant examples in categories including paradise; the memorial; private and public gardens; and ecologies, their alternatives and Schreber gardens.

Beginning in 1937, the three painters, Cadmus, French, and French, vacationed together in Provincetown and Fire Island. With a shared camera, they photographed themselves and their friends against a background of vast, empty beaches. Driftwood, umbrellas, white sheets and old fishing nets were arranged with models, to form oddly surreal compositions. Many such arrangements were later adapted for use in the artists' paintings, several examples of which are also reproduced here. "These small photographs are revealing in their beautiful compositions, and provide insights as to how these painters interpreted their visual richness for their painting.”

"By about 1950, forward-looking New York painting was seen as synonymous with abstraction, especially charged, gestural Abstract Expressionism. But there was also a strong group of dissenters: artists, all born in the 1920s and many of them students of Hans Hofmann, who never lost their enthusiasm for recognizable imagery, without rejecting Abstract Expressionism’s love of malleable oil paint. Although most of them began as abstract artists, they all evolved into painters working from observation, using a fluid, urgent touch to translate their perceptions into eloquent, highly individualized visual languages, almost always informed by the hand; that is, unlike the Color Field and Minimalist artists, these artists remained, for the most part, “painterly” painters. In light of their important contributions to twentieth-century American art, The Artist Book Foundation presents the catalogue for the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center's eponymous 2020 exhibition, Figuration Never Died: New York Painterly Painting, 1950–1970.

Ryan McGinley has selected the best photographs from his first decade of work for this beautifully realized volume. McGinley makes large-scale color photographs of his friends, a group that forms part of New York’s Lower East Side youth culture. He uses photography to break down barriers between public and private spheres of activity. His subjects are willing collaborators: drawn from skateboard, music, and graffiti subcultures, they perform for the camera and expose themselves with a frank self-awareness that is distinctly contemporary. McGinley’s newest work signals a departure from the urban youth culture images for which he is best known; he has been working in natural settings outside New York City, creating specific situations for his subjects to lose themselves in the moment. McGinley embraces nature as a site of freedom and captures a sense of buoyancy and release.

Descartes' Daughter, edited by Piper Marshall, former curator of the Swiss Institute in New York, documents the critically lauded 2013 exhibition of the same name as well as continuing its ideas. Taking the historical account of philosopher René Descartes' creation of an animatronic effigy of his deceased young daughter as its foundation, the exhibition explored the traditional divide between conceptual and expressive works, those dealing with either the mind or the body.

The reader includes five essays that explore the room in between this divide, both within the works exhibited and beyond. Fionn Meade, curator at the Walker Art Center, submits a poetic elegy to René Descartes, placing his ideas and the discussion around them at the center of this book. Jenny Jaskey, director and curator of the Artists's Institute, writes on scale and the subjective, metabolic qualities of “human.” Piper Marshall asks how one can curate a feminist art exhibition, firmly merging the discussion.

Copublished with Swiss Institute following the exhibition “Descartes' Daughter” (September 20–November 3, 2014), with works by Malin Arnell, Miriam Cahn, John Chamberlain, Hanne Darboven, Melanie Gilligan, Rochelle Goldberg, Nicolás Guagnini/Jeff Preiss, Rachel Harrison, Charline von Heyl, Lucas Knipscher, Jason Loebs, Ulrike Müller, Pamela Rosenkranz, Karin Schneider, and Sergei Tcherepnin.

In these images Verene atomizes the wounded, struggling, poignant characters of a small-town, lower-class American life with its pregnant teenagers, schizophrenically decorated living rooms, dejected elderly, and prematurely forlorn children. From the grubby yellow pillow where Verene's Grandpa Bill rests his weary head to the obviously cherished, hugged-too-closely pets, Verene uses minute details to enlarge our understanding of people we might otherwise write off as insignificant.

An exhibition catalogue that memorializes Jonas's first major exhibition in a New York museum, and includes a selection of the artist's works in installation and video, drawings, photographs and sketchbooks. The exhibition of the same name took place at Queens Museum (December 14, 2003-March 28, 2004).

A reprint of Bill Burke's seminal book of the same title, first published by Nexus Press in 1987, I Want to Take Picture features black-and-white images which Burke shot during several trips through Southeast Asia in the early 1980s, particularly focusing on the aftereffects of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. "In 1982, years after Vietnam, I decided to give myself my own Southeast Asia experience. I wanted to make pictures in a place where I didn't know the rules, where I'd be off balance. Friends who had been there recommended Thailand; nice people, easy transportation, good food. Another friend told me that as long as I was going to Thailand I should go see the refugees coming out of Cambodia. He set me up with the International Rescue Committee, which was working at the Thai-Cambodian border." — Bill Burke

Decades before today's major Los Angeles museums realized the potential of contemporary art, the pioneering institutions, Pasadena Art Museum and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, under curator directors Thomas Leavitt and Walter Hopps championed talented local and internationally recognized painters. Part of the Getty Research Institute's Pacific Standard Time initiative, this crisp exhibition catalog reconstructs the partially forgotten history through photos and reproductions. Storied moments such as Kienholz's first solo show(1961), Duchamp's chess game with a naked Eve Babitz(1963) and Diebenkorn's first major exhibition(1963) reenter the annals of 20th century American art history. Authored by curator, Julie Joyce.

