Books

Tauba Auerbach

Folds

Co-published by the artist and Bergen Kunsthall

2011

100 pages

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In connection with Tauba Auerbach’s exhibition “Tetrachromat” at Bergen Kunsthall, Folds presents Auerbach’s eponymous painting series for the first time in book form. In these paintings Auerbach twists and folds the canvas before applying the paint. In its stretched form the flat canvas conjures a trompe l’oeil rendering of its previous three-dimensional state. Transferred to the medium of the book, the paintings are presented here in a new and unexpected way alongside mathematical diagrams and three texts. Auerbach works with a number of printed media, and the book enjoys a quite central position in her oeuvre: from highly sophisticated book sculptures that are somewhere between physical objects and non-narrative books, to a series of individually made artist books—most recently [2,3] (2011), a pop-up book where six detailed paper sculptures emerge from the book’s pages.

Radcliffe Bailey

Memory As Medicine

High Museum of Art/Prestel

2011

160 pages

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The catalogue features essays by Carol Thomson (author), and contributions by Edward S. Spriggs, Rene Paul Barilleaux, Michael Rooks and Manthia Diawara. This book offers the first mid-career survey of work by American artist Radcliffe Bailey. The volume reproduces more than 70 works, many of which have never been published before, and considers Bailey's work in a major essay and four shorter discussions. In these large- and small-scale pieces Bailey explores ideas of ancestry, race, memory, struggle, and sacrifice, including the artist's own engagement with African sculpture in connection with an investigation into his family's DNA.

Chris Ballantyne

Chris Ballantyne

Peres Projects

2006

80 pages

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Hernan Bas

Hernan Bas

Rizzoli

2014

274 pages

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Written by Hernan Bas, Contribution by Jonathan Griffin and Nancy Spector, Introduction by Christian Rattemeyer. This book chronicles the work of this young figurative painter, whose moody portraits reflect the youth of contemporary culture. Hernan Bas is known for his overgrown landscapes and intimate figurative portraits of beautiful boyish and hip young men. With a style that is energetic and gestural, his work nods to abstract expressionism yet remains contemporary in feel. His pieces are romantic and often uncompromisingly sexual, with dark narratives or open landscapes. A soft palette is met with the gorgeous contrast of unpredicted dark hues and vibrant colors, while his loose brushwork creates intricate textures. This lavish monograph is the most complete book devoted to Bas's career thus far, focusing on his paintings, film stills, and illustrations. With over 200 color plates and with texts by Christian Rattemeyer, Jonathan Griffin, and Nancy Spector, this gorgeous volume presents the intricate and sensuously delightful work of this up-and-coming artist, whose work personifies epic romance by embracing both the decadence and nastiness of pleasure.

Gee's Bend

Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt

Tinwood Books

2006

224 pages

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In 2002, Gee’s Bend burst into international prominence through the success of Tinwood’s Quilts of Gee’s Bend exhibition and book, which revealed an important and previously invisible art tradition from the African American South. Critics and popular audiences alike marveled at these quilts that combined the best of contemporary design with a deeply rooted ethnic heritage and compelling human stories about the women.Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt is a major book and museum exhibition that will premiere at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), in June 2006 before traveling to seven American museums through 2008. The book's 330 color illustrations and insightful text bring home the exciting experience to readers while displaying all the cultural heritage and craftsmanship that have gone into these remarkable quilts.

Mary Lee Bendolph

Gee’s Bend: Get Ready

Clarkson Potter

2021

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A magnificent 1000-piece puzzle featuring a colorful, intricately patterned quilt by artist Mary Lee Bendolph, matriarch of the historic quilting community in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and published by Paulson Fontaine Press in Berkeley, California.

Essie Bendolph Pettway

Gee’s Bend: Equal Justice

Clarkson Potter

2021

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An extraordinary 1000-piece puzzle that portrays an intricate, geometric-patterned quilt in mesmerizing shades of teal, lavender, pink, and royal blue stitched by Essie Bendolph Pettway, a member of the historic Gee's Bend quilting community, and published by Paulson Fontaine Press in Berkeley, California.

