Designed as a companion to the hugely successful monograph Noah Davis, this volume offers further insight into the impact and legacy of the revolutionary Los Angeles artist and activist. ---------- “Embedding his dreams on canvas and in the community, visionary American artist Noah Davis created a mighty legacy.” — Rachel Willcock, ArtReview (2022) ---------- Looking to literature, film, architecture, and art history, Noah Davis imbued his ethereal paintings with emotion and imagination. Muted colors, fantastic scenes, and blurred subjects create an intoxicating vision. Attuned to the power of his medium, Davis layered his paintings—figuratively and literally—using a unique dry paint application to depict quotidian life at an enigmatic, almost magical remove. Featuring sumptuous close-ups throughout, this important new book brings into focus the rich, painterly variety and luminous detail of Davis’s canvases. With a special focus on the groundbreaking Underground Museum, which Noah Davis co-founded with his wife, Karon Davis, Noah Davis: In Detail includes a special conversation, moderated by Helen Molesworth, between Fred Moten, Glenn Ligon, Thomas Lax, and Julie Mehretu. This renowned group of artists and thinkers share personal experiences of the powerful and emotional impact of The Underground Museum and its connection to the larger artistic environs of Los Angeles. Franklin Sirmans contributes a new essay and Lindsay Charlwood, a lifelong friend of Noah’s, authors a chronology of his life, contextualizing his artistic and social achievements.

From Bauhaus jewellery and West African textiles to contemporary portraiture and sculpture, this unique volume explores the rituals of making that underpin an artist's work. Accompanying an exhibition curated by the groundbreaking Nigerian-born British fashion designer Duro Olowu at Camden Art Centre, London, this book offers the opportunity to re-evaluate art and textiles from the nineteenth-century to the present. Olowu selects material by more than 60 artists from around the world, including rarely seen works by Anni Albers, Wangechi Mutu, Alice Neel, Chris Ofili and Irving Penn, and newer paintings by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. By setting up unexpected dialogues between historic and contemporary artists working in a myriad of media - textile, painting, sculpture, photography and collage - Olowu reveals a shared preoccupation with themes of gender, race, beauty, sexuality and the body. The volume includes an in-depth conversation between Olowu and artist Glenn Ligon, along with texts by Jennifer Higgie and Shanay Jhaveri, that together highlight the intricate layers of history and place that influence the making of art.

Glenn Ligon (b1960) is one of the most significant American artists of his generation. Much of his work relates to abstract expressionism and minimalist painting, remixing formal characteristics to highlight the cultural and social histories of the time, such as the civil rights movement. The exhibition brings together artworks and other material he references in his own work and writings, or work with which he shares certain affinities. This publication is both a comprehensive exhibition catalogue, which fully illustrating all works in the exhibition from artists including Chris Ofili, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Lorna Simpson, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Jasper Johns, accompanied by newly commissioned texts by Glenn Ligon, Francesco Manacorda, Alex Farquharson, and Gregg Bordowitz; and an anthology of around 20 texts selected/excerpted by Glenn Ligon.

In this artist book, celebrated American Conceptual artist Glenn Ligon traces the representation of Black people on book covers in the United States, highlighting the deliberate use of typography, photography and graphics. Best known for appropriating imagery and text from popular culture, Ligon has selected over 50 book covers - by both lesser-known and seminal authors, such as James Baldwin, Norman Mailer and Toni Morrison - to explore a rich and complex set of histories and representations. To introduce the book, an essay by Ligon identifies one of the foundation stones of his life and work: the act of reading. Spanning the twentieth century and grouped thematically, the covers reveal correspondences between the past and the present, as well as links between the social and visual constructs of race, beauty and the body. Published to coincide with the exhibition Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions, both co-curated and featuring works by the artist, held at Nottingham Contemporary (4 April-14 June 2015) and Tate Liverpool (30 June-18 October 2015).