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The untold story of an American hustler who upset the art world and became a pop culture icon, cutting a swath across twentieth-century history and culture. LeRoy Neiman—the cigar-smoking and mustachioed artist famous for his Playboy illustrations, sports paintings, and brash interviews—stood among the twentieth century's most famous, wealthy, and polarizing artists. His stylish renderings of musicians, athletes, and sporting events captivated fans but baffled critics, who accused Neiman of debasing art with popular culture. Neiman cashed in on the controversy, and his extraordinary popularity challenged the norms of what art should be, where it belongs, and who should have access to it. The story of a Depression-era ragamuffin–turned–army chef–turned–celebrity artist, Neiman's biography is a rollicking ride through twentieth-century American history, punctuated by encounters with the likes of Muhammad Ali, Frank Sinatra, Joe Namath, and Andy Warhol. In the whirlwind of his life, Neiman himself once remarked that even he didn't know who he really was—but, he said, the fame and money that came his way made it all worth it. In this first biography of the captivating and infamous man, Travis Vogan hunts for the real Neiman amid the America that made him..

Only in the darkest moments of our lives do the brightest stars appear.An artist, mother, teacher, and rebel, Audrey Flack is counted among the most important American artists of the twentieth century. In With Darkness Came Stars, she recounts and reflects upon a life fully lived. Flack came up in the New York art scene when the city was fast becoming a world arts center. She had a studio in the Bowery and frequented the Cedar Tavern, where she rubbed elbows with Jackson Pollock, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, and other giants of the Abstract Expressionist movement. After leaving that scene and starting a family, she spearheaded Photorealist painting, alongside the likes of Chuck Close and Richard Estes. Flack has lived a remarkable life, successfully navigating a vibrant and virulently sexist art world, escaping an abusive marriage, and reshaping the rules of art creation in the middle of the twentieth century—all while raising two children, one with severe autism. Her story is full of strife and striving, but as an artist, Flack has always been able to find the beauty in it.

Weaving a tapestry of creativity and circumstance, this lauded chronicle of the many links and serendipitous meetings between giants of American culture—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein to Zora Neale Hurston to Marcel Duchamp—now includes a new afterword by the author. Rachel Cohen's A Chance Meeting is a dazzling group portrait that offers a striking new vision of the making and remaking of the American mind and imagination from the Civil War to the Vietnam War. How does the happenstance of daily life become history? Cohen shows us, describing a series of, now boldly, now subtly, transformative encounters between a wide and surprising range of Americans. A young Henry James has his portrait taken by the photographer Mathew Brady—Brady, who will receive Walt Whitman in his studio and depict General Grant on the battlefield. Later, W.E.B. Du Bois and his professor William James visit Helen Keller; Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz argue about photography; and Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston write a play together. Throughout, Cohen's narrative loops back and leaps forward with supreme agility, connecting, among others, Willa Cather, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Beauford Delaney, James Baldwin, and Richard Avedon. In A Chance Meeting, Rachel Cohen offers an abiding account of the continuing challenges and the astonishing achievements of American life.

The remarkable life and legacy of an extraordinary man whose influence echoes through time. Tappan Adney travelled from New York to New Brunswick for a summer holiday at the age of 19 in 1887, and it changed the course of his life. Adney is best known for a singular achievement. He was the artist, writer, and illustrator whose chance encounter with Peter Jo, a Wəlastəkwi Elder–craftsman, led to a passionate, lifelong interest in the birchbark canoe and Wəlastəkwey culture. But that is only part of the story. Throughout his life, little escaped Adney's curiosity. From his extensive documentation of the design of Indigenous canoes to his reportage on the Klondike Gold Rush; from his work as an illustrator, photographer, and designer to his natural history journalism; from his activism for Indigenous rights to his documentation of the Wəlastəkwey language, Adney's mind roamed from one passion to another, leaving behind a treasure trove of natural history and ethnographic research. This book tells the intriguing story of his remarkable life and his multifaceted legacy.

• LILLY'S LIBRARY NOVEMBER BOOK CLUB PICK •Manboobs is Komail Aijazuddin's riotous yet intelligent memoir of searching for love, seamlessly blending humor, politics, pop culture, and the bravery required to be yourself. Aijazuddin confidently announces himself as a sharp new voice in humor with his moving, wickedly funny reexamination of the American Dream and our search for home.'One of the funniest books I've ever read.'—EDMUND WHITE “One of the best-written memoirs I've ever read—I couldn't put it down. The humor is so sharp, so delicious, so irresistible. What a remarkable feat.” —ALOK VAID-MENON “At once both humorous and heartbreaking, [Aijazuddin's] memoir allows his bubbly personality to shine in a story about letting go of shame and finding self-acceptance.” —WASHINGTON POST “[A] sterling debut... Aijazuddin combines blazing wit with heartbreaking candor as he recounts his path toward self-acceptance as a gay Pakistani.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review I'm just a man, standing in front of a salad, asking it to be a cake. What do you do when you're too gay for Pakistan, too Pakistani to be gay in America, and you're ashamed of your body everywhere? How can you find happiness despite years of humiliation, physical danger, and a legion of Brooklyn hipsters who know you only as a queer from Whereveristan? How do you summon the courage to be yourself no matter where you are? Even as a young child in Lahore, Komail Aijazuddin knew he was different—no one else at his all-boys prep school was pirouetting off their desks, or bullied for their “manboobs,” or spontaneously bursting into songs from The Little Mermaid. Aijazuddin began to believe his only chance at a happy, meaningful life would be found elsewhere: America, the land of the free, the home of the gays. But the hostility of a post-9/11 world and society's rejection of his art, his desires, and his body would soon teach him that finding happiness takes a lot more than a plane ticket. Searching for his place between two worlds while navigating a minefield of expectations, prejudice, and self-doubt, Aijazuddin discovered, sometimes painfully, sometimes hilariously, that there are people and places he'd need to let go of to move forward.

ICON By ArtTour International Presents Howard Harris. Howard Harris is a well-known artist who has developed a distinctive artistic style known as Techspressionism. This innovative technique involves layering a single, often abstracted, image over itself on transparent acrylic surfaces that are superimposed on a subtle grid. Howard Harris'Techspressionism explores perception to recreate the perceptual experience.

New York Times Notable BookLos Angeles Times Book Prize FinalistWall Street Journal—One of Five Best Artist Biographies Edward Hopper's canvasses are filled with stripped-down spaces and unrelenting light, evocative landscapes, and the lonely aspects of men and women seemingly isolated in their surroundings. What kind of man had this haunting vision, and what kind of life engendered this art? No one is better qualified to answer these questions than art historian Gail Levin, author and curator of the major studies and exhibitions of Hopper's work. In this intimate biography she reveals the true nature and personality of the man himself—and of the woman who shared his life, the artist Josephine Nivison.

