World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2017, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 24 x 19 cm
Ed. of 200,
Published by
Hopkinson Mossman / Auckland
$55.00 - In stock -
Monograph on New Zealand artist Nick Austin (b. 1979), published in an edition of 200 copies in 2017, surveying Austin's paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations, alongside text by Austin and Wystan Curnow, designed by Warren Olds.
Simultaneously concrete and elusive, Austin’s work is always open-ended and inconclusive. A master of the quotidian, Austin's works have referenced socks, fish aquariums and spider-webs, inspired by formal structures derived from concrete poetry, ideograms, puns and crosswords. His works trigger fluid, accidental associations and digressive meanings rather than convey any fixed or predetermined ideas. The disjunctive space between the titles of Austin’s individual works and what is visible in them delays the inference of meaning and creates a distance that enables poetic qualities to develop. Austin likens his work to a poetry collection that dramatises the mysteries of the creative process.
2013, English
Document folder containing 10 loose-leaf items, 31 x 23 cm
Edition of 200,
Published by
University of Otago / Otago
$50.00 - In stock -
This wonderful artist edition by New Zealand-based Nick Austin (b. 1979) was produced in an edition of 200 copies on the occasion of the exhibition "The Liquid Dossier" at the University of Otago in 2013. It collects a gathering of collateral (documents and ephemera including poster, postcard, photographs, CD, instant coffee, etc), alongside texts by Jon Bywater and Natalie Poland, in a hand-titled/numbered manilla foolscap document folder, designed by Nick Austin and Gilbert May.
Simultaneously concrete and elusive, Austin’s work is always open-ended and inconclusive. A master of the quotidian, Austin's works have referenced socks, fish aquariums and spider-webs, inspired by formal structures derived from concrete poetry, ideograms, puns and crosswords. As with the contents of a dossier, the works in "The Liquid Dossier" exhibition are loosely bound to each other in a manner that draws our attention to overlooked or absent items. As a result his works trigger fluid, accidental associations and digressive meanings rather than convey any fixed or predetermined ideas. The disjunctive space between the titles of Austin’s individual works and what is visible in them delays the inference of meaning and creates a distance that enables poetic qualities to develop. Austin likens his work to a poetry collection that dramatises the mysteries of the creative process.
2018, English
Hardcover, 244 pages, 21.5 x 28.5 cm
Published by
Guggenheim Museum / New York
$100.00 - Out of stock
When Swedish artist Hilma af Klint died in 1944 at the age of 81, she left behind more than 1,000 paintings and works on paper that she had kept largely private during her lifetime. Believing the world was not yet ready for her art, she stipulated that it should remain unseen for another 20 years. But only in recent decades has the public had a chance to reckon with af Klint's radically abstract painting practice--one which predates the work of Vasily Kandinsky and other artists widely considered trailblazers of modernist abstraction. Her boldly colorful works, many of them large-scale, reflect an ambitious, spiritually informed attempt to chart an invisible, totalizing world order through a synthesis of natural and geometric forms, textual elements and esoteric symbolism.
Accompanying the first major survey exhibition of the artist's work in the United States, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future represents her groundbreaking painting series while expanding recent scholarship to present the fullest picture yet of her life and art. Essays explore the social, intellectual and artistic context of af Klint's 1906 break with figuration and her subsequent development, placing her in the context of Swedish modernism and folk art traditions, contemporary scientific discoveries, and spiritualist and occult movements. A roundtable discussion among contemporary artists, scholars and curators considers af Klint's sources and relevance to art in the 21st century. The volume also delves into her unrealized plans for a spiral-shaped temple in which to display her art--a wish that finds a fortuitous answer in the Guggenheim Museum's rotunda, the site of the exhibition.
Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. Though her paintings were not seen publicly until 1987, her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich.
2018, English
Hardcover, 288 pages, 21.6 x 27.9 cm
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$100.00 - Out of stock
At the turn of the twentieth century, Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) created a body of work that left visible reality behind, exploring the radical possibilities of abstraction years before Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, or Piet Mondrian. Many consider her the first trained artist to create abstract paintings. With Hilma af Klint: Notes and Methods, we get to experience the arc of Klint's artistic investigation in her own words.
