A scuplture by Yayoi Kusama called Dancing Pumpkin dated 2020

Yayoi Kusama, 2021.  Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki

In her most personal book to date, Yayoi Kusama brings us into her private world through poetic recollections, giving insight into her creative process and the essential role language plays in her paintings, sculptures, and daily life.

With a new focus on Kusama’s use of language, this book features an impressive overview of her poetry, which the artist creates alongside her work in other mediums. Highlighting the importance of words to the artist, the book draws special attention to the captivating poetic titles of her paintings, such as in 

I WOULD LIKE TO SHOW YOU THE INFINITE SPLENDOR OF STARDUST IN THE UNIVERSE and FIGURE OF THE MIDNIGHT DARKNESS OF THE UNIVERSE THAT I DEDICATED ALL MY HEART

. These visionary titles are a quintessential part of Kusama’s eye-catching artworks, but also hold their own as unique aphorisms and appealing statements of cosmic spirituality. The poetry collected here touches on Kusama’s personal trials, her human ideals, and her heroic pursuit of art above all else.

, Kusama’s acclaimed exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, this book features more than 300 pages of new paintings, sculptures, and Infinity Mirrored Rooms. It also includes photographs of Kusama over time, offering a unique visual timeline of this iconic artist.

Yayoi Kusama: Every Day I Pray for Love

Cynthia Zarin

ekphrasis

From acclaimed poet and New Yorker writer Cynthia Zarin comes a deeply personal meditation on two cities, Venice and Rome—each a work of art, both a monument to the past—and on how love and loss shape places and spaces.

Here we encounter a writer deeply engaged with narrative in situ—a traveler moving through beloved streets, sometimes accompanied, sometimes solo. With her, we see, anew, the Venice Biennale, the Lagoon, and San Michele, the island of the dead; the Piazza di Spagna, the Tiber, the view from the Gianicolo; the pigeons at San Marco and the parrots in the Doria Pamphili. As a poet first and foremost, Zarin’s attention to the smallest details, the loveliest gesture, brings Venice and Rome vividly to life for the reader.

The sixteenth book in the expanding, renowned 

 creates space for these two historic cities to become characters themselves, their relationship to the writer as real as any love affair.

Two Cities

Jarrett Earnest

Ann Reynolds

Kenneth E. Silver

Michael Schreiber

Edited by Jarrett Earnest. Texts by Jarrett Earnest, Ann Reynolds, and Kenneth E. Silver. Interview with Alexander Jensen Yow by Michael Schreiber

Lauded by Jerry Saltz as “one of the most reactionary yet radical visions of art,” 

 tells the story of a group of artists and writers active during the first half of the twentieth century, when homosexuality was as problematic for American culture as figuration was for modernist painting.

These artists—including Paul Cadmus, Fidelma Cadmus Kirstein, Charles Henri Ford, Jared French, Margaret Hoening French, George Platt Lynes, Bernard Perlin, Pavel Tchelitchew, George Tooker, Alexander Jensen Yow, and their circle—were new social creatures, playfully and boldly homosexual at a time when it was both criminalized and pathologized. They pursued a modernism of the body—driven by eroticism and bounded by intimacy, forming a hothouse world within a world that doesn’t nicely fit any subsequent narrative of modern American art. In their work, they looked away from abstraction toward older sources and models—classical and archaic forms of figuration and Renaissance techniques. What might be seen as a reactionary aesthetic maneuver was made in the service of radical content—endeavoring to depict their own lives. Their little-known history is presented here through never- before-exhibited photographs, sculptures, drawings, ephemera, and rarely seen major paintings—offering the first view of its kind into their interwoven intellectual, artistic, and personal lives.

Edited by Jarrett Earnest, who also curated the 2019 exhibition at David Zwirner New York, 

features new scholarship by art historians Ann Reynolds and Kenneth E. Silver and an interview with Alexander Jensen Yow by Michael Schreiber.

1930–1955

The Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York

Auguste Rodin

Rachel Corbett

Elisabeth Chase Geissbuhler

Text by Auguste Rodin. Introduction by Rachel Corbett. Translated by Elisabeth Chase Geissbuhler

Master sculptor Auguste Rodin’s illuminating writings on cathedrals in France are especially relevant and significant following the recent fire at Notre Dame.

