Albert Contreras began his painting career in Los Angeles. He earned public acclaim for his minimalist paintings, and his work as an artist moved him to Mexico City and then onto Madrid, Stockholm, and New York. During his travels and work, he explored the edges of minimalist and reductivist styles, experimenting with the dematerialization of the object.
In the late 1960s, Contreras decided to stop painting entirely, returning to California to work for the City of Los Angeles. Upon retirement, he went to therapy for five years and started to paint again. Unlike his early art work, which often featured monochromes painted onto flat, stretched canvases, Contreras’s later paintings dazzle with Technicolor palettes and viscous textures.
Marquand Books recently published Albert Contreras, the first substantial monograph of the artist’s work. The 112-page book features essays by Dave Hickey, David Pagel, Ed Schad, and John Yau that chronicle Contreras’s career and reflect on the nature and significance of his work. The monograph, designed by Jeff Wincapaw, also includes seventy-seven full-color illustrations of Contreras’s recent and older paintings.
Albert Contreras can be purchased through the D.A.P. bookstore.
photography by Jeremy Linden
Some day when I am gone, my children / Will leaf through these pages I have writ / And find a thought that chimes with theirs / And so feel comforted and less alone.
Dorothy Darling Kerper, “Against Loneliness—A Bequest”
Dorothy Kerper Monnelly advocates for the preservation of nature through her work as a photographer and conservationist. In 2006, Monnelly published Between Land and Sea: The Great Marsh—a book of black-and-white landscapes that garnered critical praise in both the fine art and conservation communities.
In her most recent publication, For My Daughters, Monnelly pairs her photography with poetry written by her mother, Dorothy Darling Kerper. Exploring themes of happiness, connection, loss, and wonder, the book is a dialog between mother and daughter, word and image, time and place. Monnelly’s photographs communicate the enduring beauty of the natural world—its lakes and trees, driftwood and petals—as well as the abiding presence of those we have loved.
Marquand Books produced For My Daughters, designed by John Hubbard. The seventy-two-page book features more than thirty tritone illustrations and includes several poems by Kerper.
Monnelly’s work will be featured in the traveling exhibition Fragile Waters, alongside photographs by Ansel Adams and Ernest H. Brooks II. To learn more about the artist and her photography, visit her website. To purchase a copy of For My Daughters, visit Hudson Hills Press.
Photography by Jeremy Linden
Pasión Popular: Spanish and Latin American Folk Art from the Cecere Collection opened earlier this month at the San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA). Over the last ten years, SAMA received more than three hundred works of Spanish and Latin American folk art by collector and folk art specialist Peter P. Cecere. The show features nearly two hundred works from the collection that range from paintings and wood sculptures to tin masks and cast-iron signs.
Bright and distinctive, Cecere’s collection reflects his eye for objects integral to the societies and cultures that created them. His career as a cultural affairs officer introduced him to many expressions of folk art and allowed him to pursue with passion his love for collecting and research.
Marquand Books, together with Paper Hammer Studio, produced a limited run of catalogues for the exhibition. Designed to be as distinctive as the works it represents, the catalogue is composed of a hand-bound folding case that holds two components. The first is a hand-sewn booklet that features a foreword by Katherine Crawford Luber and essays by Marion Ottengier, Jr. and Martha Egan, as well as an exhibition checklist. The second is a collection of thirty color plates, printed on heavy stock paper, that present selected works from the exhibition. Together, the 80-page catalogue includes more than 170 full-color illustrations.
For more information about the exhibition and catalogue, visit SAMA.
photography by Jeremy Linden
Marquand Books is pleased to announce that Melissa Duffes is our new managing editor. After three years at the helm, Brynn Warriner is stepping down from the position.
Melissa has more than a decade of experience editing, writing, and preparing museum publications. She comes to us from the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, where she was Publications and Media Coordinator. Melissa has edited many museum publications as a freelance editor over the past 12 years. Her first museum publications position was as Assistant Editor at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
Melissa has an MA, Art History from SUNY Buffalo and an M.Phil., History of Decorative Arts from the University of Glasgow. She has worked as a historian at The Montpelier Foundation in Orange, Virginia; a curator and historian for Historic Green Spring in Alexandria, Virginia; and a curator at Tudor Place Historic House and Gardens, Washington, DC.
During her time at Marquand Books, Brynn led the editorial department with her commitment to produce excellent work. She brought her eye for detail, sense of humor, and impeccable organization skills to every project. Brynn will continue to edit, typeset, and proofread many of our publications on a freelance basis from the great city of New Orleans, Louisiana. She remains an essential part of Marquand Books.
photography by Jeremy Linden
Tonight marks the opening reception for Barbara Earl Thomas’s show Story Line at the Paper Hammer Gallery. Thomas is a local visual artist, award-winning writer, and the Deputy Director of the Northwest African American Museum. Story Line presents fourteen of Thomas’s prints made between 2006 and 2013.
Thomas first started making prints in 2006. The medium allowed her to engage both her visual and storytelling abilities. Her prints focus on the “mess of living,”* and her subjects include fisherman, readers, fish, trumpets, trees, and the activities of everyday life. She uses distinct lines, colors, and characters to create vivid—and rapturously messy—images. Like words on a page, these forms culminate into fluid and complex pictures and stories.
Marquand Books produced the exhibition booklet for Story Line, which features essays by Thomas and Sandra Jackson-Dumont along with full-color illustrations of the fourteen prints. The booklets will be available for purchase at the opening reception.
To learn more about Barbara Earl Thomas and her work, visit her website.
Story Line opening reception:
Paper Hammer Gallery
1400 2nd Ave
Seattle, WA 98101
5–7 p.m.
*Barbara Earl Thomas, Story Line. (Paper Hammer, 2013), 5.
Photography by Jeremy Linden
More than one thousand years ago, Northwest Coast two-dimensional art was developed along the shorelines of the northeast Pacific Ocean, between the central coast of British Columbia and the coast of Southeastern Alaska. When the United States and Canadian governments expanded west, this aesthetic tradition was methodically suppressed, along with Native languages and social and political customs. By the early twentieth century, mastery of Northwest Coast arts and languages had nearly extinguished, save for the voices and skills of a few elders in the local Native communities.
At midcentury, young Native men and women began the work of reclaiming their Native identity and heritage, learning once-forbidden languages and traditional arts. The careful examination of old works informed these new artists about how to use structure, line, and form in their art.
The power of Northwest Coast art caught the attention of nonnative artists as well. Duane Pasco, a Seattle artist, studied the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of the aesthetic tradition in order to master its form. Pasco’s work ranges from totem poles, longhouses, and canoes, to sculptures, masks, and bowls. Throughout his fifty-year career, Pasco has created a prolific body of work and has taught, mentored, and partnered with Native and nonnative artists and communities to create and promote Northwest Coast art.
Marquand Books recently produced the catalogue Duane Pasco: Life as Art, designed by Zach Hooker. The two-hundred-page catalogue features more than one hundred full-color illustrations. Essays coauthored by Pasco and Barbara Winther recount the events that led to Pasco’s discovery and embrace of Northwest Coast art.