Girls left behind. Guys making bad choices. In his third book, Sunday Drive, photographer Luke Smalley continues his journey for truth inside the lives of small-town youth. This poignant photo novella tells a story of consequence when innocence takes a wrong turn. Girls getting ready, girls getting anxious. Boys bored. Wide-eyed, raw off the football field. Visiting hours: 1 to 8 p.m. As in his past volumes, humor pervades: the boys' plight is juxtaposed with Smalley's amusement at the girls' preoccupation about what to wear.

For over thirty years, Peter Halley’s paintings, with their characteristic day-glo color and distinctive faux-stucco surfaces, have engaged in variations on the same closed set of geometric forms, designated by the artist as prisons, cells, and conduits — “icons that reflect the increasing geometricization of social space in the world in which we live.” Treating space as a manifestation of social control—an idea inspired by the artist’s interest in Michel Foucault’s notion of a carceral society—Halley’s paintings provide metaphors for the constantly proliferating communication and organizational networks that have come to dominate our world. Over a career of three decades, the artist has deployed his trademark iconic forms with ever increasing intensity, resulting in works with ever more dazzling combinations of color, shape, and texture, assuring their continuing relevance in the post-millennial information age.

Inspired by Le Corbusier's 1925 Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau, the second exhibition in Swiss Institute's annual Architecture and Design series presents a prototype for the 21st-century home, simulating a living environment where the house moves beyond its physical confines and into the digital realm.

In our fourth book of Duane Michals's work, the artist explores classic themes of love and death through photographs and words. The evocative images and poems collected in Eros & Thanatos conjure memories of love and loss, lust and longing, in what is perhaps the most revealing and overtly sensual of Michals's works to date. The full richness of Michals's imagery emerges from these exquisite, large-format sheet-fed gravures.

"We’re so conditioned to the syntax of the camera that we don’t realize that we are running on only half the visual alphabet....It’s what we see every day in the magazines, on billboards, and even on television. All those images are being produced basically the same way, through a lens and a camera. I’m saying there are many, many other ways to produce photographic imagery, and I would imagine that a lot of them have yet to be explored." — Adam Fuss A nineteenth-century child's dress is carefully laid out for our viewing. Perhaps, because we are aware that it is a part of lost time, our thoughts go to its missing inhabitant—an ethereal presence, intricate to the weave of the fabric before us. And then there are the birds, scattering in a grey photographic dusk, soundless. Now, the mirrored surfaces of the daguerreotypes flicker before us, never completely giving up their secrets. In this body of work the artist essays loss and its attendant ghosts.

Top Stories was a prose periodical published from 1978 to 1991 by the artist Anne Turyn in Buffalo, New York, and New York City. Over the course of twenty-nine issues, it served as a pivotal platform for experimental fiction and art through single-artist issues and two anthologies. The entire run of Top Stories is collected and reproduced here across two volumes.

Top Stories primarily featured female artists, though in Turyn’s words a few men “crept in as collaborators.” Although primarily “a prose periodical” (as its byline often stated), the issues varied in form and aesthetics, pushing the boundaries of what prose could be and, from time to time, escaping the genre altogether. In fact, the only parameters required for participants were that the periodical’s logo and issue list be included on the front and back covers, respectively.

A great deal of the works are short stories by the likes of Pati Hill, Tama Janowitz, and Kathy Acker, whose Pushcart Prize–winning “New York City in 1979” appeared for the first time in book form as part of the series. Constance DeJong contributes “I.T.I.L.O.E.,” a widely unavailable work that features the artist’s trademark prose and is sure to please fans of her novel, Modern Love. The largest issue of the periodical is undoubtedly Cookie Mueller’s “How to Get Rid of Pimples,” which consists of a series of character studies of friends interspersed with photographs by David Armstrong, Nan Goldin, and Peter Hujar altered with freshly drawn blemishes.

Top Stories also celebrates less conventional literary forms. Issues by Lisa Bloomfield, Linda Neaman, and Anne Turyn take the form of artists’ books, juxtaposing image and text to construct tightly wound, interdependent narratives. Jenny Holzer and Peter Nadin present a collaborative work in copper ink comprised of truisms by Holzer on corporeal and emotional states and drawings of abstract bodies by Nadin. Janet Stein contributes a comic, while Ursule Molinaro provides a thorough index of daily life (and the contempt it produces) consisting of entries that were written just prior to lighting a cigarette.

Primary contributors include Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Sheila Ascher, Douglas Blau, Lisa Bloomfield, Linda L. Cathcart, Cheryl Clarke, Susan Daitch, Constance DeJong, Jane Dickson, Judith Doyle, Lee Eiferman, Robert Fiengo, Joe Gibbons, Pati Hill, Jenny Holzer, Gary Indiana, Tama Janowitz, Suzanne Jackson, Suzanne Johnson, Caryl Jones-Sylvester, Mary Kelly, Judy Linn, Micki McGee, Ursule Molinaro, Cookie Mueller, Peter Nadin, Linda Neaman, Glenn O’Brien, Romaine Perin, Richard Prince, Lou Robinson, Janet Stein, Dennis Straus, Sekou Sundiata, Leslie Thornton, Kirsten Thorup, Lynne Tillman, Anne Turyn, Gail Vachon, Brian Wallis, Jane Warrick, and Donna Wyszomierski.