McArthur Binion

McArthur Binion Re:Mine

Black Dog Publishing

2015

80 pages

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Over his forty-year career, artist McArthur Binion has developed a unique visual language through the fusion of Minimalism and personal narratives. This monograph, Binion’s first, is produced in conjunction with the artist’s inaugural solo show at a New York gallery and on the occasion of his exhibition Re:Mine at Galerie Lelong.

Squeak Carnwath

Painting Is No Ordinary Object

Pomegranate Communications

2009

159 pages

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The paintings of Squeak Carnwath (American, b. 1947), often subtly illuminated by meticulously applied layers of glaze, embody complex layers of meaning. "Paintings are not ordinary objects," the artist observes. "Painting is a carrier of meaning, of human touch. Each brush stroke or smear of pigment is freighted with philosophical inquiry." In Carnwath's works, rows of writing are placed to slow the eye, "to put the viewer in real time." Recurring motifs touch on personal and universal themes, from a rabbit tentatively seeking its place in a chaotic world to the seated blue Medicine Buddha, healer of ills and reminder of the latent Buddha nature in each of us. Published in conjunction with the exhibition organized by the Oakland Museum of California, Squeak Carnwath: Painting Is No Ordinary Object celebrates the wonder and spirit embodied in each of Carnwath's works. Over eighty full-color reproductions trace the development of the artist's distinctive style from the 1970s to the present, while essays by curator Karen Tsujimoto and art critic John Yau explore the personal, social, and artistic context of this powerful body of work.

Woody De Othello

Woody De Othello: Maybe tomorrow

Karma Books, New York

1162024

112

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The San Francisco–based artist Woody De Othello (born 1991) finds inspiration for his paintings and ceramics by adapting a position of porousness to the things around him. Through his adroit interventions, everyday artifacts of the domestic—tables, chairs, television remotes, telephone receivers, lamps and air purifiers—are anthropomorphized in glazed ceramic, bronze, wood and glass. The result is often tubular, drooping and coated in vibrant reds, purples and magnetic blacks, imbued with the subterranean futurity of jazz. Fittingly, this catalog, published following the eponymous solo exhibition in New York, is titled after jazz musician Grant Green’s 1971 tune. The new body of ceramic works in Maybe Tomorrow brim with spiritual charge; the domestic objects are treated as repositories of psychic significance. The catalog explores this thematic wellspring, along with other topics, in an essay by Jason R. Young, as well as in two conversations with the artist.

Thornton Dial

Thornton Dial in the 21st Century

Tinwood Books

2006

324 pages

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Self-taught African American artist Thornton Dial (born 1928) is an acclaimed, original artist. This tribute to his work includes nearly 150 images and focuses on his post-9/11 output, including a haunting suite inspired by that event, homages to his famous friends the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers, and pieces drawing on his memories of an impoverished Southern childhood. The book also has a rich overview of Dial's pre-9/11 work. An in-depth biography and contextualizing essays by leading art historians shed new light on Dial's life and work.

Thornton Dial

Hard Truths/The Art of Thornton Dial

Prestel

2010

240 pages

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Celebrating Thorton Dial's contributions to American art, this book surveys the career of one of our most original contemporary artists, whose epic work tackles the most compelling social and political issues of our time. Born in poverty in Alabama, Dial has lived his entire life in the American South, and his art, informed by decades of struggle as a black working-class man, reveals a unique perspective on America's most difficult and pervasive challenges, such as its long history of race and class conflict, the war in Iraq, and the 9/11 tragedy. This monograph includes reproductions of 70 of Dial's large-scale paintings, drawings and found object sculptures spanning twenty years of his artistic career. Drawing inspiration from the rich symbolic world of the black rural South and with no formal education, Dial has developed a truly distinctive and original style. Incorporating salvaged objects in his work-from plastic grave flowers and children's toys to cow skulls and goat carcasses-he creates highly charged assemblages combined with turbulent fields of expressionistic painting. With commentary from historian David Driskell, cultural critic Greg Tate, and art historian Joanne Cubbs, this volume brings long-overdue recognition to Dial's remarkable career and offers audiences an unprecedented look into the creative world of this important artist.

