Seven Rooms brings together highlights from Hotel, a magazine for new approaches to fiction, non-fiction & poetry which, since its inception in 2016, provided a space for experimental reflection on literature's status as art & cultural mediator. Co-published by Tenement Press and Prototype, this anthology captures, refracts, and reflects a vital moment in independent publishing in the UK, and is built on the shared values of openness, collaboration, and total creative freedom.

British painter William Tillyer (born 1938) is regarded as one of the most accomplished and consistently inventive artists working in watercolor. His work luxuriates in translucent color and sensuous brushwork. Some of his pieces, in their untrammeled expressive zeal and readily apparent love of color as a pure quality call to mind the canvases of Morris Louis; in other paintings, flamboyantly voluptuous shapes confront geometric abstractions and Minimalist blocks of color. With 224 full-color images, "William Tillyer: Watercolours" provides a comprehensive look at the titular aspect of Tillyer's oeuvre, looking back over nearly 40 years of work. It includes three texts by the American poet and art historian John Yau, an essay describing the development of Tillyer's watercolors and linking his work to the tradition of the English watercolor, an essay on the latest body of work and an interview with the artist.

Far-ranging and thought-provoking essays on the relation of art and ethnic identity. This first collection by award-winning author John Yau, drawn from decades of work, includes essays about Black, Asian, Latinx, and Native American artists: sculptors Luis Jimenez and Ruth Asawa; "second generation Abstract Expressionists" such as the Black painter Ed Clark and the Japanese American painter Matsumi Kanemitsu; the performance artists James Luna and Patty Chang; the photographers Laurel Nakadate and Teju Cole; and a generation of Asian American artists that has emerged during the last decade. While identity is at the fore in this collection, Yau's essays also propose the need for an expansive view of identity, as in the essay "On Reconsidering Identity," which explores the writings of Lydia Cabrera and Edouard Glissant, and the possibilities of creolisation versus the reductiveness of Aime Cesaire's Negritude. Please Wait by the Coat Room is for serious readers interested in the art and artists of color that many mainstream institutions and critics misrepresented or overlooked. It presents a view guided by the artists' desire for autonomy and freedom in a culture that has deemed them undesirable or invisible.

Anton van Dalen: Community of Many chronicles the historic artist Anton van Dalen's lifelong visual investigation informed by the influences of war, religion and migration, his devotion to nature, and his dedication to documenting the technological and cultural evolutions within our society across a variety of mediums, from drawing and sculpture to collage and painting. Born in the Netherlands in 1938 to a conservative Calvinist family, Anton witnessed first-hand the terrors of both technological and human destruction during the Second World War. Since he immigrated to New York in 1966 and settled in the East Village, Anton has served as witness, storyteller and documentarian of the dramatic cultural shifts in the neighbourhood through his masterfully honed and singular iconography. Featuring critical essays by John Yau and Tiernan Morgan, this heavily illustrated publication is the first comprehensive monograph on Anton van Dalen's work that provides a language by which to discuss the consequences of human brutality towards nature and our entanglement with technology. Anton has been included in group exhibitions at notable institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New Museum, New York; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; and the New-York Historical Society. He has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at Temple Contemporary, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, Philadelphia; University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Exit Art, New York. His Avenue A Cut-Out Theatre has toured since 1995 both nationally and internationally and has been shown at numerous institutions including The Drawing Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and The New-York Historical Society.

The first comprehensive monograph on the master contemporary Korean American sculptor, from his seminal wire sculptures to his never-before-seen early works formed of steel. John Pai (b. 1937) is a prolific multimedia artist whose handmade three-dimensional sculptures are, paradoxically, still objects that seem to exist in a state of movement and transformation. This full-career survey of Pai s inventive work consists of his rarely seen early work up to the present. Pai s incredibly intricate, three-dimensional abstract 'drawings in space' are made of endless lengths of individual steel or copper rods and textured sheets made from hundreds of rods welded together. Unlike many contemporary sculptors who draw a sketch and let metalworkers do the actual construction, Pai continues to do all his work himself?from choosing the materials to the labor-intensive process of welding and bending the metals into complex and sometimes massive forms. Immigrating from Korea to the US at age 11, Pai showed his prodigious talent for art at a young age. He received a scholarship to attend Pratt Institute, and in the 1960s, Pai became the youngest professor appointed to the faculty at Pratt. Leading its fine arts and sculpture programs for nearly four decades, Pai proved a talented and beloved educator, nurturing generations of sculptors and fostering the burgeoning Korean artistic community in New York with those such as his contemporary Nam June Paik, reflecting a sensibility outside the mainstream of American art.

