Luminous late works on paper from the great Color Field pioneer

Exploring works from the later period of Helen Frankenthaler's life, Late Works, 1988-2009 features approximately 50 plates and archival images dating from 1988 to 2009. Originally inspired by the exhibition curated by Douglas Dreishpoon (Director of the Helen Frankenthaler Catalogue Raisonné and Chief Curator Emeritus of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery), the book expands upon the original exhibition to include a wide range of important pieces from this prolific period in the artist's career.
Through her invention of the soak-stain technique, Frankenthaler expanded the possibilities of abstract painting while referencing figuration and landscape in unique ways. In her later years, her practice continued to evolve through her use of diverse mediums and processes, as she shifted from painting canvas on the floor to using larger sheets of paper that were laid out on the floor or on tabletops for easier accessibility. The continuity between the late work and what came before is striking.
Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) has long been recognized as one of the great American artists of the 20th century. She was eminent among the second generation of postwar American abstract painters and is widely credited for playing a pivotal role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting with her invention of the soak-stain technique, which involved pouring thinned paint directly onto unprimed canvas. The juxtaposition of amorphous fields of color and gestural brushstrokes produces a vigorous rhythm of activity that seems to convey both the expanse of landscape and the surface texture of mark-making.

In Tomas van Houtryve: 36 Views of Notre Dame, the viewer accompanies the artist on his fourteen-year journey photographing the Paris icon before and after the fire. Van Houtryve obtained remarkable access to the cathedral to document the devastation of the fire and the reconstruction.

Drawing inspiration from Hokusai's series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, the artist explores the monument in different contexts, seasons and using a wide range of photographic techniques--from 19th-century wet collodion to aerial drones. Accompanying the artist's works is a multilayered archive of the cathedral, including historic photographs, vernacular images and text by Victor Hugo.

Her second monograph with Radius, Victoria Sambunaris: Transformation of a Landscape shares the nuance and majesty of the artist's practice in a large-scale book format.

Based in New York, Victoria Sambunaris structures her life around a photographic journey traversing the American landscape for several months per year. Equipped with a 5×7-inch field camera, a video camera, and research material, she crosses the country alone tenting on top of her car. Her project-based photographs document the continuing transformation of the American landscape with specific attention given to expanding political, technological, and industrial interventions.

Part of her ongoing, twenty-four-year series Taxonomy of a Landscape, this book encompasses the past decade of work, including collected ephemera that form the essential and incidental elements of her practice as a photographer and researcher. Also featured are archival documentation of experiences and observations on the road, such as snapshots, maps, road logs, journals, geology and history books, mineral specimens, and artifacts.

The fruition of decades of labor, Vicuña's poetical works on the cosmologies and myths of the deer are now realized in a gorgeously designed artist's book

Inspired initially by Jerome Rothenberg's translation Flower World Variations, which Cecilia Vicuña (born 1948) first encountered in 1985, Cecilia Vicuña: Deer Book brings together nearly 40 years of the artist's poetry, poethical translations and drawings related to cosmologies and mythologies surrounding the deer, and sacrificial dance in cultures around the world. Woven like one of her quipu installations, Vicuña's texts--which include original compositions in Spanish as well as English translations by Daniel Borzutzky--become meditations on translation, not just of the sacred nature of this animal but on how our understandings of ceremony and ritual are transformed by this ongoing process. Taken as inspiration rather than conundrum, the impossibility of translation opens up poetic possibilities for Vicuña as she continues her lifelong exploration into the nature of communication across eras and distant lands, languages and shared symbols within Indigenous spiritualities.

Inventive Modernist tracks the scope and significance of Frey's career, from his early days in Paris working with Le Corbusier to his rise as the iconic architect of Palm Springs. With full access to Frey's various archives, the book provides many rare and previously unexhibited architectural models, drawings, films, photographs, and furniture, and offers an exceptional visual guide that goes far beyond the mere documentation of finished buildings. New academic research, in-depth essays, and a thorough, illustrated listing of the architect's projects between 1925 and 1997 serve to contextualize Frey's relevance today while securing his importance as a twentieth-century architectural master.

