artist

The late-16th century was the golden age of Japanese screen painting, both literally and figuratively. The Momoyama period (1573-1615) was also an age of monumental architecture, with feudal lords building forts and castles of a size unprecedented in Japan. The great masters of the art of screen painting who were called upon to decorate the interiors of these large buildings filled them with screens of bold and innovative aesthetics, some with gold leaf covering their entire surfaces. Japan had a well-established tradition of incorporating gold leaf into art and decorative work.

Los Angeles-based video artist Doug Aitken is known for his multi-screen environments projected onto iconic buildings, including the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum in 2012. In the spring of 2007, Aitken premiered the video projection Sleepwalkers on seven facades of the Museum of Modern Art in midtown Manhattan. Four years later, Aitken partnered with Princeton Architectural Press and DFA Records to create a multimedia artist’s box based on Sleepwalkers.

Although black—the color that contains all colors—has been American sculptor Louise Nevelson’s signature color, the artist began incorporating white and gold into her work in the 1960s. This announcement for an exhibition of sculptures by Nevelson at The Pace Gallery, New York, October 23-November 28, 1992, reflects her limited palette. Reproductions of her assemblage sculptures are presented in three die-cut printed pop-ups, printed in silver and gold. Nevelson herself is pictured in a silver-printed portrait on the front cover. The entire elegant presentation is ribbon-tied.

This catalog was published in conjunction with the two-part exhibition “Paul McCarthy's Low Life Slow Life,” curated by the artist, which took place at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts on the San Francisco campus of California College of the Arts from 2008-2009. Packaged as a recreation of a vintage Tide detergent box circa 1973, this publication was designed by McCarthy to serve as an extension of the show and as an artwork in itself.

"'Yumechigae.' According to the dictionary, this means: A charm to divert misfortune after experiencing a nightmare." Thus opens the essay to this exquisite exhibition catalog for a solo show of Japanese artist Tabaimo’s work at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, in the summer of 2003. Tabaimo is a contemporary Japanese artist whose immersive video installations evoke Japanese woodblock prints (Ukiyo-e), manga, and anime to express the anxieties underpinning Japanese society in an age of globalization.

Ailey Spirit is a reflection of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s amazing journey as it has progressed from “a small group of young, African-American dancers traveling the country in a station wagon, to what we now respect as one of the best modern dance companies in the world.”  Photographs from an array of

This book is an invaluable tool for art historians, scholars, dealers, and collectors interested in metal sculptures of Northern India, the Himalayas, and Tibet. It is also an important work for scholars studying Chinese bronzes of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Published in 1981, it remains the only publication providing a timeline of the evolution of the art of these types of metal sculptures. The author, Ulrich von Schroeder, has been studying Buddhist art and culture as an independent scholar since the early 1960s.

The Book of the Art of Cennino Cennini is an English translated book from Italian, first published in 1859. The artist, Cennino Cennini, was an Italian painter born around 1360 and died before 1427. He trained under Agnolo Gaddi, and worked in Padua, at the court of Francesco Novello da Carrara. This book is an English translation of Cennino Cennini’s most notable publication, Il Libro Dell'Arte, with an introduction and commentary by celebrated British artist (and art patron), Christiana J. Herringham.

Birth of the Cool may be the coolest book you will ever see. In this 2008 exhibition catalog of his first retrospective, Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) distills black identity into powerful three-quarter and full-length portraits that teem with style and attitude. His sitters are unapologetic in their self-presentation and the result is a phenomenal elevation of African Americans who would have otherwise gone unnoticed in the decades immediately following the civil rights movement.

This multiple was created by George Maciunas, ostensible leader of the avant-garde movement Fluxus, in conjunction with Yoko Ono’s 1971 retrospective This is Not Here at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY. Yoko Ono, artist, peace activist, and widow of John Lennon has used smiles as a recurring theme since the 1960s. "It is the simplest thing to make yourself healthy and make others feel good," she says about smiling.

This beautiful coffee table book book is signed by the author, Jonathan Green of South Carolina. It contains 108 color portraits and paintings, with captions describing each work of art. The first thirty pages share a biography of the artist and describe his life’s work. The rest of the book is devoted entirely to nothing but beautiful art. The images depict the artist’s upbringing. He was raised on a farm in Gullah country, the coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia, inhabited by the descendants of freed slaves from the area. 

This seemingly insignificant, slim volume is the catalog for a groundbreaking exhibition curated by Sam Wagstaff at the Detroit Institute of Arts. A renowned curator and collector, Wagstaff is best known as the benefactor of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and poet-musician Patti Smith.

This beautiful book, a wordless novel, tells a story of the African slave trade and one slave trader’s obsession and tragic downfall—all in 128 powerful woodcuts that combine Art Deco and Expressionist styles. Lynd Ward was one of America’s finest wood engravers, and the detailed, complicated plates in this book show him as a master craftsman and illustrator who could also reveal psychological anguish through his art. The plates in this second-edition copy are reproduced photographically; the front and back covers are bound in papers showing a woodcut-style design in black and white.

Queensland Art Gallery curators Ted Gott and Kathryn Weir created an exhibit featuring monsters and beasts as depicted in art and entertainment history. The exhibit and accompanying book, Kiss of the Beast: From Paris Salon to King Kong highlights the many ways beasts feature prominently in imaginations of artists and filmmakers. The animal now known as the gorilla came to the attention of modern Europeans in 1847. From that time, gorillas and similar beasts have been popular subjects in sculptures, paintings, books, and movies.

A book that accompanied the 1946 exhibit "If You Want To Build A House" exhibit at The Museum of Modern Art. The book highlights mid-century modern architects such as Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, and Richard Neutra as well as Prairie School architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The book describes the concepts of modern architecture from the prospective of a potential home builder.

An attractive, slipcased catalog for a collaborative exhibition of sculptor Isamu Noguchi, painter Genichiro Inokuma, and designer Issey Miyake at the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (MIMOCA), Japan, highlighting the mutual influence of the three friends and their hybrid Japanese and American cultures.

Emile-Allain Séguy (1877-1951) was one of the foremost French designers at the beginning of the 20th century, creating examples of ornamentation to inspire artists and designers based on the natural world, including flowers, foliage, crystals, insects, and animals. Working in both the Art Deco and Art Nouveau styles, he published many design folios utilizing the pochoir technique, a printing process that employs a series of stencils to lay dense and vivid color. Samarkande is a portfolio of decoration and ornament reflecting Oriental influences.