Can a sculpture be a river? Can contemporary art unite conflicting systems of belief? Do other species appreciate culture? And can public art revive communities and ecosystems? Cristina Iglesias’ horizontal fountains, submerged rooms and tropical mazes bring together language, architecture and botany to create immersive spaces of contemplation. In this publication an international roster of curators, art critics, philosophers, architects and scientists discuss the social and ecological potential of art in urban and rural space.

The first book to explore the fascinating career and fantasy-driven worlds created by the acclaimed Argentinean artist Adrian Villar Rojas's works concoct imaginary realms. Usually made from clay, his colossal installations are transitory and so cannot be collected, as they disappear or decay over time. His practice confronts the public with ideas of obsolescence and extinction, but also with the possibilities of humankind and its endless imagination. This is the first book to include all of Villar Rojas' most significant projects, featured in international biennials such as Venice, Documenta, Shanghai, and others.

"Every last page is worth a look." --Bustle Ben Katchor, "the most poetic, deeply layered artist ever to draw a comic strip" (New York Times Book Review), selects the best graphic pieces of the year. The Best American Comics 2017 showcases the work of both established and up-and-coming contributors and highlights both fiction and nonfiction from graphic novels, pamphlet comics, newspapers, magazines, minicomics, and the Web to make sure "the Best American Comics brand is poised to enjoy a killer second decade" (Bookgasm).

From the 1990s until just before his death, the legendary art critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto carried out extended conversations about contemporary art with the prominent Italian critic Demetrio Paparoni. Their discussions ranged widely over a vast range of topics, from American pop art and minimalism to abstraction and appropriationism. Yet they continually returned to the concepts at the core of Danto's thinking-posthistory and the end of aesthetics-provocative notions that to this day shape questions about the meaning and future of contemporary art. Art and Posthistory presents these rich dialogues and correspondence, testifying to the ongoing importance of Danto's ideas. It offers readers the opportunity to experience the intellectual excitement of Danto in person, speculating in a freewheeling yet erudite style. Danto and Paparoni discuss figures such as Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Franz Kline, Sean Scully, Clement Greenberg, Cindy Sherman, and Wang Guangyi, offering both insightful comments on individual works and sweeping observations about wider issues. On occasion, the artist Mimmo Paladino and the philosopher Mario Perniola join the conversation, enlivening the discussion and adding their own perspectives. The book also features an introductory essay by Paparoni that provides lucid analysis of Danto's thinking, emphasizing where the two disagree as well as what they learned from each other.

The momentary beauty of Sage Vaughn s butterflies is palpable. These impossibly lovely, delicate creatures appear to have magically landed or violently crashed, oozing their colorful pigment like blood-stained marks across the canvas. The dichotomy of these delicate and ephemeral creatures co-existing over images of gritty urban life creates a contrast that is layered, mysterious, and up for interpretation. Vaughn s butterflies appear as choreographed naturet their drips echoing his early beginnings as a graffiti artist. Sometimes juxtaposed against the likes of mundane interiors, forests, or the Russian punk band Pussy Riot, Vaughn s distinctive paintings create provocative relationships between the built and natural environment. The effect is dreamlike and almost hypnotic, as swarms of butterflies concurrently live and die in graceful formations that are at once heart-breakingly beautiful and sublimely melancholy.
Sage Vaughn is an LA-based painter and illustrator who is best recognized for his wildlife series. Moustachioed, eccentric, and consistent, Vaughn works in his studio from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and has been quoted as an artist with a blue-collar work ethic. As a child, Vaughn and his father, who was also a painter, would spend hours on end at the LA Zoo sketching animals all day. As a teenager, growing up in the San Fernando Valley in the late 70s and early 80s, Vaughn was greatly influenced by the punk movement and graffiti art. Vaughn s current Wildlives paintings focus on the juxtaposition and coexistence of humans and animals, drawing comparisons between their inherent liberty, freedom, and survival skills. He has had widely acclaimed solo shows in New York, Geneva, and London and has been featured in a group show at MOCA in LA, curated by the Beastie Boys Mike D."

