The riotous and colorful artwork of famed catholic nun and educator Corita Kent

At 18, Corita Kent (1918-86) entered the Roman Catholic order of Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles, where she taught art and eventually ran the art department. After more than 30 years, at the end of the 1960s, she left the order to devote herself to making her own work. Over a 35-year career she made watercolors, posters, books and banners--and most of all, serigraphs--in an accessible and dynamic style that appropriated techniques from advertising, consumerism and graffiti. The earliest, which she began showing in 1951, borrowed phrases and depicted images from the Bible; by the 1960s, she was using song lyrics and publicity slogans as raw material. Eschewing convention, she produced cheap, readily available multiples, including a postage stamp. Her work was popular but largely neglected by the art establishment--though it was always embraced by such design luminaries as Charles and Ray Eames, Buckminster Fuller and Saul Bass. More recently, she has been increasingly recognized as one of the most innovative and unusual Pop artists of the 1960s, battling the political and religious establishments, revolutionizing graphic design and making some of the most striking--and joyful--American art of her era, all while living and practicing as a Catholic nun. This first study of her work, organized by Julie Ault on the 20th anniversary of Kent's death, with essays by Ault and Daniel Berrigan, is the first to examine this important American outsider artist's life and career, and contains more than 90 illustrations, many of which are reproduced for the first time, in vibrant, and occasionally Day-Glo, color.

Girls are powerful the '70s feminist posters of See Red Women's Workshop

A feminist silkscreen poster collective founded in London in 1974 by three former art students, the See Red Women's Workshop grew out of a shared desire to combat sexist images of women and to create positive and challenging alternatives. Women from different backgrounds came together to make posters and calendars that tackled issues of sexuality, identity and oppression. With humor and bold, colorful graphics, See Red expressed the personal experiences of women as well as their role in wider struggles for change.

Written by See Red members, detailing the group's history up until the closure of the workshop in 1990, and with a foreword by celebrated feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham, See Red Women's Workshop features all of the collective's original screenprints and posters. Confronting negative stereotypes, questioning the role of women in society, and promoting women's self-determination, the power and energy of these images reflect an important and dynamic era of women's liberation--with continued relevance for today.

Published as part of the Four Corners Familiars series, this beautiful edition of the great Russian author Nikolai Gogol's The Overcoat (a short story originally published in 1842) includes newly commissioned artwork from Sarah Dobai. This influential story--in which a lowly government clerk's life is briefly transformed by the extravagant purchase of a new coat--has been adapted into a variety of stage and film interpretations; as Fyodor Dostoevsky remarked on the story's impact in Russian literature, We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat.'
Artist, filmmaker and photographer Sarah Dobai responds to the story's preoccupation with material desire and illusion; the text is printed alongside her photographs of shop windows in London and Paris, showing ready-made still lifes of merchandise and mannequins in window displays. Combining contemporary visual work with a beloved 19th-century classic, this special edition of The Overcoat reimagines Gogol for a new generation.

The seventh in Four Corners' Familiars series takes us to Ruritania, a land reminiscent of many Central European countries. A new king is about to be crowned, but his brother drugs him and attempts to claim the throne for himself. To foil him, the king's supporters recruit his cousin to impersonate him at the coronation. British artist Mireille Fauchon's handsome edition of the classic adventure novel includes tipped-in illustrations.

An intimate history of the lost art of the psychedelic light show

The latest volume in Four Corners' Irregulars series on forgotten and fascinating subcultures of British visual history, Wheels of Light charts the history of light-show art in Britain from the 1970s on. Emerging from avant-garde art performances of the 1960s, light shows became an ultra-hip accompaniment at gigs and clubs in the 1970s. Swirling colored oils and kaleidoscopic patterns were projected across bands and venues, while 360-degree painted panorama wheels would slowly rotate in projectors, showing only a section of the image at any one time. This book brings together images and the panorama wheels made by key projection companies that sprang up in the UK during this time, including Optikinetics, Pluto and Orion, and tells their story.