In this volume, the writer and Rodin scholar Rachel Corbett selects excerpts from the famous sculptor’s book 

, first published in 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I. Cathedrals were central to the way Rodin thought about his art: he saw them as visual metaphors for the human figure, among the finest examples of craftsmanship known to modern man, and as a model for how to live and work—slowly, brick by brick.

Here, Corbett takes the fire at Notre Dame and the concerns over its restoration as an entry point in an exploration of Rodin’s cathedrals. Rodin adamantly opposed restoration, as he felt it often did more damage than the original injury. (Many of the cathedrals that Rodin looks at in his texts were, in fact, bombed during the war.) But while he rails against various restoration efforts as evidence that “we are letting our cathedrals die,” the book, with its tenderly rendered sketches and written portraits, is itself an attempt to preserve these cathedrals. The selection of texts in this volume is a reminder—as is the tragedy of Notre Dame—of why we ought to appreciate these feats of architecture, whether or not they are still standing today.

The Cathedral Is Dying

David Levi Strauss

In this exploration of contemporary photography, David Levi Strauss questions the concept that “seeing is believing.”

Identifying a recent shift in the dominance of photography, Strauss looks at the power of the medium in the age of Photoshop, smartphones, and the internet, asking important questions about how we look and what we trust.

title on photography, Strauss challenges the aura of believability and highlights the potential dangers around this status. He examines how images produced on cameras gradually gained an inordinate power to influence public opinion, prompt action, comfort and assuage, and direct or even create desire. How and why do we believe technical images the way we do?

Offering a poignant argument in the era of “deepfakes,” Strauss draws attention to new changes in the technology of seeing. Some uses of “technical images” are causing the connection between images and belief (between seeing and believing) to fray and pull apart. How is this shifting our relationship to images? Will this crisis in what we can believe come to threaten our very purchase on the real? This book is an inquiry into the history and future of our belief in images.

Photography and Belief

An untitled painting by Noah Davis, dated 2015.

Helen Molesworth

Lindsay Charlwood

Dagny Corcoran

Daniel DeSure

Thomas Houseago

Deana Lawson

Henry Taylor

Edited with text by Helen Molesworth. Interviews with Lindsay Charlwood, Dagny Corcoran, Daniel DeSure, Thomas Houseago, Deana Lawson, Henry Taylor, and Venus X by Helen Molesworth

Providing a crucial record of the painter Noah Davis’s extraordinary oeuvre, this monograph tells the story of a brilliant artist and cultural force through the eyes of his friends and collaborators.

Despite his exceedingly premature death at the age of 32, Noah Davis created emotionally charged work that places him firmly in the canon of great American painting. Stirring, elusive, and attuned to the history of painting, his compositions infuse scenes from everyday life with a magical realist atmosphere and contain traces of his abiding interest in artists such as Marlene Dumas, Kerry James Marshall, Fairfield Porter, Mark Rothko, and Luc Tuymans.

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the 2020 exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, which travels to the Underground Museum in Los Angeles, a space that Davis founded with his wife, artist Karon Davis. In her introduction, catalogue essay, and interviews with important figures in Davis’s life, curator Helen Molesworth shows how the artist’s generosity and sense of responsibility galvanized a uniquely supportive artistic community, culture, and vision. Through color illustrations and archival photographs, the book captures the intimate yet expansive spirit of a studio visit with the artist.

Noah Davis

Lucas Arruda at the print shop René Tazé, Paris, 2023. Photo by Matthew Avignone

Will Chancellor

Barry Schwabsky

Texts by Will Chancellor and Barry Schwabsky

The first comprehensive monograph on the work of Brazilian painter Lucas Arruda elucidates the artist’s intricate, meditative compositions.

Arruda has gained critical acclaim for atmospheric paintings that fluctuate between abstraction and figuration, imagination and reality. This monograph presents three groups of works loosely characterized as seascapes, jungles, and monochromes. Collectively titled 

, they have an ephemeral, transient quality.

Arruda’s intimately sized paintings of seascapes and junglescapes are characterized by their subtle rendition of light. Painted from memory, they are devoid of specific reference points, instead achieving their variety through the depiction of atmospheric conditions. Verging on abstraction, the compositions are grounded by an ever-present, if sometimes faint, horizon line that offers a perception of distance. They appear at once familiar and imaginary. Through his often evocative and textured brushstrokes, Arruda foregrounds the materiality and physicality of paint, while also recalling his genres’ historical associations with the notion of the romantic sublime.

