by Brandon Stanton (2015)
In the summer of 2010, photographer Brandon Stanton began an ambitious project: to photograph everyday inhabitants of New York City and collect their life stories. The result is a profoundly moving, funny, and deeply honest portrait of urban humanity.
John Berger
Based on the BBC television series, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language. Berger looks at how we look at paintings, challenging traditional Western conventions of perspective, ownership, and the female form in art.
Mark Richard Leach and Barbara J. Bloemink
This volume presents two decades of Michael Lucero's glazed ceramic, bronze, and mixed media sculptures, including such series as the Dreamers, Pre-Columbus, New World, and Reclamations. While at first glance his work appears to be a vigorous example of contemporary ceramic sculpture with a background in 1960s California art and a foreground in New York eclecticism, in fact his figurative forms borrow liberally and wittily from the history of art of various cultures, including pre-Columbian, Native American, European, Afro-Carolinian, and the vernacular and popular media. The imagery that slides in and out of the complex glazes of this master of the ceramic medium is art about art and about self. The consistent strength of the work comes from a fusion of ceramic tradition with sculptural innovation, and from a combination of extraordinarily fine technique, keen wide-ranging intelligence, and the resonance brought to bear by past associations, cultures, and use.
Doris von Drathen
"A few years ago, The New York Times's Ken Johnson wrote of a series of Pat Steir paintings that "Beauty and Intellect join forces" in them, and that "what saves them from being just pretty pictures is the way they weave together several strands of meaning into a more complex conceptual fabric." Over the decades Steir has been carrying on just the sort of A-list painting career that pulls in accolades like that, putting up installations of her paintings in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. This monograph contains complete biographical and bibliographical information, an essay and an extensive interview between Doris von Drathen and Steir."--BOOK JACKET.
Paul Hofmann
No other people over so long a history have shown a greater knack for survival than the Italians. In this wryly affectionate book, Hofmann reveals his adopted countrymen in all their glorious paradoxes, capturing their national essence as no other book has done since Luigi Barzini's More ... classic, The Italians. The national art of arrangement-- dodging taxes, double-dealing, working only as hard as one must-- is counteracted by Italian inventive genius, gusto for life, fierce individuality, deep family bonds (as well as animosities), and a marvelously hedonistic sophistication.