Contemporary artists and writers from Jennie C. Jones to Teju Cole consider Agnes Martin's influence and legacy

This is a reenvisioned, fresh look at Agnes Martin, the enigmatic, influential, highly independent painter whose life and work have proved inspirational to audiences across many fields and disciplines. Accompanied by color reproductions of works by Martin, Agnes Martin: Independence of Mind presents a series of essays by living artists and writers commissioned especially for this volume. Contributors include artists Martha Tuttle, Jennie C. Jones and James Sterling Pitt, as well as authors Teju Cole, Bethany Hindmarsh, Darcey Steinke and Jenn Shapland. These contributors write about Martin's influence on their creative lives and work, and offer new interpretations that defy stereotyped notions about Martin's life. Longer essays are mixed with shorter, more anecdotal texts by a wider selection of artists.
Agnes Martin was born in Maklin, Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1912, and moved to the US in 1932, studying at universities in Oregon, California, New Mexico and New York. In the early 1950s she developed a biomorphic style influenced by Abstract Expressionism. Her first solo exhibition was held at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, in 1958. From around 1960-61 she began to work with the grids of horizontal and vertical lines for which she has become renowned. In 1967 she moved from New York to New Mexico, where she lived until her death in 2004.

Success for artists is often measured by their ability to quit a day job and focus full time on their practice. Yet these jobs can often spur creative growth by providing artists with new materials and methods, hands-on knowledge of a specific industry that becomes an area of artistic investigation, or a predictable paycheck and structure that enable unpredictable ideas.

The book is comprised of thirty-nine chapters, one for each included artist, with images of their work, commissioned essays, and interviews. Included are creative pioneers such as Larry Bell, Mark Bradford, Tishan Hsu, Howardena Pindell, and Julia Scher, who offer firsthand accounts of how their day jobs--as a frame shop technician, hair stylist, word processor, museum employee, and security systems installer, respectively--altered their artistic trajectories in surprisingly profound ways.

By examining the impact of day jobs on artists, Day Jobs seeks to demystify artistic production and overturn the romanticized concept of the artist sequestered in their studio, waiting forinspiration to strike. Conceived as a corrective to traditional art historical narratives, this book encourages us to more openly acknowledge the precarious and generative ways that economic and creative pursuits are intertwined.

Day Jobs was on display at The Blanton Museum of Art from February 19-July 23, 2023. It then travelled to the Cantor Arts Center from March 6-July 21, 2024.

The major monograph Howard Smith celebrates the far-reaching practice of the multifaceted African-American artist, designer, and collector who spent most of his creative life in Finland.

Working with paper, pigments, wood, clay, textiles, and metal, Smith had both fine art and commercial practices. While he designed for industry--planning interior designs for corporate offices, public buildings and a ferry--he especially enjoyed recycling items like scrap metal, used cardboard, and castoff clothing, which he transformed into offbeat compositions. Howard Smith's work displays an exuberance and generosity characteristic of the man. Immediately recognizable for bold gestures in line, plane, and mass, his creations embrace rich colors and contrasts in material and form. He referred to many of these forms as 'glyphs, ' vibrant figures that often suggest the human form in posture of celebration.

Exhibition schedule:
Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, California
(opening May 2025)
National Nordic Museum, Helsinki, Finland
(dates TBD)

These artifacts are the forensic evidence of Black life and events in the United States. -Wendel A. White

Manifest Thirteen Colonies is a photographic project and journey through the repositories of African American material culture found in libraries, museums, and archives of the original thirteen English colonies and Washington, DC. Conceived by photographer Wendel A. White, this project is a personal reliquary of the remarkable evidence of Black agency and racial oppression stored in public collections. Accompanying his imagery, White discusses his approach to finding, selecting, and photographing artifacts--from rare singular objects to more quotidian materials--and highlights their significance as forensic evidence of Black life and history in the United States.

Bound in a unique format with different types of paper, the pages are cut and layered to simulate the process of physically excavating folders in an archive. By examining the blind spots, holes, and fragments of these collections, she examines the ways photography, anthropology, and national archives produce and proliferate images of exclusion and cultural Othering.

Using techniques of layering, blocking, digital manipulation, pixelating, blowing up, and taping together, the artist's work ultimately seeks to talk back to the archive and find agency in challenging its images. As she states in the book's introduction, I do not make work about Filipino identity; I make work about the white gaze, and those are two totally different things.