David Armstrong, Nan Goldin, JT Hryvniak, Peter Hujar, Nancy Linn, Trish McAdams, Linda Neaman, Marcia Resnick, Michael Sticht, and Aja Thorup all make appearances as well, contributing artwork for the covers or as illustrations.

German artist and institutional critique pioneer Hans Haacke (born 1936) is famed worldwide for examining museums by directly asking their audiences questions. Hans Haacke: Swiss Institute Visitors Poll documents the results of his longest ever poll work, which was conducted at Swiss Institute from June 21, 2018 to October 24, 2019.

Newly commissioned for this publication, Haacke's featured essay outlines the history of his poll works, discussing the context and development of this body of work over four decades—all leading up to the Swiss Institute Visitors Poll. The book documents the results of the poll, including 652 pages of facsimile index cards that were written by poll respondents in response to Question #20: “What multiple-choice question would you also have liked to see in this poll?”

Bodies function, fight, and fail. People bear witness to these processes every day, actively and passively, in the flesh and on-screen. But bodies are also unruly: they desire and shapeshift and betray. This oscillation between the realities of mortal progression and everything that transpires in those indeterminate zones serves as the basis for Swiss artist Shahryar Nashat’s visceral, future-facing practice. What Nashat presents to us, the viewer, are depictions of humanness, of aliveness, filtered through ways of seeing that may have not yet arrived. There are hypotheticals at play, although the sensations generated in Nashat’s sculptures and videos point toward primal expressions of desire and survival.

This monograph ventures to articulate the new shapes and sentiments that spill out from Nashat’s artistic output of the last eight years. The book is co-published by Kunsthalle Basel and Swiss Institute, where Nashat had solo exhibitions. But, while the two exhibitions are the occasion for publishing this book, the contents here far surpass them: twelve of Nashat’s works made between 2012 and 2020 are examined across six essays and one conversation, each of which forges a new reading of what is at stake in the artist’s oeuvre. For Nashat, in spite of the endless questions they raise, bodies have answers.

Known for his conceptual and often whimsical approach to art, artist Gilles Barbier is particularly recognized for creating intricate works that explore language, culture, and the boundaries between knowledge and creativity. This book focuses on his Dictionary Pages series and other related works that engage with language in innovative and thought-provoking ways. This catalogue was published on the occasion of an exhibition of the artist's work at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, November 6, 1999 - January 30, 2000.

“In the interstices between film and photography, ad stereotypes, and clichés of a Californian paradise, Jack Pierson produces pictures that are deliberately sensual and sentimental. Through a subtle hybridization of genres they raise the central question of autobiographical sincerity as the work’s theme and site. By arresting intimate moments, they compose a familiar, private world, happy and nostalgic. By disclosing (or pretending to disclose) something of the artist, they acquire a natural quality that turns them into secret confessions. We are simultaneously in the artist’s studio and in the middle of his life, and, I’d be tempted to add, in the idealizing and loving grace of his gaze.” — Henry-Claude Cousseau

In Nashville he became a diesel mechanic. Fell in love. Moved across the country again. Got married. Bought land on the long dusty Winnemucca road Johnny Cash sang about. Started his own business. Built a house. Put down roots. And when that life exploded, the open road called again. Throughout almost all of it, his cameras were with him, and at last those pictures are coming to light. If Michael Brodie’s first monograph was a cinematic dream, Failing is the awakening and the reckoning, a raw, wounded, and searingly honest photographic diary of a decade marked by love and heartbreak, loss and grief — biblical in its scope, and in its search for truth and meaning. Here is the flip side of the American dream, seen from within; here is bearing close witness to the brutal chaos of addiction and death; here are front-seat encounters with hitchhikers and kindred wanderers on society’s edges, sustained by the ragtag community of the road. Failing often exists in darkness but is tuned to grace. Brodie’s eye stays forever open to the strange and fleeting beauty that exists in forgotten places — the open country and the lost horizons that sweep past dust-spattered windows in a spectral blur.

Between 1975 and 1978, the Khmer Rouge brutally executed two hundred
thousand Cambodians suspected of crimes against Pol Pot's regime. This
book is a grim yet fascinating collection of Khmer Rouge photographs of
prisoners as they were checked in to the S-21 death camp. Harrowed by
interrogation and often, torture, these faces betray their fate--forcing
the viewer to reckon with the circumstances that ever allowed these
atrocities to occur. A powerful, important book.

Born and raised in Mississippi and Tennessee, William Eggleston began taking pictures during the 1960s after seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment. In 1966 he changed from black-and-white to color film, perhaps to make the medium more his own and less that of his esteemed predecessor. John Sarkowski, when he was curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, called Eggleston the ‘first color photographer,’ and the world in which we consider a color photograph as art has changed because of him.

