A fascinating look at Keith Haring's New York City subway artwork from the 1980s Celebrated artist Keith Haring (1958-1990) has been embraced by popular culture for his signature bold graphic line drawings of figures and forms. Like other graffiti artists in the 1980s, Haring found an empty canvas in the advertising panels scattered throughout New York City's subway system, where he communicated his socially conscious, often humorous messages on platforms and train cars. Over a five-year period, in an epic conquest of civic space, Haring produced a massive body of subway artwork that remains daunting in its scale and its impact on the public consciousness. Dedicated to the individuals who might encounter them and to the moments of their creation, Haring's drawings now exist solely in the form of documentary photographs and legend. Because they were not meant to be permanent--only briefly inhabiting blacked-out advertising boards before being covered up by ads or torn down by authorities or admirers--what little remains of this project is uniquely fugitive. Keith Haring: 31 Subway Drawings reproduces archival materials relating to this magnificent project alongside essays by leading Haring experts. Distributed for No More Rulers

Keith Haring: 31 Subway Drawings

Arts & Photography

Haring, Keith

Deitch, Jeffrey

Geldzahler, Henry

McCormick, Carlo

Warsh, Larry

History & Criticism

Princeton University Press

The visionary paintings of Martin Wong, one of the unsung geniuses of New York's East Village art scene of the 1980s, are collected here and examined in depth for the first time. Entirely self-taught, Wong creates intricate compositions that combine gritty social documents, cosmic witticisms, and highly charged symbolic languages-customized manual alphabets for the deaf, street graffiti, Nuyorican poetry, hand-lettered signs, meticulously rendered brick facades, rearrangements of Zodiac signs-sometimes within a single painting. The urban landscape of Loisaida, the Hispanic section of the Lower East Side where Wong lives, is the source of his imagery. Whatever the theme-the survival of a neighborhood besieged by drugs and crime, homoerotic fantasies of men in uniform, the multiplicity of meaning in language, the kitsch and ornamentation of Chinatown USA-Wong's work is visually startling and movingly autobiographical. This mid-career survey of Wong's work accompanies an exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and the University Galleries, University of Illinois, in Normal, which has been organized by Dan Cameron and Bary Blinderman. Their insightful essays and those contributed by Lydia Yee, Yasmin Ramirez, and Carlo McCormick connect Wong's oeuvre with popular culture, cultural heritage, and the history of painting.

Sweet Oblivion: The Urban Landscape of Martin Wong (New Museum Books)

Cameron, Dan

Individual Artists

Rizzoli

A visual account of the birth of graffiti and street art, showcasing as-yet-unseen works collected by preeminent artist Martin Wong. Referred to by the New York Times as an artist "whose meticulous visionary realism is among the lasting legacies of New York’s East Village art scene of the 1980s," Martin Wong (1946–1999) was firmly entrenched in the NYC street art world of the late ’70s and ’80s. City as Canvas chronicles the most important chapter in the street art movement and the artists involved. Showcasing Wong’s enormous graffiti art collection, the book contains artwork, photographs, black books, letters, postcards, posters, and flyers made by Wong and his artist friends. The book contains previously unpublished art by famous street artists such as Futura 2000, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Christopher "Daze" Ellis, LA II, Lady Pink, and Keith Haring, to name only a few. City as Canvas traces the origins of urban self-expression and the era of "outlaw" street art in New York, which primed the floodgates for graffiti art to spread worldwide. Exhibition Schedule: Museum of the City of New York: Opens October 2013

City as Canvas: New York City Graffiti From the Martin Wong Collection

Corcoran, Sean

Humor & Entertainment

Skira/Rizzoli

The limitless boundaries of the internet, and the endless possibilities that exist in cyberspace for communication and information, are what drives Nick Waplington's survey of what this new media holds for the artist and society in general. Not bound by social, moral or ethical considerations, the internet and its implications were elaborated on for Waplington's presence at the Venice Biennale. Nick Waplington's contribution to the Venice Biennale in 2001 expresses a yearning for the artistic and commercial freedom that the web might yet expose, and a celebration of the dislocated reason behind conventional thoughts and the media they use. Somewhere out there lies the new unchartered frontier of cyberspace. In that Babel there are images, dreams, inert and vital messages, anonymous ciphers and calculating incubi. Because it is faceless, as if somehow subterranean, human dialogue and the expression of ideas can multiply without responsibility, without the parameters of authorial disciplines or social conventions. Could this be anarchy, of the kind that artists linger on street corners for? Nick Waplington, alert to these possibilities, went last year with a series of works to the Venice Biennale, which had commissioned him to elaborate on this theme. The result was undeniably the work of an artist, one who embraces the limitless avenues of freedom of expression on the internet. For Waplington the medium is certainly the message, but one far more profound than McLuhan's epithet, since this is a medium not bound by social, moral or ethical considerations. It's as if he had found himself a child again, locked in the toy shop overnight, where train sets would double as conveyor belts of ideas, and Action Man as a table leg. "If, as I suspect," says Waplington, "the internet has broken the stranglehold of governments and large media corporations on mass communication, then we could be in for a very exciting period of development on a number of different levels. Would a breakdown of current modes of social, moral and political cohesion be too much for a man to ask for?"