Hilma af Klint studied at the Royal Swedish Academy in Stockholm where she was part of the first generation of female students. Up until the beginning of the century, she painted mainly landscapes and detailed botanical studies. Her work from this period was that of a young artist of her time who meticulously observed the world around her. But, like many of her contemporaries, af Klint was also interested in the invisible relationships that shape our world, believing strongly in a spiritual dimension. She joined the Theosophical Society, and, with four fellow female members who together called themselves "The Five," began to study mediumship. Between 1906 and 1915, purportedly guided by a higher power, af Klint created 193 individual works that, in both scale and scope of imagery, are like no other art created at that time. Botanically inspired images and mystical symbols, diagrams, words and geometric series, all form part af Klint's abstract language. These abstract techniques would not be seen again until years later.
Notes and Methods presents facsimile reproductions of a wide array of af Klint's early notebooks accompanied by the first English translation of af Klint's extensive writings. It contains the rarely seen "Blue Notebooks," hand-painted and annotated catalogues af Klint created of her most famous series "Paintings for the Temple," and a dictionary compiled by af Klint of the words and letters found in her work. An introduction by Iris Muller-Westermann illuminates this unique and important contribution to the legacy of Hilma af Klint.
2020, English
Hardcover, 270 pages, 24.7 x 26.6 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
The Metropolitan Museum of Art / New York
$105.00 - Out of stock
A lavishly illustrated monograph that spans the entire career of one of the most celebrated contemporary artists. Over the course of his acclaimed 60-year career, Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) has employed both representation and abstraction as a means of reckoning with the legacy, collective memory, and national sensibility of post-Second World War Germany, in both broad and very personal terms. This handsomely designed book features approximately 100 of his key canvases, from photo paintings created in the early 1960s to portraits and later large-scale abstract series, as well as select works in glass. New essays by eminent scholars address a variety of themes: Sheena Wagstaff evaluates the conceptual import of the artist's technique; Benjamin H. D. Buchloh discusses the poignant Birkenau paintings (2014); Peter Geimer explores the artist's enduring interest in photographic imagery; Briony Fer looks at Richter's family pictures against traditional painting genres and conventions; Brinda Kumar investigates the artist's engagement with landscape as a site of memory; Andre Rottmann considers the impact of randomization and chance on Richter's abstract works; and Hal Foster examines the glass and mirror works. As this book demonstrates, Richter's rich and varied oeuvre is a testament to the continued relevance of painting in contemporary art.
2020, English
Hardcover, 256 pages, 21 x 29.8 cm
Published by
SFMOMA / San Francisco
D.A.P. / New York
$100.00 - Out of stock
Part artist's book, part exhibition catalog, this book chronicles Tauba Auerbach’s multimedia syntheses of abstraction, science, graphic design and typography.
Tauba Auerbach studies the boundaries of perception through an art and design practice grounded in math, science and craft. Published in conjunction with the first major survey of the artist’s work, this volume, designed by Auerbach in collaboration with David Reinfurt, spans 16 years of her career, highlighting her interest in concepts such as duality and its alternatives, interconnectedness, rhythm and four-dimensional geometry.
Encapsulating Auerbach’s longstanding consideration of symmetry, texture and logic, the title S v Z offers a framework for this volume’s typeface, design and structure. Images of more than 130 paintings, drawings, sculptures and artist’s books created between 2004 and 2020 are mirrored by a comprehensive selection of related reference images, illuminating her multifaceted practice as never before. Essays by Joseph Becker, Jenny Gheith and Linda Dalrymple Henderson provide further context for the work.
The book contains original marble patterns created specially for the book by the artist on both the endpapers and the edges of the book block. The cover is lettered in Auerbach’s calligraphy, applied in black foil on a silver paper. The typeface was designed by David Reinfurt with Auerbach expressly for this publication, and is based on her handwriting.