The remarkable plein air paintings of Liu Xiaodong (b.1963), which chronicle everyday lives within our diverse modern world, are the focus of this first monograph of his career to date. Immersing himself in communities around the globe, Xiaodong seeks to present people who often sit on the fringes of society who find themselves marginalised within a contemporary world striving for homogenisation. At first glance a traditional realist painter, closer examination reveals an artist exploring a range of media while interrogating the opportunities presented by modern technology. The result is an outstanding body of work, often monumental in scale, that examines, reconsiders, and extends observational painting in fresh directions, while bringing into question the lines between fact and fiction, the traditional and the contemporary, to create a wholly original vision.

This is the first major look at the work of the renowned yet intensely private and reclusive artist William Tillyer (b. 1938), best known for his abstract oil paintings, watercolours, and prints. Tillyer s skill and hugely varied body of work make him one of Britain s most respected artists, in the same generation as Lucian Freud and David Hockney. Tillyer is finally getting the recognition he deserves. While Tillyer s paintings are largely abstract, they are based on the landscape of North Yorkshire, where he has lived and worked for most of his life. The book covers Tillyer s experiments with nontraditional materials and techniques his 3D panels, cut canvases, constructed works with found objects, printmaking with a wide range of processes, and paintings on wire mesh.

Yau's comic and cutting poetry collides with the work of Nozkowski, whom the New Yorker has termed "the Chardin of contemporary abstraction." The end result is a dazzling and vibrant concoction of visual and written imagery. All the poems in Ing Grish are new, as are Nozkowski's paintings and illustrations, which he created expressly for this collection.
Ing Grish was named "Book of the Year" by Small Press Traffic in San Francisco.

Carole A. Feuerman is celebrated as one of America's major hyper-realistic sculptors, alongside Duane Hanson and John De Andrea. Born 1945, she was educated in New York and Philadelphia and began as an illustrator before turning to sculpture in the 1970s, which soon earned her much recognition and early success. A pioneer of hyper-realism in sculpture, her work has been displayed in many group shows and solo exhibitions at private galleries and public museums, as well as at the major art fairs, in America, Europe, and Asia. Over five decades, Feuerman has created visual manifestations of stories telling of strength, survival, and balance. She works in marble, bronze, vinyl, painted resins, and stainless steel. Her work is marked by her thorough understanding of materials' characteristics and her ability to control them in the studio. Her subject matter is the human figure, most often a woman in an introspective moment of exuberant self-consciousness shaded by erotic lassitude. Feuerman's works represent a state of female mind rather that an alluring body meant to attract the male gaze. They suggest that women look at themselves differently from men looking at them, that a woman is more innately creative than a man. Many of Feuerman's figures have a fragmented quality, recalling those by Auguste Rodin, and the aesthetics of Surrealism. This is the most comprehensive survey of Feuerman's work in sculpture to date. Lavishly illustrated in colour throughout, it demonstrates the variety of materials and media she uses and highlights the specific qualities of her figures.

The newest monograph dedicated to the striking new work of internationally acclaimed abstract painter Suzan Frecon Suzan Frecon features new paintings, which highlight the artist's ongoing exploration of the interaction of shape, color, texture, and light. Painted over long periods of time, these works are the result of a deliberative process guided by a deep understanding of color and the properties of paint. Frecon has been exploring the issues of horizontality and verticality, asymmetrical balances, and interacting arrangements of color for over five decades. The result is an ongoing dialogue that yields new and surprising paintings at every turn. Frecon's knowledge of color is deeply rooted in art history; her selection of color brings with it an understanding of the scientific properties of pigments as well as their use by Renaissance painters. Esteemed poet and critic John Yau explores this inspiration in his illuminating essay, in which he teases out the connections between these bold abstract works and historic figurative paintings. Highlighting Frecon's interest in these paintings for their form and color rather than their narrative, Yau offers a new and intriguing way of looking at both present and past.

The Schulhofs were unique among American collectors, as they sought art with a truly international dimension; Milan, Rome, Paris, Dusseldorf, Basel, London, Kassel, Venice, Pittsburgh, and New York were just a few of the many destinations for the late Hannelore and Rudolph Schulhof in over fifty years of collecting art. Starting in the early 1950s, together they built a collection that continues to inspire and educate future generations-from the powerful elegance of Richard Serra's Schulhof's Curve to Eduardo Chilida's exquisite ironworks and works on paper by artists such as Robert Smithson, Mark Rothko, and Cy Twombly. The collectors' interest in minimalism is reflected in works by Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin, and Robert Ryman. This handsome volume showcases the thoughtful and highly personal texture of the Schulhof Collection.