Alongside meticulous color plates and powerful details, author Will Chancellor offers a close reading of the work, raising questions about artifice, thresholds, and perception. Critic Barry Schwabsky unpacks the challenges posed by Arruda’s mysterious painted surfaces. As a whole, this book provides a detailed introduction to the work of a uniquely thoughtful and inventive artist.

Lucas Arruda: Deserto-Modelo

Detail of an oil on linen painting, titled Clear Message, dated 2019.

Bob Nickas

The most comprehensive overview of artist Josh Smith’s radical technicolor paintings.

looks at the artist’s vigorous repetition of particular motifs, illuminating his approach to painting as an exploratory medium for image production. Published on the occasion of Smith’s critically acclaimed first exhibition at David Zwirner, this catalogue features a new body of work that marks an important evolution for the artist. In these paintings, Smith sets the stage for a new mode of self-reflective commentary on image making, acknowledging that “the meaning perhaps arises in the making.”

A new essay by Bob Nickas treats the Reaper, Turtle, and Devil figures from 

as ciphers through which to understand Smith’s work. Nickas demonstrates how these new paintings restage and personalize the artist’s more abstract earlier works and illuminates the ways in which repetition functions within Smith’s practice. With more than one hundred illustrations, this book serves as the ideal introduction to Smith’s disruptive oeuvre.

a Celebration

Josh Smith: Emo Jungle

Suzanne Hudson

Robert Slifkin

Texts by Suzanne Hudson and Robert Slifkin

 focuses on American abstract artist Joan Mitchell’s large-scale multipanel works from the 1960s through the 1990s.

Mitchell’s exploration of the possibilities afforded by combining two to five large canvases allowed her to simultaneously create continuity and rupture, while opening up a panoramic expanse referencing landscapes or the memory of landscapes.

Mitchell established a singular approach to abstraction over the course of her career. Her inventive reinterpretation of the traditional figure- ground relationship and synesthetic use of color set her apart from her peers, resulting in intuitively constructed and emotionally charged compositions that alternately evoke individuals, observations, places, and points in time. Art critic John Yau lauded her paintings as “one of the towering achievements of the postwar period.”

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner New York in 2019, this book offers a unique opportunity to explore the range of scale and formal experimentation of this innovative area of Mitchell’s extensive body of work. It not only features reproductions of each painting in this selection as a whole, but also numerous details that allow an intimate understanding of the surface texture and brushwork. In the complementing essays, Suzanne Hudson examines boundaries, borders, and edges in Mitchell’s multipanel paintings, beginning with her first work of this kind, 

 (1956), considering them as both physical and conceptual objects; Robert Slifkin discusses the dynamics of repetition and energy in the artist’s paintings, in relation to works by Monet and Willem de Kooning, among others.

Joan Mitchell: I carry my landscapes around with me

Germano Celant

Over five decades, Doug Wheeler has pioneered the art of light and space. His work powerfully explores the way we perceive “empty” space—the way light can affect our perception and make emptiness feel full and dense. From his early experiences flying across the desert with his father, a doctor in Globe, Arizona, Wheeler developed a passion for the intensity and stillness of vast expanses, seeing in them a whole new set of possibilities for visual art.

Although Wheeler began his career as a painter, his wall-mounted artworks soon began incorporating light as a medium and quickly gave way to an unprecedented art-historical breakthrough: his construction of an absolute light environment, crafted in his studio in 1967. Since that unparalleled moment, Wheeler’s work has been exhibited widely all over the world; in the past decade, with numerous major gallery and museum installations, his reputation as the definitive light and space artist has been solidified.

This volume, featuring new scholarship by renowned art historian Germano Celant, traces the entire course of Wheeler’s career to date, from his first mature paintings to his immersive installations. Writing on Wheeler’s intense and direct engagement with the absoluteness in the optical fields he creates, Celant provides a detailed account for Wheeler’s development as one of the most original and influential artists of his generation. Wheeler’s work not only changes how we encounter reality after we see it, but also how we envision what is possible more broadly in visual art.