To learn more about Pasco and his work, visit his website. To purchase a copy of Duane Pasco: Life as Art, visit the University of Washington Press.
photography by Jeremy Linden
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco recently opened the exhibition Artful Animals at the Legion of Honor Museum. The show features selected works from the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts—the largest collection of works on paper in the United States. Through works like Elaine de Kooning’s Ley Eyzies to Kobayashi Kiyochika’s Fox and Crescent Moon, the exhibition examines our enduring connection and fascination with the animal kingdom.
Marquand Books produced the catalogue for Artful Animals. Designed by Zach Hooker with assistance from Ryan Polich, the eighty-page book features more than seventy full-color illustrations. An essay by Colleen Terry explores the history of animals in art and how the advent of the printing press in the fifteenth century expanded our knowledge of the animal world.
To learn more about the Artful Animals exhibition, visit the Legion of Honor Museum.
photography by Jeremy Linden
Martha Casanave took her first portraits when she was eight years old, using a Kodak Brownie camera. Her insatiable curiosity about how others lived in their homes and with their possessions inspired her to become a photographer and specialize in environmental portraiture. She quickly realized that non-commissioned portraits held her interest. The ability to photograph the people and spaces she found compelling gave Casanave an artistic freedom and satisfaction she found wanting in her commissioned photography.
Her recent publication, Trajectories: A Half Century of Portraits, gathers portraits taken over the last fifty years. Several of the portraits feature the same subject photographed over several years. The portraits reveal each sitter’s unique trajectory and explore how circumstances and choices affected each life. Her sitters include childhood friends, neighbors, family members, immigrants, intellectuals, artists, and eccentrics.
Trajectories was produced by Marquand Books and designed by Jeff Wincapaw. The 184-page book features more than 100 full-color illustrations along with essays by Martha Casanave and Arno Rafael Minkkinen.
To purchase a copy of Trajectories: A Half Century of Portraits, visit Consortium Book Sales & Distribution. To learn more about Casanave and her work, visit her website.
photography by Jeremy Linden
The design wall at Marquand Books stretches down the hallway, a parade of color and text on sheets of paper. The wall, a strip of white sheet metal, is an indispensable canvas for our designers. It’s a place where they can move ideas from a computer screen to a three-dimensional space and where the relation between a book’s object quality and design can be tested.
In our open floor plan, the design wall has increased visibility—making it a catalyst for dialogue between our design, editorial, and production teams. Its accessibility allows everyone to stay tuned to new projects and design directions. The design wall shows the creative work involved in book production, and it underscores the essential role each department plays in the process.
“The thing I like best about the design wall is that it encourages the designers to print pages and spreads in full size so that we can see the design subtleties in a real-world scale. This makes it feel like a real physical object, rather than a digital concept of a real object. And it allows everyone to see how their contributions are affecting the designer’s work.”—Ed Marquand, Creative Director
“I end up seeing designs much sooner than I would otherwise, so I feel connected to the material earlier on in the process. I believe that it fosters a collaborative environment.”—Brynn Warriner, Managing Editor
“I like being able to see the designs because it’s easier to visualize possible cover treatments that might enhance them. And I love seeing the overall spread of the new books.” —Leah Finger, Production Manager
“I like the fact that it invites conversation about the designs and encourages feedback.”—Jeremy Linden, Production Artist
“The design wall opens up one aspect of our work to everyone else, encouraging discussion and fostering a better understanding of what designers do.”—Adrian Lucia, Managing Director
“I really enjoy the critique environment that the design wall creates. Talking about the designs only makes them better, and I think it’s great that everyone has a chance to provide input.”—Ryan Polich, Design and Production Assistant
“It can definitely open up dialogue within the office, and all can see how the early concepts are developing. And when clients come to visit, it allows them to see what we’re up to. Everyone knows to look for new designs when they hear the loud clicking of magnets on sheet metal.”—Jeff Wincapaw, Design Director
photography by Jeremy Linden
In 2012, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the High Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Musée du Louvre announced a four-year collaboration to explore American and European art through programming and annual exhibitions that draw from the collections of each institution.
The first installation from this collaboration debuted at the Louvre in January 2012. This exhibition explored the birth of American landscape paintings, particularly works by Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand.
In January 2013, the Louvre opened the second exhibition, American Art Enters the Louvre: The Origins of American Genre Painting, on view through April 22. This exhibition looks at the ways in which genre paintings from the early nineteenth century helped the young United States articulate its identity and culture. The American genre paintings on display include Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait’s The Life of the Hunter: A Tight Fix, Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South, and George Caleb Bingham’s The Jolly Flatboatmen. These works will be shown along with two paintings that significantly influenced the American style: Dutch painter Jan Steen’s Festive Family Meal and English painter William Mulready’s Train Up a Child.
Accompanying this exhibition is the English catalogue American Encounters: Genre Painting and Everyday Life, and the French catalogue New Frontier: Les travaux et les jours: aux sources de la peinture américaine de genre. Both editions feature an essay by Peter John Brownlee and more than twenty-five full-color illustrations. The catalogues were produced by Marquand Books and designed by Zach Hooker.
For more information about the exhibition and its travel itinerary, visit the Terra Foundation for American Art. To purchase a copy of the catalogue American Encounters: Genre Painting and Everyday Life, visit the University of Washington Press.
Photography by Jeremy Linden
In 1935, a group of volunteers founded what is now the Tacoma Art Museum (TAM). Collecting artwork by Pacific Northwest artists was an early goal. When TAM started to build its permanent collection in 1963, works by Northwest artists Jacob Elshin, Paul Horiuchi, Beulah Hyde, and Hilda Morris were some of the first purchases. Today, TAM’s collection of Northwest art includes more than 3,500 works that range in origin from the late nineteenth century to the present.
TAM celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary in 2010 and kicked off an initiative to present the Northwest art collection through an online collection database and an exhibition series. The initiative also included the publication of its most recent publication, Best of the Northwest: Selected Works from the Tacoma Art Museum. The catalogue highlights key works in the collection and explores early influences on Pacific Northwest art—including Native American, Asian, and European aesthetics.
Marquand Books produced the 240-page catalogue, designed by John Hubbard. More than 200 full-color illustrations of selected works are included in the catalogue, which was compiled by curators Margaret E. Bullock and Rock Hushka. Featured artists include Imogen Cunningham, Gaylen Hansen, Jeffry Mitchell, Kenjiro Nomura, and Mary Randlett, among others.
To see some of the works presented in the catalogue, visit TAM’s current exhibition Best of the Northwest: Selected Paintings from the Collection, open now through Sunday, March 17. For information on ordering a copy of Best of the Northwest: Selected Works from the Tacoma Art Museum, contact TAM’s museum store.
photography by Jeremy Linden
On November 11, 2011, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, founded by Alice Walton, opened to the public. The museum focuses on American art and is home to works from the Colonial period to the present day. Through its continued collection of historic and contemporary works—such as War News from Mexico by Richard Canton Woodville and Rosie the Riveter by Norman Rockwell—Crystal Bridges seeks to chronicle the United States’ dynamic cultural landscape.