The Domestic Plane: New Perspectives on Tabletop Art Objects features work by more than eighty artists across the fields of art and craft from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, presented in a meta-group exhibition in five parts mounted by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. This fully illustrated publication features texts by curators Elizabeth Essner, Dakin Hart, Richard Klein, and Amy Smith-Stewart; a visual essay by artist and illustrator Richard McGuire; and work by participating artists including David Adamo, Yuji Agematsu, Alma Allen, Janine Antoni, Robert Arneson, Genesis Belanger, Kathy Butterly, James Lee Byars, Anthony Caro, Melvin Edwards, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Pam Lins, Tucker Nichols, Mai-Thu Perret, Jessi Reaves, Kay Sekimachi, Diane Simpson, Arlene Shechet, Alina Szapocznikow, and Nari Ward, among many others.

The work by contemporary Brazilian artist, Valeska Soares navigates the realms of human emotion and experience, ranging from love and intimacy, loss and longing, to memory and language. In her multimedia paintings, sculptures, videos, and sight specific installations, ordinary, everyday objects are transformed to create new and poignant narratives. Initiating her career in Brazil in the late 1980s, Soares’ early work is recognized for engaging the full range of senses, even scent—through the use of flowers and perfumes. Works from recent decades elicit her mastery of language and text, specifically through the conceptual and physical use of books. Published on the occasion of the artist’s largest survey exhibition to-date, this monograph provides a comprehensive examination of works and installations produced during the artist’s nearly thirty-year oeuvre. Part of the Getty’s noted Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a far- reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles (2017-2018).

Explicitly—or not—protocols determine much of what we do. Far exceeding traditional notions of “good manners,” protocols are systems of language that regulate how we relate to each other, to our cultural, social, and political environments, and to the technologies that create them. The first publication to look at protocols across a wide range of disciplines, As for Protocols brings together contributions by twenty-four international artists, writers, scholars, musicians, architects, and scientists who explore protocols across various fields, foregrounding opportunities for creating new protocols that are inclusive and equitable. Through essays, artworks, interviews, and scores, the book speaks to protocols as practice—neither conventional mannerisms nor abstract concepts, but material processes, relational affinities, shared responsibilities, and mutual care.

Co-edited with an introduction by Re’al Christian, Carin Kuoni, and Eriola Pira, with an opening score by Raven Chacon and contributions by Salome Asega, Carolina Caycedo with Lupita Limón Corrales, Jesse Chun, Asia Dorsey, Taraneh Fazeli and Cannach MacBride, Pablo Helguera, Emmanuel Iduma, Mary Maggic, Shannon Mattern, V. Mitch McEwen with Nadir Jeevanjee, Rashaun Mitchell with Silas Riener, Romy Opperman, Rasheedah Phillips, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson with Maria Hupfield, Ultra-red with Robert Sember, and Underground Resistance.

The mediascapes of late capitalism reconfigure erotic responses and trigger primal aggression; under constant surveillance, we occupy simulations of ourselves, private estates on a hyperconnected globe; fictions reprogram reality, memories are rewritten by the future…

Fleeing the excesses of ’90s cyberculture, a young researcher sets out to systematically analyse the obsessively reiterated themes of a writer who prophesied the disorienting future we now inhabit. The story of his failure is as disturbingly psychotropic as those of his magus—J.G. Ballard, prophet of the post-postmodern, voluptuary of the car crash, surgeon of the pathological virtualities pulsing beneath the surface of reality.

Plagued by obsessive fears, defeated by the tedium of academia, yet still certain that everything connects to Ballard, his academic thesis collapses into a series of delirious travelogues, deranged speculations and tormented meditations on time, memory, and loss. Abandoning literary interpretation and renouncing all scholarly distance, he finally accepts the deep assignment that has run throughout his entire life, and embarks on a rogue fieldwork project: Applied Ballardianism, a new discipline and a new ideal for living. Only the darkest impulses, the most morbid obsessions, and the most apocalyptic paranoia, can uncover the technological mutations of inner space.

An existential odyssey inextricably weaving together lived experience and theoretical insight, this startling autobiographical hyperfiction surveys and dissects a world where everything connects and global technological delirium is the norm—a world become unmistakably Ballardian.

Will Barnet’s artistic career as a painter and printmaker spanned nearly eight decades of continuous creativity. Few artists, other than perhaps Picasso or Monet, can claim such an extended period of uninterrupted and innovative art making. From the darkness of the Great Depression to the opening decade of the twenty-first century, his oeuvre reflects his unique interpretation of the art world’s evolving genres: Social Realism, Modernism, Abstract Expressionism, and ultimately representational Minimalism with the human figure as his primary subject.

Barnet was devoted to making art every day and worked diligently even at the very end of his life. “The Old Masters are still alive after 400 years, and that’s what I want to be,” he once said. “At the age of 10 or 12, I discovered that being an artist would give me an ability to create something which would live on after death.” Live on it does; in addition to his acclaimed body of work, he influenced a broad spectrum of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, James Rosenquist, Cy Twombly, and Ethel Fisher, and he held teaching positions at the Cooper Union, Yale University, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Photography was quickly adapted to the social rituals and customs of nineteenth century America, and among these institutions was the memorial portrait. until the advent of photography, this portrait was a painting and was primarily an upper-class phenomenon. With the widespread use of the camera, nearly everyone could afford a post-mortem portrait, and for the next half-century these portraits were a mainstay of American's commercial photographers.

