Bookshelf News
Craftlab
Posted on Wednesday, February 8, 2012, by Lindsey Westbrook
Craftlab
Issuu, 2012
Digital, 20 pages, free
This catalogue documents the work done in Sasha Duerr's (Textiles and Fine Arts faculty and MFA 2003) fall 2011 Craft Lab course, a cross-pollination of textile, fashion, and environmental systems thinking, inspired by ecological principles found in permaculture and regenerative design applied to restoration, repair, and its inherent connection to "craft."
Read the rest >>>Christopher Russell: Sniper
Posted on Tuesday, February 7, 2012, by Lindsey Westbrook
Sniper
Bedwetter Books, 2011
Hardcover, 208 pages, $40
Sniper takes a loose and imaginary look at the Baltimore Snipers, examining the relationships of paired serial killers as an ultimate expression of repressed desire. Christopher Russell (Photography 1998) writes a perverse version of the classic American love story told through the narrative chaos of nameless characters, past-life flashbacks, false recollection, and parental and bureaucratic influences that define the psychological space of the outsider. The text’s 200 full-color pages are heavily illustrated, reproducing Russell’s drawings scratched into photographic emulsion. The release of Sniper revives the Bedwetter brand, which achieved notoriety during its 12-issue existence with a destroy-to-enjoy design strategy and an embrace of difficult literary and visual material.
Read the rest >>>Gregory Halpern: A
Posted on Tuesday, February 7, 2012, by Lindsey Westbrook
Gregory Halpern: A
J&L Books, 2011
Hardcover, 96 pages, $40
In A, American photographer Gregory Halpern (MFA 2004) leads us on a ramble through the beautiful and ruined streets of the American Rust Belt. The cast of characters, both human and animal, are portrayed with compassion and respect by this native son of Buffalo (now a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology). The cities he is drawn to -- Baltimore, Cincinnati, Omaha, Detroit -- share similar histories with his hometown, and in this postapocalyptic springtime all forms of life emerge and run riot. Halpern's two previous books, Harvard Works Because We Do (a portrait of Harvard University through the eyes of the school's service employees) and Omaha Sketchbook (a lyrical artist's book portrait of the titular city), were also investigations of locations and persons that fly under the radar.
Read the rest >>>Chicks with Guns
Posted on Tuesday, February 7, 2012, by Lindsey Westbrook
Chicks with Guns
Vendome Press, 2011
Hardcover, 168 pages, $45
Graphic Design faculty member Bob Aufuldish is the designer for this book of photographs by Lindsay McCrum showing women gun owners in America. The book examines issues of self-image and gender through the visual conventions of portraiture and fashion. The guns are presented not as superimposed props but as very personal lifestyle accessories of the subjects portrayed. The women (whose portraits are accompanied by their own words) reside in all regions of the country, come from all levels of society, and participate seriously in diverse shooting activities. They are sportswomen, hunters, and competition shooters. Some use guns on their jobs. They may not all be classically beautiful, but in these photographs they all look beautiful, exuding honesty, confidence, poise, power and pride.
Read the rest >>>CCA Wattis Institute: More American Photographs
Posted on Tuesday, February 7, 2012, by Lindsey Westbrook
More American Photographs
CCA Wattis Institute, 2012
Paperback, 106 pages, $28
As the United States slowly emerges from its most significant economic downturn since the Great Depression, the [CCA Wattis Institute] reexamines the well-known photography program of the Farm Security Administration (1935-44). In More American Photographs, 12 contemporary photographers were commissioned to travel the United States, documenting its land and people. These new works are presented alongside historical images by original FSA photographers such as Dorothea Lange in a catalogue whose design was inspired by Walker Evans's seminal book American Photographs. The featured photographers include Walead Beshty, Esther Bubley, Larry Clark, Roe Ethridge, Walker Evans, Katy Grannan, William E. Jones, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Sharon Lockhart, Catherine Opie, Gordon Parks, Martha Rosler, Collier Schorr, Ben Shahn, Stephen Shore, Alec Soth, Hank Willis Thomas (MFA and MA Visual Criticism 2004), and Marion Post Wolcott. The exhibition was curated by Wattis director Jens Hoffmann, who contributes an essay, and the book is designed by Graphic Design faculty Jon Sueda.