Marquand Books produced the catalogue Celebrating the American Spirit: Masterworks from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, now in its third printing. The 356-page book features detailed entries and full-color illustrations for more than 150 of the museum’s most significant pieces. Contributors include such scholars and curators as William C. Agee, Stephanie Meyer Heydt, Linda Merrill, and John Wilmerding. Designed by Zach Hooker and edited by Christopher B. Crosman and Emily D. Shapiro, Celebrating the American Spirit is a beautiful, in-depth introduction to the collection and vision of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
Visit Crystal Bridges to learn more about the museum and its current exhibitions. To purchase a copy of Celebrating the American Spirit, visit the museum store or Amazon.com.
photography by Jeremy Linden
Tonight marks the opening of Ellsworth Kelly Prints at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA). The exhibition, which debuted last year in Portland, OR, and then traveled to Los Angeles, features artworks that span Kelly’s career. MMoCA’s exhibit will include five additional pieces that belong to The River series.
The museum’s curator Rick Axsom organized the show. Axsom authored The Prints of Ellsworth Kelly. This two-volume catalogue raisonné was produced by Marquand Books and published by the Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation in 2012. Accompanying the raisonné is the book Letters to Ellsworth. Both publications are available for purchase through Amazon.com.
To learn more about the Ellsworth Kelly Prints exhibition and events, visit MMoCA.
photography by Jeremy Linden
The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) has recently expanded its collection of art from South Asia. Since the museum acquired the Tibetan Majushri sculpture in 1955, the collection and promotion of Asian art has become integral to the DMA’s work. The collection has grown to nearly five hundred works that range from Himalayan Buddhist sculptures to decorative objects from India’s Mughal period.
To celebrate the collection, the DMA published The Arts of India, Southeast Asia, and the Himalayas at the Dallas Museum of Art. The catalogue presents more than 140 works from the collection and details the cultural and artistic importance of each. Marquand Books produced the 264-page catalogue, designed by Jeff Wincapaw with Ryan Polich. The book features more than 200 full-color illustrations; intricate maps; and essays by Anne R. Bromberg, Catherine B. Asher, Frederick M. Asher, Robert Warren Clark, and Nancy Tingley.
To learn more about the Asian art collection, visit the DMA. To purchase a copy of the catalogue, visit Yale University Press.
photography by Jeremy Linden
Lipsticks, eye shadows, mirrors, soaps—these are a few of the materials used by Los Angeles–based conceptual artist and sculptor Rachel Lachowicz. Known as the “lipstick feminist” of the art world, Lachowicz counters male-dominated spheres of modern and historical art with acid wit and keen technical skill. Through her work, she explores the connections between identity and the politics of mark-making.
Her famous (and infamous) performance art piece Red Not Blue—a charged, thought-provoking reinterpretation of Yves Klein’s Anthropométries performance—and her sculptural works such as Red David and Mondrian Blue demonstrate her artistic vision and push established boundaries. Her artwork evokes multiple interpretations and falls under many categories, including feminist, appropriationist, conceptual, and postminimalist. Visually bold and provocative, Lachowicz’s work unsettles and recasts the ideas and contexts that surround modern and canonical art.
The Shoshana Wayne Gallery, together with Marquand Books, recently published Rachel Lachowicz, a mid-career survey and comprehensive monograph. With more than 100 full-color illustrations and essays by George Melrod, Amelia Jones, and Jillian Hernandez, this 128-page book examines Lachowicz’s twenty years of art making.
To purchase a copy of Rachel Lachowicz, visit DAP. Visit Lachowicz’s website to learn more about the artist and her work.
photography by Jeremy Linden
Happy Holidays to you and yours from Marquand Books! Over the course of the year, we had the privilege to create catalogues and publications that covered a range of topics—from Greek sculpture and modern painting to photography and performance art.
We’re honored to work with such talented artists, galleries, curators, and collectors. To celebrate, we’ve put together a slideshow that features publications from 2012. Congratulations and best wishes for a merry and bright new year!
A Mine of Beauty:
Landscapes by William Trost Richards
Unrivaled Splendor:
The Kimiko and John Powers Collection of Japanese Art
Color and Form:
The Geometric Sculptures of Morton C. Bradley Jr.
The Seduction of Color:
Photographs from the Collection of Robert E. Jackson
Knitted, Knotted, Twisted, and Twined:
The Jewelry of Mary Lee Hu
Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist
Rising Up:
Hale Woodruff’s Murals at Taladega College
Ferreira Gullar in Conversation with/
en Conversación con Ariel Jiménez
The Prints of Ellsworth Kelly
A Catalogue Raisonné
Ink on Paper:
The Mary Cooley Print Collection
at Cornish College of the Arts
Maine Sublime:
Frederic Edwin Church’s Landscapes of
Mount Desert and Mount Katahdin
Behold, America!
Art of the United States from the Three San Diego Museums
Collecting Art is a Slippery Slope
Human Canvas
The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece
Gail Grinnell
Out of Character:
Decoding Chinese Calligraphy
Bearing Witness from Another Place:
James Baldwin in Turkey
Motion, Emotion, and Love:
The Nature of Artistic Performance
Microsoft Art Collection:
25 Years of Celebrating Creativity and Inspiring Innovation
Ancient Near Eastern Art
at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Lesley Vance & Ricky Swallow
at The Huntington
The Art of Golf
Bill Traylor
Drawings from the Collections of the
High Museum of Art and the
Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts
Letters to Ellsworth
Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe
Andy Warhol: Fame and Misfortune
A Glorious Enterprise:
The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia
and the Making of American Science
Toxic Beauty:
The Art of Frank Moore
Ancestral Modern:
Australian Aboriginal Art
Tellings: Johanna Nitzke Marquis
Estampas de la Raza:
Contemporary Prints from the Romo Collection
The San Antonio Museum of Art
Guide to the Collection
Gyula Kosicein Conversation with/
en Conversación con Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro
Benjamin Patterson:
Born in the State of FLUX/us
Charles Reiffel:
An American Post-Impressionist
Like a Valentine:
The Art of Jeffry Mitchell
Rachel Lachowicz
Making a Presence: F. Holland Day in Artistic Photography
Lois Dodd: Catching the Light
Becoming Van Gogh
Access to Excellence:
The Ten-Year Impact of the Charles & Lisa Simonyi Fund
for Arts and Sciences
The Female Gaze:
Women Artists Making Their World
Daily Pleasures:
French Ceramics from the MaryLou Boone Collection
Barbara Rogers:
The Imperative of Beauty
In the Eye of the Muses:
Selections from the Clark Atlanta University Art Collection
Brooklyn Botanic Garden
The Artist’s Hand:
American Works on Paper 1945–1975
Dallas Museum of Art
A Guide to the Collection
Museo de Arte de Ponce:
The British Collection
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is home to several permanent collections, each representing distinct eras, cultures, and geographies. Their collection of ancient Near Eastern art spans more than four thousand years and includes more than two thousand objects. LACMA’s artifacts come from the eastern Mediterranean to Afghanistan, with a focus on Iran.
Until the eighteenth century, the art of the ancient Near East was almost unknown. No organized exploration of the region occurred until the nineteenth century, when, in 1801, Napoleon sent soldiers, civilian scientists, and scholars to excavate in Egypt. Scientists and archaeologists followed soon thereafter to explore the surrounding areas, including southern Mesopotamia and southwestern Iran. Through these ventures, the Sumerian and Elamite civilizations were discovered, and several artifacts were brought back to museums. LACMA’s collection presents a broad spectrum of ancient Near East art; it is a mosaic of objects that reveals the values, aesthetics, ideals, and realities of cultures past.