Learn How to Die the Easy Way

Waplington, Nick

Trolley Books

The Strange Case of T.L. (Artspace's Series)

Labat, Tony

Artspace Books

Chris Johanson: You Are There

A monograph of Anthony Ausgang's artwork from 1980 through 2006, a mind-altering high-octane visual joy ride through the artist’s oeuvre. Starting with his early Kustom Kulture work on classic hot rods and ending with his current psychedelic Lowbrow paintings, this lavishly illustrated book includes essays by pop culture pundits Carlo McCormick and Chris Pfouts. Divided into three sections, the book first covers his paintings which comment on the human condition with animal cartoon characters in semi-realistic environments. The second section showcases his paintings of and on cars. The third part chronicles his fabled Improved Art series with insouciant characters paintied on thrift and antique store art. This is the first book devoted exclusively to his work.

Vacation from Reality: The Art of Anthony Ausgang

Pfouts, Chris

9Mm Books

Over a five year period, in one of the most epic conquests of civic space ever ventured, Keith Haring (1958–1990) produced a massive body of work across the New York City subway system that remains to this day, some 30 years after the fact, daunting in its scale and its impact upon public consciousness. Dedicated both the people who might randomly encounter them and to the present tense to which their momentary existence was tethered, Haring’s drawings now exist solely in the posterity of myth. Because they were not meant to last, briefly inhabiting blacked-out advertising boards before being covered up by commerce or torn down by authorities and admirers alike, what little remains of this project is oddly (for this most populist of artists) fugitive. 31 Subway Drawings reproduces all archival materials relating to this magnificent project.

Art Issue Editions

Unlike the free spirits depicted in this 25-year survey of Raymond Pettibon’s paintings and watercolors on paper, the artist and former L.A. punk-scene habitué doesn’t actually surf. But in a more metaphorical sense, he has spent his career riding the dark waves of the historical and psychological realities that break upon the American Dream. Starting out in the late 1970s as the bass player for Panic, the precursor group to Black Flag, Pettibon designed the latter’s familiar logo and its album covers, a talent he also lent to other groups, including Sonic Youth for their 1990 record, Goo. He emerged as an art star during the waning years of the Reagan era, with works that expressed a certain malaise-heavy, noir-seasoned sense of alienation. To that end, his recipe has entailed a mixture of texts and comix-zine-style drawings, most notably in a series of hard-boiled tales of national infamy. Populated by the likes of J. Edgar Hoover and Charlie Manson, these efforts evoke a de

Raymond Pettibon: Surfers 1985-2014: Are Your Motives Pure?

Venus Over Manhattan

In her riveting new book, Fandomania, photographer Elena Dorfman examines the pop culture phenomenon of "cosplay," in which participants dress up in costumes--and live part of their lives--as characters from video games, animated films and Japanese graphic novels. The exploding cosplay subculture flourishes at convention centers, college dorms, private clubs and in homes across the country. Dorfman puts herself quietly behind the scenes of these fan-based events to create a remarkable collective portrait. As she describes it, "The theater of cosplay has no boundaries, is unpredictable, open-ended. It includes both the fantastic and the mundane, the sexually aberrant and innocent, female characters who become samurai warriors and brainy scientists, and male characters who magically change their sex." Explorations of identity through portraiture are at the forefront of Dorfman's work, with the blurred lines between fantasy and reality a continuing theme. She allows each individual a spotlight in which to enact his or her fantasy. The effect is pointedly evocative of this new world of role playing and narrative, one in which scenery is secondary and persona is everything. Comes with a special foam-bound cover and features an essay by Carlo McCormick.

Elena Dorfman: Fandomania: Characters & Cosplay

Aperture

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