How does sleep--or its absence--change us? At the end of another wakeful night, High Winds tears off on a hallucinatory road trip in search of his estranged half brother, led by cryptic signs and coincidences. Part modern-day pillow book, part picture book for adults, and told in an associative, elliptical style, the narrative takes readers deep into a dreamlike Western landscape. Jessica Fleischmann's atmospheric imagery amplifies the words on every page, referencing 1980s graphics, net art, and something yet unseen; Sylvan Oswald's text inhabits and draws meaning from this visual environment. Gas stations, local legends, and unlikely rock formations become terrain for explorations of fear, fantasy, masculinity, medication, spatial structures, and bodily functions--inspired by the author's experience of gender transition, insomnia, and moving to Los Angeles. Poetic and funny, surreal and beautiful--High Winds makes a delightful companion, before or instead of a good night's sleep.

High Winds

Sylvan Oswald

Literature & Fiction

X Artists’ Books

The Artists' Prison looks askance at the workings of personality and privilege, sexuality, authority, and artifice in the art world. Imagined through the heavily redacted testimony of the prison's warden, written by Alexandra Grant, and powerfully allusive images by Eve Wood, the prison is a brutal, Kafkaesque landscape where creativity can be a criminal offence and sentences range from the allegorical to the downright absurd. In The Artists' Prison, the act of creating becomes a strangely erotic condemnation, as well as a means of punishment and transformation. It is in these very transformations--sometimes dubious, sometimes oddly sentimental--that the book's critical edge is sharpest. In structural terms, The Artists' Prison represents a unique visual and literary intersection, in which Wood's drawings open spaces of potential meaning in Grant's text, and the text, in turn, acts as a framework in which the images can resonate and intensify in significance.

The Artists' Prison

Arts & Photography

Alexandra Grant

Individual Artists

This is the first english translation of León Ferrari's masterpiece The Words of Others.

The Words of Others - Conversations between God and a few men and between a few men and a few men and God

León Ferrari

In (Zus), a visual essay by the French photographer Benoît Fougeirol, views of and views from eleven of the "Zones urbaines sensibles" (Sensitive Urban Zones) on the peripheries of Paris reveal harsh paradoxes of modern society. These poor, marginal districts were defined by administrative boundaries in response to the "emergence of a social problem." Through the synecdoche of architecture-its materials, patterns, and surfaces-Fougeirol presents the stubborn vitality and dereliction of the ZUS-and the failures of collective imagination that they represent. (Zus) documents each territory with an inventory comprising photographs, graphic representations, and toponyms, none of which alone can account for a totality. The book's cumulative structure raises questions about the tools of representation and the nature of individual perspective. A text by the author, poet, and playwright Jean-Christophe Bailly reflects on the broader significance and lived experience of the ZUS, following a lyrical thread through inhospitable spaces.

(Zus)

Benoît Fougeirol

A 1967 collaboration between beat poet Diane di Prima and assemblage artist George Herms, in print for the first time.

Haiku

Diane Di Prima

George Herms

Oracular Transmissions weaves together three of the most recent collaborative projects Etel Adnan and Lynn Marie Kirby have completed through processes of exchange and translation: Back, Back Again to Paris (2013), The Alhambra (2016), and Transmissions (2017). Etel Adnan is a Lebanese, Paris-based artist, essayist, and poet who was a longtime resident of Marin County and is known for her works inspired by her relationship to Mount Tamalpais. Lynn Kirby is a San Francisco-based artist who makes films, videos, and site responsive installations, often with text based components. The book also includes poems by Denise Newman, a friend to both Adnan and Kirby, and an introduction by Kadist Foundation curator Jordan Stein presenting their works and performances. Design and typography by Brian Roettinger bring these numerous transmissions - video, performance, photography, email and other texts - together in one volume.

