Interaction of Colour

Sample

(essay by Craig Owens

Since the late 1970s, Allan McCollum (b. 1944, Los Angeles, lives in New York) has addressed the production, distribution, acquisition, display, and reading of the artwork. His constant use of strategies of multiplication, his examination of the museum as a discursive agent, and his recurrent interest in notions of display, as well as his attempt to find a generic form for any purpose, were entirely reconfigured by this displacement of context. Working with regional museums, heterogeneous audiences, and references ranging from palaeontology to mineralogy, McCollum has built a very strong and intriguing body of works that has remained, in large part, unknown to (or at least unseen by) the art world.

Sample

Barry Dawson

"In the city that never sleeps, New York's soul is on display around the clock. New York is the world capital of street graphics - a creative kaleidoscope of urban ephemera in the form of signs, graffiti, murals and advertising. Its innovative ideas, styles and mediums quickly become international trends. Street Graphics New York captures the rich visual patina of the city's cultural diversity - jazz age elegance, brash Sixties Pop Art, hip-hop graffiti, anarchic stencil and sticker art. New York's landmarks are appropriated for chic fashion advertising and iconic tourist souvenirs, and here is the city's 9/11 experience too, up on the walls in emotionally charged imagery." "Barry Dawson's visual themes excite, inform and surprise. New York's streets are acutely observed and presented in a designer's sourcebook and an urban explorer's inspirational guidebook."--Jacket.

Sample

Suzanne Joinson

Years after photographer William Harrington participates in a 1920s project to redesign Jerusalem with British parks against a backdrop of growing nationalist unrest, his revelations about long-buried secrets transform the life of his former employer's daughter--

Sample

R. Tripp Evans

He claimed to be “the plainest kind of fellow you can find. There isn’t a single thing I’ve done, or experienced,” said Grant Wood, “that’s been even the least bit exciting.” Wood was one of America’s most famous regionalist painters; to love his work was the equivalent of loving America itself. In his time, he was an “almost mythical figure,” recognized most supremely for his hard-boiled farm scene, American Gothic, a painting that has come to reflect the essence of America’s traditional values—a simple, decent, homespun tribute to our lost agrarian age. In this major new biography of America’s most acclaimed, and misunderstood, regionalist painter, Grant Wood is revealed to have been anything but plain, or simple . . . R. Tripp Evans reveals the true complexity of the man and the image Wood so carefully constructed of himself. Grant Wood called himself a farmer-painter but farming held little interest for him. He appeared to be a self-taught painter with his scenes of farmlands, farm workers, and folklore but he was classically trained, a sophisticated artist who had studied the Old Masters and Flemish art as well as impressionism. He lived a bohemian life and painted in Paris and Munich in the 1920s, fleeing what H. L. Mencken referred to as “the booboisie” of small-town America.