New York–based artist Tauba Auerbach (born 1981) grew up in San Francisco and graduated from Stanford University in 2003. She apprenticed and worked as a sign painter at New Bohemia Signs in San Francisco. In 2013 she founded Diagonal Press. She is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, and Standard Oslo.
1983, English /Japanese / Flemish
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Nippon Television Network Corporation / Japan
$85.00 - Out of stock
First edition hardcover Japanese catalogue published by the Nippon Television Network Corporation (!) in 1983 on the occasion of a major travelling retrospective of James Ensor's work in Japan. Through Ensor's (1860-1949) various depictions of masks, monsters, and skeletons, the somewhat shocking expression he employed to explore the human spirit had a significant influence on the Expressionist and Surrealist artists to come. Here over 140 works dating from early on in his career to his late years and consisting of oil paintings, drawings, and prints are presented in largely three sections. Beginning with his period of Realism and ending with his prolific graphic and painterly works of the grotesque, where Ensor's critical mentality toward religious or social themes was incisive and remorseless, yet witty. The special middle section focuses on the influence of the Orient on Ensor. The series of pictures known as the Hokusai mangwa, illustrated by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, is considered to have influenced Ensor's art. "There are a series of drawings in which Ensor copied these sketches and pictures depicting Chinese ceramics or Japanese fans. Ensor's family ran a souvenir shop, where there were all sorts of unusual things imported from the Orient and carnival masks. In recent years, the influence of such objects brought from the Orient has been focused on as part of the background to this artist's production of grotesque characters." Includes photographs from his life in Ostend, essays, descriptions of works, bibliography, biography, and much more. Texts in English, Flemish and Japanese.
James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor (13 April 1860 – 19 November 1949) was a Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for almost his entire life. He was associated with the artistic group Les XX. While Ensor's early works, such as Russian Music (1881) and The Drunkards (1883), depict realistic scenes in a somber style, his palette subsequently brightened and he favored increasingly bizarre subject matter. Such paintings as The Scandalized Masks (1883) and Skeletons Fighting over a Hanged Man (1891) feature figures in grotesque masks inspired by the ones sold in his mother's gift shop for Ostend's annual Carnival. Subjects such as carnivals, masks, puppetry, skeletons, and fantastic allegories are dominant in Ensor's mature work. Ensor dressed skeletons up in his studio and arranged them in colorful, enigmatic tableaux on the canvas, and used masks as a theatrical aspect in his still lifes. Attracted by masks' plastic forms, bright colors, and potential for psychological impact, he created a format in which he could paint with complete freedom. James Ensor is considered to be an innovator in 19th-century art. Although he stood apart from other artists of his time, he significantly influenced such 20th-century artists as Paul Klee, George Grosz, Wols, and many expressionist and surrealist painters of the 20th century.
Very Good copy.
2005, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 15.9 x 24.8cm
Published by
Anthroposophic Press / UK
$56.00 - Out of stock
This book introduces a new way for thinking about, creating, and viewing art. Rudolf Steiner saw his task as the renewal of the lost unity of science, the arts, and religion; thus, he created a new, cognitive scientific and religious art in anthroposophy. The implications of his act--recognized by such diverse artists as Wassily Kandinsky and Joseph Beuys--are only now coming fully to light.
In his thorough introduction of more than a hundred pages, Michael Howard takes readers through these thought-provoking chapters:
Is Art Dead?; To Muse or Amuse; Artistic Activity as Spiritual Activity; The Representative of Humanity; Beauty, Creativity, and Metamorphosis; New Directions in Art
Rudolf Steiner's Lectures :The Aesthetics of Goethe's Worldview; The Spiritual Being of Art; Buildings Will Speak; The Sense Organs and Aesthetic Experience; The Two Sources of Art; The Building at Dornach; The Supersensible Origin of the Arts; Truth, Beauty, and Goodness; Christ, Ahriman, and Lucifer
2017, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 312 pages, 18 x 23 cm
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$87.00 $60.00 - Out of stock
Art historian Darby English is celebrated for working against the grain and plumbing gaps in historical narratives. In this book, he explores the year 1971, when two exhibitions opened that brought modernist painting and sculpture into the burning heart of black cultural politics: Contemporary Black Artists in America, shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The DeLuxe Show, an integrated abstract art exhibition presented in a renovated movie theater in a Houston ghetto.