Will James'cowboy autobiography Lone Cowboy tells how a little boy, hardly more than a baby, becomes an orphan in the West; how an old French trapper, whom the boy calls Bopy, adopts him and takes him on his long, long hunts; how when he is hardly more than a little boy Bopy is lost in an icy river and the child, heartbroken, rides down into the prairie region alone-on his own. James gives a complete and varied idea of how a cowboy lives. This first appeared in 1930 as James'life story, following the author's evolution from boy to cowboy to artist and writer. This will offer new audiences a spirited blend of fiction and autobiography as James traces the early influences which marked his life... --Midwest Book Review

Between 1891 and 1915, pen-and-ink artist Merritt Dana Houghton made over 200 bird's-eye sketches of towns, ranches, mines, businesses, historic sites, and animals in Wyoming, northern Colorado, Montana, Idaho, and Washington state. Historian Michael A. Amundson brings these many views together for the first time in these pages. This lavishly illustrated biography details Houghton's life and work from his birth in Michigan in 1846 to his death in 1919 in Spokane through extensive genealogical records, newspaper accounts, and his illustrations—including historic ranches and bird's-eye views of Fort Collins, Colorado; Dillon, Montana; and Spokane, Washington and the only known illustrations of long-lost places like Pearl, Colorado, and Rambler, Wyoming. Also included is reproduction of a four-foot-by-eight-foot view of Sheridan, Wyoming and a sixty-image sample portfolio of his best-preserved illustrations organized by type. Houghton's work depicts the infrastructure of the new settler society that was remaking the West in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, and Amundson demonstrates how Houghton's vision of the American West remains active today.

An expansive and revelatory study of Robert Smithson's life and the hidden influences on his iconic creations This first biography of the major American artist Robert Smithson, famous as the creator of the Spiral Jetty, deepens understanding of his art by addressing the potent forces in his life that were shrouded by his success, including his suppressed early history as a painter; his affiliation with Christianity, astrology, and alchemy; and his sexual fluidity. Integrating extensive investigation and acuity, Suzaan Boettger uncovers Smithson's story and, with it, symbolic meanings across the span of his painted and drawn images, sculptures, essays, and earthworks up to the Spiral Jetty and beyond, to the circumstances leading to what became his final work, Amarillo Ramp.While Smithson is widely known for his monumental earthwork at the edge of the Great Salt Lake, Inside the Spiral delves into the arc of his artistic production, recognizing it as a response to his family's history of loss, which prompted his birth and shaped his strange intelligence. Smithson configured his personal conflicts within painterly depictions of Christ's passion, the rhetoric of science fiction, imagery from occult systems, and the impersonal posture of conceptual sculpture. Aiming to achieve renown, he veiled his personal passions and transmuted his professional persona, becoming an acclaimed innovator and fierce voice in the New York art scene.Featuring copious illustrations never before published of early work that eluded Smithson's destruction, as well as photographs of Smithson and his wife, the noted sculptor Nancy Holt, and recollections from nearly all those who knew him throughout his life, Inside the Spiral offers unprecedented insight into the hidden impulses of one of modern art's most enigmatic figures. With great sensitivity to the experiences of loss and existential strife that defined his distinct artistic language, this biographical analysis provides an expanded view of Smithson's iconic art pilgrimage site and the experiences and works that brought him to its peculiar blood red water.

In this first biography of artist Belle (Goldschlager) Baranceanu, Jennifer Peoples Hernandez tells the extraordinary story of a woman who rose from humble beginnings to become the most important female muralist in San Diego during the Great Depression and a prominent California Modern artist. Her meteoric rise in the art world began in Chicago in the 1920s, but the onset of the Great Depression nearly ended her career. Drawing from previously unpublished letters and archival records, Hernandez skillfully weaves Baranceanu's resilient story into the larger history of the Depression and New Deal in Chicago and San Diego and highlights the success of the government's work relief programs. For Baranceanu and others fortunate enough to work for the New Deal art projects, the Depression turned out to be a goldenage in American art history with a level of government patronage that has been unmatched ever since.

A spirited memoir by artist Aviva Rahmani, offering a relatable narrative to discuss trigger point theory and the importance of eco-art activism.Divining Chaos is an intimate personal memoir of unparalleled transparency into the moments in Rahmani's life that shaped her as an artist and activist. Detailing the history that led her to two seminal projects—Ghost Nets, restoring a coastal town dump to flourishing wetlands, and The Blued Trees Symphony, which applied her premises to challenge natural gas pipelines with a novel legal theory about land use—Rahmani shares the decisions that shaped her life's work and thinking. Her discussions about trigger point theory argue for how to predict, confront, and determine outcomes to the ecological challenges we face today.

For more than sixty years, Yoko Ono has fascinated us as one of the world's most innovative, radical artists. From a childhood of both extraordinary privilege and extreme deprivation in war-time Japan, she adopted an outsider's persona and moved to America where, after a spell at Sarah Lawrence College, she made a place for herself in bohemian arts circles. She was already twice divorced and established as a performance artist in the Fluxus movement and in Tokyo's avant-garde scene before her fortuitous meeting with the Beatles'John Lennon at a London Gallery in 1966. Their intense yet fraught relationship, reputed to have blown-up the Beatles, made headlines around the world, as did their famous bed-ins in protest of the Vietnam war, and their majestic, Grammy-winning musical collaborations. Through it all, and for decades after Lennon's tragic death, she remained defiantly herself. Yoko Ono: An Artful Life charts her journey of personal turmoil, artistic evolution, and activism, and at last tells her iconic story on her own terms.

Celebrating Anne Truitt's centenary, this posthumously published work serves as the fourth and final volume in her remarkable series of journals In the spring of 1974, the artist Anne Truitt (1921–2004) committed herself to keeping a journal for a year. She would continue the practice, sometimes intermittently, over the next six years, writing in spiral-bound notebooks and setting no guidelines other than to “let the artist speak.” These writings were published as Daybook: The Journal of an Artist (1982). Two other journal volumes followed: Turn (1986) and Prospect (1996). This book, the final volume, comprises journals the artist kept from the winter of 2001 to the spring of 2002, two years before her death. In Yield, Truitt's unflinching honesty is on display as she contemplates her place in the world and comes to terms with the intellectual, practical, emotional, and spiritual issues that an artist faces when reconciling her art with her life, even as that life approaches its end. Truitt illuminates a life and career in which the demands, responsibilities, and rewards of family, friends, motherhood, and grandmotherhood are ultimately accepted, together with those of a working artist.