Jarringly juxtaposed images from apparently unrelated sites--such as US Border Patrol Academy training scenarios, Save America rallies, and history museums--illuminate systems that reconcile, justify, or distract from the harsh realities of life in a polarized, militarized society. The design accentuates slippages: images flow across French-fold page turns, just as Cornwall's practice questions the role of documentary photography in an era of splintered realities.

The Model Citizens project was awarded the 2023 Prix Elysée, a biennial juried prize for mid-career photographers, sponsored by the Photo Elysée Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland. The award also includes a grant for a concurrent publication in both English and French (Citoyens Modèles, Éditions Textuel, 2024). Both editions will be released to coincide with Les Rencontres de la Photographie d'Arles in July 2024.

The inaugural monograph of multidisciplinary artist Cameron Welch presents a vivid, comprehensive look into a young artist's practice. Welch's work has straddled sculpture, collage, and textiles, but in early 2017, he shifted to mosaic as his primary medium. As a child, the artist was introduced to mosaic by his grandmother, an experience that has a lasting impact on the way he works the age-old medium to piece together disparate materials and histories. Welch treats mosaic as a physical manifestation of intertextuality, referring to the colliding contexts he unearths in the work as a kind of infiltration.

While Welch's chosen medium evokes ancient traditions, the effect of his work is decidedly contemporary. His chaotic, jumbled compositions speak to the same anxiety felt in the Information Age, an era when unlimited information is available at the tap of a screen. Amidst the pictorial chaos of Welch's mosaics, the figures who emerge range from familiar to foreign, comical to heroic. Frequently depicting himself and figures from his own life, Welch sheds light on unsung histories within the intricate topology of his creations. An incisive essay by Greek and Roman Art scholar Alexis Belis helps readers contextualize Welch's work within historical and contemporary creative practice.

A photographic fever dream of America's Midwest, from the author of Homegrown and Domestic Vacations

For her third monograph, Midwest Materials, Julie Blackmon has created a new body of work that sparkles with the wit, dark humor and irony for which the photographer has gained such renown. Finding insight and inspiration in the seeming monotony of her generic American hometown of Springfield, Missouri, Blackmon constructs a captivating, fictitious world that is both playful and menacing. I think of myself as a visual artist working in the medium of photography, Blackmon notes, and my assignment is to chart the fever dreams of American life. Midwest Materials follows Domestic Vacations (Radius Books, 2008) and Homegrown (Radius Books, 2014).
Julie Blackmon (born 1966) pursued studies in art education and photography at Missouri State University. Her photographs are included in the permanent collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art; George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Toledo Museum of Art; Portland Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and numerous others. She is represented by Robert Mann Gallery, Haw Contemporary and Fahey Klein, among others. Blackmon lives and works in Springfield, Missouri.

Thirty-Six Views of the Moon is a meditative collection of nighttime exposures made with book pages from texts referencing the night sky spanning the last ten centuries.

Drink wine and look at the moon and think of all the civilizations the moon has seen passing by...
-- Omar Khayyam, 11th-century mathematician and poet

Taking his cue from Omar Khayyam's poem, Ebtekar produces a vignette of windows to the moon, inviting us to shift the direction of our gaze. In his process, the artist works with a photographic glass plate negative of the moon from the Lick Observatory archives in Northern California, treating each book page with Potassium ferricyanide and Ammonium ferric citrate (cyanotype) to make the surface of the page light-sensitive. Then, Ebtekar exposes the pages overnight in the UV-light emitted by the moon.
This project challenges viewers to imagine the the moon looking at us, seeing ourselves as the objects of the moon's billion-year gaze. There are four unique editions to the work, each produced under the moonlight of a season (i.e. winter, spring, etc.), and each with its own unique bibliography. The artist's proof is the only edition made with moonlight from all four seasons over the span of one year.