Doug Wheeler

Brenda Danilowitz

T’ai Smith

Texts by Brenda Danilowitz and T’ai Smith

The first in-depth study of a monumental wall hanging—rediscovered after many years—by renowned Bauhaus artist Anni Albers, who was influential in elevating textiles from craft to fine art.

Albers was influential in elevating textiles from craft to fine art. Her exquisite wall hanging 

—seen for the first time outside of Mexico City at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, and the subject of this book—is a superb example of this modern master’s work.

In 1967, noted architects Ricardo Legorreta and Luis Barragán commissioned Albers to create a work for the newly built Hotel Camino Real in Mexico City. Completed in 1968, her striking wall hanging 

is heavily influenced by Latin American art and culture. Showcasing Albers’s approach to working with textiles as a “many-sided practice,” it is accompanied in this book by works Albers made following her move to the United States in 1933, including innovative wall hangings, weavings, and a range of works on paper. Together, these works reflect Albers’s brilliant embrace of different materials and techniques and her ability to work at varied scales. The works in this publication offer additional context and motifs, demonstrating the artist’s pioneering investment in textiles as an art form and her parallel interest in mass-produced designs.

Published on the occasion of the Anni Albers exhibition presented at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, this catalogue features new scholarship from the show’s curator, Brenda Danilowitz, art historian and chief curator of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and T’ai Smith, an expert on Bauhaus craft and weaving.

Anni Albers: Camino Real

Guy Davenport

Judith Thurman

Lucas Zwirner

By Guy Davenport. Contribution by Judith Thurman. Afterword by Lucas Zwirner

In his 1989 book on Balthus—the storied and controversial artist who worked in Paris throughout the twentieth century—Guy Davenport gives one of the most nuanced, literary, and compelling readings of the work of this master. Reading it today highlights the change in perspectives on sexuality and nudity in art in the past thirty years.

Written over several years in his notebooks, Davenport’s distinct reflections on Balthus’s paintings try to explain why his work is so radical, and why it has so often come under scrutiny for its depiction of girls and women. Davenport throws the lens back on the viewer and asks: is it us or Balthus who reads sexuality into these paintings? For Davenport, the answer is clear: Balthus may indeed show us periods in adolescent development that are uncomfortable to view, but the eroticization exists primarily on the part of the viewer.

Arguing that Balthus’s figures are erotic only if we make them so, and that their innocence is more present than anything pornographic in them, Davenport posits that the paintings hold up a mirror to our own perversities and force us, difficultly, to confront them. He writes, “The nearer an artist works to the erotic politics of his own culture, the more he gets its concerned attention. Gauguin’s naked Polynesian girls, brown and remote, escape the scandal of Balthus’s, although a Martian observer would not see the distinction.” Davenport’s critique helps us understand Balthus in our times—something we need more than ever as we crucially confront sexual politics in visual art.

A Balthus Notebook

Michael Glover

Spotlight Series

Celebrated British painter Rose Wylie—whose works are at once tactile, cerebral, and humorous—often draws her influence from a wide range of popular culture. Here her newest body of work references memories from her own life and mimics the way memories evolve and change over time.

Wylie’s source material is culled from the vast visual world around her, ranging from sixteenth-century British estates to Serena Williams and the French Open. While initially these may seem random or aesthetically simplistic, through the nuanced use of humor, language, and compositional structure, Wylie creates wittily observed and subtly sophisticated meditations on the nature of memory, and visual representation itself, in line with the paintings she has become known for over the course of her career.

A new essay by art critic Michael Glover explores the remarkable painter whose work has “spark, assurance, brash humor, an extraordinary, freewheeling eclecticism that seems to be just as ready to suck in references to the art of Ptolemaic Egypt and Roman portraiture as to pay homage to the films of Quentin Tarantino and the late paintings of Philip Guston.” Part of David Zwirner Books’s 

, this book features Wylie’s newest paintings and drawings and is published on the occasion of the artist’s 2020 solo exhibition of these works at David Zwirner Hong Kong.

Rose Wylie: Painting a noun (English)

Jeff Koons

The first book to explore two of the biggest names in modern and contemporary art side by side, Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons

In the first half of the 20th century, Marcel Duchamp redefined what we consider art and what it means to be an artist. Many of his ideas return, transformed, in the work of Jeff Koons, born when Duchamp was 68 years old and whose own career lit up the art world of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

This is the first book to explore the affinities between these two highly influential artists, whose creative universes similarly question the function of objects and the allure of commodities. International art historians, writers, and curators contribute their expertise on topics such as each artist's persona, as well as reflecting on the influence of technology and sexuality on their work.