Keith Haring was a revolutionary artist, who transformed the art world during his short but impactful life. Brought to life by Simon Doonan, Creative Director for Barneys New York, this new pocket-sized biography tells his inspirational story.Revolutionary and renegade, Keith Haring was an artist for the people, creating an instantly recognisable repertoire of symbols - barking dogs, space-ships, crawling babies, clambering faceless people - which became synonymous with the volatile culture of 1980s. Like a careening, preening pinball, Keith Haring playfully slammed into all aspects of this decade - hip-hop, new-wave, graffiti, funk, art, style, gay culture - and brought them together.Haring's fanatical drive propelled him into the orbit of the most interesting people of his time: Jean Michel Basquiat envied him; Warhol, William Boroughs and Grace Jones collaborated with him. Madonna and he shared the same tastes in men. Famous at 25, dead from AIDS at 31, Keith Haring is remembered as a Pied Piper, an unpretentious communicator who appeared happiest when mentoring a gang of kids, arming them with brushes and attacking the nearest wall.A series of brief biographies of the great artists, Lives of the Artists takes as its inspiration Giorgio Vasari's five-hundred-year-old masterwork, updating it with modern takes on the lives of key artists past and present. Focusing on the life of the artist rather than examining their work, each book also includes key images illustrating the artist's life. Hardbound, but pocket-sized, the books each sport a specially-commissioned portrait of their subject on the half-jacket.

The extraordinary life story of the celebrated artist and writer, as told through four decades of intimate letters to her beloved motherBarbara Chase-Riboud has led a remarkable life. After graduating from Yale's School of Design and Architecture, she moved to Europe and spent decades traveling the world and living at the center of artistic, literary, and political circles. She became a renowned artist whose work is now in museum collections around the world. Later, she also became an award-winning poet and bestselling novelist. And along the way, she met many luminaries—from Henri Cartier-Bresson, Salvador Dalí, Alexander Calder, James Baldwin, and Mao Zedong to Toni Morrison, Pierre Cardin, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Josephine Baker.I Always Knew is an intimate and vivid portrait of Chase-Riboud's life as told through the letters she wrote to her mother, Vivian Mae, between 1957 and 1991. In candid detail, Chase-Riboud tells her mother about her life in Europe, her work as an artist, her romances, and her journeys around the world, from Western and Eastern Europe to the Middle East, Africa, the Soviet Union, China, and Mongolia.By turns brilliant and naïve, passionate and tender, poignant and funny, these letters show Chase-Riboud in the process of becoming who she is and who she might become. But what emerges most of all is the powerful story of a unique and remarkable relationship between a talented, ambitious, and courageous daughter and her adored mother.

Featuring many rare images, an enlightening exploration of the life and work of avant-garde multihyphenate Mina Loy. Mina Loy was born in London in 1882, became American, and lived variously in New York, Europe, and finally, Aspen until she died in 1966. Flamboyant and unapologetically avant-garde, she was a poet, painter, novelist, essayist, manifesto-writer, actress, and dress and lampshade designer. Her life involved an impossible abundance of artistic friends, performance, and spectacular adventures in the worlds of Futurism, Christian Science, feminism, fashion, and everything modern and modernist. This new account by Mary Ann Caws explores Mina Loy's exceptional life and features many rare images of Mina Loy and her husband, the Swiss writer, poet, artist, boxer, and provocateur Arthur Cravan—who disappeared without a trace in 1918.

With color photographs and artwork, Sisters in Art is the first biography to capture the lives and works of Margaret, Esther, and Helen Bruton, three exceptionally talented sisters whose mark on the California modernist art scene still impacts our world.Nominee, 2021 New Deal Book Award'Great stories abound in this book, including the goings-on of the'Monterey Group'of painters and an encounter with a teetotaling Henri Matisse at a North Beach cocktail party. If California had a Belle Époque, this was it. From their chubby-cheeked'Gibson Girl'childhood through their sunlit dotage, the Brutons were exemplars of many aspects of California history and, in recent years, overlooked. Good's book corrects this.'—Library Journal'Both beautiful and substantial, Sisters in Art: The Biography of Margaret, Esther, and Helen Bruton... would make a great gift for the art lover in your life […] The book contains detailed-but-lively accounts of the sisters'lives and work, and is filled with black-and-white and color plates of their art.'—The Carmel Pine Cone'An illuminating and heroic work... [Good] writes vividly about how all three Brutons continued to make art until the very end of their lives.'—Jasmin Darznik, New York Times–bestselling author of The Bohemians'For decades, Margaret, Esther and Helen Bruton have been relegated to a side note in California art history. Yet their work has found new appreciation in the 21st century, and their fascinating lives and impressive artistic achievements are finally coming back into the light.'—Carmel MagazineEducated at art schools in New York and Paris, the Brutons ran in elite artistic circles and often found themselves in the company of luminaries including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Henri Matisse, Armin Hansen, Maynard Dixon, Imogen Cunningham, and Ansel Adams. Their contemporaries described the sisters as geniuses, for they were bold experimenters who excelled in a wide variety of mediums and styles, each eventually finding a specialization that expressed her best: Margaret turned to oil paintings, watercolors, and terrazzo tabletops; Esther became known for her murals, etchings, fashion illustrations, and decorative screens; and Helen lost herself in large-scale mosaics.Although celebrated for their achievements during the 1920s and 1930s, the Brutons cared little about fame, failing to promote themselves or their work. Over time, the'famous Bruton sisters'and their impressive art careers were nearly forgotten. Now for the first time, Sisters in Art reveals the contributions of Margaret, Esther, and Helen Bruton as their works continue to inspire and find new appreciation today.

A biography of the elusive but celebrated Dada and Surrealist artist and photographer connecting his Jewish background to his life and art Man Ray (1890–1976), a founding father of Dada and a key player in French Surrealism, is one of the central artists of the twentieth century. He is also one of the most elusive. In this new biography, journalist and critic Arthur Lubow uses Man Ray's Jewish background as one filter to understand his life and art. Man Ray began life as Emmanuel Radnitsky, the eldest of four children born in Philadelphia to a mother from Minsk and a father from Kiev. When he was seven the family moved to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where both parents worked as tailors. Defying his parents'expectations that he earn a university degree, Man Ray instead pursued his vocation as an artist, embracing the modernist creed of photographer and avant-garde gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. When at the age of thirty Man Ray relocated to Paris, he, unlike Stieglitz, made a clean break with his past.