LACMA recently published the catalogue Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Produced by Marquand Books and designed by Tina Kim, this seventy-two-page catalogue features more than sixty full-color illustrations. Essays by Ali Mousavi focus on key pieces in the collection and their connection to important historical developments, such as the invention of writing.
To learn more about the collection of Ancient Near Eastern art or to view the collection online, visit LACMA. To purchase a copy of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, visit LACMA’s bookstore.
photography by Jeremy Linden
In the 1980s, frustrated by the lack of representation of women in galleries and museums, Philadelphia-based collector Linda Lee Alter focused her collection on female artists. Her collection, which includes nearly 500 objects, was presented as a gift to the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in December 2010.
Last week, PAFA debuted Alter’s collection in the exhibition The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World. The exhibition features more than 200 works that present a diversity of artists, themes, and mediums. Alter’s collection focuses on contemporary living artists but includes works by such influential female artists as Elizabeth Catlett, Alice Neel, and Louise Bourgeois. When the premiere exhibition ends on April 7, 2013, the collection will tour throughout the United States.
Accompanying the exhibition is a 336-page catalogue, produced by Marquand Books and designed by Susan Kelly. The catalogue includes more than 100 full-color illustrations, essays by leading scholars of feminism and modern and contemporary art, and an interview with Linda Lee Alter.
Visit PAFA to learn more about the exhibition and to view a slideshow of works in the Alter collection. To learn more about Alter’s work to support female artists, visit the Leeway Foundation, which she helped found in 1993.
photography by Jeremy Linden
From the colonial period to the present, the art of the United States has influenced and reflected the evolution of a country and its people. Last week, three San Diego museums—The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, The San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA), and the Timken Museum of Art—opened the innovative exhibition Behold, America! Art of the United States from Three San Diego Museums. This exhibition offers a sweeping view of American art history, dividing the featured works into three distinct shows: Forms, Figures, and Frontiers.
The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presents Frontiers, focusing on landscape painting and installations. The works range from Georgia O’Keefe’s desert paintings to installations by artists such as Vito Acconci. The Timken Museum of Art features Forms and places traditional still-life paintings by artists such as Raphaelle Peale next to early modern and minimalist works by artists such as Morgan Dawson and Agnes Martin. The San Diego Art Museum exhibits Figures, highlighting portraiture from early American painters like Thomas Sully to contemporary artists such as Cindy Sherman.
Marquand Books produced the 412-page catalogue, designed by Zach Hooker. The book features essays, interviews, and more than 200 full-color illustrations. Behold, America! explores a range of topics—from the development of modernism to the process of organizing a survey exhibition—and invites readers to engage with American art history in new and thoughtful ways.
Visit Behold, America!’s website to learn more about the exhibition. To purchase a copy of the book, visit the bookstore at SDMA.
photography by Jeremy Linden
On Saturday, November 10, The San Diego Museum of Art will open its new exhibition Charles Reiffel: An American Post-Impressionist. Charles Reiffel led the California plein-air school of landscape painting in the late 1920s. SDMA’s exhibition explores Reiffel’s relationship with nature and form and examines the influence of American Post-Impressionism and Expressionism on his work.
Reiffel moved from Silvermine, Connecticut, to San Diego in 1925. The Pacific shores and desert hills of Southern California renewed his imagination and art, but he did not experience the same kind of financial success there as he had back East. Though critics embraced Reiffel, collectors dismissed his paintings as “too modern.” Reiffel’s bold colors and rhythmic lines, interrupted by angular brush strokes, challenged the conservative style of local plein-air paintings. These quintessentially modern works, however, reveal the artist’s unique vision and “absolute command of the monumental landscape.”*
The exhibition catalogue, produced by Marquand Books and designed by Annabelle Gould, features an essay by San Diego–area curator Bram Dijkstra that considers the writers and artists who inspired Reiffel’s approach to art—from American transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, to painters such as Carl Marr. The 190-page book includes more than 70 full-color images and an exhibition timeline for Reiffel’s work.
To learn more about the exhibition and purchase tickets, visit SDMA.
*Ariel Plotek, Charles Reiffel: An American Post-Impressionist. (San Diego: The San Diego Art Museum), 15.
photography by Jeremy Linden
The New York Times recently featured an article on the new exhibition at the Denver Art Museum, Becoming van Gogh. The exhibition explores the unorthodox journey that Vincent van Gogh took to becoming an artist. Focusing on key periods in his life—his work in London and Paris for an art dealer, his attempted career in the church, and the spiritual crisis that influenced his decision to become an artist—Becoming van Gogh investigates the influences and beliefs that made up van Gogh’s approach to art.
Becoming van Gogh represents nearly a decade of DAM’s collaborative work with more than sixty institutions to bring together works that reveal van Gogh’s artistic progression. The exhibition features more than seventy paintings and drawings by van Gogh and includes works by the artists who influenced him, such as Camille Pissarro and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec.
Accompanying the exhibition is the publication Becoming van Gogh. The catalogue, produced by Marquand Books and designed by John Hubbard, illuminates van Gogh’s evolution through essays and a timeline of his artistic career. With more than 150 full-color illustrations, this 288-page book is an insightful consideration of one of the most significant and beloved artists of the modern era.
To learn more about Becoming van Gogh, visit DAM. To purchase your copy of the book, visit Yale University Press.
photography by Jeremy Linden
Instead of irony there is wonder, humor, humility, and a warmth so intense you may as well call it love. Actually, that’s it: no other Seattle artist has come close to producing as much sheer love as Jeffry Mitchell.
—Jen Graves*
The Henry Art Gallery opens its new exhibition Like a Valentine: The Art of Jeffry Mitchell on Saturday, October 27. The show, curated by Sara Krajewski, presents the first career survey of Jeffry Mitchell’s art, from his early etchings and watercolors to his recent work in ceramics and installation. Mitchell’s art engages themes of sexuality, spirituality, and class and explores the intricacies of each. The whimsical subjects Mitchell creates, such as alphabet letters, flowers, bears, and elephants, work to obscure and reveal the complex undertakings of his art.
Marquand Books joined with the Henry to publish the first monograph of the artist’s work, Like a Valentine: The Art of Jeffry Mitchell. This 208-page book, designed by Zach Hooker, features full-color illustrations of Mitchell’s work. It includes essays by Sara Krajewski, Matthew Stadler, Patterson Sims, and Sam Korman; a conversation between Mitchell and artist Matthew Offenbacher; and anecdotes from Eric Fredericksen, Tina Hoggatt, Kristan Kennedy, Jeanne Quinn, Hanneline Rogeberg, and Tommy White. Both the book and exhibition celebrate Mitchell’s mischievous and love-saturated approach to life and art.
To learn more about Like a Valentine: The Art of Jeffry Mitchell, visit the Henry. The book will soon be available for purchase through Paper Hammer.