Thornton Dial

Thoughts On Paper

The University of North Carolina Press

2012

224 pages

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Thornton Dial (b. 1928), one of the most important artists in the American South, came to prominence in the late 1980s and was celebrated internationally for his large construction pieces and mixed-media paintings. It was only later, in response to a reviewer's negative comment on his artistic ability, that he began to work on paper. And it was not until recently that these drawings have received the acclaim they deserve. This volume, edited by Bernard L. Herman, offers the first sustained critical attention to Dial's works on paper. Concentrating on Dial's early drawings, the contributors examine Dial's use of line and color and his recurrent themes of love, lust, and faith. They also discuss the artist's sense of place and history, relate his drawings to his larger works, and explore how his drawing has evolved since its emergence in the early 1990s. Together, the essays investigate questions of creativity and commentary in the work of African American artists and contextualize Dial's works on paper in the body of American art.

Torkwase Dyson

Torkwase Dyson: A Liquid Belonging

Pace Publishing

2023

80

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Featuring unconventional materials and a range of written responses from her peers, Torkwase Dyson’s first publication is an artful, indispensable volume. Through her multidisciplinary practice guided by her working philosophy of Black Compositional Thought, Torkwase Dyson creates unique curvilinear and rectangular hypershapes and abstractions that speak to infrastructures of liberation and resistance. With its large-scale, site-specific installations and accompanying layered paintings, A Liquid Belonging, Dyson's recent exhibition at Pace Gallery in New York, explored these geometries on an architectural scale to invite viewers into new spatial and perceptual practices. The accompanying publication takes a similar approach, asking readers to engage with the forms and spatial actions that make up a book. Composed of one bound paper book and an array of unbound materials—including acetate and accordion-folded paper—all contained in a box-slipcase, it is as much an art object as it is an addendum to the exhibition. With new texts and experimental writing by Dionne Brand, LeRonn P. Brooks, Saidiya Hartman, Jaleh Mansoor, and Mabel O. Wilson and a conversation with Christina Sharpe, Torkwase Dyson: A Liquid Belonging takes a multifaceted approach to represent the artist’s wide influence.

Liam Everett

Without an Audience

Altman Siegel and kamel mennour

2018

156

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Kota Ezawa

The History of Photography Remix

Nazraeli Press

2010

56 pages

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Using well-known films, videos, and photographs, Ezawa explores the appropriation and mediation of current events and images. The History of Photography Remix draws on important art and documentary photographs made throughout the history of the medium.

Caio Fonseca

Caio Fonseca

Institut Valencia d'Art Modern, Valencia, Spain

2003

201 pages

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A chronological survey of 20 years of painting, both figurative and abstract.

Charles Gaines Gaines

Charles Gaines: Palm Trees and Other Works

Hauser & Wirth Publishers

2019

144

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Published alongside Charles Gaines’s 2019–20 exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, this monograph charts the evolution of the palm tree in Gaines’s work from the 1980s to the present. In a new text, David Platzker explores the cultural and art historical contexts of the series, particularly the recent ‘Numbers and Trees’ works, shown for the first time in Los Angeles, that take palm trees as their subject. Also featured is a conversation between Gaines and Cherise Smith, which delves into the conceptual underpinnings of the artist’s work. Additionally, this publication documents and discusses other works from Gaines’s decades-long career, including the ‘Manifestos’ series (2008–18), exploring the threads that unite various parts of his practice.

Charles Gaines

Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974-1989

The Studio Museum in Harlem

2014

168

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Widely regarded as one of the leading exponents of postminimalist art in the late 1970s, Charles Gaines (born 1944) is known primarily for his photographs, drawings and works on paper that investigate systems, cognition and language. Considered against the backdrop of the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s and the rise of multiculturalism in the 1980s, the works in Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974-1989 are radical gestures. Eschewing overt discussions of race, they take a detached approach to identity that exemplifies Gaines' determination to transcend the conversations of his time and create new paths. Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974-1989 gathers significant examples from several of the artist's most important series, including 75 key works from the mid-1970s through the late 1980s. It features drawings and photographs from public and private collections--some of which were previously considered lost--and essays by leading scholars and curators.