One of the greatest and most admired artists of the twentieth century, Georgia O'Keeffe led a life rich in intense relationships—with family, friends, and especially with fellow artist Alfred Stieglitz. Her extraordinary accomplishments, such as the often eroticized flowers, bones, stones, skulls, and pelvises she painted with such command, are all the more remarkable when seen in the context of the struggle she waged between the rigorous demands of love and work. When Roxana Robinson's definitive biography of O'Keeffe was first published in 1989, it received rave reviews and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. This new edition features a new foreword by the author setting O'Keefe in an artistic context over the last thirty years since the book was first published, as well as previously unpublished letters of the young O'Keeffe to her lover, Arthur MacMahon. It also relates the story of Robinson's own encounter with the artist. As interest in O'Keeffe continues to grow among museum-goers and scholars alike, this book remains indispensable for understanding her life and art.

King of Pop Art Andy Warhol is one of the greatest artists of all time. Rarely venturing into public without his camera and tape recorder, Warhol was a great observer and documentarist of the American social scene. Somewhere within the iconic images, carefully-made personae, star-studded milieu, million-dollar price tags and famous quotes lies the real Andy Warhol. But who was he? Andy Warhol,Robert Shore unfolds the multi-dimensional Warhol, dissecting his existence as undisputed art-world hotshot, recreating the amazing circle that surrounded him, and tracing his path to stardom back through his early career and his awkward and unusual youth. After Warhol, nothing would be the same – he changed art forever. Find out how with his remarkable story.‘Lives of the Artists'is a new series of brief artists biographies from Laurence King Publishing. The series takes as its inspiration Giorgio Vasari's five-hundred-year-old masterwork, updating it with modern takes on the lives of key artists past and present. Focusing on the life of the artist rather than examining their work, each book also includes key images illustrating the artist's life.

Adolf Dehn belongs to a group of distinguished midcentury American artists who were eclipsed by Abstract Expressionism and the following movements in American art. His lithographs of the Roaring Twenties introduced a note of social satire into American printmaking. He was one of the most gifted and innovative printmakers of the American Scene movement of the 1930s and one of the most significant American watercolorists. In this wide-ranging biography, Henry Adams explores how a once central figure can come to be forgotten. Noting that Dehn's watercolor Spring in Central Park has been widely reproduced on calendars, postcards, and other Metropolitan Museum of Art souvenirs, Adams asks why it is that some artists are celebrated as key figures while others, even those who created images that form an integral part of our visual culture, are relatively unknown. With his account of the life of the prolific and influential Dehn, and a look at the circles of artists and writers in which Dehn moved, Adams helps to fill in what he calls the “secret or subterranean history of art.”

In this inspiring biography, discover the true story of Harriet the Spy author Louise Fitzhugh -- and learn about the woman behind one of literature's most beloved heroines. Harriet the Spy, first published in 1964, has mesmerized generations of readers and launched a million diarists. Its beloved antiheroine, Harriet, is erratic, unsentimental, and endearing -- very much like the woman who created her, Louise Fitzhugh. Born in 1928, Fitzhugh was raised in segregated Memphis, but she soon escaped her cloistered world and headed for New York, where her expanded milieu stretched from the lesbian bars of Greenwich Village to the art world of postwar Europe, and her circle of friends included members of the avant-garde like Maurice Sendak and Lorraine Hansberry. Fitzhugh's novels, written in an era of political defiance, are full of resistance: to authority, to conformity, and even -- radically, for a children's author -- to make-believe. As a children's author and a lesbian, Fitzhugh was often pressured to disguise her true nature. Sometimes You Have to Lie tells the story of her hidden life and of the creation of her masterpiece, which remains long after her death as a testament to the complicated relationship between truth, secrecy, and individualism.

The inspiring life story of pioneering feminist artist, activist, and Buddhist teacher Mayumi Oda told through her own words and original thangka paintings.Sitting in meditation in front of a statue of Goddess Sarasvati, Mayumi Oda heard her say in a loud voice,'Stop the plutonium shipment!'After taking a stunned breath, Mayumi replied,'I can't do that. I'm only an artist,'and Sarasvati answered,'Help will be provided.'This book is the culmination of a life devoted to responding to Sarasvati's call to cultivate a path of peace, justice, and compassion. Known as the'Matisse of Japan,'Mayumi Oda is a painter, environmental activist, and Buddhist practitioner whose life reflects both the brilliance and shadows of modernity. Sarasvati's Gift explores her upbringing in Japan, her tumultuous marriage and the death of her son, her immigration to the country responsible for the destruction of her home, her inspiration for both her Buddhist practice and her art, and ultimately her commitment to the planet that gives her life both hope and meaning. This raw, heartfelt, and powerful memoir shares Mayumi's story of finding her place and her mission to transform the world.

A celebration of the prolific artist's heartfelt devotion to the people and places of the American SouthA View from the South: The Narrative Art of Boyd Saunders is the first comprehensive examination of the life and art of one of America's premier printmakers. In this celebration of an enduring and widely acclaimed career as an artist, Thomas Dewey II chronicles Saunders's work not only as a printmaker, but also as a painter, sculptor, illustrator, author, educator, amateur musician, and sometimes horseman. With great care Dewey exposes the common thread that runs through Saunders's visual expressions: his intriguing tales that reveal his heartfelt devotion to the people and places of the American South. Dewey has captured Saunders's life story through intensive research as well as via a series of interviews with the artist over several years. Details of Saunders's early life on a West Tennessee farm and his family's long attachment to the land document a profound influence on his life, outlook, and art. But Saunders was also moved by literature—namely that of William Faulkner, whom he met while earning a master's of fine art at the University of Mississippi. Saunders credits Faulkner with inspiring much of his work, demonstrated in his Spotted Horses, a limited volume of lithographs illustrating Faulkner's short story of the same name, which was published by the University of South Carolina Press in 1989.Now a distinguished professor emeritus of the University of South Carolina, Saunders founded its Art Department's printmaking program as well as a southern printmaker's organization called the Southern Graphics Council. In the more than forty years since its founding the organization, now called SGC International, it has grown well beyond its southern borders and now serves twenty-five hundred members worldwide.A View from the South features more than 120 color images showcasing the themes, ideas, and techniques Saunders has used in his paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts. His art is exhibited throughout the world and is included in many private and public collections, including the Boston Public Library, the U.S. Wildlife Collection in Washington, D.C., and Shanxi University collection in China. A foreword is provided by Charles R. Mack, professor emeritus of art history at the University of South Carolina.