*Patterson Sims, Like a Valentine: The Art of Jeffry Mitchell. (Seattle: Marquand Books), 13.
photography by Jeremy Linden
This Saturday, October 20, the Northwest African American Museum opens its new exhibition, Bearing Witness From Another Place: James Baldwin in Turkey. The show, which marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Baldwin’s death, features photographs by Sedat Pakay of the writer’s life in Turkey between 1961 and 1971.
Baldwin’s works—prophetic and complex—underscored the failings of tolerance and equality in the United States, and his rise to literary fame brought with it the unrelenting gaze of the American public. The tense dynamics of American culture throughout the 1960s and ’70s caused Baldwin to look for respite abroad. Turkey—and Istanbul, in particular—became Baldwin’s haven.
Bearing Witness From Another Place: James Baldwin in Turkey offers a glimpse into Baldwin’s life in Turkey. Photographs of the writer eating with friends, sipping tea, or entering a mosque reveal the intimate and unencumbered life he led away from public view. Istanbul nourished his creative life; during his time there, Baldwin finished his fourth novel, Tell Me How Long The Train’s Been Gone and directed John Herbert’s play Fortune and Men’s Eyes. In Istanbul, Baldwin discovered a city filled with artists and intellectuals who welcomed him and his work, a “city which the people from heaven had made their home.”*
Marquand Books produced the sixty-four-page exhibition catalogue, designed by Gretchen Scoble. The book features more than forty full-color illustrations and includes essays by Brian J. Carter, David Leeming, Reşat Kasaba, Nancy Rawles, Magdalena J. Zaborowska, and Howard Norman, as well as an interview with Pakay.
To learn more about the exhibition and its events, visit NAAM. To purchase a copy of Bearing Witness From Another Place: James Baldwin in Turkey, visit the University of Washington Press.
*David Leeming, Bearing Witness From Another Place: James Baldwin in Turkey. (Seattle: Northwest African American Museum), 20.
On September 25, the McNay Art Museum opened Estampas de la Raza: Contemporary Prints from the Romo Collection. Open through January 27, the exhibition presents a survey of prints given to the museum by collectors Harriett and Ricardo Romo. Estampas de la Raza focuses on works by Latino and Chicano artists from the late 1960s to the 2000s. The show engages with the Latino struggle for equality in social, economic, and political realms, and the prints are sharp and resiliently vibrant, depicting images that celebrate, define, and redefine Chicano culture.
Marquand Books produced the exhibition catalogue for Estampas de la Raza. The 152-page book, designed by Jeff Wincapaw, includes essays by Lyle W. Williams and the Romos. The essays examine how art communities and printmaking helped to establish Latino communities in the United States. Both the book and the exhibition explore themes of identity, tradition, memory, culture, and icons present in the Romo Collection prints. The catalogue features more than 150 full-color illustrations and includes a biography for each artist in the collection.
To learn more about Estampas de la Raza, visit the McNay Art Museum. To purchase a copy of the catalogue, visit the University of Texas Press.
photography by Jeremy Linden
Last Friday marked the opening of Portland Art Museum’s new exhibition The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece. The show features more than 120 objects from the British Museum’s renowned collection of Greek and Roman art. From iconic sculptures to bawdy drinking vessels, the evolution of ideas and aesthetics around the human form in Ancient Greece is evident in each piece.
Among the many objects present at the exhibition is the famous marble sculpture of a discus thrower. Making its debut appearance in the United States, the statue represents the athleticism and masculinity so highly esteemed in ancient Greek culture.
The exhibition’s catalogue, produced by Marquand Books and designed by John Hubbard, further explores ancient Greek attitudes toward the human body through an essay by Ian Jenkins and detailed entries for each object. The 176-page book comprises more than one hundred full-color illustrations that highlight the movement toward realism in Ancient Greek art.
To learn more about the exhibition and its events, visit PAM. Contact PAM’s bookstore for information about purchasing the catalogue The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece.
Photography by Jeremy Linden
The Seattle Art Museum will open the exhibition Elles: Women Artists from the Centre Pompidou, Paris next Thursday, October 11. The exhibition, organized by the Centre Pompidou, hosts more than 130 works of art by 75 women artists from 1907 to 2007. In this fresh and startling exhibition, a full spectrum of media is presented, and the artists include such women as Frida Kahlo, Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, and Marina Abramovic.
We are proud to join SAM in their celebration of women artists by hosting an installation by the American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer. Holzer creates thought-provoking work that blends text with a variety of media, from LED lighting and projection to printed posters and T-shirts. She gathers text from a range of sources, from censored governments documents to intimate poetry written by friends. Holzer combines her clear vision for design with her desire to “pull from good and ghastly text, to offer these to people, and to present them in ways that are lovely and exacting.”*
The photos that follow mark the progression of Holzer’s installation on the exterior of Paper Hammer.
Visit Holzer’s website to learn more about the artist and her work. To learn more about upcoming Elles exhibition, visit SAM.
*Art21.org, “Jenny Holzer in Protest.” Arts21 video, 12:13. October 4, 2012. http://www.pbs.org/art21/watch-now/segment-jenny-holzer-in-protest.
Photography by Jeremy Linden
In the 1970s, Seattle art patron Virginia Wright joined with local art institutions to organize the Washington Art Consortium (WAC), an educational cooperative dedicated to bringing world-class art to Washington State. The consortium—the first of its kind in the United States—began with five founding members. WAC is now composed of seven institutions: the Henry Art Gallery, Washington State University’s Museum of Art, the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, the Seattle Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, Western Washington University’s Western Gallery, and the Whatcom Museum.
In 1976, with funds from Wright and the National Endowment for the Arts, WAC assembled its first collection, Works on Paper 1945–1975. The collection, which focuses on works on paper by a range of artists—including Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Agnes Martin, and Josef Albers, represents a defining era in American art—one that pushed boundaries and challenged notions of what art is and can be.
In the last few years, the works have undergone condition analysis, conservation, and reframing. To celebrate the completion of this process, the Museum of Art presents the exhibition The Artist’s Hand: Works on Paper 1945–1975. The show opens today and runs through December 15. It is accompanied by a 136-page catalogue, produced by Marquand Books and designed by John Hubbard. The book includes more than sixty color illustrations of selected works and an essay by Wright that details the creation of the consortium.
To learn more about The Artist’s Hand: Works on Paper 1945–1975, visit the Museum of Art.
The Prints of Ellsworth Kelly: A Catalogue Raisonné is now available at Amazon.com. Marquand Books produced the stunning two-volume catalogue, working directly with the Ellsworth Kelly studio and Richard Axsom, the raisonné’s author. Published by the Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation and distributed by Marquand Books, the catalogue features more than 400 color illustrations accompanied with detailed entries.
Letters to Ellsworth, a companion publication, is also available on Amazon. This book gathers the reflections of men and women who have been close to Kelly and his art over the years. In many cases, the proximity has been to the artist’s prints. Curators, art historians, publishers, printers, dealers, and collectors contribute personal essays on Kelly’s work. Unlike any other book on Kelly—one of the most important artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—Letters to Ellsworth offers an intimate look at the bond between friend and artist.
The publication of the catalogue raisonné coincides with a traveling exhibition, Ellsworth Kelly Prints. The show, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (where it first opened as part of Ellsworth Kelly: Prints and Paintings in January 2012) recently closed at Portland Art Museum and moves in January to the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.