1971 takes an insightful look at many black artists' desire to gain freedom from overt racial representation, as well as their and their advocates' efforts to further that aim through public exhibitions. Amid calls to define a "black aesthetic" or otherwise settle the race question, these experiments with modernist art favored cultural interaction and instability. Contemporary Black Artists in America highlighted abstraction as a stance against normative approaches, while The DeLuxe Show positioned abstraction in a center of urban blight.
The power and social importance of these experiments, English argues, came partly from color's special status as a racial metaphor and partly from investigations of color that were underway in formalist American art and criticism. From Frank Bowling to Virginia Jaramillo, Sam Gilliam to Peter Bradley, black modernists and their supporters rose above the demand to represent or be represented, compromising nothing in their appeals for racial reconciliation. At a time when many debates about identity sought closure, these exhibitions offered openings; when icons and slogans touted simple solutions, they chose difficulty. But above all, as English demonstrates in this provocative book, these exhibitions and artists responded with optimism rather than cynicism to the surrounding culture's preoccupation with color.
2018, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 488 pages, 19.3 x 23.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Karma / New York
$300.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this incredible and very quickly out of print monograph on Gertrude Abercrombie, edited by Dan Nadel. Text by Robert Storr, Susan Weininger, Robert Cozzelino, Dinah Livingston.
Interview with Studs Terkel.
This is the most comprehensive book ever published on the Chicago surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–77), a key figure in midcentury American surrealism. From the late 1930s until her death, Abercrombie made paintings populated by objects of personal significance—moons, towers, cats, pennants, Victorian furniture, shells, snails and doors—to create allegories for her own often precarious psychological states. Often presiding over these symbols was Abercrombie herself, who appears in numerous pictures as proud observer or witchy caricature.
Abercrombie exhibited in Chicago and New York in the 1940s and ‘50s, and her salon became a center of Midwestern culture, hosting jazz musicians (such as her close friend Dizzy Gillespie), writers and artists. This book includes new scholarship by Robert Cozzolino; a memoir of Abercrombie by Robert Storr; the artist's own writing; a definitive text by art historian Susan Weininger; and a memoir by the artist's daughter, Dinah Livingston.
As New copy of this now extremely scarce book.
1983, German
Softcover, 118 pages, 18 x 11.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Ullstein KunstBuch / Frankfurt
$40.00 - Out of stock
German artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) was one of the most subversive artists associated with Surrealism, famous--notorious, even--for his erotic engravings, objects and photographs. The first edition of Die Puppe (The Doll) comprised a series of Bellmer's photographs "illustrated" with prose poems by Paul Éluard; Bellmer's hand-colored photographs subsequently acquired an iconic status as perhaps the purest exemplification of the Surrealist ideal of "convulsive beauty." Later editions of the book were expanded to incorporate a body of theoretical, poetic and speculative texts that together comprise one of the most important expositions of Surrealist cultural theory. Bellmer weaves a remarkably disparate set of concepts and intuitions--from fields as diverse as mathematics, morphology, optics and psychology--into a theory of eroticism that provides a totally unexpected rationale for his uncompromising art. His ideas are, in the words of poet Joë Bousquet, a "scandal to reason."
This 1983 printing from Frankfurt is in the original German language, as are majority of editions of Die Puppe, and includes Die Puppe, Die Spiele der Puppe, and Die Anatomie des Bildes, and more. Illustrated throughout. Very Good copy.
2011, Japanese / French
Softcover (w. printed plastic jacket over reflective cover), 296 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
National Art Centre / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
First printing of this great exhibition catalogue from the National Art Centre Tokyo via Centre Pompidou Paris, on occasion of the most comprehensive Surrealist exhibition ever staged in Japan, “Le Surrealism: Exposition organisee par Le Pompidou a partir de sa Collection” at The National Art Center, Tokyo in 2011.