How the poet Robert Duncan and the artist Jess made the household part of their separate and collaborative creative practice.“I'm a householder,” the poet Robert Duncan once explained. “My whole idea of being able to work was to have a household.” In this book, Tara McDowell examines the household (physical and conceptual) that Duncan established with the artist Jess, beginning in 1951 when the two men exchanged marriage vows, and ending with Duncan's death in 1988. For Duncan and Jess, the household—rather than the studio, gallery, or collective—provided the support structure for their art. Indeed, McDowell argues convincingly, their work was coextensive with their household. The material surroundings of their house in San Francisco and the daily rhythms of their domestic lives became part of their creative practice. Duncan wrote poetry that is romantic, ornate, and obscure; Jess (born Burgess Franklin Collins) created multi-imaged, complex collages and assemblages. McDowell explores their life and work—reading Duncan and Jess with and against each other, in alignment and misalignment. She examines their illustrated book Caesar's Gate, a collaborative effort that led them to reject collaboration; considers each man's lifelong preoccupation with an unfinished project, Jess's Narkissos and Duncan's The H.D. Book; and discusses their “origin myths” and self-made genealogies, describing them as a form of witness in the face of the calamities of the twentieth century. Duncan and Jess made the household a necessary precondition for their art making. Doing so, they reclaimed and rehabilitated the domestic—from which gay couples were traditionally excluded—for their own uses. The household permitted them to reimagine the world. McDowell's portrait of a couple expands to encompass broader issues, urgent in midcentury America and still resonant today: belonging and kinship, alienation, and catastrophe.

The Romare Bearden Reader brings together a collection of new essays and canonical writings by novelists, poets, historians, critics, and playwrights. The contributors, who include Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, August Wilson, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Kobena Mercer, contextualize Bearden's life and career within the history of modern art, examine the influence of jazz and literature on his work, trace his impact on twentieth-century African American culture, and outline his art's political dimensions. Others focus on specific pieces, such as A Black Odyssey, or the ways in which Bearden used collage to understand African American identity. The Reader also includes Bearden's most important writings, which grant readers insight into his aesthetic values and practices and share his desire to tell what it means to be black in America. Put simply, The Romare Bearden Reader is an indispensable volume on one of the giants of twentieth-century American art.Contributors. Elizabeth Alexander, Romare Bearden, Mary Lee Corlett, Rachel DeLue, David C. Driskell, Brent Hayes Edwards, Ralph Ellison, Henri Ghent, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Harry Henderson, Kobena Mercer, Toni Morrison, Albert Murray, Robert G. O'Meally, Richard Powell, Richard Price, Sally Price, Myron Schwartzman, Robert Burns Stepto, Calvin Tomkins, John Edgar Wideman, August Wilson

“A fascinating, detailed and moving account on the life and work of a truly genius artist. A must read for anyone interested in Art.” —João Leonardo, artistSol LeWitt (1928–2007), one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, upended traditional practices of how art is made and marketed. A key figure in minimalism and conceptualism, he proclaimed that the work of the mind is much more important than that of the hand. For his site-specific work—wall drawings and sculpture in dozens of countries—he created the idea and basic plan and then hired young artists to install the pieces. Though typically enormous and intricate, the physical works held no value. The worth was in the pieces of paper that certified and described them. LeWitt championed and financially supported colleagues, including women artists brushed aside by the bullies of a male-dominated profession. Yet the man himself has remained an enigma, as he refused to participate in the culture of celebrity. Lary Bloom's book draws on personal recollections of LeWitt, whom he knew in the last years of the artist's life, as well as LeWitt's letters and papers and over one hundred original interviews with his friends and colleagues, including Chuck Close, Ingrid Sischy, Philip Glass, Adrian Piper, Jan Dibbets, and Carl Andre. This absorbing chronicle brings new information to our understanding of this important artist, linking the extraordinary arc of his life to his iconic work. Includes twenty-eight illustrations.“An insightful and intimate portrait of the artist, the man and his times.” —Saul Ostrow, Founder of Critical Practices Inc.

A fascinating biography of a revolutionary American artist ripe for rediscovery as a photographer and champion of other artists Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) was an enormously influential artist and nurturer of artists even though his accomplishments are often overshadowed by his role as Georgia O'Keeffe's husband. This new book from celebrated biographer Phyllis Rose reconsiders Stieglitz as a revolutionary force in the history of American art. Born in New Jersey, Stieglitz at age eighteen went to study in Germany, where his father, a wool merchant and painter, insisted he would get a proper education. After returning to America, he became one of the first American photographers to achieve international fame. By the time he was sixty, he gave up photography and devoted himself to selling and promoting art. His first gallery, 291, was the first American gallery to show works by Picasso, Rodin, Matisse, and other great European modernists. His galleries were not dealerships so much as open universities, where he introduced European modern art to Americans and nurtured an appreciation of American art among American artists.

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) was a breaker of boundaries and a consummate collaborator. He used silk-screen prints to reflect on American promise and failure, melded sculpture and painting in works called combines, and collaborated with engineers and scientists to challenge our thinking about art. Through collaborations with John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and others, Rauschenberg bridged the music, dance, and visual-art worlds, inventing a new art for the last half of the twentieth century.Robert Rauschenberg is a work of collaborative oral biography that tells the story of one of the twentieth century's great artists through a series of interviews with key figures in his life—family, friends, former lovers, professional associates, studio assistants, and collaborators. The oral historian Sara Sinclair artfully puts the narrators'reminiscences in conversation, with a focus on the relationship between Rauschenberg's intense social life and his art. The book opens with a prologue by Rauschenberg's sister and then shifts to New York City's 1950s and'60s art scene, populated by the luminaries of abstract expressionism. It follows Rauschenberg's eventual move to Florida's Captiva Island and his trips across the globe, illuminating his inner life and its effect on his and others'art.The narrators share their views on Rauschenberg's work, explore the curatorial thinking behind exhibitions of his art, and reflect on the impact of the influx of money into the contemporary art market. Included are artists famous in their own right, such as Laurie Anderson and Brice Marden, as well as art-world insiders and lesser-known figures who were part of Rauschenberg's inner circle. Beyond considering Rauschenberg as an artist, this book reveals him as a man embedded in a series of art worlds over the course of a long and rich life, demonstrating the complex interaction of business and personal, public and private in the creation of great art.

An American Art Colony demonstrates the social dimension of American art in the twentieth century, paying special attention to the role of fellow artists, nonartists and the historical context of art production. This book treats the art colony not as a static addendum to an artist's profile but rather as an essential ingredient in artistic life. The art colony here becomes a historical entity that changes over time and influences the kind of art that ensues. It is a special methodology of the study that collective features of three generation of artists help clarify how artists engage their audiences. Since many of these artists worked within the cultural confines of metropolitan New York and its magazine industry, they cultivated subjects that were recognizable by ordinary citizens. Early on, they drew from the emergent suburban life of their neighbors for their artistic themes. Gradually these contexts become more formally institutionalized and their subjects gravitated away from themes of ordinary life to themes more exotic, expressionistic and fanciful. A key methodology for this study consisted of an analysis of collective biographies of 170 participating artists. The theme of modern art explains here how abstraction was suborned to public images, widening the very meaning of the term modern.