A pandemic logbook in words and images, with gorgeous Cape Cod panoramas and poetical meditations

Far from the vibrant urban worlds where I've often photographed, I followed the subtle movements of time and tide, wind and water. Meanwhile, Rebecca photographed the waves of light as they washed through our house of many windows--and wrote spare text pieces to try to emotionally navigate this unsettling time, when so many we know have been caught in its undertow. -Alex Webb, May 2021
Inspired by Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves, this collaborative project brings together the work of creative partners Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb. This intimate collection serves as a pandemic logbook in words and images, created while the couple was largely sequestered on Cape Cod from March 2020 through May 2021. Rebecca provides original, handwritten poetry that punctuates her lyrical photographs and Alex's panoramic seascapes. Their images serve as poignant meditations on what it means to be both deeply connected to the world around us and profoundly isolated from much that we hold dear.
Alex Webb (born 1952) has published more than 15 photography books, including the survey The Suffering of Light. His most recent books include La Calle: Photographs from Mexico and the collaboration Brooklyn: The City Within, with Rebecca Norris Webb.
Originally a poet, Rebecca Norris Webb (born 1956) often interweaves her text and photographs in her nine books, most notably with her monograph, My Dakota. Her most recent book, Night Calls, was published by Radius Books in 2020.

A beautifully produced celebration of Leo Amino's sculptural adventures in light and color, richly complicating the story of abstraction in America

The first monograph to be published featuring the work of the Japanese American artist, Leo Amino: The Visible and the Invisible introduces a vital revision into both the canon of 20th-century avant-garde sculpture and the history of Asian American art.
The volume is published in association with the first significant museum exhibition dedicated to the artist's work since 1985, Leo Amino: Work with Material at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and shares a title with the artist's first solo exhibition in New York since 1973, held at David Zwirner Gallery in 2020. Edited and written by the artist's grandchild, poet and curator Genji Amino, the book includes additional texts by a selection of writers, poets and scholars including Aruna D'Souza, Wayne Koestenbaum, Lucy Lippard, Susette Min, Neferti Tadiar, Mary Whitten, Ronaldo Wilson and Karen Yamashita. Richly illustrated with images from the BMC Museum and Zwirner exhibitions, the volume includes an extended chronology featuring never-before-seen archival images and ephemera from across the artist's career.
Amino is the first artist in the United States to take up plastics as a principal material of sculptural composition, the innovator of cast plastics in American sculpture, and the most represented artist of color in the history of the Whitney Museum of American Art's annual exhibitions for sculpture after Isamu Noguchi. He is the only Asian American artist to teach on faculty in the history of the Summer Art Sessions at Black Mountain College, where he taught alongside artists including Josef and Anni Albers, Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, and Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, and informed the education of students Ruth Asawa, Kenneth Noland and Harry Seidler, among others. Recommended to the faculty at Cooper Union by Josef Albers, Amino taught there for 25 years, introducing students such as Jack Whitten to sculptural concerns.
Across a breadth of media and compositional approaches often remarked during the artist's lifetime for its inventiveness and versatility, Amino's oeuvre brings into focus the dynamics of perception, articulating space, light and color through the optics of encounter, interpenetration and absorption. Almost exclusively self-taught, Amino drew on three months' training in direct carving technique at the American Artists School in Greenwich Village in order to adapt the study of form latent in wood grain into a promiscuous and autodidactic material investigation. Beginning in the early 1940s, the artist's experiments in new media emerged from his dissatisfaction with painting on the sculptured surface. In 1945, Amino became the first American sculptor to employ cast plastics in an exploration of the question of interior and exterior relation through the problem of integral color, introducing the newly declassified military and industrial material of polyester resin into a history of media experiment following the Plexiglas works of Bauhaus and constructivist artists László Moholy-Nagy and Naum Gabo. Amino envisioned a mode of sculpture for which the principal means of composition would be light and color as early as 1949, anticipating the concerns of the next generation's Minimalist and Light and Space movements whose artists would take up his medium of choice two decades later. In 1965, Amino made the decision to abandon his other avenues of inquiry in order to dedicate himself exclusively to the new material, beginning a series of geometric, refractional compositions in resin that he would pursue until his passing in 1989.
Born in Taiwan under the auspices of Japanese colonial rule and educated in Tokyo, Leo Amino (1911-89) immigrated to the West Coast as a young man in 1929, where he attended San Mateo Junior College before anti-Japanese sentiment moved him to cross the country to New York in 1935. During the second Sino-Japanese and World Wars, he found himself an outsider to both Japanese and American nationalisms, signing an anti-fascist declaration by Japanese American artists in New York City in 1941, and ultimately resolving never to return to Japan. Rather than approaching the New York School of painters and sculptors who came to represent Abstract Expressionism as an exceptionally American phenomenon, Amino embraced a community of outsiders, finding a measure of freedom among the exiles and refugees of Black Mountain only two years after the college's integration. Joining Noguchi, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and others in denouncing fascism in Japan while attempting to carve out a space for their work on the East Coast of the United States during the era of Japanese American incarceration, he is one of few artists of Asian descent in the first half of the 20th century to have figured so prominently in the art historical record.