A sumptuously designed artist's book edition of Stevenson's classic, with illustrations by Shiraz Bayjoo expanding on themes of colonialism and slavery

Published as part of Four Corners' acclaimed Familiars series, providing a fresh look at the tradition of the illustrated novel, this is a stunning artist's book edition of Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson's colonial-era adventure story, illustrated by multidisciplinary Mauritian artist Shiraz Bayjoo.
Bayjoo's images take us from the ports of England to landscapes scarred by plantations and mines; from the brutality of the 18th-century colonial Caribbean to the Indian Ocean; and to wider global histories of slavery, colonialism and violence that shaped that period. Designed by award-winning designer John Morgan, this beautiful clothbound volume is printed on uncoated paper with color images throughout.
Shiraz Bayjoo has created a thrilling visual interpretation of Treasure Island that sets Stevenson's story within the context of 18th-century Atlantic trade and colonial power. The result is timely, urgent and strikingly beautiful. -Ekow Eshun

In May 1968, thousands of workers and students took to the streets of Paris, provoking an unprecedented wave of strikes, walkouts and demonstrations. The confrontations between police and protesters led to a general strike of eleven million workers that brought the country to a virtual standstill and nearly toppled Charles de Gaulle's government. The faculty and student body of the Ecole des Beaux Arts were among the strikers, and a number of the students met spontaneously in the college's lithographic department to produce the first poster of the revolt, which bore the declaration Usines, Universit s, Union (Factories and universities unite, loosely translated). From this initiative was born the Atelier Populaire (or popular workshop ), a collective of print shops that produced hundreds of posters to encourage the protestors and to report on police brutality. These posters included many of the often Situationist-inspired mottos for which May '68 is remembered today, such as Be young and shut up and return to normal (accompanied by a picture of a herd of sheep). Beauty Is in the Street reproduces more than 200 of these posters in full color, which have since become landmarks in political art and graphic design. Also included is a thumbnail index of an additional 411 posters; a wealth of archival documentary photographs and new translations of firsthand accounts of the clashes between the students and strikers and the police, many published in English for the first time; and an introduction by Philippe Verm s, one of the founders of the Atelier Populaire.

For this eighth installment in Four Corners' Familiars series, Marc Camille Chaimowicz has chosen Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Flaubert's bestselling masterpiece was first translated into English by Eleanor Marx-Aveling (the youngest daughter of Karl Marx) in 1898. Chaimowicz has selected Marx-Aveling's translation for his edition of the book, which he has illustrated with more than 250 images.

In Prison Landscapes artist Alyse Emdur (born 1983) presents over 100 photographs of prison inmates presenting themselves in front of the idealized landscapes of painted visiting-room backdrops, posing with their visitors and pretending, for a moment, that they are elsewhere. Prison Landscapes explores this little-known genre of painting and portraiture seen only by inmates, visitors and prison employees. Created specifically for escape and self-representation, the paintings of tropical beaches, waterfalls, mountain vistas and cityscapes invite sitters to engage in fantasies of freedom. Prison Landscapes offers viewers a rare opportunity to see America's incarcerated population, not through the usual lens of criminality, but through the eyes of inmates' loved ones. The book includes correspondence with prisoners and an interview with prison artist Darrell Van Mastrigt.

Self-taught artist Michael Patterson-Carver's drawings celebrate ordinary men and women working for change through direct action and demonstrations. This is the first monograph on the artist, edited by artist Harrell Fletcher and including a conversation between Fletcher and an essay by White Columns Director Matthew Higgs.

The Nose, one of Nikolai Gogol's most important and influential tales, is now available in this gorgeously produced volume, illustrated with photographs by British artist Rick Buckley. Taking on a life of its own, the nose of a St Petersburg official leaves its rightful place to cause havoc in the city. The novel ends with the author seemingly addressing the reader directly, refusing to resolve the story he has narrated. Written between 1835 and 1836, and a key precursor to absurdist and Magical Realist strains in 20th-century fiction, this fantastic tale is extended in Buckley's photographs, which document a Gogol-inspired street intervention for which he fixed plaster noses on to buildings all over London. This edition of The Nose is part of the Four Corners Familiars series, in which contemporary artists produce a new edition of a classic novel or short story.

For the latest in the Four Corners Familiars series, artist Fiona Banner (born 1966) recasts Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness as a luxury magazine with new photographs by Magnum photographer Paolo Pellegrin. First published in 1899, Heart of Darkness is a story of trade and corruption that proceeds from a boat moored on the banks of the Thames into the heart of the Congo. For her new edition, Banner commissioned Pellegrin, a conflict photographer who has worked extensively in the Congo, to photograph London's financial center, its streets and trading floors, its costumes and strip clubs--the City of London as seen by a veteran war photographer. The collaboration between Banner and Pellegrin emerged from an initial invitation from Peer, London, to work with the collection of the Archive of Modern Conflict; a selection of Pellegrin's images are now part of the Archive, filed under Heart of Darkness, 2014.