Adolphe Gouhenant tells the story of artist, revolutionary, and early North Texas resident Francois Ignace (Adolphe) Gouhenant (1804-1871). Born at the dawn of the Romantic era, Gouhenant traveled from a small village near the foothills of the Alps to France's second largest city, where he built a monument to the arts and sciences atop Lyon's famous Fourvière Hill. His wildly ambitious schemes landed him in court and ultimately devastated him financially. Participating in clandestine revolutionary organizations, Gouhenant organized a secret meeting under the guise of a Masonic banquet and was later imprisoned for conspiracy against the monarchy. Aligning himself with the early communist movement, Gouhenant advocated for workers'rights and was selected by well-known Icarian communist Etienne Cabet to lead an advance guard on a treacherous journey across the Atlantic to settle a utopian colony in North Texas. Despite broken wagons, severe weather, and lack of food, he navigated overland from New Orleans in 1848 to establish a small settlement in Denton County. The community, beset by hardships, ultimately scapegoated Gouhenant and accused him of being a French agent deliberately sent to lead the group to destruction into the wilds, and for this “treason” they shaved his head and beard and expelled him from the colony (which collapsed shortly thereafter). Gouhenant then journeyed to Fort Worth to teach the federal soldiers French and art, and next to Dallas where he founded the town's first arts establishment in the 1850s. He set up shop as a daguerreotypist and photographed the town's early residents. His Arts Saloon was the scene of many exhibitions and dances but ultimately became the high stake in a nasty battle among Dallas's leading citizens, setting legal precedent for Texas homestead law. Gouhenant's death in a freak railroad accident left behind mysterious claims that contribute one last chapter to this amazing man's story.

In 1978, Harvey Milk asked Gilbert Baker to create a unifying symbol for the growing gay rights movement, and on June 25 of that year, Baker's Rainbow Flag debuted at San Francisco's Gay Freedom Day Parade. Baker had no idea his creation would become an international emblem of liberation, forever cementing his pivotal role in helping to define the modern LGBTQ movement. Rainbow Warrior is Baker's passionate personal chronicle, from a repressive childhood in 1950s Kansas to a harrowing stint in the US Army, and finally his arrival in San Francisco, where he bloomed as both a visual artist and social justice activist. His fascinating story weaves through the early years of the struggle for LGBTQ rights, when he worked closely with Milk, Cleve Jones, and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Baker continued his flag-making, street theater and activism through the Reagan years and the AIDS crisis. And in 1994, Baker spearheaded the effort to fabricate a mile-long Rainbow Flag—at the time, the world's longest—to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in New York City. Gilbert and parade organizers battled with Mayor Rudy Giuliani for the right to carry it up Fifth Avenue, past St. Patrick's Cathedral. Today, the Rainbow Flag has become a worldwide symbol of LGBTQ diversity and inclusiveness, and its colorful hues have illuminated landmarks from the White House to the Eiffel Tower to the Sydney Opera House. Gilbert Baker often called himself the'Gay Betsy Ross,'and readers of his colorful, irreverent, and deeply personal memoir will find it difficult to disagree.

Born to Jewish radical parents in Chicago in 1939, Judy Cohen grew up to be Judy Chicago—one of the most daring and controversial artists of her generation. Her works, once disparaged and misunderstood by the critics, have become icons of the feminist movement, earning her a place among the most influential artists of her time. In Becoming Judy Chicago, Gail Levin gives us a biography of uncommon intimacy and depth, revealing the artist as a person and a woman of extraordinary energy and purpose. Drawing upon Chicago's personal letters and diaries, her published and unpublished writings, and more than 250 interviews with her friends, family, admirers, and critics, Levin presents a richly detailed and moving chronicle of the artist's unique journey from obscurity to fame, including the story of how she found her audience outside of the art establishment. Chicago revolutionized the way we view art made by and for women and fundamentally changed our understanding of women's contributions to art and to society. Influential and bold, The Dinner Party has become a cultural monument. Becoming Judy Chicago tells the story of a great artist, a leader of the women's movement, a tireless crusader for equal rights, and a complicated, vital woman who dared to express her own sexuality in her art and demand recognition from a male-dominated culture.

A New York Times Book Review Editor's ChoiceFinalist for the National Book Critics Circle AwardA Princeton professor-turned-artist recounts her late-in-life career change in this “feisty and delightfully irreverent memoir” about art and coming-of-age in your 60s (Boston Globe).“A glorious achievement... a cup of courage for everyone who wants to change their lives.” —Tayari Jones, author of An American MarriageFollowing her retirement from Princeton University, celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter surprised everyone in her life by returning to school—in her sixties—to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. In Old in Art School, she travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design; finds meaning in the artists she loves, even as she comes to understand how they may be undervalued; and struggles with the unstable balance between the pursuit of art and the inevitable, sometimes painful demands of a life fully lived.How are women and artists seen and judged by their age, looks, and race? What does it mean when someone says, “You will never be an artist”? Who defines what an artist is and all that goes with such an identity, and how are these ideas tied to our shared conceptions of beauty, value, and difference?Bringing to bear incisive insights from two careers, Painter weaves a frank, funny, and often surprising tale of her move from academia to art in this “glorious achievement—bighearted and critical, insightful and entertaining. This book is a cup of courage for everyone who wants to change their lives” (Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage).

The definitive biography of Edward Gorey, the eccentric master of macabre nonsense. From The Gashlycrumb Tinies to The Doubtful Guest, Edward Gorey's wickedly funny and deliciously sinister little books have influenced our culture in innumerable ways, from the works of Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman to Lemony Snicket. Some even call him the Grandfather of Goth. But who was this man, who lived with over twenty thousand books and six cats, who roomed with Frank O'Hara at Harvard, and was known -- in the late 1940s, no less -- to traipse around in full-length fur coats, clanking bracelets, and an Edwardian beard? An eccentric, a gregarious recluse, an enigmatic auteur of whimsically morbid masterpieces, yes -- but who was the real Edward Gorey behind the Oscar Wildean pose? He published over a hundred books and illustrated works by Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Edward Lear, John Updike, Charles Dickens, Hilaire Belloc, Muriel Spark, Bram Stoker, Gilbert & Sullivan, and others. At the same time, he was a deeply complicated and conflicted individual, a man whose art reflected his obsessions with the disquieting and the darkly hilarious. Based on newly uncovered correspondence and interviews with personalities as diverse as John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Lemony Snicket, Neil Gaiman, and Anna Sui, Born to Be Posthumous draws back the curtain on the eccentric genius and mysterious life of Edward Gorey.