A fascinating exploration of how photography, graphic design, and popular magazines converged to transform American visual culture at mid-century. This dynamic study examines the intersection of modernist photography and American commercial graphic design between the 1930s and the 1950s. Avant-garde strategies in photography and design reached the United States via European émigrés, including Bauhaus artists forced out of Nazi Germany. The unmistakable aesthetic made popular by such magazines as Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue—whose art directors, Alexey Brodovitch and Alexander Liberman, were both immigrants and accomplished photographers—emerged from a distinctly American combination of innovation, inclusiveness, and pragmatism. Beautifully illustrated with more than 150 revolutionary photographs, layouts, and cover designs, Modern Look considers the connections and mutual influences of such designers and photographers as Richard Avedon, Lillian Bassman, Herbert Bayer, Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Gordon Parks, Irving Penn, Cipe Pineles, and Paul Rand. Essays draw a lineage from European experimental design to innovative work in American magazine design at mid-century and offer insights into the role of gender in fashion photography and political activism in the mass media.

Photorealism is a genre of painting that developed in the United States and Europe using high-resolution photography as its primary source material. Embracing digital photography perhaps more than any other artist working in this genre, French-born Bertrand Meniel (1961–) is able to incorporate an astonishing amount of detail into his renderings of cityscapes in New York City, Miami, and Paris.

Primarily self-taught and with no preliminary experimental, developmental, or student work, by 1996 Meniel was creating works with powerful, distinctive, and very original imagery, having mastered techniques and skills that normally require a lifetime. Using a variety of photographs of his chosen subject, he manipulates an image to perfection, focusing simultaneously on the foreground and background by combing hundreds of shots on a computer screen.

His choice to depict iconic American scenes in his paintings, particularly those associated with the “American Way of Life,” reflects not just a technical mastery of Photorealism but a deep emotional connection to the culture that captivated him during his youth. His unique perspective, influenced by French artistic traditions and shaped by exposure to American pop culture, allows him to capture in his art the essence of what may be best described as the “New York State of Mind.”

A central figure in the Cali and Bogotá art and film scenes of the 1970s and ’80s, Karen Lamassonne has maintained a focus on self-portraiture and depictions of intimacy across private and public spaces in her work. From the peaceful atmosphere of cool, tiled bathrooms to urban bridges and parks, Lamassonne depicts bodies in relation to their environments with an insistently erotic sensibility that, at times, has been highly politicized within male-dominated cultural spheres. Ruido / Noise, the first monograph devoted to the artist, brings together her paintings, photographs, videos, installations, and contributions to “Caliwood” cinema for the first time, providing a topography of the artist’s work amid shifting sociocultural landscapes. New essays by Inti Guererro and Maria Wills Londoño, and a new interview with Miguel González, trace Lamassonne’s career and analyze the continuing impact of her work in Colombia, the United States, and beyond.

In his second book, American photographer Luke Smalley revisits the themes from his 2002 monograph Gymnasium. After receiving a degree in sports medicine from Pepperdine University and then working as both a model and personal trainer, Smalley became fascinated with the archetype of the athletic American male, and sought to explore its more playful side. His compositions were inspired by early 20th-century fitness manuals and high school yearbooks. In Exercise at Home, now reissued after being out of print since 2007, Smalley returns to his native Pennsylvania to consider the small-town interiors and landscapes that are the settings for his portraits of young athletes. Color photographs, inspired by a more innocent era, combine whimsy with the inexplicable. Smalley hires a local seamstress to construct a colossal medicine ball; he binds two boys together with a “harness” and leaves them in an empty room for a psychological game of tug-of-war, while somewhere nearby two others lead donkeys around the floor of a basketball court in a high school gym. Scale, time and content are altered to create the world Smalley inhabits. The lush colors of this new vision belie the viewer’s sense of dislocation.

As a cofounder of Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, Emmy Hennings, with her partner, the Dadaist Hugo Ball, is recognized as having established and environment for collective experimentation. This book gathers an extensive collection of Hennings’s writings, ephemera, and art, to give shape to a practice and an individual so ofter flattened for the sake of art historical narrative. In the exhibitions held at Cabaret Voltaire and at the Swiss Institute in 2020, Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi made evocative displays that created space for a deeper engagement with Hennings’s life and art. For this publication, she has made new collages, combining found materials and working tools such as adhesive strips, supplemented by graphic gestures and subjective indexes such as cigarette butts. By bringing the Hennings archive into dialogue with her own work, Ghaznawi considers the manner in which an individual’s multiple identities guide the accumulation of personal experience, be they her own or those of a woman she never met. Commissioned on the occasion of her exhibitions, and published together here for the first time, are texts by Ghaznawi’s friends and collaborators Michael Zimmerman, Semuel Lala, Nils Amadeus Lange, Sophia Rohwetter, Ser Serpas, Ian Woolridge, Olamiju Fajemisin, Shamiran Istifan, Timur Akhmetov and Furqat Palvan-Zade.

Inspired by the life and work of the poet and land surveyor, Frank Stanford, these photographs of hermetic homes and men living in solitude were taken in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and Missouri. By capturing the foggy landscapes, cluttered interiors, and rugged men that are tucked away in the dark woods, Jasper explores a fascination with running away from the everyday. The work bounces between fact and fiction, exhibiting the reality and myth of what it means to be truly apart from society. Short-listed for the Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award in 2018.