The publication of this intriguing book coincides with an exhibition at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, opening in May 2019.

Appearance Stripped Bare: Desire and the Object in the Work of Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons, Even

Luc Tuymans in his studio, 2022. Photo by Otman Q

Eva Meyer-Hermann

The third volume of a catalogue raisonné of Luc Tuymans’s paintings, surveying nearly two hundred works, charts the artist’s investigation into painting’s relationship to history and technology.

Tuymans is widely credited with having contributed to the revival of painting in the 1990s. His sparsely colored, figurative works speak in a quiet, restrained, and at times unsettling voice and are typically painted from preexisting imagery that includes photographs and video stills. The works in this volume, made between 2007 to 2018, show Tuymans at his most virtuosic, subtly but provocatively addressing a range of topics including religion, corporatization, and cultural memory, in addition to modernism and the history of painting. The Internet, in particular, is central to these works as well as the screen—leading to a new style of contemporary image. The works are mediatized to the nth degree, despite the artist’s continuous use of the traditional medium of painting. There is a certain kind of light that comes out of a screen, which can be found in Tuymans’s recent paintings.

This volume includes an editor’s note by Eva Meyer-Hermann and an illustrated chronology with archival images and installation views of the featured works. It also presents brilliant color reproductions of each painting from this period. This publication is a testament to Tuymans’s persistent assertion of the relevance and importance of painting—a conviction that he maintains even in today’s digital world, when his work continues to be a touchstone for artists and scholars.

Luc Tuymans Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings: Volume 3 2007–2018, David Zwirner Books, 2019

Luc Tuymans Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings: Volume 3, 2007–2018

2007–2018

Luc Tuymans Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings: Volume 3

A career retrospective of Yayoi Kusama, Japan’s most prominent artist and “Queen of Polka Dots,” covering all aspects of her provocative work.

Avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama’s matchless creativity and originality have been captivating the world for more than six decades. Her retrospective exhibitions in four major European and American museums have seen record attendance.

, originally published to accompany a sellout exhibition at the Matsumoto City Museum of Art, offers an overview of Kusama’s entire career, including works from her youth, when she indulged in drawing in order to escape from her hallucinations; paintings made when she was based in New York, including “Infinity Nets” and “Polka Dots,” and her happenings in places such as Central Park; her immersive mirrored infinity rooms from the 1980s and 1990s, when she participated in the Venice Biennale; and last but not least, the ongoing large-scale series “My Eternal Soul.” Kusama has continuously innovated and reinvented her style; well-known for her repeating dot patterns, her art encompasses an astonishing variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance, and immersive installation.

Featuring an essay by Akira Shibutami analyzing Kusama’s work, this comprehensive publication celebrates one of Japan’s most important artists.

Yayoi Kusama: All About My Love

H.D.

Michael Green

H.D.’s writing continues to inspire generations of readers. Bringing together a number of never-before-published essays, this new collection of H.D.’s writings introduces her compelling perspectives on art, myth, and the creative process.

While she is best known for her elemental poetry, which draws heavily on the imagery of natural and ancient worlds, H.D.’s critical writings remain a largely underexplored and unpublished part of her oeuvre. Crucial to understanding both the formative contexts surrounding her departure from Imagism following World War I and her own remarkable creative vision, 

, written in 1918, is one of the central works in this collection. H.D. guides her reader to the untamed shores of the Isles of Scilly, where we hear of powerful, transformative experiences and of her intense relationship with the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci. The accompanying essays, many published here for the first time, help color H.D.’s astute critical engagement with the past, from the city of Athens and the poetry of ancient Greece. Like Rainer Maria Rilke’s 

 series, this collection is essential reading for anyone interested in the creative process.

Visions and Ecstasies: Selected Essays

Okwui Enwezor

Interview with the artist by Okwui Enwezor

Over the course of his three-decade career, Thomas Ruff has taken up many approaches to photography in his investigation into the status of the image in contemporary culture.