Visit our post “Color, Shape, and Nature: Ellsworth Kelly’s Prints” to learn more about the exhibitions and catalogue. To purchase The Prints of Ellsworth Kelly and Letters to Ellsworth, visit Amazon.com.
“Hold fast to dreams / For when they let go / Life is a barren field /
Frozen in snow”—Frank Moore
Fields littered with oversized pill bottles, buffalo grazing on cotton bedsheets, clouds in the shape of chemical compounds: these are the landscapes and images depicted by the late New York City artist Frank Moore (1953–2002). In his life and work, Moore fervently confronted issues of the day, from genetically modified food and pollution to the AIDS pandemic and human sexuality—his paintings, surreal and highly detailed, reveal the chaos and beauty inherent in each.
In early September, Grey Art Gallery opened the most comprehensive exhibition to date of Moore’s work. Toxic Beauty: The Art of Frank Moore chronicles the artist’s career and reveals his eloquent and inquisitive approach to life and art. The exhibition features more than thirty-five major paintings and fifty drawings, sketches, and gouches as well as Moore’s personal notebooks, source materials, and ephemera.
Marquand Books produced the exhibition catalogue, designed by Laura Lindgren. Essays by Gregg Bordowitz, Susan Harris, and Klaus Kertess study the connections between environmental, social, and personal health that Moore examined in his work. Excerpts from artist statements, essays, and interviews with Frank Moore are also included in the book, which features more than one hundred color illustrations.
To learn more about the exhibition Toxic Beauty: The Art of Frank Moore or to purchase a copy of the catalogue, visit the Grey Art Gallery.
Photography by Jeremy Linden
“Oftentimes when I’m in the studio I feel my mother’s hands tracing unabashedly across my back and through my hands, and it reinforces
everything I learned from her about myself and about working.”—Gail Grinnell
Gail Grinnell cuts and draws on fabric to shape her sweeping, intricate installations. Her work is influenced by the memory of her mother, a talented and self-taught seamstress. Grinnell’s use of polyester interfacing fabric references the tissue-paper patterns her mother used for sewing, and the material allows the artist to create durable sculptures from seemingly fragile materials.
Grinnell’s new installation, RUFFLE, opens with a reception tomorrow evening at Suyama Space in Seattle. The installation responds to the unique structure of Suyama Space—the delicate forms creating alcoves throughout the gallery, spanning across the ceiling and draping to the floor. At noon on Saturday, September 8, Grinnell will be in the gallery to discuss her work and the installation.
RUFFLE follows Grinnell’s 2011 installation Tinker, Tailor, Mender, Maker at the Anchor Art Space gallery in Anacortes, Washington. Marquand Books designed and produced the catalogue for this exhibition. The sixteen-page catalogue was designed by Ryan Polich and features color illustrations of her work—from the exhibit as well as her studio—and essays by Patricia Grieves Watkinson and Jean Behnke. The catalogue was printed digitally in our Seattle office.
For more informationabout RUFFLE, visit Suyama Space. To learn more about Grinnell’s work, visit her website.
Photographs from the catalogue Tinker, Tailor, Mender, Maker by Chris Terrell and Jean Behnke (installation images) and Richard Nicol (drawings).
Last Monday, August 6, marked the eighty-fourth birthday of the late Andy Warhol. Warhol—whose reproductions of Campbell’s soup cans, Brillo pads, and Marilyn Monroe garnered fame—understood America’s obsession with celebrity and violence.
In February of this year, the McNay Art Museum explored works by Warhol that combined these fascinations. The exhibition, Andy Warhol: Fame and Misfortune, assembled more than 150 objects from the collection of the Andy Warhol Museum. Fame and Misfortune included prints, photographs, drawings, and paintings by the artist. Iconic prints of Liza Minnelli and Dennis Hopper were shown next to images of automobile accidents and electric chairs. Displayed side-by-side, the works illuminate the unsettling connection Warhol drew between fatality and fame.
Marquand Books produced the exhibition catalogue, which was designed by Jeff Wincapaw. The eighty-page book reflects the colorful appeal of Warhol’s work and includes more than eighty-five color illustrations. An introduction by the exhibition’s curator, René Paul Barilleaux, and an essay by Justin Spring examine Warhol’s art and its reflection of America’s relationship with stardom and its shadows.
To learn more about the Andy Warhol: Fame and Misfortune, visit the McNay. To purchase a copy of the catalogue, visit your local bookseller or find the book on the ARTBOOK | DAP website.
Ellsworth Kelly, born in Newburgh, New York in 1923, has been fascinated with colors, shadows, and shapes since childhood. An avid birder, Kelly was intrigued by the color and quick movement of birds. The way light and shadow played on their feathers captured his attention and inspired his artistic work; “I didn’t need Cubism to become an artist,” Kelly said, “I had nature.”*
Early this year, the Los Angeles County of Modern Art (LACMA) held a major exhibition of work by the renowned abstract artist. The exhibition, Ellsworth Kelly: Prints and Paintings, was open from January through April of this year and showcased more than 100 works by the artist, including sketches, paintings, prints, and a sculpture. These works reveal Kelly’s attention to form and color as well as his connection with the natural world. The exhibition was the first retrospective of Kelly’s prolific career since 1988.
Following LACMA’s exhibition, the Portland Art Museum (PAM) recently opened Ellsworth Kelly / Prints. The exhibition was organized in cooperation with LACMA and Jordan D. Schnitzer, who, along with his Family Foundation, lent the works for exhibition. Ellsworth Kelly / Prints features more than eighty prints and focuses on the motifs used by Kelly in his work: curved lines, right angles, grids, and precise use of color.
Marquand Books produced the catalogue, which was designed by Zach Hooker and published by the Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation. The two-volume catalogue features more than 400 color illustrations and includes essays by leading Kelly scholar Rick Axsom that chronicle the artist’s work from the 1940s to the present.
The catalogue will be distributed by Paper Hammer. Additional information about purchasing the catalogue will be posted soon. To learn more about the exhibition Ellsworth Kelly / Prints, visit PAM.
*Rick Axsom, The Prints of Ellsworth Kelly: A Catalogue Raisonné. (Portland, OR: Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation, 2012), 41.
photography by Jeremy Linden
In 2007, the Smithsonian announced plans to build the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). This February, the museum broke ground to begin construction on what will be most likely be the final building on the National Mall. The museum, designed by Ghanaian-born architect David Adjaye, is scheduled to open in 2015.
The exhibition Let Your Motto Be Resistance, which first opened in February 2008 at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), was the NMAAHC’s first traveling exhibition. The exhibition toured fifteen cities and was created in collaboration with the International Center of Photography in New York. Let Your Motto Be Resistance featured a selection of portraits from the Gallery’s collection, ranging from Sojourner Truth to James Baldwin. The exhibition focuses on the power portraits have to resist cultural stereotypes and communicate the self-worth and dignity of the photographed individual.