Housed in mirrored cover and profusely illustrated in colour with the work of André Breton, Victor Brauner, Rene Magritte, Joan Miro, Andre Masson, Francis Picabia, Claude Cahun, Hans Bellmer, Dorothea Tanning, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Toyen, Guilaume Apollinaire, Meret Oppenheim, Luis Buñuel, Jindrich Heisler, Andre Masson, Yves Tanguy, Alberto Giacometti, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Wilhelm Freddie, and many others, alongside comprehensive documentation of major historical Surrealist exhibitions and documents/publications.
Very Good copy.
1985, English
Softcover (stapled), 14 pages, 20.5 x 25.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Charles Nodrum / Melbourne
$35.00 - Out of stock
Published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Charles Nodrum Gallery in Melbourne, 1985, this scarce catalogue features the work of Robert Klippel, Danila Vassilieff, George Duncan, Alison Rehfisch, Roland Wakelin, Grace Cossington Smith, Sybil Craig, Hector Gilliland, Peggy Crombie, William Frater, Russell Drysdale, Kenneth Jack, Miriam Moxham, Dorothy Braund, John Taylor, Michael Shannon, Kenneth Rowell, Clifton Pugh, Lawrence Daws, Godrey Miller, Leonard Crawford, William Rose, Syd Ball, Alun Leach Jones, Jonas Balsaitis, John Firth Smith, Fred Cross, Paul Partos, Ron Lambert, Gunther Christmann, David Fitts, Brian Westwood, John Hopkins, Vivienne Pengilley. Illustrated throughout in black and white. Includes tipped in compliments note signed by "Charles" Nodrum.
1958, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 27 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Museum of Modern Art of Australia / Melbourne
$65.00 - Out of stock
Scarce 1958 first publication of the Museum of Modern Art of Australia which closed in 1966. In 1958 John Reed founded and was first director of the Museum of Modern Art of Australia (1958-66). Modern Australian Art : A Melbourne Collection of Paintings and Drawings presented a collection of 163 works donated by John and Sunday Reed from 1930's-1950's and exhibited in from 30th September to 10th October, 1958. Illustrated throughout with work examples, portraits and biographies of each artist, this rare historical title includes the work of Adrian Lawlor, Samuel Atyeo, Moya Dyring, Ian Fairweather, Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, Joy Hester, Mary Boyd, James Gleeson, Josl Bergner, Noel Counihan, Danila Vassilieff, H. Dearing, John Yule, Laurence Hope, Jean Langley, Charles Blackman, Robert Dickerson, Leonard Crawford, Ian Sime, Dawn Sime, Grey Smith, John Molvig, George Johnson, John Brack, Fred Williams, Mirka Mora, Peter Burns. Includes a full catalogue of the collection and statements John and Sunday Reed. Texts by editor Barrie Reid.
Good copy with general wear for age.
2001, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 22 x 27.5 cm
Published by
Self-Published / Melbourne
$20.00 - In stock -
This monographic publication, published in Melbourne in 2001, survey's the work of Anne-Marie May. Profusely illustrated in colour throughout, this book covers all bodies of work from 1989-2001, including her Cutouts, Screens, Felts, Carpets...) accompanied by texts by May and Kevin Murray, an interview between the two, biography, and list of works. May's history of abstraction is directed by varying processes and techniques guided by the qualities of everyday materials such as denim, felt, carpet, and more recently, plastics.
Born 1965, Melbourne, Victoria; lives and works in Melbourne. Anne-Marie May has been exhibiting since the late 1980s, and (alongside was a member of the influential artist-run space Store 5, Melbourne. Selected solo exhibitions have been held at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2004; Michael Lett Gallery, Auckland, 2004; and Murray White Room, Melbourne, 2009, 2011 and 2013. Her work was included in 21st Century Modern: 2006 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, and Less is More: Minimal and Post-Minimal Art in Australia at Heide in 2012.