Since its formation in 1987, Critical Art Ensemble has set out to explore the intersections between art, critical theory, technology and political activism. The award-winning group of tactical media practitioners has exhibited and performed in a variety of venues internationally, from the street to the museum to the internet. Disturbances is the first book to assess the group's 25-year history, examining the environmental, political and bio-technological themes of their various initiatives.
In the publication, each project is presented by the group itself, from their early live multimedia productions; to their development of models of electronic civil disobedience, digital resistance, and contestational biology and ecology; to their most recent tactical media projects.
Disturbances is a landmark handbook for activists in art, theory, science and politics.

Postgate & Firmin produced some of the best-loved British children's television of the 1960s and '70s, including Bagpuss, The Clangers and Ivor the Engine

Working from a cowshed on a farm in Kent, Oliver Postgate (1925-2008) and Peter Firmin (born 1928) produced some of the best-loved British children's animated television of the 1960s and 1970s. Their iconic productions include Bagpuss (originally aired in 1974), The Clangers (1969-74), Ivor The Engine (1975-77), Pogles' Wood (1966-68) and Noggin The Nog (1959-65). Postgate and Firmin worked together from 1959 through the 1980s, creating popular, beloved characters that appealed to children and their parents alike, like the whistling, mousy Clangers (knitted by Firmin's wife Joan in bright pink wool) in outer space, the saggy, baggy cloth cat Bagpuss and the mild-mannered Viking boy Prince Noggin. Firmin painted the backdrops and created the models, and Postgate wrote scripts, did the stop-motion filming and frequently recorded the kindly, avuncular narration. This book, which includes a preface by Postgate's son Daniel, presents the Smallfilms archive: the puppets and cutouts from these shows (including some of the characters who didn't quite make the cut), along with insights into how they were created. The emphatically handmade models and painstakingly drawn illustrations that came to life in the Smallfilms productions are captured here in attentive, detailed photographs. The archive is presented like a collection of artifacts in an exhibition detailing some much-admired twentieth-century art movement, like Fluxus or Dada, as acclaimed English stand-up comedian Stewart Lee notes in his introduction. The Art of Smallfilms, full of pipe cleaners, cotton balls, wire and ping-pong balls, celebrates the imagination and ingenuity of two artists who shaped a generation's childhood.

Sixty years of letters, official reports, photographs, drawings and paintings of UFO sightings from British government files

Originally established at the request of Winston Churchill in the aftermath of World War II, the British Ministry of Defence's UFO Desk operated for more than 60 years, collating mysterious sightings and records of strange objects in the sky from observant, and sometimes imaginative, members of the public. As well as letters and official reports, the UFO files contain photographs, drawings and even paintings of these curious sightings sent in by concerned citizens. In 2007, after decades of stonewalling questions about its UFO investigations, the Ministry of Defence announced that it had decided to release all of its surviving files, in an attempt to counter the maze of rumor and frequently ill-informed speculation on the subject.

Journalism scholar David Clarke has been working with the UK's National Archives on the UFO files since the Ministry of Defence began to release them. In this volume, Clarke selects examples from the archives to present a history of British UFO art and the remarkable stories behind these images: accounts of an alien craft on the A1, flying saucers over Hampstead and a spaceship landing at a primary school in Macclesfield. Revealing the uncanny experiences, rumors, hopes, fears and fantasies expressed by British people from all walks of life, UFO Drawings from the National Archives offers a glimpse into a secret social history of the twentieth century.

UFO Drawings from the National Archives is part of the Four Corners Irregulars series spotlighting important but overlooked areas of creativity from modern British visual history.

In the revolutionary fervor of 1968, activists beat a path to London's Poster Workshop

From 1968 to 1971, anyone could drop in to the basement in Camden Town, London, and commission a poster from the Poster Workshop. In walked workers on strike, tenants associations, civil rights groups and liberation movements from all over the world. Inspired by the Atelier Populaire (protagonists of May '68), the workshop created posters that could be made quickly to respond to what was needed, on a great number of themes: Vietnam, Northern Ireland, South Africa, housing, workers' rights and revolution. The Poster Workshop existed at an exceptional time. It thrived on the energy generated by the belief that huge changes were possible, through movements for equality, civil rights, freedom and revolution. The posters made there show the extraordinary diversity of those who came to the workshop and provide a microcosm of much that was happening nationally and internationally.