The photographs highlighted in the exhibition are of people whose lives and portraits resound with the famous abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet’s words:
Let your motto be Resistance! Resistance! RESISTANCE! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance. What kind of resistance you…make you must decide by the circumstances that surround you.… *
Accompanying the exhibition was the catalogue Let Your Motto Be Resistance. The catalogue includes essays by Cheryl Finley and Sarah Elizabeth Lewis and biographies of the writers, statesmen, artists, scientists, abolitionists, and entertainers whose portraits are featured in the publication. The National Portrait Gallery created an online museum venue for the exhibition, where visitors to the website can see portraits of Frederick Douglass, Asa Phillip Randolph, Lorraine Hansberry, and others whose lives manifested the resistance, creativity, and hope that early African American abolitionists championed.
Marquand Books produced the exhibition’s 184-page catalogue, designed by Jeff Wincapaw. We are pleased to note that we are working on a reprint of this stunning publication.To see portraits from Let Your Motto Be Resistance or to purchase a copy of the catalogue, visit the virtual exhibition at the NPG. Visit the NMAAHC online for more information about the museum’s construction and current events.
*Deborah Willis, Let Your Motto Be Resistance. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2007), 11.
photography by Ryan Polich
Ryan Polich is our design and production assistant and image manager at Marquand Books, which means he is busy turning visions for book projects into tangible realities. Ryan moves from designing book layouts and managing images on his computer to printing and binding small-run books and brochures by hand. This week, we caught up with Ryan to ask him a few questions about book production and design.
What is your current favorite typeface?
Franklin Gothic. It’s a solid design that’s really versatile, but still has plenty of personality. The fact that it was designed over one hundred years ago and still looks contemporary is also pretty fantastic.
What does a typical day as the design and production assistant and image manager look like?
There is definitely no such thing as a typical day for me, and that’s just perfect. I’m involved in a lot of different activities in the office: layout, design, printing and binding, image management—it’s never slow, and there’s always something new to keep me on my toes. I don’t think I’m cut out for a predictable job—I’d probably just fall asleep at my desk.
What sparked your interest in book production?
Working on books is one of those things that I didn’t realize I should be doing until I started doing it. When I started at Marquand Books, I thought it might be an interesting change of pace from the design work I had been doing. And now that I’ve been here awhile, it’s hard for me to think about doing anything else. Part of that is because you can access a book from so many angles; sure, you may be drawn to the content, but you can also appreciate the design, the typography, the printing, and the binding. I’ve always been a type geek and a designer at heart, so I think that was the doorway into the world of book production for me. Books are places where design and typography can really thrive and do what they do best.
What projects have you been excited to work on this year?
The Rodin book we’re wrapping up has been a really interesting project—it uses a wide variety of printing techniques, so there had to be a lot of thought and planning about how it was going to work from a production standpoint. I’ve also gotten the chance to stretch my legs a little more from a design perspective this year—there are a couple projects where I’ve been heavily involved in the design process, or have built the design from the ground up.
What things, people, or experiences have recently inspired your work?
I find a lot of inspiration in letterpress printing, especially within the community of printers at the School of Visual Concepts (where I’m an occasional teaching assistant). After spending a day sitting in front of a computer, it’s so amazing to interact with physical pieces of type and make something tangible and immediate with them. And the experience directly relates to the world of books, because it’s how books were made for hundreds of years. That alone is crazy and inspiring—it’s not very often you get to tinker with such old and important technology.
photography by Jeremy Linden
In the 1960s, John Powers resigned from his position as president of a major publishing company and pursued his passion for collecting contemporary American art and antique Japanese art. His enthusiasm for Japanese art prompted him, along with his wife, Kimiko, to travel extensively throughout Japan and meet with art dealers and scholars to learn more about the works they wanted to collect.
The ’60s proved an ideal time for the Powerses to begin collecting. Japanese art was not widely known, and its obscurity allowed them to build a collection focused on exquisite pieces without the stress of competing collectors. Today, the Powers Collection is recognized as the premier collection of Japanese art in the United States and as one of the largest collections outside of Japan. Throughout their years of collecting, John and Kimiko Powers gathered together more than 300 paintings, scrolls, Buddhist sculptures, calligraphy, and illuminated documents that reveal the stories and innovation of Japan’s artistic evolutions.
Unrivalled Splendor: The Kimiko and John Powers Collection of Japanese Art is currently featured at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. The exhibition, which runs through September 23, presents eighty-five selections from the collection and highlights elaborate screens, narrative scroll paintings, and some of the earliest known examples of Buddhist art in Japan.
Marquand Books produced the 246-page catalogue that accompanies the exhibition. Designed by Zach Hooker, the catalogue presents more than eighty color illustrations of the selected works and includes an essay by Miyeko Murase that examines the importance of the objects presented in the exhibition.
To learn more about Unrivalled Splendor, visit the MFAH. To purchase a copy of the exhibition catalogue, visit Yale University Press.
photography by Jeremy Linden
Tomorrow, the Portland Museum of Art in Maine opens a new exhibition of oil sketches by Frederic Edwin Church. Maine Sublime: Frederic Edwin Church’s Landscapes of Mount Desert and Mount Katahdin focuses on Church’s trips to Maine and the exquisite oil sketches he created there.
In 1850, the landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church took his first trip to Maine after viewing a portfolio of drawings by his teacher Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School. His initial journey sparked an affair with Maine that persisted throughout his career. Church painted the coastlines, rocky islands, and inland hills of the northeastern state in romantic and majestic styles, establishing his place as a central figure in the Hudson River School.
The inland Mount Katahdin and the island of Mount Desert were two places in Maine that Church especially liked to explore. These natural landmarks are the setting for the twenty-three oil paintings showcased in the Portland Museum of Art’s exhibition.
The seventy-six-page exhibition catalogue was produced by Marquand Books and designed by John Hubbard. The book features more than sixty-five color illustrations and includes an essay by John Wilmerding of Princeton University.
To learn more about the exhibition Maine Sublime, visit the Portland Museum of Art. To purchase a copy of the catalogue, visit Cornell University Press.
photography by Jeremy Linden
This month, the Newport Art Museum opened A Mine of Beauty: Landscapes by William Trost Richards. The exhibition features a collection of 110 postcard-sized paintings by William Trost Richards, a mid-nineteenth-century artist famous for his marine and landscape paintings.
Richards spent his time in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Newport, Connecticut. Both places served to inspire and advance his artwork, but it was in Philadelphia where Richards met the prominent collector George Whitney. Whitney first collected Richards’s works in the 1860s, and he soon became Richards’s friend and patron. Whitney funded several of Richards’s travels abroad and was an energetic advocate for Richards’s work. Richards painted the miniature watercolor landscapes (or coupons, as he referred to them) as gifts to Whitney. The paintings were often included in Richards’s correspondence with Whitney and depict the pastures and rocky coastlines of New England as well as scenes from the artist’s travels to Scotland, England, and Italy.
When Whitney died in 1885, his estate was sold, and his collection of Richards’s finest paintings—eighty-seven in all—were forcibly dispersed. Only Whitney’s collection of the small watercolors remained together. Remarkably, these paintings recently found their way back to Philadelphia to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). Mirroring Richards’s life, these paintings will also travel between PAFA and the Newport Art Museum.
Marquand Books produced the 156-page catalogue, designed by Zach Hooker. The book’s tactile qualities—with embossed case stamping and an imprinted image on the cover—evoke the texture and intimate details of the paintings themselves. The entire collection of miniatures is featured in the catalogue. These watercolors, reproduced on a one-to-one scale, reveal the grace and sensibility of Richards’s artistic skill, and essays by Linda S. Ferber and Anna O. Marley illuminate the history of American landscape painting that surrounds these jewellike miniatures.