2019, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 21.4 x 28.5 cm
Ed. of 950,
Published by
3-Ply / Victoria
$38.00 - Out of stock
Angela Brennan: 19 Desires and One Belief is an artist-driven publication edited by Angela Brennan, a non-exhaustive slice of practice, spanning around thirty years. The monograph includes an essay by Jan Bryant, a poem by Justin Clemens and contributions by Mitch Cairns, Mel Deerson, Michael Graf, Elizabeth Newman, Lisa Radford, and Georgina Sambell. The texts have been dispersed amongst an array of images, arranged non-periodically, sequenced to reflect a circuitous approach to practice. The book decontextualizes artworks, liberating them from previous frameworks in which they have been presented, opening space for new readings and atemporal crosscurrents.
Angela Brennan: 19 Desires and One Belief continues 3-ply’s investigation of monograph-as-artist-book. Design by Lucy Russell. Published in an edition of 950 copies.
1968, Japanese / German
Softcover, 80 pages, 21 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Goethe-Instituts / Japan
Staalichen Museums für Moderne Kunst / Tokyo
$70.00 - Out of stock
1st pinting of this publication on Dada, published in Japan in 1968. Features the work of Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Höch, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, Josef Albers, Hans Richter, Hans Arp, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Peter Agostini, Jean Tinguely, Karl Gerstner, and more reproduced alongside a collaged history of Dada across the globe (New York, Zürich, Cologne, Italy, Paris, Berlin, Hannover) w. reproductions of texts, illustrations, publications and ephemera.
Very Good copy.
2010, English / German
Three hardcover volumes (in slipcase), 496 pages, 28.5 x 23 cm
Out of print title / as new
Published by
Verlag Feymedia / Berlin
$340.00 - In stock -
During the course of Willem de Rooij's Neue Nationalgalerie major solo exhibition "Intolerance" (18 September 2010 - 2 January 2011), a three-part in-depth catalogue, was published by Verlag Feymedia, edited by Willem de Rooij and Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer for the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and designed by Martha Stutteregger.
Central to the exhibition itself, this long out-of-print and now very scarce catalogue comes in the form of three hardcover volumes in a heavy illustrated slipcase.
"Intolerance is a new work conceived by the Dutch artist Willem de Rooij. Developed especially for the Neue Nationalgalerie, it consists of a large, temporary installation and a three-part publication. Intolerance confronts a group of 17th century Dutch bird-paintings by Melchior d’Hondecoeter with a group of 18th and 19th century feathered objects from Hawai‘i. Open to a complex of interpretations, Intolerance can be read as a three-dimensional collage, as a reflection on the conditions of the exhibition space and of institutional practice, and as a visual study on the triangular relationship between early global trade, inter-cultural conflict and mutual attraction. Both groups of objects that form the nexus of Intolerance were originally produced to represent establishment and to decorate those in power. Through their high material and (in the case of the feather objects) religious value, these objects confirmed the prevailing power structures existing at that time."
Volume 1: Intolerance
Volume one of the catalogue documents the installation “Intolerance” in the Neue Nationalgalerie through 40 color illustrations. In a joint text, Willem de Rooij and Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer explain the social and political conditions under which both groups of objects were originally produced. In a further text, Juliane Rebentisch examines the principle of montage in this and other works by Willem de Rooij.
Juliane Rebentisch teaches philsophy at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main and is a member of the Cluster of Ecxcellence "Normative Orders" there. She received a PhD from the University Potsdam in 2002 and habilitated in Frankfurt in 2010. She published numerous texts and publications on contemporary art, amongst them Ästhetik der Installation (Aesthetics of Installation, Suhrkamp 2003).
Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer studied Comparative Literature and History and earned his PhD in 2006 at the Freie Universität Berlin with a thesis on the artist Dieter Roth. He works as a writer, lecturer and scholar in the field of art and esthetics.