Born in New York in 1941, Joel Shapiro is one of the most significant artists of his generation. Since the first public showing of his work in 1969 as part of the landmark Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials exhibiton at the Whitney Museum of American Art, he has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world. Most renowned for having developed in the 1980s and '90s a distinctive language of dynamic sculpture that blurs the lines between abstraction and figuration, Shapiro became known through his earliest 1970s New York shows for introducing common forms of often diminutive size. Since then he has continued to push the material and conceptual boundaries of sculpture by working in a number of materials and employing various working methods. Joel Shapiro: Sculpture and Works on Paper 1969-2019 is the first book in over twenty years to survey the artist's entire working career. In an extensive essay, art historian Richard Shiff provides a fresh and incisive examination of Shapiro's oeuvre and working process. With more than two hundred striking full-colour illustrations, this is a long-anticipated and much-needed survey of this vital and essential American artist.

Federico Solmi: Escape Into The Metaverse examines the work of Federico Solmi, a leading practitioner in the genre of new media art. As a narrative and figurative artist, Solmi utilises lurid colours and satire to portray a dystopian vision of contemporary society, highlighting the contradictions and fallibilities that characterise our time. Employing video, painting, drawing, sculpture, sound and digital game design, he creates a carnivalesque virtual reality with historical and present-day world leaders - animated by computer script and motion capture performance - in a critique of Western society's obsession with power. Inspired by real events and fabricated myths, Solmi explores, re-interprets and concocts celebrated moments in history. As reconfigured narratives, these social and political commentaries disrupt the mythologies that underpin Western society, revealing its ties to nationalism, colonialism, religion and consumerism. The book documents Solmi's unique process of melding traditional art practices and digital technologies in a case study of his most ambitious video-painting to date, The Bathhouse (2020). Pioneering new modes of cultural production and art experience afforded by the metaverse, Solmi's absurd rewriting of past and present merge dark humor and a sense of the grotesque in a virtual world that indicts our own reality. Solmi was born in 1973 to a working-class family in Bologna, Italy. He is self-trained and self-educated. In 1999, he moved to Brooklyn, New York, to pursue his career. His perspective reflects his outlook as a cultural voyeur, questioning the nationalistic and revisionist American mythologies that are often presented as fact. In 2003, Solmi began to experiment with the tools of video game design, fascinated by the parallel universe made possible by 3D graphics, which he saw as a structure to create narrative video sequences using drawings and paintings. Every visual texture is painted and scanned on the computer up to three times to achieve the intentional flickering effect. The art of Paolo Uccello, Giorgio Morandi and Giorgio di Chirico serve as references for his visual compositions, while the writings of Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Oriana Fallaci serve as inspiration for his social and political commentary.

Over the course of his career, Eamon Ore-Giron has examined the personal and historical ramifications of cultural hybridity. Raised in Tucson, Ore-Giron is inspired by his roots in the American Southwest, his visits to his father s hometown of Huancayo, Peru, and his time spent as a practicing artist in California and Mexico. This catalogue brings together for the first time three pivotal chapters in Ore-Giron s career: his Southwest and Peruvian-inspired figurative works from the 2000s; his paintings from the 2010s that engaged elements of both figuration and abstraction, including an ongoing series focused on Mesoamerican deities; and the sublime gold-based paintings from his recent Infinite Regress series. Curator Miranda Lash, along with celebrated scholars C. Ondine Chavoya and Jace Clayton, explore Ore-Giron s approach to de-colonizing the medium of painting, his impact within in the Los Angeles art scene, and his seminal work as a DJ who highlights the intersections between North and South American sound.

Born in Beirut to a Palestinian family, artist Mona Hatoum came toBritain as a student in the mid-1970s, settling in London in 1975.Her art - whether video, performance, sculpture or installation- is concerned with confrontational themes including violence,oppression and voyeurism, often in reference to the human body;and with the juxtaposition of opposites such as beauty and horror,desire and revulsion.Hatoum has participated in numerous important group exhibitionsincluding The Turner Prize and the Venice Biennale. As the winner ofthe Joan Miro Prize, she held a solo exhibition at Fundacio Joan Miroin Barcelona in 2012, and the following year was the subject of a soloexhibition at the Kunstmuseum St Gallen. In 2014 a large survey showof her work was held at the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar.With eight new essays, including an introduction by curator ClarrieWallis, and a re-published text by renowned Orientalist scholarEdward Said, a wide range of texts cover both the theory and practiceof Hatoum's work. Beautifully designed, with 250 colour imagescovering the whole of Hatoum's ouevre, this is the essential book on adistinctly powerful voice in contemporary art.