, the artist presents new work that continues his ongoing probe into the history, processes, techniques, and technology of photography. One of the most influential artists working with photography today, Ruff has redefined the medium’s conceptual possibilities, simultaneously capturing and challenging the essence of the medium as a means for visual experience. He has investigated various photographic genres, including portraiture, the nude, and landscape and architectural photography, using both analog and digital technologies, and culling imagery from scientific archives, print media, and the internet.

Presented here is a selection of Ruff’s most well-known works, as well as the newer 

 series, begun in 2018, which draws on negatives of India and Burma taken in the 1850s by Captain Linnaeus Tripe, an officer in the East India Company. Also included is a conversation between Ruff and Okwui Enwezor, which took place at Haus der Kunst in Munich, in connection with the artist’s retrospective then on view. The conversation, published here for the first time, has been edited for this volume and examines Ruff’s artistic practice and inspiration, serving as an engaging and dynamic introduction to the artist.

Published on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition at David Zwirner, Hong Kong, in 2019, 

Thomas Ruff: Transforming Photography

Oscar Wilde

Michael Bracewell

By Oscar Wilde. Introduction by Michael Bracewell

, arguably the most complete exploration of his aesthetic thinking, and certainly the most entertaining, Oscar Wilde harnesses his famous wit to demolish the supposed boundary between art and criticism.

, the essay takes the form of a leisurely dialogue between two characters: Ernest, who insists upon Wilde’s own belief in art’s freedom from societal mandates and values, and a quizzical Gilbert. With his playwright’s ear for dialogue, Wilde champions idleness and contemplation as prerequisites to artistic cultivation. Beyond the well-known dictum of art for art’s sake, Wilde’s originality lays argument for the equality of criticism and art. For him, criticism is not subject to the work of art, but can in fact precede it: the artist cannot create without engaging his or her critical faculties first. And, as Wilde writes, “To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own.”

The field of art and criticism should be open to the free play of the mind, but Wilde plays seriously, even prophetically. Writing in 1891, he foresaw that criticism would have an increasingly important role as the need to make sense of what we see increases with the complexities of modern life. It is only the fine perception and explication of beauty, Wilde suggests, that will allow us to create meaning, joy, empathy, and peace out of the chaos of facts and reality.

The Critic as Artist

Sherrie Levine, Dark Blue Moonlight After Man Ray: 11, 2016

New work by American artist Sherrie Levine engages her ongoing practice of appropriating artworks from the Western art historical canon—this time by taking Ad Reinhardt’s 

 (2018) continues the artist’s ongoing investigation of color separated from its representational function. Inspired by the exhibition 

 held at David Zwirner, New York in 2017, Levine has created abstract restatements of the 28 works that were on view, making use of pixilation to consolidate the range of blue tones in each painting into a single, truly monochromatic value. This work revisits a technique first employed by Levine in her 1989 group of woodcut prints 

, where an averaging algorithm was used to create a checkerboard composition based on modernist artists’ iconic paintings.

 is published on the occasion of Levine’s eponymous solo exhibition at David Zwirner’s Upper East Side location in New York in 2019. The publication features full color reproductions of 

 and includes the 1965 text “Reinhardt Paints a Picture,” in which Reinhardt famously interviewed himself.

Sherrie Levine: After Reinhardt

A sculpture by Ruth Asawa, called Untitled (S.175, Hanging Single-Lobed, Four-Layer Continuous Form within a Form), dated c. 1992.

Edited by Tamara H. Schenkenberg. Texts by Aruna D’Souza, Helen Molesworth, and Tamara H. Schenkenberg

“Doing is living. That is all that matters.”—Ruth Asawa

Throughout her long and prolific career American artist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) developed innovative sculptures in wire, a medium she explored through increasingly complex forms using craft-based techniques she learned while traveling in Mexico in 1947. In 1949, after studying at Black Mountain College, Asawa moved to San Francisco and created dozens of wire works, among them an iconic bronze fountain—the first of many public commissions—for the city’s Ghirardelli Square.

Bringing together examples from across Asawa’s full and extraordinary career, this expansive volume serves as an unprecedented reorientation of her sculptures within the historical context of 20th-century art. In particular, it includes careful consideration of Asawa’s advocacy for arts education in public schools, while simultaneously focusing on her vital—and long under-recognized—contributions to the field of sculpture. Insightful essays explore the intersection of formal experimentation and identity to offer a fresh assessment of this celebrated artist. Richly illustrated with exquisite new installation views, 

 introduces original scholarship that traces the dynamic evolution of form in the artist’s work.