Read the rest >>>CCA Wattis Institute: Painting Between the Lines
Posted on Tuesday, February 7, 2012, by Lindsey Westbrook
CCA Wattis Institute: Painting Between the Lines
CCA Wattis Institute, 2012
Hardcover, 72 pages, $25
Writing and painting have been intertwined throughout history, but literature has of late become a diminished subject in the medium of painting, which has looked more to history, society and politics for inspiration. With Painting Between the Lines, the CCA Wattis Institute sought to reinvigorate the relationship between these two fields by commissioning 14 contemporary artists to create works based on descriptions of paintings in historical and contemporary novels. Here, art that until now has only existed in the mind's eye can now be seen, as interpreted by the likes of Fred Tomaselli (on Samuel Beckett's Watt) and Marcel Dzama (on Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore). Additional materials include images of first-edition book covers and installation images from the accompanying exhibition. The exhibition was curated by Wattis director Jens Hoffmann and the book is designed by Graphic Design faculty Jon Sueda.
Read the rest >>>Jacqueline Francis: Making Race: Modernism and "Racial Art" in America
Posted on Tuesday, February 7, 2012, by Lindsey Westbrook
Making Race: Modernism and "Racial Art" in America
University of Washington Press, 2011
Paperback, 256 pages, $40
Jacqueline Francis (Visual and Critical Studies and Painting/Drawing faculty) explores the flowering of racial art rhetoric in criticism and history published in the 1920s and 1930s, and analyzes its underlying presence in contemporary discussions of artists of color. She specifically looks at the cases of Malvin Gray Johnson, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Max Weber, three New York artists whose work was popularly assigned to the category of "racial art" in the interwar years of the 20th century. The term was widely used by critics and the public at the time, and was an unexamined, unquestioned category for the work of non-whites (such as Johnson, an African American), non-Westerners (such as Kuniyoshi, a Japanese-born American), and ethnicized non-Christians (such as Weber, a Russian-born Jewish American). The discourse on racial art is a troubling chapter in the history of early American modernism that has not, until now, been sufficiently documented. Francis juxtaposes the work of these three artists in order to consider their understanding of the category and their stylistic responses to the expectations created by it, in the process revealing much about the nature of modernist art practices.
Read the rest >>>Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards
Posted on Monday, February 6, 2012, by Lindsey Westbrook
Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2011
Hardcover, 168 pages, $29.95
Tanya Zimbardo (MA Curatorial Practice 2005), SFMOMA's assistant curator of media arts, coauthored this book chronicling and illustrating more than 100 SECA Award recipients from the late 1960s to the present, including CCA alumni Squeak Carnwath, Desirée Holman, Mitzi Pederson, Laurie Reid, Leslie Shows, and Kathryn VanDyke, among others. Featured faculty include Rebeca Bollinger, Kota Ezawa, Thom Faulders, Chris Finley, Donald Fortescue, Amy Franceschini, Clay Jensen, Jordan Kantor, Shaun O'Dell, Maria Porges, and Mary Snowden.
Read the rest >>>2010 SECA Art Award Exhibition Catalogue
Posted on Monday, February 6, 2012, by Lindsey Westbrook
2010 SECA Art Award Exhibition Catalogue
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2011
Paperback, 36 pages, $9.95
The most recent SECA Art Award exhibition showcases four Bay Area artists whose innovative works, while diverse in form and subject matter, reflect overlapping affinities. Representing CCA is Ruth Laskey (Painting/Drawing 1999, MFA 2005), who employs weaving, using a traditional floor loom, to expand on the painterly tradition of geometric abstraction. The other three featured artists are Colter Jacobsen, whose meticulous drawings, watercolors, and installations often incorporate found ephemera to explore reflection and longing; Mauricio Ancalmo, who combines various found mechanical instruments in a film-based installation to form a structural dialogue that is both poetically and philosophically inspired; and Kamau Amu Patton, who synthesizes works in a range of media to investigate the inter-zone of sound, materiality, and perceptual experience.
Read the rest >>>Matt Shears: 10,000 Wallpapers
Posted on Monday, February 6, 2012, by Lindsey Westbrook
10,000 Wallpapers
Brooklyn Arts Press, 2011
Paperback, 40 pages, $8
This is a new chapbook of poems by Matt Shears, a faculty member in Writing and Literature, Writing, and Critical Studies. Cathy Park Hong, author of Dance Dance Revolution, says, "This long lyric is full of brute terror and bucolic beauty, exploring individual consciousness unmoored by our present 'thundering interconnectivity'; 10,000 Wallpapers chronicles 'the everyman meandering through this digitized countryside,' questioning how we can truly inhabit the world when reality has become denatured by the image. The speaker in this poem sings like Prufrock, in a lyric that is searing and true, as he searches for the possibilities of pure utterance and perception amidst what is manufactured."
Read the rest >>>