This book presents a comprehensive view of the work of American painter Philip Taaffe (b.1955), who has expanded the parameters of painting through his use of silkscreen, linocuts, collage, stencils, gouache, chine-colle, marbling, acrylic, enamel, watercolour and gold leaf. Possessing many technical skills, Taaffe has moved decisively between unique pictorial inventions and appropriations, as well as overlaying divergent modes of representation, through cultural patterns found in ornament, and biomorphic abstraction. John Yau's insightful text is the first to look at every part of Taaffe's artistic development, from the works he made at Cooper Union while a student of Hans Haacke, to the present. It pays special attention to Taaffe's acquisition of different techniques, as well as investigating his various sources of inspiration, which include the work of experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner and Harry Smith, the Natural History illustrations of Ernst Haeckel, and the ancient art of paper marbling.

Robert Motherwell, who died in 1991, was the youngest member of the first wave of Abstract Expressionists known as the New York School (a phrase he coined), which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman. An articulate writer, Motherwell was pegged early on as the intellectual of the group. "Robert Motherwell: Open" is the first examination of the painter's "Open" series, which preoccupied him from 1967 until the last years of his life. Pared down and minimal, these paintings differ greatly from his more dynamic and monumental "Elegies" series, for which he is perhaps best known. Containing many previously unpublished paintings as well as works in public collections, this monograph--the most comprehensive and best-illustrated book on Motherwell currently in print--introduces a series of texts by critics and art historians John Yau, Robert Hobbs, Matthew Collings, Donald Kuspit, Robert Mattison, Mel Gooding and Saul Ostrow.

Poems that consider doubleness and truth-telling through the voice of an Asian American poet, while referencing a range of writers and pop culture figures.   Emily Dickinson begins one of her poems with the oft-quoted line, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant." For Asian Americans, the word “slant� can be heard and read two ways, as both a racializing and an obscuring term. It is this sense of doubleness—culminating in the instability of language and an untrustworthy narrator—that shapes, informs, and inflects the poems in John Yau’s new collection, all of which focus on the questions of who is speaking and who is being spoken for and to. Made up of eight sections, each exploring the idea of address—as place, as person, as memory, and as event —Tell It Slant does as Dickinson commands, but with a further twist. Yau summons spirits who help the author “tell all the truth,� among whom are reimagined traces of poets, movie stars, and science fiction writers, including Charles Baudelaire, Thomas de Quincey, Philip K. Dick, Li Shangyin, and Elsa Lanchester.  

Extolled as a contemporary heir of Edward Hopper, Catherine Murphy has evolved a style acutely American that combines obsessive authenticity with Minimalist rigor. From the shaded lawns of the New Jersey suburbs to the Massachusetts woods, from childhood interiors to self-portraits and detailed images of buttons and dust, carpeted stairs, or a stuccoed ceiling, Murphy always paints and draws from life, often the domestic and quotidian. However, Murphy has distinguished her art from that of other realists, particularly in her later work, which often presents her subjects in extreme proximity to the viewer, literally in your face. Murphy uses painting and drawing to slow time down with intense concentration, so much so that it may take her a year to complete one painting. This volume explores Murphy's complete body of work, from the hushed world of her early work to the hyper encounters of the present with more than 100 paintings and drawings accompanied by texts by art critic John Yau.

H is here, in the truest sense, the alpha and omega. Helmut Federle uses the first letter of his first name as a format-filling, artistic matrix on canvases measuring between forty and fifty centimetres. Since his early days as an artist in the late 1970s, he has created seventy variations of Liegendes H (Reclining H). The basic form of three lines and two squares enumerates the variations of expressions in painting. Their synopsis plays with figure and ground, forming an inventive collection of painterly techniques and the atmospheres they evoke. At the same time, the subtitles for the individual works seem to hint at the specific horizons of experience in their creation. They lend each work a poetic dimension, as one tries to imagine the artist's world in the planes of colour. Thus, each picture represents Helmut and is, in its mysterious originality, a fascinating haiku.

A diverse and cacophonous poetry collection tackling subjects from identity to current events. At once comic and cantankerous, tender and discomfiting, piercing and irreverent, Genghis Chan on Drums is a shape-shifting book of percussive poems dealing with aging, identity, PC culture, and stereotypes about being Chinese. Employing various forms, John Yau's poems traverse a range of subjects, including the 1930s Hollywood actress Carole Lombard, the Latin poet Catullus, the fantastical Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo's imaginary sister, and a nameless gumshoe. Yau moves effortlessly from using the rhyme scheme of a sixteenth-century Edmund Spenser sonnet to riffing on a well-known poem-rant by the English poet Sean Bonney, and to immersing himself in the words of condolence sent by a former president to the survivors of a school massacre. Yau's poems are conduits through which many different, conflicting, and unsavory voices strive to be heard.