Jones' multisensory art ingeniously weaves connections between Minimalism, music and the Black avant-garde

This volume explores the interdisciplinary practice of Hudson-based artist Jennie C. Jones (born 1968), which moves viewers through both visual and auditory engagement. Aurally altering the spaces in which her paintings, sculptures and installations are on view, Jones' work encourages viewers to anticipate sound even in the quietest of environments. As she explains, I always say [the artworks are] active even when there's no sound in the room; they are affecting the subtlest of sounds in the space--dampening and absorbing even the human voice.
Conceptually, Jones' practice reflects on the legacies of modernism and Minimalism while underscoring the connection between Minimalism and music, illuminating the influence of the Black avant-garde. Bringing this multisensory experience to book form, Jones unites documentation of recent exhibitions--including Dynamics, her expansive show at the Guggenheim Museum (2022)--with excerpts of text, poetry and conversations to create a score that reveals the layers of Jones' artwork. Part artist's book and part primer, this lyrical volume unfolds in movements, like a printed and bound evening of poetry, prose and music.

When art critic David Pagel realized he had written five reviews about John Sonsini over the past thirty years, this book project was born. Even though he had been covering the work of the Los Angeles-based painter for three decades, they had never met until they began collaborating on this project. The unique, intimate compilation brings together an extensive essay by Pagel--including facsimile reproductions of the original five articles--along with illustrations, plates, and archival pieces that cover Sonsini's artistic trajectory, from early works to his most recent watercolors and large-scale commissions. Broad Reminders provides a rambling, joyful, engaging look into the world of art and artists, critics, and creators.

Swazi craft meets digital photography in Kyle Meyer's astounding woven photos of a silenced LGBTQ community

Kyle Meyer (born 1985) has worked between eSwatini (formerly Swaziland) and New York City since 2009, creating richly tactile artworks as conceptually complex as they are visually lush. In this debut monograph, Meyer's portraits from his Interwoven series fuse digital photography with traditional Swazi crafts, giving voice to silenced members of the LGBTQ community. Tension between the necessity of the individuals to hide their queerness for basic survival and their desire to express themselves openly inform both the subject and the means of fabricating Meyer's unique works.

Each piece from the Interwoven series is labor-intensive, taking days or sometimes weeks to complete. Meyer often photographs his subjects wearing a traditional headwrap made from a vibrantly colored textile. He then produces a print of the portrait and shreds it, together with the fabric from the headwrap, weaving the strips into patterned three-dimensional works. The final portrait presents each person's individuality while using the fabric as a screen to protect their identity. Included in each copy of this book is a unique piece of fabric torn from the remnants of the Interwoven project, intended to serve as a bookmark.

100 essential images from the founder of environmental portraiture

Published to coincide with the centennial of Arnold Newman's birth, Arnold Newman: One Hundred offers a celebratory look at 100 of the photographer's most provocative and memorable images. Arnold Newman is widely renowned for pioneering and popularizing the environmental portrait. He placed his sitters in surroundings representative of their professions, aiming to capture the essence of an individual's life and work. Though this approach is commonplace today, his technique was highly unconventional in the 1930s when he began shooting his subjects. His environmental approach to portraiture was influenced by symbolism and impressionism, and defined by the imperative of captivating the viewer no matter how well known the subject was. While he specialized in photographing artists, Newman captured the likenesses of a vast range of figures, from athletes and actors to presidents and politicians, including Marlene Dietrich, John F. Kennedy, Harry S. Truman, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe, Ronald Reagan, Mickey Mantle and Audrey Hepburn.