"Verene walks right into the lives of his folks, showing you how they are, without any embarrassment on either side. Their togetherness is taken for granted so openly that the viewer feels at each moment like one of them, a member of the clan. Verene’s color [is] tender, warm and sensual, though stops well short of being glamorous . . . flooding them all with a strange, sweet romance. These pictures convey his bittersweet fondness for a smaller world in which he grew up but no longer shares, but which has lessons to teach him about the inroads of ageing, disability and other difficulties. Many viewers are familiar with visits back home in this mood, which Verene renders luminous and fatal." — Max Kozloff

Issued in conjunction with an exhibition on the theme. Catalogue lists 89 works by 20 Los Angeles artists. Includes a five-page introduction by Barry Heisler, a 30-page essay by Paul Karlstrom, "Modernism in Southern California, 1920-1956, Reflections on the Art and the Times", and biographical essays on each of the artists by Susan Ehrlich. Wonderful color illustrations.

In Heber Springs, a reclusive photographer known simply as "Disfarmer" created an uncanny record of American rural life during the 1930s and 1940s. Working out of his modest studio, Disfarmer created portraits which are direct and unpretentious. Disfarmer's portraits of cotton farmers, tradesmen, soldiers home on leave, and the extended families that made up this rural community, reveal a common bond that is rapidly disappearing in the United States. They are bold portraits, and sometimes confrontational, yet they show his sitter's humble grace and small-town charm. Handed down through generations and found today in the family albums of this community, Disfarmer's portraits are emblematic of the post-Depression era. These photographs, many unpublished or rarely seen, underscore his uniquely American vision of place. For this monograph of Disfarmer’s work, Jack Woody returned to the surviving glass-plate negatives, choosing 180 for this book. A set of contact prints were made from the glass plates, and the book was printed on a sheet-fed gravure press in Kyoto, Japan. Gravure gives the images a richness and depth that evokes their time and place.

Masculine beauty is examined in these sensitive portraits of men. Most are identified, such as William Burroughs, Roy Lichtenstein, and Christopher Isherwood. Some are anonymous memories such as the four marines and three surfers.

The teenage athletes in Luke Smalley's pictures seem inhabitants of some time or place other than the northwestern Pennsylvania towns where the photographer recently found and photographed them. The sensuality of these young athletes seems familiar, their gaze immediate and direct, yet their otherworldly quality remains a product of the artist's unique vision. No telephone or television seems possible in this not-quite-familiar landscape. For the past ten years the photographer has painstakingly coordinated the creation of these works, often making his own athletic equipment, props, and costumes.

An exploration of fashion designer Gaby Aghion’s life, career, and legacy at the French fashion house Chloé. As imagined by the company’s founder, Gaby Aghion (1921–2014), the sophisticated, romantic, and glamorous designs of Chloé have captured the energy and aspirations of generations of women since Aghion designed her first collection in 1952. This sumptuously illustrated book centers Chloé and Aghion within the cultural arena and crystallizes a major transition in the postwar Parisian fashion industry, from haute couture to prêt-à-porter. Aghion defined Chloé as a brand of luxury ready-to-wear clothing combining high-end materials and savoir faire with light shapes for active women. Aghion, an Egyptian Jew in Paris, brought a fresh, outsider perspective to French fashion. Seventy years of archival clothing from Chloé designers are reproduced here, many for the first time, along with sketches, advertisements, and photographs. Essays shed light on Aghion’s life, the company’s approach to fashion, and the ways in which it fostered young talents. The book celebrates Aghion’s daring entrepreneurship and her legacy through the acclaimed designers who embodied and reinterpreted her original inspiration. Paulo Melim Andersson, Gabriela Hearst, Clare Waight Keller, Karl Lagerfeld, Hanna MacGibbon, Stella McCartney, Peter O’Brien, Phoebe Philo, Natacha Ramsay-Levi, and Martine Sitbon offer recollections of their experiences working at the fashion house. Published in association with the Jewish Museum, New York.

American photographer Jim Mangan began The Crick as a photographic survey of the unorthodox architecture of Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) houses in the Utah-Arizona border town of Short Creek. He soon found that the bigger story lay in a group of teenage boys navigating their disintegrating community, fractured after leader Warren Jeffs was imprisoned in 2011. These subjects were children at the time of the fallout, who remained with their families in Short Creek as others elected to leave the town altogether. The Crick is a meditation on religious succession, patriarchal systems, zealotry and fraternity in the life built by these young men. Mangan’s pictures transport the reader into an alternate reality of the boys’ making: where they explore the rugged terrain of southern Utah, northern Arizona and southern Nevada on horseback, emulating old-time explorers of the Western frontier. His “ecological and sociological approach” to this series, spanning five years, depicts the playfulness of youth against the capricious landscape of the American West. In both their real and imaginary worlds, these subjects have gained a knowledge of and closeness to nature that has largely been lost in the conventions of modern life.