Volume 2: Melchior d’Hondecoeter (1636-1695)
This volume offers the first comprehensive book publication on the work of the Dutch painter Melchior d’Hondecoeter. It contains more than 80 color illustrations and two texts: Marrigje Rikken represents an overview of the life and work of the painter; Lisanne Wepler explores the narrative potential of Melchior d’Hondecoeter’s paintings.
Marrigje Rikken is an art historian. While working as assistant curator Dutch 17th-century paintings at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, she wrote a text on Melchior d'Hondecoeter. She is currenly writing her PhD dissertation on the way artists employed newly acquired knowledge of natural history for the depictions of animals between 1550-1670.
Lisanne Wepler wrote her M.A. thesis on the significance of fables for the genre of bird paintings in Dutch baroque. Currently she is writing her doctoral thesis on the narrative potential of bird pieces from the 17th to 18th century in Dutch art at the institute of art history at the University of Bonn.
Volume 3: Hawaiian Featherwork
For the first time, this volume delivers a compilation of all the known feather objects that originated in Hawaii before 1900. It contains more than 260 illustrations of feather-god images, helmets, capes and cloaks. Adrienne Kaeppler wrote both the catalogue raisonné and the accompanying text, which consolidates what is known about production, coloration, design and meaning of these objects. It follows the introduction of Hawaiian featherwork into Europe and beyond, and it seeks to explain why and under whose authority these objects left Hawaii.
Adrienne Kaeppler has dedicated herself to material and spiritual culture of Hawai‘i since 1960. She is a social/cultural anthropologist and Curator of Oceanic Ethnology (Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia, New Guinea, and Australia) at the National Museum of Natural History/National Museum of Man, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. She received her BA, MA, and PhD degrees from the University of Hawai‘i. Before she came to the Smithsonian she was an anthropologist on the staff of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawai‘i.
Willem de Rooij (b. 1969) works in a variety of media, including film and installation. He studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Akademie in Amsterdam from 1990-95 and at the Rijksakademie from 1997-98. He has been a tutor at De Ateliers in Amsterdam since 2002 and professor of fine arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main since 2006. The artist lives and works in Berlin. He worked in collaboration with Jeroen de Rijke (1970-2006) from 1994 to 2006, as de Rijke / de Rooij. Art historian Pamela M. Lee states that in their work they trace "the recursive economy of the image: its affective power, its capacity to seduce and organize perception, and its mediation of time and subjectivity." De Rooij received a Robert Fulton Fellowship at Harvard University in 2004 and represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale in 2005. Among other institutions, his works can be found in the collections of the Nationalgalerie in Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, at the MUMOK in Vienna, and the MoMA in New York.
2016, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 292 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$54.00 - Out of stock
Painting beyond Itself
The Medium in the Post-medium Condition
Isabelle Graw, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth (Eds.)
Contributions by Carol Armstrong, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Sabeth Buchmann, René Démoris, Isabelle Graw, David Joselit, Jutta Koether, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Julie Mehretu, Matt Saunders, Amy Sillman
In response to recent developments in pictorial practice and critical discourse, Painting beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-medium Condition seeks new ways to approach and historicize the question of the medium. Reaching back to the earliest theoretical and institutional definitions of painting, this book—based on a conference at Harvard University in 2013—focuses on the changing role of materiality in establishing painting as the privileged practice, discourse, and institution of modernity. Myriad conceptions of the medium and its specificity are explored by an international group of scholars, critics, and artists. Painting beyond Itself is a forum for rich historical, theoretical, and practice-grounded conversation.
Institut für Kunstkritik Series
Design by Surface
2020, English
Softcover, 300 pages, 14 x 21.1 cm
Published by
Campus Verlag / Frankfurt
$96.00 $60.00 - Out of stock
The Value of Critique casts its gaze on the two dominant modes of passing judgment in art--critique and value (or evaluation). The act of critique has long held sway in the world of art theory but has recently been increasingly abandoned in favor of evaluation, which advocates alternate modes of judgment aimed at finding the intrinsic "value" of a given work rather than picking apart its intentions and relative success. This book's contributors explore the relationship between these two practices, finding that one cannot exist with the other. As soon as a critic decides an object is worthy enough of their interest and time to critique it, they have imbued that object with a certain value. Similarly, theories of value are typically marked by a critical impetus: as much as critique takes part in the construction of evaluations, bestowing something with value can then trigger critiques. Assembling essays from an international array of authors, this book is the first to put value, critique, and artistic labor in conversation with one another, making clear just how closely all three are related.
