Decades before today s major Los Angeles museums realized the potential of contemporary art, the pioneering institutions Pasadena Art Museum and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art under curator directors Thomas Leavitt and Walter Hopps championed talented local and internationally recognized painters. Part of the Getty Research Institute s Pacific Standard Time initiative, this crisp exhibition catalog reconstructs the partially forgotten history through photos and reproductions. Storied moments such as Kienholz s first solo show(1961), Duchamp s chess game with a naked Eve Babitz(1963) and Diebenkorn s first major exhibition(1963) reenter the annals of 20th century American art history.

Pasadena to Santa Barbara: A Selected History of Art in Southern California, 1951-1969

Arts & Photography

Julie Joyce

History & Criticism

Ram Publications

Lewis Baltz is an artist whose work has always sythesized broader cultural issues. Breaking from his past serial formats, this striking exhibition catalog tackles the job of documenting the artists monumnetal color installations created from 1991 through 1995. Baltz moves from the phsical landscape into the virtual and veiled landscape of contemporary global culture. Featured are all three trilogies, Ronde de Nuit , Docile Bodies and The Politics of Bacteria Essay by curator Cornelia H. Butler.

The Politics of Bacteria, Docile Bodies, Ronde de Nuit

Baltz, Lewis

Butler, Cornelia H.

Photography & Video

Timed to coincide with the centennial of the Russian Revolution, Red Horizon a survey of art made shortly after Joseph Stalin s death in 1953 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and beyond chronicles how artists represented the growing gap between government-sanctioned orthodoxies and life in the USSR and Russia. Thoughtfully designed to read backwards for the art and forward for the photography, this softcover catalog accompanying the exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art (2017) draws from two facets of Neil K. Rector s renowned art collection Soviet and Russian photography from the 1970s to 1990, and the work of Moscow-based unofficial artists who came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. Combining documentary photography, conceptual art, painting and more, Red Horizon suggests how creativity and critical thinking manifest themselves under the most difficult social and ideological circumstances. Includes introductions by curators Tyler Cann and Drew Sawyer along with essays by four art historians on symbols of the Soviet state, modernism, landscape and memory, and the tension between folk and mass cultures.

Red Horizon - Contemporary Art and Photography in the USSR and Russia, 1960-2010

Nick Liptak

The creation of seamless illusion remains a driving tenet of Hollywood cinema. In order to preserve this illusion, it is crucial that there are no jarring disruptions of cinematic space and time. This preservation of order is called continuity, and it has been the focus of John Divola's photographic work for the past several years, as beautifully represented in this striking book. Divola takes the original still photographs he has collected of Warner Bros. film sets from the 1930s, which were used to maintain continuity, and creates haunting installations of fictive reality. Divided into subject categories such as "Hallways" and "Broken Furniture and Evidence of Aggression," these images possess a glorious beauty, made possible by the use of 8 x 10 negatives, while being grounded in an intelligence found in the best of conceptual art. Features an elucidating essay by the noted film writer and critic Edward Dimendberg.

Continuity (Smart Art Press (Series), V. III, No. 34)

John Divola

Edward Dimendberg

Theresa Luisotti

Devils Canyon, Hells Half Acre, Dirty Devil River: photographer Mark Ruwedel visited all of these places and more, while creating the series Pictures of Hell. This book is the culmination of the journey he began in 1995, and brings together virtually every photographic image in the artist s brilliant interpretation of the American West. This interpretation focuses on sites and places with the word hell or devil or some variation thereof in their names. Place names evoking Satan and his dominion were imposed on the arid Western landscape by Euro-American explorers and settlers, who considered it desolate wilderness, cursed, populated with heathens and demons. By naming them, Euro-Americans symbolically took possession of these sites, denying the existence of indigenous cultures. These place names may also suggest the frustrations or whimsical humor of the nominators.

Mark Ruwedel: Pictures of Hell

Mark Ruwedel

Lewis Baltz's earliest portfolio, The Tract Houses (1971), reproduced for the first time. New Topographics minimalist images of suburban landscapes. Photographs by Lewis Baltz; essay by Sheryl Conkelton; introduction by Adam Weinberg. 68 pages; 25 tri-toned b&amp;w plates; 11 x 10.75 inches. Text in English and German.