The work of Martha Rosler is perennially incisive, provocative, political, and timely, exploring a range of issues from everyday life and the media to architecture and the built environment, especially as they affect women. Over her prolific career, Rosler has returned to themes of social justice, popular culture, food, gardens and the natural world, and the intersection of aesthetics and ethics. Martha Rosler: Irrespective is the only survey of the artist’s vital and enduring work, examining it across media including photocollage, video and film, installation, actions, and books. In addition to a rich array of artworks, this book presents texts by distinguished critics and art historians, and a candid and insightful conversation with the artist. Through her interrogations of the Vietnam War, the War on Terror, feminism, gentrification, and other timely issues, Rosler has persistently bridged art and activism. This important catalogue comes at a moment when work like Rosler’s has the power to inspire change.

Figurative Impulses: Five Contemporary Sculptors explores the works of five prominent artists: Heidi Fasnacht, Mark Lee, Scott Richter, Judith Shea, and Mia Westerlund Roosen. The book delves into the their vaired approaches, focusing on a contemporary sense of figuration that lurks between the representational and the abstract. While each sculptor brings a unique perspective to the field, they all share an interest in figurative forms as a means of exploring complex themes like identity, form, and emotion. The book includes both critical essays and visual documentation of the featured artists' works, offering insight into their creative processes and the cultural and artistic contexts that shaped their work.

An engaging exploration of the relationship between avant-garde art and American network television from the 1940s through the 1970s. The aesthetics and concepts of modern art have influenced American television ever since its inception in the 1930s. In return, early television introduced the public to the latest trends in art and design. This engaging catalogue comprehensively examines the way avant-garde art shaped the look and content of network television in its formative years, from the 1940s through the mid-1970s. It also addresses the larger cultural and social context of television. Artists, fascinated with the new medium and its technological possibilities, contributed to network programs and design campaigns, appeared on television to promote modern art, and explored, critiqued, or absorbed the new medium in their work.

More than 150 illustrations reveal both sides of the dialogue between high art and television through a selection of graphic designs, ephemera, and stills from important television programs—from The Twilight Zone to Batman to Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, and more—as well as works by artists including Salvador Dalí, Lee Friedlander, Agnes Martin, Man Ray, Andy Warhol, and many others. Revolution of the Eye uncovers the cultural history of a medium whose powerful influence on our lives remains pervasive. Published in association with the Jewish Museum, New York, and the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This catalogue was published to accompany Shaw's first institutional solo exhibition in France, at the Centre Pompidou in February 2020. On the occasion of Phase Shifting Index, this catalogue constitutes the first complete monograph on the artist and offers a survey of his larger body of work.

Artist Jeremy Shaw has explored the human aspiration towards transcendence through his multidisciplinary practice since the early 2000s. Shaw has developed a body of work that reveals the edges of culture and consciousness by adopting techniques from conceptual art and documentary film to create new narratives shot through with metaphysics, anthropology and science. His innovative work combines eschatological questioning, juxtaposed belief systems, and science fiction, with disparate zones of neuroscience and subculture to confront the aspirations of people in a post-human epoch.

Marking the first museum exhibition devoted solely to the photographs of Ellsworth Kelly, this beautifully designed volume features each photograph in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s illuminating presentation of this lesser-known aspect of Kelly’s art. From the late 1940s on, Kelly created an era-defining body of abstract art based on many kinds of visual phenomena he perceived around him. Largely made for himself, Kelly’s photographs record these discoveries in tightly-composed images of nature and architecture that often reverberate with striking sunlight and shadow.

The abandoned and forgotten landscapes of rural southwestern towns are the favored subjects of Rod Penner’s paintings. The artist’s keen eye combines photojournalism and Photorealism to create images of small-town America. Penner’s works are based on his photographs, digital video stills, and his experience of the rural landscapes of Texas and New Mexico. He depicts desolate, often deserted locations, the character of old houses and abandoned buildings, weather, and unique geography. His chosen scenes are infused with a cinematic quality that is the result of the exquisite light that he captures with his meticulous process.

A comprehensive monograph on the Argentinian pioneer of happenings, soft sculpture and video art. This handsome volume is published on the occasion of the Jewish Museum’s retrospective of the Argentinian artist Marta Minujín (born 1943). Celebrated for her performance art, happenings and large-scale public works, Minujín has long been a leading figure of the Latin American avant-garde. Arte! Arte! Arte! provides an overview of her career, tracing her intersections with American, European and Latin American developments in postwar art and exploring her relevance for subsequent generations of artists. The publication is illustrated extensively throughout with Minujín’s artworks and documentation of the artist at work. Punctuating these images are critical essays by Darsie Alexander, chief curator at the Jewish Museum, and Rodrigo Alonso, the Argentinian journalist and curator. An interview with Minujín, "Art Protects Me," concludes the book, focusing on the artworks she created during the height of the pandemic.

Herb Ritts' photographs quickly became the quintessential distillation of American Pop culture in the eighties. His portraits of celebrities are at once monumental, recognizable, and sexually charged. His pictures of Madonna have given cache to all she hopes to sell the world; glamour, sex, and song. Sylvester Stallone, another Pop icon, seems to parody himself with his macho posturing in Ritts' photographs. Others joining the pop parade are Pee Wee Herman, Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Shirley MacLaine and Beach Boy Brian Wilson. This volume is the new testament of high Pop culture in the eighties.

