Primetime Contemporary Art: Art by the Gala Committee as Seen on Melrose Place

An expansive anthology focused on concrete poetry written by women in the groundbreaking movement’s early history. It features 50 writers and artists from Europe, Japan, Latin America, and the United States selected by editors Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre.

Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 takes as its point of departure Materializzazione del linguaggio—the groundbreaking exhibition of visual and concrete poetry by women curated by Italian feminist artist Mirella Bentivoglio for the Venice Biennale in 1978. Through this exhibition and others she curated, Bentivoglio traced constellations of women artists working at the intersection of the verbal and visual who sought to “reactivate the atrophied tools of communication” and liberate words from the conventions of genre, gender, and the strictures of the patriarchy and normative syntax.

The works in this volume evolved from previous manifestations of concrete poetry as defined in foundational manifestos by Öyvind Fahlström, Eugen Gomringer, and the Brazilian Noigandres Group. While some works are easily recognized as concrete poetry, as documented in canonical anthologies edited by Mary Ellen Solt and Emmett Williams in the late ’60s, it also features expansive, serial works that are overtly feminist and often trouble legibility. Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 revisits the figures in Bentivoglio’s orbit and includes works by women practicing in other milieus in the United States, Eastern Europe, and South America who were similarly concerned with activating the visual and sonic properties of language and experimenting with poetry’s spatial syntax.

Artists and writers include Lenora de Barros, Ana Bella Geiger, and Mira Schendel from Brazil; Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga, Liliana Landi, Anna Oberto, and Giovanna Sandri from Italy; Amanda Berenguer from Uruguay; Suzanne Bernard and Ilse Garnier from France; Blanca Calparsoro from Spain; Paula Claire and Jennifer Pike from the UK; Betty Danon from Turkey; Mirtha Dermisache from Argentina; Bohumila Grögerová from the Czech Republic; Ana Hatherly and Salette Tavares from Portugal; Madeline Gins, Mary Ellen Solt, Susan Howe, Liliane Lijn, and Rosmarie Waldrop from the US; Irma Blank and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt from Germany; Chima Sunada from Japan; and Katalin Ladik and Bogdanka Poznanović from the former Yugoslavia.

Contextures was originally published in 1978 by New York City’s legendary Just Above Midtown gallery. Edited by gallery founder Linda Goode Bryant and Marcy S. Philips, the publication provides an extensive history of Black artists working in abstraction from 1945 to 1978, while also articulating a newly-emerging movement of Black Conceptual Art in the 1970s.

The publication contains extensive writing by Goode Bryant and Philips drawn from interviews with the featured artists, as well as 58 black-and-white and 16 color images documenting the work of 25 artists: Banerjee, Frank Bowling, Donna Byars, Ed Clark, Houston Conwill, John Dowell, Mel Edwards, Wendy Ward Ehlers, Fred Eversley, Susan Fitzsimmons, Sam Gilliam, Gini Hamilton, David Hammons, Manuel Hughes, Suzanne Jackson, Noah Jemison, James Little, Al Loving, Senga Nengudi, Howardena Pindell, Betye Saar, Raymond Saunders, Sharon Sutton, Randy Williams, and William T. Williams. A newly commissioned afterword by Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, curator of the exhibition Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces at the Museum of Modern Art, is also included.

Goode Bryant and Philips originally conceived Contextures to accompany The Afro-American Artists in the Abstract Continuum of American Art: 1945–1977. Functioning more like a textbook than a traditional catalog, the book nonetheless realizes a vital mission of their curatorial vision, placing Black artists within the still-prevalent, white-dominated canon of post-war abstract art. Despite its historical importance and visionary scholarship, Contextures was originally produced in a limited run of just a few hundred copies by the gallery and remains rare and largely unknown.

This new edition is produced in facsimile form and is a co-publication with Pacific.

An artist's book presenting a photographic study of onions.

On Onions is a photographic study of onions by artist Elad Lassry (born 1977). Characteristically highlighting the spectrum of hues and shapes for the vegetable, Lassry's selected taxonomy includes sections on red, yellow and white onions, each of which possesses its own distinct taste and benefits. On Onions is Lassry's first artist's book, and the work will exist only in book form; it is at once wry, refreshing and disorienting in its biology workbook style, which makes fruitful use of "the confusion that results when there is something just slightly wrong in a photograph" (as the artist has described his practice in general).

Composed by the artist and arranged by Stuart Bailey, the book includes an essay written by Angie Keefer about the effects of sliced onions on human tear ducts.

Pippa Garner’s Better Living Catalog, originally published in 1982, takes the form of a mail order catalog featuring clever and whimsical inventions that parody consumer goods while simultaneously critiquing America’s obsession with ingenuity, efficiency, leisure, and comfort. These works, which were made as prototypes and photographed for the publication, take the form of improbable accessories, clothing, footwear, home appliances, and office gadgets.

For example, the “Reactiononometer,” a portable wristband, instantly measures social success, while the “Digital Diet Loafers” display the wearer’s weight with every step. If the “Munch-o-Matic” reduces deskwork interruptions by flinging a snack right into the user’s mouth, other items promise financial solvency (the controlled cash flow “Autowallet”), sustainable waste management, or mess-free companionship (the “Pet-a-Vision” TV console). The artist asserts that all of the products in the book are “absolute necessities for contemporary survival.”

The Better Living Catalog was a pop hit when it was published, earning Garner spots on nighttime TV talk shows and attention from magazines like Vogue and Rolling Stone. In a meme-filled culture, the works still resonate today, finding their analog in widely-circulating consumer products, and—in the case of the “High Heel Skates”—even appearing unattributed in the runway collection of a major luxury fashion brand.

