A fascinating look at Keith Haring's New York City subway artwork from the 1980s Celebrated artist Keith Haring (1958-1990) has been embraced by popular culture for his signature bold graphic line drawings of figures and forms. Like other graffiti artists in the 1980s, Haring found an empty canvas in the advertising panels scattered throughout New York City's subway system, where he communicated his socially conscious, often humorous messages on platforms and train cars. Over a five-year period, in an epic conquest of civic space, Haring produced a massive body of subway artwork that remains daunting in its scale and its impact on the public consciousness. Dedicated to the individuals who might encounter them and to the moments of their creation, Haring's drawings now exist solely in the form of documentary photographs and legend. Because they were not meant to be permanent-only briefly inhabiting blacked-out advertising boards before being covered up by ads or torn down by authorities or admirers-what little remains of this project is uniquely fugitive. Keith Haring: 31 Subway Drawings reproduces archival materials relating to this magnificent project alongside essays by leading Haring experts. Distributed for No More Rulers

For the past 35 years, Henry Geldzahler, controversial first curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Department of Twentieth Century Art, has been at the center of America's lively and vital art scene. Making It New is the first collection of his essays, interviews and talks, and includes work that has never been published. His style is disarmingly intimate, insightful and amusing. In this generous selection of writings Henry Geldzahler is always an enchanting guide to a world of innovative artistic activity. He is master of a particularly informal interview style which allows artists as diverse as Frank Stella, Alice Neel and Louise Bourgeois to reveal fresh insights to their methods and intentions. His essays on photography, on "The Sixties" and his commencement address remind us of Calvin Tompkins' comment in "The Scene" that Henry Geldzahler's effect (as teacher) was phenomenal. "Students...were mesmerized by his brilliant, amusing perception on every imaginable subject." These extraordinary writings are filled with high spirits, humor, literary charm and skillful connoisseurship.

Bruce Davidson's groundbreaking "Subway," first published by Aperture in 1986, has garnered critical acclaim both as a documentation of a unique moment in the cultural fabric of New York City and for its phenomenal use of extremes of color and shadow set against flash-lit skin. In Davidson's own words, "the people in the subway, their flesh juxtaposed against the graffiti, the penetrating effect of the strobe light itself, and even the hollow darkness of the tunnels, inspired an aesthetic that goes unnoticed by passengers who are trapped underground, hiding behind masks and closed off from each other." In this third edition of what is now a classic of photographic literature, a sequence of 118 (including 25 previously unpublished) images transport the viewer through a landscape at times menacing, and at other times lyrical and soulful. The images present the full gamut of New Yorkers, from weary straphangers and languorous ladies in summer dresses to stalking predators and homeless persons. Davidson's accompanying text tells the story behind the images, clarifying his method and dramatizing his obsession with the subway, its rhythms and its particular madness.
Bruce Davidson (born 1933) is considered one of America's most influential documentary photographers. He began taking photographs when he was ten, and studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Yale University School of Design. In 1958 he became a member of Magnum Photos, and in 1962 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to document the civil rights movement. After a solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1963, Davidson spent two years photographing in Harlem, resulting in the book "East 100th Street." In 1980, after living in New York City for 23 years, Davidson began "Subway," his startling color essay of urban life.