The Tract Houses: Die Siedlungshauser (English and German Edition)

Lewis Baltz

More than15 years after Italian artist Alighiero Boetti's death, 2011 marks the opening of a major international retrospective of the work of the Arte Povera master, sponsored by MoMA NY, the Tate Modern and Madrid's Reina Sofia. Adding to the new appreciation of Boetti's joyous work is this dazzling, multi-layered photo essay on the unseen story behind the making of his seminal arazzi (embroidered works). For the first time, the international web of artisans who made the arazzi comes into focus, through the work of American photographer Randi Malkin Steinberger. In 1990, Steinberger traveled to Peshawar, Pakistan, with Boetti's blessing, to document how the Afghan refugee women realized the embroideries which Boetti had outlined. Steinberger, traveling with a Boetti assistant, followed ''the journey of the cloths'' into the craftswomen's workrooms as they brought color to these spectacular works. When Steinberger returned to Rome, she and Boetti worked together to choose 55 color photographs for a future book. Now, two decades after the photos were taken, they are being published for the first time in this beautiful edition. Boetti often said that he considered his art a way to communicate across the globe, and that the resulting works were owned as much by the women who realized the embroidery as by the artist himself. Now, their story is revealed, and their work can be celebrated as Boetti intended. Included are texts by Steinberger, Boetti scholar Christopher G. Bennett, longtime Boetti assistant Andrea Marescalchi, and a conversation between Steinberger and Rome-based gallerist, Alessandra Bonomo.

Boetti by Afghan People: Peshawar, Pakistan 1990

Randi Malkin Steinberger

Artist Ricky Swallow was invited to curate an exhibition on the tradition of ceramics in California because of the palpable debt his own clay slab and assemblage sculptures owe to the mid-century period. The resulting show focuses on the work of five iconic artists who redefined the use of clay in contemporary art from the 1940s to the 1980s. Objects and sculptures by Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Michael Frimkess, John Mason, Ron Nagle and Peter Shire were chosen by Swallow to exemplify the ways in which the medium underwent dramatic changes after World War II. Also included are select works by other artists influential in this dialogue, such as Ken Price and Peter Voulkos. An essay by the internationally recognized Swallow, who has exhibited at the Venice Biennale and the British Museum, explores the movement s continued influence on his own personal practice and those of his contemporaries.Published by David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

Grapevine~

Ricky Swallow

"The fragility of Mats Gustafson's art is almost tangible," Berndt Arell writes. "Landscapes, portraits pervaded with eroticism, and fashion illustrations – Gustafson's brush is adept at them all." Mats Gustafson, Watercolors is the first overview publication to date on one of the most admired illustration artists of our time. Known for his subtle and haunting fashion illustrations, intimate portraits, and scenes of nature, Gustafson began his career as an illustrator in the late 1970s, at a time when editorial illustration was eclipsed by photography and watercolor as a conceptual medium had barely been explored. The elegant and expressive character of Gustafson's watercolor, pastel and cut-out paperworks expanded the possibilities of fashion illustration and nearly single-handedly reinvigorated the genre. Published to coincide with a major retrospective exhibition of Gustafson's work at the Millesgarden in Stockholm in 2013, the volume includes texts from Stockholm's Nationalmuseum director Berndt Arell and former Interview editor-in-chief and art critic Glenn O'Brien.

Mats Gustafson: Watercolors

Mats Gustafson

Individual Artists

The Public School for Architecture Brussels seeks to establish an educational framework for public engagement within the realm of architecture. The school, which has branches worldwide, was initiated in Brussels in 2014 by common room in collaboration, dating back to 2007, with telic arts exchange (LA) and recyclart (NY). With support from the KU Leuven faculty of architecture, the self-organiz- ing educational program in which curriculum and schedule are proposed by the general public via the school s website offers the general public the opportunity to negotiate public space and access architectural culture. Conceived following the first eight weeks of the program, this publication reflects on what an alterna- tive education in architecture is and why it is necessary. Documents of activities that took place during the initial period and contributions from people outside the program provide a broad perspective on pedagogy and contextualize the public school in a larger discussion about architecture in the city.

The Public School For Architecture Brussels

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