Mary Bonner: Impressions of a Printmaker is the definitive account of the life of an iconic Texas artist known for her delicate etchings and prints of the places and people that make South Texas unique. Mary Bonner begins with the artist's early years in San Antonio and continues through her awakening as an artist at the Woodstock colony in upstate New York in summer 1922 to her years in France under the instruction of master printmaker Édouard Henri Léon. In Paris, Bonner began entering her work in juried exhibitions, and these early Paris prints were met with some acclaim. She came into her own when she began experimenting with a more innovative and modern style, exemplified by Les cowboys, a three-part frieze inspired by memories of her family's ranch in Texas.After several years of dedicated study in Paris, Bonner began splitting her time between San Antonio and Paris. By 1928 she had begun to take on the causes of art and conservation in San Antonio, devoting less time to her own work. She spent the last years of her life at the family residence in San Antonio and died in 1935 at age forty-eight. Bonner's legacy, both as an accomplished artist and as a steadfast advocate for the arts, lives on, especially in San Antonio.Mary Bonner is copublished with the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Villa Finale. The book will accompany a retrospective of Bonner's work at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio. This edition includes a new preface, an introduction by McNay curator Lyle Williams, and an afterword by Jane Lewis, director of Villa Finale.

This is an intimate and revealing biography of Agnes Martin, renowned American painter, considered one of the great women artists of the 20th and 21st Century. A resident of both New Mexico and New York City, Martin has always remained an enigma due to her fiercely guarded private life. Henry Martin, award-winning writer, and art scholar, having access to those who were close to Agnes Martin—friends, family, former lovers—gives us a full portrait of this universally revered artist. Readers will learn of her bouts with mental illness, her several significant lesbian relationships, and her lifelong yearning for recognition despite her reclusive lifestyle and need for privacy. Arriving in the wake of major international retrospective exhibitions of her work from London's Tate Modern, LACMA in Los Angeles, and the Guggenheim in New York City, this book provides a perspective of Agnes Martin that has not been seen in earlier, more academic works or fine-art monographs. Certain to be a mainstay for readers of the arts, and admirers of the creative spirit, this book also includes rare photographs from Martin's family and friends, many of which have never appeared in a book before.

••A New York Times Editors Choice••'The most substantive biography of the artist to date...propulsive, positive and persuasive.'—Holland Cotter, New York Times Book Review ••PEN / Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Finalist•• ••A Marfield Prize Finalist••Cy Twombly was a man obsessed with myth and history—including his own. Shuttling between stunning homes in Italy and the United States where he perfected his room-size canvases, he managed his public image carefully and rarely gave interviews. Upon first seeing Twombly's remarkable paintings, writer Joshua Rivkin became obsessed himself with the mysterious artist, and began chasing every lead, big or small—anything that might illuminate those works, or who Twombly really was. Now, after unprecedented archival research and years of interviews, Rivkin has reconstructed Twombly's life, from his time at the legendary Black Mountain College to his canonization in a 1994 MoMA retrospective; from his heady explorations of Rome in the 1950s with Robert Rauschenberg to the ongoing efforts to shape his legacy after his death.Including previously unpublished photographs, Chalk presents a more personal and searching type of biography than we've ever encountered, and brings to life a more complex Twombly than we've ever known.

Five women revolutionize the modern art world in postwar America in this'gratifying, generous, and lush'true story from a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist (Jennifer Szalai, New York Times). Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, Ninth Street Women is the impassioned, wild, sometimes tragic, always exhilarating chronicle of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstract painting -- not as muses but as artists. From their cold-water lofts, where they worked, drank, fought, and loved, these pioneers burst open the door to the art world for themselves and countless others to come. Gutsy and indomitable, Lee Krasner was a hell-raising leader among artists long before she became part of the modern art world's first celebrity couple by marrying Jackson Pollock. Elaine de Kooning, whose brilliant mind and peerless charm made her the emotional center of the New York School, used her work and words to build a bridge between the avant-garde and a public that scorned abstract art as a hoax. Grace Hartigan fearlessly abandoned life as a New Jersey housewife and mother to achieve stardom as one of the boldest painters of her generation. Joan Mitchell, whose notoriously tough exterior shielded a vulnerable artist within, escaped a privileged but emotionally damaging Chicago childhood to translate her fierce vision into magnificent canvases. And Helen Frankenthaler, the beautiful daughter of a prominent New York family, chose the difficult path of the creative life. Her gamble paid off: At twenty-three she created a work so original it launched a new school of painting. These women changed American art and society, tearing up the prevailing social code and replacing it with a doctrine of liberation. In Ninth Street Women, acclaimed author Mary Gabriel tells a remarkable and inspiring story of the power of art and artists in shaping not just postwar America but the future.

In 1867, German immigrant Paul Seifert settled in the Driftless Area of southwestern Wisconsin and began capturing the distinctive farms and landscapes of his new home in vivid, detailed watercolors. Today, these paintings are coveted by American folk art collectors across the country, but Seifert's life remains shrouded in mystery. In this first book written about Paul Seifert, author Joe Kapler examines the life of this enigmatic artist and provides context for his extraordinary art. The book features high-quality reproductions of twenty-two Seifert watercolors (more than half of which have never been published) and many close-ups of his characteristic details, from horses and hay wagons to dogs and dinner bells. Part art history treatment, part coffee table book, part research memoir, and part love letter to the Driftless Area, Wisconsin in Watercolor shines a long-awaited light on Seifert and the land he so carefully rendered over a hundred years ago.

By the time of his death in 1988, Romare Bearden was most widely celebrated for his large-scale public murals and collages, which were reproduced in such places as Time and Esquire to symbolize and evoke the black experience in America. As Mary Schmidt Campbell shows us in this definitive, defining, and immersive biography, the relationship between art and race was central to his life and work -- a constant, driving creative tension. Bearden started as a cartoonist during his college years, but in the later 1930s turned to painting and became part of a community of artists supported by the WPA. As his reputation grew he perfected his skills, studying the European masters and analyzing and breaking down their techniques, finding new ways of applying them to the America he knew, one in which the struggle for civil rights became all-absorbing. By the time of the March on Washington in 1963, he had begun to experiment with the Projections, as he called his major collages, in which he tried to capture the full spectrum of the black experience, from the grind of daily life to broader visions and aspirations. Campbell's book offers a full and vibrant account of Bearden's life -- his years in Harlem (his studio was above the Apollo theater), to his travels and commissions, along with illuminating analysis of his work and artistic career. Campbell, who met Bearden in the 1970s, was among the first to compile a catalogue of his works. An American Odyssey goes far beyond that, offering a living portrait of an artist and the impact he made upon the world he sought both to recreate and celebrate.