Hanneke Beaumont is known for her life-size sculptures of human figures in public spaces, which are to be found everywhere - from Brussels to Connecticut. For 35 years, she has been a key part of the international art scene with works in the collections of, among others, the Copelouzos Family Art Museum in Athens, the Baker Museum in Florida and the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in Michigan. The latter two also organised a highly-successful solo exposition of her work.

Time, "repetition" and "metamorphosis" are the central concepts in the work of Fredrik Vaerslev (*1979 in Moss, Norway). The artist places his canvases outdoors to observe the degree to which nature leaves its "signature" on them. In the exhibition on Ile des impressionnistes, Chatou, this process could be witnessed directly where it was taking place. Between October and December, nineteen minimalistically sprayed canvases, or mimicked awnings to be exact, were scattered across the island on the Seine and hung from trees. That Vaerslev references the John Le Carre novel The Constant Gardener, where the corpse of a woman is discovered in a bush, in the title of the exhibition is a perfect showstopper. This publication documents the plein-air exhibition in its various stages and masterfully introduces the changing work of the artist. The exhibition has ended: CNEAI-Centre National Edition Art Image, Ile des impressionistes, Chatou, 17.10.-17.12.2015

* American artist Chris Johanson has built a loyal following with his vibrant and sometimes hilarious take on the universe and our place in it. This monograph offers a panoramic view of Johanson's practice from his roots as a street artist in San Francisco to his celebrated exhibitions.

Japanese Sumi-e brush painting combines the techniques of calligraphy and ink painting to produce compositions of rare beauty. This art has its roots in the Zen Buddhist practices of mindfulness and meditation--serving as a means not just for describing wonders of nature, but as a method for training our minds to view the world in its essential grace and simplicity. This book is the product of many years of study with Ukai Uchiyama--a master Japanese calligrapher and artist. Kay Morrissey Thompson shares the knowledge she gained from this association, presenting a thorough discussion of the artist's work along with a series of practical lessons based on Mr. Uchiyama's instruction. The informative text is accompanied by over fifty illustrations, many in color, reproducing works by Ukai Uchiyama and enabling aspiring artists to understand how each painting was created. With a smaller size and new cover, this timeless Tuttle Classic (originally published in 1960), has been reformatted for a new generation of readers.

A loosely formed autobiography by Andy Warhol, told with his trademark blend of irony and detachment

In "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol"--which, with the subtitle "(From A to B and Back Again)," is less a memoir than a collection of riffs and reflections--he talks about love, sex, food, beauty, fame, work, money, and success; about New York, America, and his childhood in McKeesport, Pennsylvania; about his good times and bad in New York, the explosion of his career in the sixties, and his life among celebrities.

This almanac of overlooked vintage subject matter has an emphasis on art, design, photography and culture. With an extensive array of rare images, Outr Journal presents a curated compendium of the unusual that takes its cues from cabinets of curiosities and journals of miscellany such as The Saturday Book of old. The focus on underground topics and pop culture extends across time and continents to include highlights such as: religious architecture in the Space Age, found photos and images of masked people, Satan, pop culture and many more.

The NODE.London Reader projects a critical context around the Season of Media Arts in London March 2006 and provides another discursive dimension to the events of October 2005's Open Season. It engages debates in FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software), media arts and activism, collaborative practices and the political economy of cultural production in the present day. It includes essays and artist projects from Sabeth Buchmann, Toni Prug, Armin Medosch, Simon Yuill, Chad McCail, Critical Art Ensemble, Jo Walsh, Richard Barbrook, Michael Corris, Harwood, Kate Rich, Agnese Trocchi, Matthew Fuller, Rasmus Fleischer and Palle Torsson, Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, Matteo Pasquinelli and Francis McKee.