Gee's Bend

The Quilts of Gees Bend

Tinwood Books

2002

192

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Since the 19th century, the women of Gee's Bend in southern Alabama have created stunning, vibrant quilts. Beautifully illustrated with 110 color illustrations, The Quilts of Gee's Bend includes a historical overview of the two hundred years of extraordinary quilt-making in this African-American community, its people, and their art-making tradition. This book is being released in conjunction with a national exhibition tour including The Museum of Fine Art, Houston, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Museum of Fine Art, Boston, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Milwaukee Art Museum, The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, The Mobile Museum of Art, and The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

Lonnie Holley

Something to Take My Place: The Art of Lonnie Holley

Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art

2016

215 pages

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Lonnie Holley (born 1950), acclaimed by The New York Times as "the Insider's Outsider," is best known for his assemblage sculptures incorporating natural and man-made materials, often cast off or discarded; he has recently also begun to make music, through the Dust-to-Digital label. Legendary for his environmental assemblage that spread over two acres of his property in Birmingham, Alabama-now destroyed-Holley scavenges and repurposes found objects in the service of a personal philosophy of renewal and rejuvenation. This is the first monograph on Holley's work in more than a decade. Illustrated with reproductions of more than 70 of Holley's sculptures, it provides a comprehensive overview of Holley's art, life and philosophy, with essays by Mark Sloan, Leslie Umberger, Bernard L. Herman and an "as-told-to" autobiography recorded by noted oral historian Theodore Rosengarten.

Chris Johanson

Chris Johanson

Phaidon

2103

160 pages

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American artist Chris Johanson (b.1968) has built a loyal following with his vibrant and sometimes hilarious take on the universe and our place in it. This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date monograph on Johanson’s work, produced in close collaboration with the artist. Johanson’s idiosyncratic paintings, drawings and sculptural installations portray the contemporary human condition with sincerity and wit.

Maira Kalman

My Favorite Things

Harper Design

2014

160 pages

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From Maira Kalman, the author of the bestsellers The Principles of Uncertainty and The Elements of Style, comes this beautiful pictorial and narrative exploration of the significance of objects in our lives, drawn from her personal artifacts, recollections, and selections from the collection of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

Kerry James Marshall

Kerry James Marshall: Mastry

Skira Rizzoli

2016

288

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The definitive monograph on contemporary African American painter Kerry James Marshall, accompanying a major traveling retrospective. This long-awaited volume celebrates the work of Kerry James Marshall, one of America’s greatest living painters. Born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in Birmingham, Alabama, and witness to the Watts riots in 1965, Marshall has long been an inspired and imaginative chronicler of the African American experience. Best known for large-scale interiors, landscapes, and portraits featuring powerful black figures, Marshall explores narratives of African American history from slave ships to the present and draws upon his deep knowledge of art history from the Renaissance to twentieth-century abstraction, as well as other sources such as the comic book and the muralist tradition. With luscious color and brushstrokes and highly detailed patterning, his direct and intimate scenes of black middle-class life conjure a wide range of emotions, resulting in powerful paintings that confront the position of African Americans throughout American history. Richly illustrated, this monumental book features essays by noted curators as well as the artist, and more than 100 paintings from throughout the artist’s career arranged thematically by subject: history painting; beauty, as expressed through the nude, portraiture, and self-portraiture; landscape; religion; and the politics of black nationalism.

Martin Puryear

Multiple Dimensions

Art Institute of Chicago

2015

160 pages

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American sculptor Martin Puryear (b. 1941) creates work that combines the clean elegance of minimalism and the simplicity of traditional materials. His stunning sculptures explore themes of identity, ethnicity, and history, and are rich with social and cultural commentary. Puryear, who is known for abstract, large-scale pieces in wood, stone, and bronze, has captured the attention of the art world for the past 30 years. Despite the apparent simplicity of his works, however, he engages in an extensive iterative process that has, until now, been unknown. Martin Puryear: Multiple Dimensions explores that process, featuring numerous drawings, prints, and small-scale sculptures that have never before been published. This catalogue is the first to examine Puryear’s work across media, providing invaluable insight into his visual thinking, from sketches to working drawings and constructions for sculpture. Handsomely illustrated with nearly 120 color plates that demonstrate the evolution of Puryear’s ideas between drawings, prints, and sculptures, this beautiful volume draws back the curtain on the methodology of this important and enigmatic artist.