2019, English
Hardcover, 72 pages, 30 x 25 cm
Published by
Matthew Marks / New York
$89.00 - Out of stock
Expanding on Kelly's highly-regarded 1992 book, first published in 2017 in this expanded clothbound edition, "Ellsworth Kelly: Plant Drawings" features more than 30 drawings made by Kelly between 1949 and 2008. Kelly made these gorgeously economical line drawings from life, sometimes barely lifting the pencil as he translated each plant’s contours to paper. Focusing on direct visual impression—“nothing is changed or added,” as he put it—Kelly used the natural forms of the plants to explore some of his painterly fixations, like the effects of volume, negative space and overlapping planes. Despite the immediacy of their execution and their representational content, the most striking surprise of Kelly’s plant drawings is how much they share with his abstract paintings and sculptures.
2018, English / Dutch
Softcover, 224 pages, 24.2 x 30.2 cm
Published by
Roma / Amsterdam
Stedelijk Museum / Amsterdam
$88.00 - Out of stock
Lily van der Stokker is recognised for her exuberant and decorative murals. Her work is ostensibly about things like beauty, friendship, and kindness, or about everyday activities such as tidying up or visiting the doctor – subjects seldom encountered in contemporary art. Yet her conceptual approach gives these ordinary things an entirely new dimension. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of Van der Stokker’s work at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, this book presents the themes that have typified her work since the 1990s. The close involvement of the artist in its making is apparent in its playful visual references.
Essays by the two exhibition curators offer context and background.
2019, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 13.2 x 20.3 cm
Published by
New Directions / New York
$32.00 - Out of stock
An essential selection of the poetry of one of the most important twentieth-century creative movements.
Black Mountain College had an explosive influence on American poetry, music, art, craft, dance, and thought; it’s hard to imagine any other institution that was so utopian, rebellious, and experimental. Founded with the mission of creating rounded, complete people by balancing the arts and manual labor within a democratic, nonhierarchical structure, Black Mountain was a crucible of revolutionary literature. Although this artistic haven only existed from 1933 to 1956, Black Mountain helped inspire some of the most radical and significant midcentury American poets.
This anthology begins with the well-known Black Mountain Poets— Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov—but also includes the artist Josef Albers and the musician John Cage, as well as the often overlooked women associated with the college, M. C. Richards and Hilda Morley.
2018, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 250 pages, 22.9 x 30.5 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$125.00 $60.00 - Out of stock
A revelatory reassessment of one of the most influential American artists of the 20th century
Charles White (1918-1979) is best known for bold, large-scale paintings and drawings of African Americans, meticulously executed works that depict human relationships and socioeconomic struggles with a remarkable sensitivity. This comprehensive study offers a much-needed reexamination of the artist's career and legacy. With handsome reproductions of White's finest paintings, drawings, and prints, the volume introduces his work to contemporary audiences, reclaims his place in the art-historical narrative, and stresses the continuing relevance of his insistent dedication to producing positive social change through art.
Tracing White's career from his emergence in Chicago to his mature practice as an artist, activist, and educator in New York and Los Angeles, leading experts provide insights into White's creative process, his work as a photographer, his political activism and interest in history, the relationship between his art and his teaching, and the importance of feminism in his work. A preface by Kerry James Marshall addresses White's significance as a mentor to an entire generation of practitioners and underlines the importance of this largely overlooked artist.
Edited by Esther Adler
Preface by Kerry James Marshall
Contributions by Ilene Susan Fort, Mark Pascale, Sarah Kelly Oehler, Deborah Willis, Kellie Jones