Remember radicalism? A time when the Toronto art scene was in formation - and destruction? When there were no models and anything was possible? The late 1970s was a key period when Toronto thought itself Canada's most important art centre, but history has shown that the nascent downtown art community - not the established uptown scene of commercial galleries - was where it was happening. It was a political period. Beyond the art politics, art itself was politicised in its contents and context. Art's political dimension was continually polemically posed - or postured - by artists in these years. Beyond politics, posturing, in fact, was a constant presence as the community invented itself. It was also a period rich in invention of new forms of art. Punk, semiotics, and fashion were equally influential, not to mention transgressive sexuality. It was the beginning of the photo-blowup allied to the deconstructed languages of advertising. Video and performance aligned in simulations of television production as the "underground" mimicked the models of the mainstream for its own satiric, critical purposes. With no dominant art form and the influence of New York in decline, there were no models and anything was possible: even the invention of the idea of an art community as a fictional creation. Is Toronto Burning? takes you on a journey through this period rich in invention of new forms of art. It brings together artworks by Susan Britton, David Buchan, Colin Campbell, Elizabeth Chitty, Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge, Judith Doyle, General Idea, Isobel Harry, Ross McLaren, Missing Associates (Peter Dudar & Lily Eng), Clive Robertson, Tom Sherman, and Rodney Werden alongside archival documents. The artworks were all shown at the exhibition of the same name at the end of 2014 at The Art Gallery of York University, curated by Director Philip Monk. In partnership with The Art Gallery of York University.

An exploration of the artistic and cultural influences that shaped writer and illustrator Edward Gorey The illustrator, designer, and writer Edward Gorey (1925-2000) is beloved for his droll, surreal, and slightly sinister drawings. While he is perhaps best known for his fanciful, macabre books, such as The Doubtful Guest and The Gashlycrumb Tinies, his instantly recognizable imagery can be seen everywhere from the New Yorker to the opening title sequence of the television series Mystery! on PBS. Gorey's Worlds delves into the numerous and surprising cultural and artistic sources that influenced Gorey's unique visual language. Gorey was an inveterate collector--he called it "accumulating." A variety of objects shaped his artistic mindset, from works of popular culture to the more than twenty-six thousand books he owned and the art pieces in his vast collection. This collection, which Gorey left to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art upon his death, is diverse in style, subject, and media, and includes prints by Eugene Delacroix, Charles Meryon, Edvard Munch, and Odilon Redon; photographs by Eugene Atget; and drawings by Balthus, Pierre Bonnard, Charles Burchfield, Bill Traylor, and Edouard Vuillard. As this book shows, these artistic pieces present a visual riddle, as the connections between them-to each other and to Gorey's works-are significant and enigmatic. The essays in Gorey's Worlds also examine the artist's consuming passions for animals and ballet. Featuring a sumptuous selection of Gorey's creations alongside his fascinating and diverse collections, Gorey's Worlds reveals the private world that inspired one of the most idiosyncratic artists of the twentieth century. Exhibition Schedule: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, February 10 - May 6, 2018

New York-based Todd James (born 1969) pioneered a distinct cartoon-based graffiti style in New York in the 1980s, working under the name REAS and gaining the respect of both a street-culture audience and the art and design market. He has since produced work for the Beastie Boys, Eminem and Iggy Pop, among others. This unique artist's book is the first publication by James in half a decade, and collects 60 of his drawings, all created exclusively for this volume. Bearing close resemblance to his best-known graffiti work, each drawing is complete unto itself yet also represents a potential painting for the future. "Yield to Temptation" is of a piece with James' broader concerns: American excess as represented by the forms and fictions of sexuality and the ravages of war. James invites his audience to glamorize these issues, even as he undercuts any assumptions about them. His drawings have the expressive, minimal intensity of a cartoon Franz Kline and evoke the Day-Glo era of 1970s print culture, where "Schoolhouse Rock" crosses over into "Playboy" cartoons. "Yield to Temptation" is being published on the occasion of James' solo exhibition in Tokyo.