To learn more about the exhibition of A Mine of Beauty: Landscapes by William Trost Richards, visit the Newport Art Museum and PAFA. To purchase a copy of the catalogue, visit ACC Distribution.
photography by Jeremy Linden
Morton C. Bradley Jr. was a curious and ambitious intellect and artist. He studied fine art at Harvard University, graduating in 1933; his scholarship led him to pursue studies in color science and theory. His professor Arthur Pope was a great influence on his sculptural work, especially Pope’s theories on color, design, and aesthetics. These theories are manifest in Bradley’s use of color in relationship to geometric forms.
Bradley created sculptures, designed to be suspended from ceilings, that explored mathematics and color. Before computer technology allowed for quick constructions of complex geometric forms, Bradley worked with a team of fabricators to build his sculptures. This team comprised the Bradley Workshop, and each person was responsible for a specific part in building the sculptures—from piecing together materials to painting the finished constructions.
Though he had the opportunity to do so, Bradley never sold his work. Upon his death in 2004, his collection was bequeathed to Indiana University, where he had family history. To commemorate and recognize the gift of Bradley’s sculptures, Indiania University published Color and Form: The Geometric Sculptures of Morton C. Bradley.
Marquand Books produced the 148-page book, which was designed by Brian Garvey with the assistance of Tina Kim. Color and Form features more than 145 color illustrations, essays by Lynn Gamwell and Evan Turner, and details on each member of Bradley’s Workshop.
To learn more about Bradley’s sculptures, visit Indiana University. To purchase a copy of Color and Form, go to Indiana University Press.
“A mural is a teaching.” —Hale Woodruff, 1970*
Established in 1867, Talladega College was one of the nation’s first colleges for African Americans after the Civil War. William Savery and Thomas Tarrant, former slaves, founded the school with the belief that educating youth was an essential step in preserving black liberties.
The college’s first purchased building hosted forty students. The building had previously housed a school for whites built by slaves—among them Savery and Tarrant. Over the years, Talladega College grew to acquire new buildings and more students. In the 1930s, the college started construction on its newest addition: Savery Library.
The artist Hale Woodruff, an adjunct professor at the school, accepted a commission to paint a series of murals for the library’s dedication. His six large-scale murals depict stories of survival and progress—from the Amistad mutiny in 1839 to scenes from the Underground Railroad and the construction of Savery Library.
This Saturday, June 9, Woodruff’s murals will make their debut at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. The High partnered with Talladega College for the restoration and exhibition of the murals. The exhibition, Rising Up: Hale Woodruff’s Murals at Talladega College, will feature the murals alongside thirty-seven other works by Woodruff, including paintings he created in Mexico and France.
Marquand Books produced the 156-page exhibition catalogue, which was designed by Susan E. Kelly. The vibrant catalogue features more than ninety color illustrations and includes essays by Stephanie Meyer Heydt, Renée Ater, and David C. Driskell.
To visit this exhibition, go to the High Museum of Art. To purchase the exhibition catalogue, visit University of Washington Press.
* Stephanie Meyer Heydt. Rising Up: Hale Woodruff’s Murals at Talladega College. (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2012), 121.
photography by Jeremy Linden
This week the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) opened the exhibition Ancestral Modern: Australian Aboriginal Art. The show presents work by Aboriginal Australians made from the 1970s through 2009, documenting the artistic renaissance of the world’s oldest living culture.
Although there is no word for art in Aboriginal languages, the creation and interpretation of drawings, paintings, and sculptures is deeply embedded in their culture. Aboriginal Australians are fluent in visual literacy and use art to transfer knowledge, stories, and spirituality from generation to generation. Because of the sacred nature of their art, it was often hidden from public view. However, in the last one hundred years, Aboriginal artists have chosen to share their artwork with wider audiences—sparking a contemporary art movement within Aboriginal communities.
The American collectors Margaret Levi and Robert Kaplan discovered this movement during their travels to Australia. They began their collection of Aboriginal art in the 1980s with the goal to introduce the movement to the canon of world art. Ancestral Modern is the first showing of the Kaplan and Levi Collection in a major museum in the United States.
Marquand Books produced the catalogue Ancestral Modern. The 176-page book, designed by John Hubbard, includes detailed entries for selected works and features more than one hundred color illustrations. Essays by curators Pamela McClusky, Wally Caruana, Lisa Graziose Corrin, and Stephen Gilchrist illuminate the history and creation of contemporary Aboriginal art.
To learn more about the Ancestral Modern exhibition, visit the SAM. To purchase a copy of the exhibition catalogue, visit Yale University Press.
On Friday, May 18, Lois Dodd: Catching the Light opened at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. This retrospective exhibition of Dodd’s work features paintings from the 1950s to the present. Together, the paintings highlight Dodd’s commitment to painting the immediate world she inhabits, from the green world of Maine’s rural coast to the steely landscape of New York City.
Dodd started painting in the early 1950s, during the birth of the Abstract Expressionism movement, and despite the predominance of mainstream styles and trends, her work persisted in its unique observational style. Her paintings are simple, quiet, and dramatic only in way they capture light and shadow. Her work attends to the small details of life around her—brick walls, garden flowers, and broken windows—objects and scenes others might not notice.
Marquand Books produced the exhibition catalogue that accompanies Lois Dodd: Catching the Light. The catalogue, designed by Susan E. Kelly, includes essays and reflections written by Dodd’s colleagues and features more than eighty color illustrations.
To purchase a copy of Lois Dodd: Catching the Light or to learn more about the exhibition, visit the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art online.
Throughout his life, Leonardo da Vinci worked to understand and illuminate the mystery of human anatomy. His skill as an anatomist is revealed in notes, sketches, and drawings that depict bones and muscles with an accuracy centuries ahead of its time.
The Royal Collection in London is currently showing da Vinci’s anatomical work in the exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist. The exhibition at The Queens Gallery in Buckingham Palace highlights the incredible detail and scientific fidelity with which da Vinci recorded the human body.
The exhibition catalogue was produced by Marquand Books and designed by John Hubbard. It features eighty-seven illustrations of da Vinci’s key studies, including his dissections of the skull, drawings of major organs and vessels, and notes on human proportion. Collaborative essays by Martin Clayton and Ron Philo provide historical insight to da Vinci’s drawings and life.
To learn more about the exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist or to purchase the catalogue, visit The Royal Collection online.
photography by Jeremy Linden
Maps may be one of the most pleasing reference tools in which form and function meet. Some of the books we produce include maps created by our production artist (and resident cartographer), Jeremy Linden. We recently sat down to look through some of the maps he has made for our clients and to discuss his mapmaking process.
What was the first map you worked on at Marquand Books?
In 2009, I created our first in-house map; it was for the book The Arts of Africa. I traced out the map, drew in the country outlines, and put the labels where the client wanted them. We went through a couple different color schemes as I worked with the designer to coordinate the map with the theme of the book.
Tracing the outline was pretty tedious. When you’re doing it, you’re working really close up to the map, but when you zoom out, you have this awesome, detailed coastline. