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.

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.

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.

March Avery: A Life in Color is the first monograph on the New York-based painter March Avery. Documenting the artist's practice of more than 80 years, the book features three newly commissioned texts and some 200 images.Avery was born in 1932 to the painters Milton Avery and Sally Michel, and began painting as a child. As she says, "I think I was painting in utero." The dividing line between life and art was blurred during her upbringing, as is reflected in the subject matter of her work: everyday domestic scenes, portraits of friends and family members, and landscapes visited and revisited over the course of a lifetime.Avery's oil paintings, sketches and watercolors are known for their flat picture planes, interlocking shapes and simplicity of forms. The artist's mastery of colour brings life, immediacy of place and emotional depth to her compositions, as March Avery: A Life in Color illustrates, beautifully.The book also includes articles by writers/critics Johanna Fateman, Lynne Tillman and John Yau, whose texts explore and animate Avery's life and work.

"The Passionate Spectator" collects essays, reviews, and art criticism by John Yau, an internationally lauded poet, critic, and curator. In this wide-ranging collection, Yau explores the intersection of art and poetry, dissolving boundaries between the artistic traditions and reimagining what it means to see and to write. Whether he is interpreting the poetic use of titles in Jessica Stockholder's paintings, reviewing the collaborative book project between American poet Robert Creeley and German artist Georg Baselitz, or considering the significance of Frank O'Hara's decision to have his portrait drawn wearing nothing but army boots, Yau is consistently daring, original, and contemporary.
Yau's diverse critical sensibilities permeate "The Passionate Spectator" as he moves seamlessly between the visual and literary arts. Highlights of this collection include an essay on the poet as art critic, a study of the relationship between Kevin Young's poetry and the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and an imaginative piece in which Yau speculates about what Jorge Luis Borges would have created had he been a visual artist. In the title essay, Yau lays out the duty of the spectator--a duty shared by viewer, reader, critic, and artist: "it is up to us to experience art, to engage and believe in its power.,"

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.

Don Gummer's career as a sculptor began in New York City in the late 1970s with his wall reliefs of painted wood, carefully layered geometric works exhibiting a strong architectural influence. Moving beyond wood to stone, bronze, stainless steel, aluminium, and glass as his primary materials, his artworks have evolved into subtly inventive, often monumental, freestanding sculptures that demonstrate his unfailing attention to craftsmanship and detail. This new monograph is the first survey on the artist and his highly acclaimed body of work. Gummer has described his interest in sculpture as "the recontextualization of natural phenomena, of unaltered things brought into aesthetic balance by choosing and placing." Using balance, proportion, and his unique sense of harmony, the artist makes durable materials seem almost buoyant. Negative space is an intrinsic element in his work, imparting a sense that his exquisite, seemingly permanent forms are ultimately as fleeting as any of nature's creations would be. The artist's works can be found in many public collections including the Butler Institute of American Art; the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Chase Manhattan. He has received awards from prestigious organisations such as the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he was Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.

A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent charts a territory built of speculative histories, indeterminate landscapes, and mock narratives, all of them at the threshold linking exterior and interior worlds. Their logic is highly grammatical and slyly confounding, perfectly clear and drawn from dream. It is here, “between / what is occluded and what has elapsed,� that Mahrer’s ambiguous, disordered subjects begin their journeys.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.