"Stendhal’s famous definition of the novel—a mirror carried along a road—could well apply to The Last City. But Ortiz Monasterio's is a selective mirror, precise and implacable, which retains only that which is worth preserving." — José Emilio Pacheco. Mexico City presents a post-apocalyptic paradigm, rivaled only, perhaps, by Los Angeles—it is a metropolis ravaged by immense poverty, crime, and the ill-effects of overpopulation. As a street photographer working in the tradition of committed documentary image-making, Ortiz Monasterio reveals Mexico City’s fragmentation.

Exploring the life and work of avant-garde film’s most influential and intriguing figure. Between 1950 and his death, the artist and impresario Jonas Mekas (1922–2019) made more than one hundred radically innovative, often diaristic films and video works. He also founded film festivals, cooperatives, archives, and magazines and wrote film criticism and poetry. Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running is the first major publication in English on this pivotal member of the New York avant-garde scene, presenting an extensively illustrated, in-depth exploration of his radical art and restless life.

Born in rural Lithuania, Mekas made his way to New York, where he became a central figure in the overlapping realms of experimental theater, music, poetry, performance, and film. This book brings his work alive on the page with sequences of stills from film and video, photographic series and installations, and archival documents. Leading scholars examine his work and influence, and a timeline expands our understanding of his life. Published in association with the Jewish Museum, New York, and the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, Vilnius.

This is a companion volume to the exhibition Repetition and Difference, on view in The Jewish Museum from March 13 to August 9, 2015. The notions of difference and repetition have been part of philosophy and art practices for thousands of years. Artists have commonly employed repetition - the creation of artworks in series or the making of multiples and copies - in their work for a variety of reasons, ranging from the commercial to the subversive. Yet, crucial differences are often embedded within the process of iteration. Repetition and Difference brings together objects from the Museum's collection and works by contemporary artists that examine how differences and derivations can reveal significant meaning. The exhibition is titled after Gilles Deleuze's seminal text Difference and Repetition, first published in French in 1968, a landmark book that fundamentally questioned concepts of identity and representation to propose how multiplicity replaces the ideas of essence, substance and possibility.

An engaging exploration of the use of language in a complex and colorful series of paintings. Mel Bochner (b. 1940) is celebrated as a key Conceptual artist of the 1960s. Less well-known are his paintings made after that period: complex works based on an exploration of language, often crowded with typography in lush, contrasting hues that both embrace and challenge the painterly tradition. Mel Bochner: Strong Language focuses on this important body of work, in which Bochner investigates the lines between text and image. Ranging from bold admonishments and witty emoticons to provocative floods of words, these works demonstrate conceptual seriousness, as well as delight in the playful potential of language. Norman L. Kleeblatt discusses the evolution of Bochner's art from his early word experiments through his return to painting, while Bochner offers a personal perspective. Both Kleeblatt and Bochner address the question of Jewishness in Bochner's work, particularly the ways in which the Jewish intellectual tradition embraces language as a visual expressive form. Published in association with the Jewish Museum, New York.

Garry Winogrand is known primarily for his spontaneous and energetic street photography in black-and-white. What is lesser known is that Winogrand also shot more than 45,000 color slides between the early 1950s and late 1960s. These photographs were often taken between assignments, when the photographer, working on his own, developed and refined an approach to his medium that was increasingly open, independent, and radical. He routinely photographed with two cameras strapped around his neck, one loaded with color film, the other with black and white. Winogrand Color presents 150 photographs selected from the archives at the Center for Creative Photography by the American film director, Michael Almereyda and former Museum of Modern Art curator, Susan Kismaric. It is the first monograph dedicated to the artist's rarely seen color work.

One of the clear characteristics of our digital age is that in it all things, bodies even, are generally suspended from their more or less stable material substance. This increasingly spectral state of affairs is the effect of mostly invisible forces of abstraction that can be associated with the digitization of more and more aspects of human experience. We as living beings are now confronting a structural split between the substance of things and their generic, virtual double. Concretely speaking, one can point to everyday phenomena as manifestations of this unsettling development: coffee without caffeine, or food without fat, for instance, are expressive of this mode of abstraction/extraction, but also money without currency, love without bodies, and soon following, painting without paint, and finally, art without art… Pieter Schoolwerth's attempts to reverse the above described techno-cultural trend with his series of in the last instance paintings, in which the stuff of paint itself reappears as supplement only at the end of a complex, multi-media effort to produce a figurative picture.

Model as Painting is the first in depth publication on Schoolwerth’s practice. This monograph was imagined in conjunction with a group of exhibitions that articulate his eponymous project held at Capitain Petzel, Berlin, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin. Conceived by Schoolwerth as a comprehensive overview of his work leading up to the “Model as Painting” series, and an analysis of the particular processes developed in this body of work, the volume was designed in collaboration with Tiffany Malakooti and comprises 232 pages of richly illustrated ideas, critical essays and documentation.

An introductory text by the artist lays out the foundations of his painting processes. The main essays by art historian Molly Warnock and critic David Geers respectively situate Schoolwerth’s art produced during the last five years, and set out to define his “practice [as] singular in its focus on language, labor, and the body’s dispersal in today’s technological landscape.” (Geers) The multi-media, figurative, and decidedly representational paintings in this series are elaborated through a unique and intensive sequence of creative phases, including digital photography, the making of collages and 3D models based on the collages, internet browsing, software image processing, printing, and finally, painting.