A few years after the Better Living Catalog was published, Garner began her gender transition, which she has characterized as an artistic project that draws conceptual parallels to the altered consumer goods she has continued to create since the 1970s. The artist’s practice has always been about hacking—gender hacking, she stated, was “an excellent premise for maverick conceptual art and diametrically opposed to anything I’d ever done.”

Many of the prototypes Garner created for the publication were repurposed or recycled, making this previously rare gem of an artist book one of the artist’s few works to now be widely available.

Born in 1942 in Evanston, Illinois, Pippa Garner (formerly known as Philip Garner) began her practice in the late sixties as a member of the highly regarded Transportation Design department at ArtCenter, California, with plans to become a car stylist, and was drafted to Vietnam to serve as a combat illustrator. In the mid-80s, Garner began her gender transition, which she considers a conceptual artwork, marking an extension of her practice from twenty years of altering cars, garments, and consumer products to using her own body as raw material. Garner appeared on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and other talk shows, showcasing her satirical consumer product inventions, and her artwork has been featured in Car & Driver, Rolling Stone, Arts & Architecture, and Vogue, among other publications. In the 1980s, her performance, design, and video work was exhibited in institutions including the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; since 2015, she has had exhibitions at STARS, O-Town House, Redling Fine Art, and Parker gallery in Los Angeles; Jeffrey Stark in New York; JOAN, Los Angeles; Kunstverein München; 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine, Metz; Kunsthalle Zurich; and Art Omi, Ghent, New York. She is the author of three other books: Utopia… or Bust! Products for the Perfect World (1984), Garner’s Gizmos & Gadgets (1987), and the zine Beauty 2000 (1992/2021).

Facsimile compilation of the late-'70s journal on diasporic and colonial histories that paved the way for the British Black Arts Movement.

Published in three issues between 1978 and 1979, Black Phoenix: Journal of Contemporary Art & Culture in the Third World (the subtitle was changed to Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture for its second and third issues) stands as a key document of its time. More than a decade after '60s liberation movements and the historic Bandung and Tricontinental Conferences that called for social and political alignment and solidarity to dismantle Western imperialism and (neo)colonialism, Black Phoenix issued a rallying call for the formation of a Third World, liberatory arts and culture movement on the eve of Margaret Thatcher's election in 1979.

Based in the UK, and both international and national in scope, Black Phoenix positioned diasporic and colonial histories at the center of an evolving anti-racist and anti-imperialist consciousness in late 1970s Britain—one that would yield complex and nuanced discourses on race, class and postcolonial theory in England in the decade that followed.

A precursor to the British Black Arts Movement that formed in 1982 (which encompassed such cultural practitioners as the Black Audio Film Collective and cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall), Black Phoenix proposed a horizon for Blackness beyond racial binaries, across the Third World and the colonized of the interior in the West.

This single-volume facsimile reprint gathers all three issues of the journal, which include contributions by art critics, scholars, artists, poets and writers, including editors Rasheed Araaen and Mahmood Jamal, Guy Brett, Kenneth Coutts-Smith, Ariel Dorfman, Eduardo Galeano, N. Kilele, Babatunde Lawal, David Medalla, Ayyub Malik, Susil Sirivardana and Chris Wanjala.

Le Chauffage (french for “The Heater”) is an artist-run publication based in Brussels. It is conceived as a cross-continental, community oriented platform. Bringing together the work and writing of artists / friends from different cities, Le Chauffage intends to spark discussions and fuel casual forms of critical discourse.

I am Welton Santos reenacts a dialogue between the Brazilian geo-bio-architect Welton Santos and an Interviewer. The book, which is always read collectively, is used in reading performances by groups of at least 3 people.

Printed on the occasion of an artist residency at PAV, Parco d’Arte Vivente, Turin, July 2016. Texts based on transcripts of interviews with Welton Santos.

When living things bloom & molder all in a heartskip, when they expand toward death, this is what worms hear.

Artist’s book of paintings by Mikołaj Moskal: gouache, archival paper elements, simple & meaningful captions. REMMUS is a graft of Podlasie earth-water-sky and Mikołaj’s pigments, heart, and intuition. Designed in close collaboration with graphic artist and designer Kaja Gliwa.

The paintings are bracketed by a poem each by Kuba Niklasiński (“Flows | Flaws”) and Stefan Lorenzutti (“What Worm Heard”), handwritten by Mikołaj in English and Polish.

Goswell Road presents Fous Moi La Paix a book of drawings by multidisciplinary artist Vava Dudu. Vava made 37 exclusive drawings for the publication, which launched at Paris Ass Book Fair 2024 at Palais de Tokyo. The drawings are offset with her texts, poems and several images of her iconic clothing and accessories.

"The multidisciplinary artist Vava Dudu refuses to follow convention: she draws and writes poetry, makes clothes and accessories, and builds furniture and guitars. She asserts her position as an outsider in contemporary art by stating that she “prefers extremes to the middle ground.” Her work as an independent stylist goes hand in hand with her activity as a singer in La Chatte, an electro-zouk punk new wave band founded in 2013 with Stéphane Argillet and Nicolas Jorio, aka “Nikolu.” Her underground artistic world, which joyously combines text and image, is expressed through various media.

Vava Dudu was born in 1970 in Paris, where she lives and works."

Text from Lafayette Anticipations website

For the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine a group of people/ performers memorize a book of their choice. Together they form a library collection consisting of living books. After years of learning by heart and reciting for readers, some of the books have now been written down from memory to create new editions, versions resulting from this process. This book is one of those books, chosen by one person, learned by heart and recited many times, and now written down again from memory. This edition is not a re-edition of the original text. It is a re-writing of the text after the process of reading, memorizing and reciting, with all the alterations that might have occured in the course of this process.