Chiura Obata, a gifted Japanese-born artist from California, made his first trip to Yosemite in 1927. The trip left a lasting impression in a remarkable collection of sketches, postcards, and letters. This volume includes 80 full-color reproductions of Obata's pencil sketches, watercolor paintings, and day-by-day narratives woven through his correspondences. Named one of the "Best Fifty books of 1993? by the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the book is a unique and beautiful presentation of personal artistic experience.

The celebrated survey of female Abstract Expressionist artists revealing the richness and lasting influence of their work The artists Jay DeFeo, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and many other women played major roles in the development of Abstract Expressionism, which flourished in New York and San Francisco in the 1940s and 1950s and has been recognized as the first fully American modern art movement. Though the contributions of these women were central to American art of the twentieth century, their work has not received the same critical attention as that of their male counterparts. Women of Abstract Expressionism is a long-overdue survey. Lavishly illustrated with full-color plates emphasizing the expressive freedom of direct gesture and process at the core of the movement, this book features biographies of more than forty artists, offering insight into their lives and work. Essays by noted scholars explore the techniques, concerns, and legacies of women in Abstract Expressionism, shedding light on their unique experiences. This groundbreaking book reveals the richness of the careers of these important artists and offers keen new reflections on their work and the movement as a whole. Published in association with the Denver Art Museum Exhibition Schedule: Mint Museum, Charlotte, N.C. (10/22/16-01/22/17) Palm Springs Art Museum (02/18/17-05/28/17)

Roy De Forest's brightly hued, crazy-quilted paintings and sculptures are dotted with nipples of color and inhabited by a cast of characters uniquely his own, a perennial favorite being his instantly recognizable, wild-eyed and pointy-eared dogs. Published in conjunction with a retrospective exhibition of the American painter's fifty-year career, Of Dogs and Other People reassesses De Forest's art-historical position, placing him in a national rather than solely West Coast context. Despite the playfulness of his work, close study of De Forest's art reveals deep layers of meaning. He was a fan of adventure stories, pulp fiction, and underground commix, but he also commanded a vast knowledge of art history and read widely in a variety of disciplines, including poetry, literature, philosophy, psychology, science, and mathematics. He enjoyed secreting obscure art-historical references into his work: animals assume postures found in Medieval or Renaissance art, and his compositional strategies draw from sources ranging from the romantic landscape painters of the Hudson River School to the austere geometric abstractions of Piet Mondrian. This engaging publication presents gorgeous color reproductions of De Forest's finest artworks, plus a variety of figure illustrations that illuminate the artist's diverse sources and freewheeling social and creative milieu in Northern California. Published in association with the Oakland Museum of California. Exhibition dates: Oakland Museum of California: April 29-August 20, 2017

"Art of Engagement" takes the first comprehensive look at the key role of California's art and artists in politics and culture since 1945. Tracing the remarkably fertile confluence of political agitation and passionately engaged art, Peter Selz leads readers on a journey that begins with the Nazi death camps and moves through the Bay Area's Free Speech Movement of 1964, the birth of Beat and hippie counter-cultures, the Chicano labor movement in the San Joaquin Valley, the beginning of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, and some of the most radical manifestations of the women's movement, gay liberation, Red Power, and environmental activism. It also deals with artists' responses to critical issues such as censorship and capital punishment. Selz follows California's outpouring of political art into the present with responses to September 11 and the war in Iraq. In the process, Selz considers the work of artists such as Robert Arneson, Hans Burkhardt, Jerome (Caja), Enrique Chagoya, Judy Chicago, Llyn Foulkes, Rupert Garcia, Helen and Newton Harrison, Wally Hedrick, Suzanne Lacy, Hung Liu, Peter Saul, Miriam Schapiro, Allan Sekula, Mark di Suvero, Masami Teraoka, and Carrie Mae Weems. Abundantly illustrated and beautifully produced, "Art of Engagement" showcases many types of media, including photographs, found objects, drawings and prints, murals, painting, sculpture, ceramics, installations, performance art, and collage. Readers will come away from the book with a historical sense of the significant role California has played in generating political art and also how the state has stimulated politically engaged art throughout the world. Copublisher: San Jose Museum of Art.