I am glad I am alive to witness these things; giving words to this life of sensations is a relief. Smell the flowers while you can. Close to the Knives is the artist, writer and activist David Wojnarowicz's extraordinary memoir. Filthy, beautiful, and sharp to the point of piercing, it is both an exploration of the world seen through the eyes of an artist, and a moving portrait of a generation living, grieving, and dying through the AIDS crisis. It is a triumphant hymn of resistance, and a dizzying celebration of the joys of seeing and living in the world.

An “enchanting” memoir of an artist in search of herself: “A sure hit for fans of Sara Benincasa's Agorafabulous! and Lena Dunham's Not That Kind of Girl” (Booklist, starred review).Caca Dolce is the “funny, candid, and bracingly self-aware” story of Chelsea Martin's coming of age as an artist (The Rumpus). We're with the author of cult novels Mickey and Even Though I Don't Miss You as an eleven-year-old atheist, trying to will an alien visitation to her neighborhood; fighting with her stepfather and grappling with a Tourette's diagnosis as she becomes a teenager; falling under the sway of frenemies and crushes in high school; going into debt to afford what might be a meaningless education at an expensive art college; navigating the messy process of falling in love with a close friend; and struggling for independence from her emotionally manipulative father and from the family and friends in the dead-end California town that has defined her upbringing.A book about relationships, class, art, sex, money, family, and growing up weird and poor in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Casa Dolce is “a wild ride of a memoir, and a true glimpse into the mind of an artist as she's figuring out what life is all about” (Kristin Iversen, Nylon).

Victor Arnautoff reigned as San Francisco's leading mural painter during the New Deal era. Yet that was only part of an astonishing life journey from Tsarist officer to leftist painter. Robert W. Cherny's masterful biography of Arnautoff braids the artist's work with his increasingly leftist politics and the tenor of his times. Delving into sources on Russian émigrés and San Francisco's arts communities, Cherny traces Arnautoff's life from refugee art student and assistant to Diego Rivera to prominence in the New Deal's art projects and a faculty position at Stanford University. As Arnautoff's politics moved left, he often incorporated working people and people of color into his treatment of the American past and present. In the 1950s, however, his participation in leftist organizations and a highly critical cartoon of Richard Nixon landed him before the House Un-American Activities Committee and led to calls for his dismissal from Stanford. Arnautoff eventually departed America, a refugee of another kind, now fleeing personal loss and the disintegration of the left-labor culture that had nurtured him, before resuming his artistic career in the Soviet Union that he had fought in his youth to destroy.

Pop Art — an entirely new and defiantly American style of painting and sculpture — was all the rage among the cultural cognoscenti in the turbulent 1960s, and New York City was the unquestioned epicenter of Pop Art. No artist embodies this groundbreaking movement more than Roy Lichtenstein, the only Pop Artist born in the city and whose life and experiences there inspired much of his most popular and iconic work.This book looks at Lichtenstein's life through the lens of New York City, taking the reader to the Manhattan that Lichtenstein knew, from the Prohibition era through the postwar era and countercultural revolution to the well-heeled iconoclasm of the 80s and 90s. It is a fascinating biography of a major but sometimes neglected trailblazer of 20th-centruy American art.

In this memoir, penned by the late Jerry Robinson in his final years, he tells the story of a seventeen-year-old college hopeful who became the artist on Detective Comics, and later Batman, shares his thoughts on creating the Joker as the first super villain, and relates the celebrity-studded journeys that a long life in comics afforded him. In this volume, you'll also find never before published original artwork from iconic comics like Detective Comics #76 and Batman #14 and cover artwork featuring Batman, Robin, and the Joker, delving deep into imagery that has shaped the evolution of comics'most famous villain.'I always thought that heroes were essentially dull. Villains were more exotic and could do more interesting things'. -Jerry Robinson

John La Farge, A Biographical and Critical Study is the first biography in a century of the American painter, illustrator, muralist, stained-glass artist, and writer. Examining La Farge's career from his youth to his late rebound as a decorative artist-from New York City and New England to Europe to Japan to the South Seas-this is also the only biography to date composed independently of the artist and his estate. Drawing on primary documentation culled from archives and contemporary newspapers and journals, the biography thoroughly documents La Farge's career and artwork. Earlier biographies avoided the darker aspects of his complex and conflicted life, which had dramatic effects on his work. The study also offers critical analysis of the artist's works, showing influences from other artists and giving contemporary and modern responses. La Farge authority James L. Yarnall scrutinizes how posterity has viewed the artist throughout the century since his death. The book is copiously illustrated with black-and-white and color images.

How does a twenty-first-century woman living in rural southern Oregon enter the spiritual realm of the Dreamtime and what impact does it have on her life? Denise Kester is an artist and art teacher whose inner dream life is populated by a host of profound characters (brown bears, black crows, blue monkeys, sea turtles, and rabbits among others) who guide Denise through a difficult year of artistic creation as she stares down at a deadline for an important exhibit. Drawing on the Dream is part instruction for artists but even more a profound illumination on the way of the artist. The book includes Kester's brilliant monoprints in all stages of process to completion and the stories or poetry that inspired or illuminate the work. Kester writes about the struggles and the triumphs that occur as the deadline approaches. She asks the question “do I make the art or does the art make me?”In her Foreword, bestselling author Jean Houston (Jump Time, The Possible Human observes: “As you read, see, and enjoy the riches contained in this book you too may discover, with such wonder and astonishment, that the dreamtime lives within you. For you are in the presence of Denise Kester who has tapped into the source of creativity and thus, is herself, a Source-rer.”

When Living and Sustaining a Creative Life was published in 2013, it became an immediate sensation. Edited by Sharon Louden, the book brought together forty essays by working artists, each sharing their own story of how to sustain a creative practice that contributes to the ongoing dialogue in contemporary art. The book struck a nerve – how do artists really make it in the world today? Louden took the book on a sixty-two-stop book tour, selling thousands of copies, and building a movement along the way. Now, Louden returns with a sequel: forty more essays from artists who have successfully expanded their practice beyond the studio and become change agents in their communities. There is a misconception that artists are invisible and hidden, but the essays here demonstrate the truth – artists make a measurable and innovative economic impact in the non-profit sector, in education and in corporate environments. The Artist as Culture Producer illustrates how today's contemporary artists add to creative economies through out-of-the-box thinking while also generously contributing to the well-being of others. By turns humorous, heartbreaking and instructive, the testimonies of these forty diverse working artists will inspire and encourage every reader – from the art student to the established artist. With a foreword by Hyperallergic co-founder and editor-in-chief Hrag Vartanian, The Artist as Culture Producer is set to make an indelible mark on the art world – redefining how we see and support contemporary artists. Louden's worldwide book tour begins in March 2017. More information and tour dates can be found online at www.livesustain.org.