Ruth Asawa: Life's Work

Sherry Turner DeCarava

Radiclani Clytus

Texts by Radiclani Clytus and Sherry Turner DeCarava

 is the pictorial equivalent of jazz. Here, the visionary photographer turns his gaze on legendary jazz icons Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday, among many others.

“This is a book about people, about jazz, and about things. The work between its covers tries to present images for the head and for the heart and, like its subject matter, is particular, subjective, and individual,” writes DeCarava. A master of poetic contemplation and of sensual tonalities in black and white, DeCarava is, above all, a photographer of people. A member of the post–World War II generation that sought a new modernist vocabulary, he was first recognized for his innovative images of life in Harlem (the subject of 

, his 1955 collaboration with poet Langston Hughes) and extraordinary portraits of jazz musicians. It is these two themes—New York and jazz—interwoven and inseparable, that are the ostensible subject of 

. However, the seemingly casual yet deeply felt compositions and the rich, gradient tones of DeCarava’s photographs stir emotions that resonate far beyond one neighborhood and one era.

Conceived, designed, written, and made as an artist maquette by DeCarava in the early 1960s, 

 went unpublished for almost half a century until it was printed by Phaidon in 2001. At its core is a visual and philosophical journey to plumb the meaning of a creative life. The artist’s intention in proposing a complex relationship between vision and music moves his comprehensive, decade-long reflection to the status of a magnum opus. This new edition, copublished by First Print Press and David Zwirner Books, includes new scholarship by Radiclani Clytus and reflections by Sherry Turner DeCarava.

Roy DeCarava: the sound i saw

Zoé Whitley

Preface by Zoé Whitley. Introduction and text by Sherry Turner DeCarava

 presents the first survey since 1996 of photographer Roy DeCarava, an essential figure of American art and culture, whose “poetry of vision” re-forms urban life, labor, love, and jazz into the discovery of “an intimate, emotional arc of transformation.”

Though DeCarava often refrained from public discussion of his work, this catalogue provides important background into determining factors of his aesthetic sensibility—his traditional training in painting and printmaking as well as his philosophical undertakings. It brings the viewer to a consideration of contradictory precepts in DeCarava’s work that seeks resolution through tonal and structural elements within the image.

 presents a wide-ranging selection of DeCarava’s photographs accompanied by a preface by Zoé Whitley, an American curator based in London, and features an introduction and essay by curator and art historian Sherry Turner DeCarava. Titled “Celebration,” Turner DeCarava’s essay considers the artist’s singular poetic vision, his timeless portrayals of individuals and places, and his mastery of composition and photographic printmaking.

As Whitley writes, “In making photographs, as in life, DeCarava was patient. Possessing both a peerless self-awareness and acute observational skills, he knew intuitively when to wait and when to open the camera’s shutter. In the dark room, he availed himself of these same attributes, moving with steady assurance to develop his prints so as to allow the full range of what he called his ‘infinite scale of grey tones’—often realized at the deepest end of the spectrum—to emerge slowly and fully.”

Published on the occasion of an exhibition of DeCarava’s work at David Zwirner, New York in 2019, this exquisite volume showcases a dynamic range of images that underscore DeCarava’s subtle mastery of tonal and spatial elements across a wide, fascinating array of subject matter: from the figural implications of smoke and debris to the “shimmering mirror beneath a mother as she walks with her children in the morning light.” These photographs express a strength of imagery—an intent to synchronize and honor the pulse of art as an emergent signal for creative and revelatory freedom.

Roy DeCarava: Light Break

14.08.041_mama-mummy-and-mamma-predecessors-2_splash_1

Portrait of Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Photo by Stefan Ruiz

Edited by Ian Berry and Steven Matijcio. Interview by Ian Berry. Essays by Malik Gaines and Steven Matijcio

 unites works from the artist’s Predecessors series. Investigating the confluences, contact zones, and third spaces of culture, Akunyili Crosby represents the people and places closest to her: the women of her family, her partner, the interiors of her grandmother’s home and her own. Even in the midst of such personal themes, Akunyili Crosby opens these painted worlds to her viewers, and invites them to reflect upon their own experiences, memories, and emotions.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Predecessors

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