Including many unseen and previously unpublished screen prints by 1960s activists, this book gives a unique perspective on the key political issues of the 1960s as told through the protest posters of artists and activists.

A compendium of Britain's most remarkable flexi discs, from famed ephemera aficionado Jonny Trunk

For this book, the acclaimed music and ephemera aficionado Jonny Trunk (editor of The Music Library and Dressing for Pleasure) has brought together over 150 of the most remarkable flexi discs. Cheap, disposable, often with poor audio quality but with great visuals, flexi discs were vinyl's poorer cousin in the pre-digital age. Given away with magazines such as New Musical Express, Melody Maker and Private Eye, or sent out by advertisers, they were a splashy way of getting your message heard.

Pressed onto laminated card or thin, wobbly plastic, these discs extolled the virtues of washing powders, beers and banks. Specially commissioned tunes took as their unlikely subjects shoe shops, bakers and even dentists.

Wobbly Sounds brings together more than 150 of the most remarkable British flexi discs from the 1950s to the early 1990s, chronicling the varied and sometimes bizarre uses of these flimsy records. The result is a fascinating archive of postwar design and advertising ingenuity.

Social media handles before the internet: a window into a unique subculture that prefigures online identities

The late 1970s and early 1980s was the golden age of British Citizens Band (CB) radio. Legal to own but illegal to operate, a CB radio and an antenna could connect you to other users nearby, creating a community for anyone with a rig and a desire to shoot the breeze. Entirely social, separate from the more technical HAM radio scene, CB radio was for everyone.

The reach of the average set was only a few miles, but each local area had breakers, figures who would crossover the conversation into the next area and link ever-expanding social circles.

Every breaker had a handle, a pseudonym they used to identify themselves on air. These alternate identities could be amusing, fantastical, dark or bawdy, but they were always personal. Many breakers took this identity one step further and made business cards to exchange when they met up in person--Eyeball cards. With the Eyeball cards, the alternate identities and communities of the CB radio scene were made physical.

This publication, presenting hundreds of the funniest, strangest and most intriguing Eyeball cards from across the UK, is the first to document this unique subculture. The result is a window into an outpouring of creativity that prefigures online identities--social media handles before there was even an internet.

In the late 1990s, American comic artist Michael Kupperman bought a stack of men's magazines from the 1950s and 1960s, with titles like Sir!, Real Action and Man's Thrills. They all had the owner's name stamped on them, Kupperman observed, but the stamp is slightly illegible, so it's impossible to know if the name is C. Buechtel, C. Brockel, C. Buschol or some other variant. This man--I'm assuming it was a man--spent years acquiring lurid men's magazines and taking them apart, using the contents to form his own hybrid magazines with the pages from several reassembled inside the cover of one. With a grease pencil he'd cross out the headlines on the covers that didn't apply anymore, and stamp his name on the results, along with a number. Why was he doing this? It's not clear. It might have been a need to make the magazines seem like a serious collection, his re-editing emphasizing his sober interest in subjects such as modern fiction and wife-swapping. Maybe this was one way he justified collecting these lurid periodicals, to himself or a spouse. Or maybe it was a version of the impulse that drives many artists (and three-year-olds): a need to remake and impose personal order that comes from some very deep place. Pirate Nightmare Vice Explosion presents highlights from that collection, and takes place in a murky, monochromatic world where mysterious, energetic sin is always happening behind closed doors. Some of it is factual; some of it smells of heady invention.

Michael Kupperman is the author of Tales Designed to Thrizzle, Snake 'n' Bacon's Cartoon Cabaret and Mark Twain's Autobiography 1910-2010 (Fantagraphics). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney's and Saturday Night Live.

From 1967 up until his recent death, the British sculptor and Pop art innovator Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) used the pages of the innovative British literary magazine Ambit as a space for some of his most experimental creations, collapsing the boundary between text and image with Pop abandon. His Ambit works--collages, visual essays and fragments from novels, pop culture images from newspapers, magazines and advertisements--tackle such subjects as the war in Vietnam, the acceleration of Japanese technology and the mirages of mass advertising. Housed in a funky Day-Glo plastic slip cover with silkscreened title, and printed on a variety of paper stocks, The Jet Age Compendium reprints these works in their entirety for the first time. A 28-page booklet by David Brittain inserted into the slip cover celebrates these works and discusses Paolozzi's relationship to writers associated with Ambit such as J.G. Ballard.