Gary Simmons

Gary Simmons

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

2002

88 pages

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This catalog, the first published on the artist's work, focuses on Simmons' work since the mid-1990s.

Gary Simmons

Paradise

Damiani

2012

192 pages

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This overview of Simmons's 20-plus year career brings together for the first time his photographs, installations, public projects, sculpture, drawings and paintings.

Souls Grown Deep

Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South

Royal Academy of Arts

2023

144

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A wide-ranging survey of Black art in the American South, from Thornton Dial and Nellie Mae Rowe to the quilters of Gee's Bend For generations, Black artists from the American South have forged a unique art tradition. Working in near isolation from established practices, they have created masterpieces in clay, driftwood, roots, soil, and recycled and cast-off objects that articulate America's painful past--the inhuman practice of enslavement, the cruel segregationist policies of the Jim Crow era and institutionalized racism. Their works respond to issues ranging from economic inequality, oppression and social marginalization to sexuality, the influence of place and ancestral memory. Among the sculptures, paintings, reliefs and drawings included here--the majority from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in Atlanta--are works by Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Hawkins Bolden, Bessie Harvey, Charles Williams, Mary T. Smith, Purvis Young, Mose Tolliver, Nellie Mae Rowe, Mary Lee Bendolph, Marlene Bennett Jones, Martha Jane Pettway, Loretta Pettway and Henry and Georgia Speller. Also featured are the celebrated quiltmakers of Gee's Bend, Alabama, and work from the neighboring communities of Rehoboth and Alberta.

Henry Taylor

Henry Taylor

Rizzoli Electa

2018

320

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This definitive survey of over 200 of the painter's portraits and street scenes forms a personal and political portrait of society today. For three decades the iconic artist has worked his way through New York, Los Angeles, Europe, and Africa, documenting what he sees. In his circle are artists, musicians, writers, performers, as well as friends from his ten years as a psychiatric technician. It is the artist's empathetic eye that allows him to imagine his figures with authenticity and grace--not better than they are, or more glamorous--but part of a big, complicated world. Flat, brushy flows of color cast figures that often float in surreal landscapes abstracted from the barbeque in the park, or neighboring street. Suites of Taylor's paintings are reproduced alongside handwritten accounts of the sittings, offering an in-depth understanding of the artist's world. Contributions by Charles Gaines, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Sarah Lewis, and Zadie Smith touch on the nature of truth, racial terror; memory and belonging in America. This definitive monograph celebrates Taylor's direct and revealing portraits, offering a tonic to a divisive cultural moment.

Henry Taylor

Henry Taylor: B Side

DelMonico Books/The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

2022

237

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The official catalog accompanying the major retrospective at MoCA LA: Henry Taylor creates a grand pageant of contemporary Black life in America Surveying 30 years of Henry Taylor’s work in painting, sculpture and installation, this comprehensive monograph celebrates a Los Angeles artist widely appreciated for his unique aesthetic, social vision and freewheeling experimentation. Taylor’s portraits and allegorical tableaux―populated by friends, family members, strangers on the street, athletic stars and entertainers―display flashes of familiarity in their seemingly brash compositions, which nonetheless linger in the imagination with uncanny detail. In his paintings on cigarette packs, cereal boxes and other found supports, Taylor brings his primary medium into the realm of common culture. Similarly, the artist’s installations often recode the forms and symbolisms of found materials (bleach bottles, push brooms) to play upon art historical tropes and modernism’s appropriations of African or African American culture. Taken together, the various strands of Taylor’s practice display a deep observation of Black life in America at the turn of the century, while also inviting a humanist fellowship that pushes outward from the particular.