Oracular Transmissions

Etel Adnan

Lynn Marie Kirby

Baragouin is an artists' book by Los Angeles and Berlin-based artist Kim Schoen. The book is a companion piece to a video work of the same name, filmed in a now-closed residential sculpture showroom in Los Angeles. The video Baragouinpresents these sculptures--which are copies of copies of original works of art--as an important collection of art and records their voices--a pastiche of verbal nonsense and phonetically imitated sounds of languages from around the world. The sculptures range in style and geographic origin from Buddhist to Rococo, Neoclassical to Modernist. Baragouin, the book, catalogs these sculptures as a fictional collection and gives them each a clear art-historical provenance based on morphological resemblances. Baragouin is designed by Ella Gold and includes an essay and provenance work by Edward Sterrett.

Baragouin

Kim Schoen

Edward Sterrett

Music Book is a 64-page facsimile artist's book by Sarah Cain, comprising a series of colorful abstractions painted directly over a collection of vintage sheet music. The original book of music was found in Switzerland and Cain's paintings within collide with and respond to the previous owner's handwritten notes. Music Book is an extension of Cain's works on paper that balance her installation and large-scale painting practice: these works are intimate meditations; intricate and small-scale.Cain has been painting Music Book since 2008 and has carried it through three studios. It is this journal of time that you can open up, start, close, put away, like a diary.Music Book is co-published by X Artists' Books and the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum on the occasion of Cain's exhibition, Sarah Cain--Enter the Center.

Music Book

Cain, Sarah

Regionalia, a bilingual catalogue, documents the research, projects, and culminating exhibition generated during Cognate Collective's artist residency at GCAC. The 128-page catalogue includes an additional 32-page insert drawn from public conversations that took place throughout the exhibition. Designed by Stephen Serrato of Ella, the publication contains texts by Cognate Collective, Christian Zúñiga, and a dialogue between the artists and Karen Stocker.

Regionalia

Cog•nate Collective

Christian Zúñiga

Karen Stocker

John D. Spiak

Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures is the first monograph dedicated to the pivotal work of African American choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings. The book accompanies an exhibition of the same name co-organized by the Getty Research Institute and Art + Practice, on view at Art + Practice in Los Angeles from September 18, 2021 through February 19, 2022. 
A foundational figure in American dance, Cummings bridged postmodern dance experimentation and Black cultural traditions. Through her unique movement vocabulary, which she called "moving pictures," Cummings combined the visual imagery of photography and the kinetic energy of movement in order to explore the emotional details of daily rituals and the intimacy of Black home life. In her most well-known work Chicken Soup (1981), Cummings remembered the family kitchen as a basis for her choreography; the dance was designated an American Masterpiece by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2006. 
This book draws from Cummings's personal archive and includes performance ephemera and numerous images from digitized recordings of Cummings's performances and dance films; newly commissioned essays by Samada Aranke, Thomas F. DeFrantz, and Tara Aisha Willis; remembrances by Marjani Forté-Saunders, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Meredith Monk, Elizabeth Streb, Edisa Weeks, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar; a 1995 interview with Cummings by Veta Goler; and transcripts from Cummings's appearances at Jacob's Pillow and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Bringing together reprints, an extended biography, a chronology of her work, rarely seen documentation, and new research, this book begins to contextualize Cummings's practice at the intersection of dance, moving image, and art histories.\nFrom the Back Cover\nBlondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures sheds new light on the pivotal work of African American choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings. A foundational figure in dance, Cummings bridged postmodern dance experimentation and Black dance traditions. Through a unique movement vocabulary that she called "moving pictures," Cummings combined the visual imagery of photography and the kinetic energy of movement in order to explore the emotional details of daily rituals and the intimacy of Black home life. This book--the first dedicated to the artist--draws from Cummings's personal archive and includes newly commissioned essays, performance documentation, interviews, photographs, lesser-known dance films, and remembrances from friends and collaborators. It is the companion volume to an exhibition by the same name, organized collaboratively by Art + Practice and the Getty Research Institute's African American Art History Initiative.

Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures

Kristin Juarez

History & Criticism

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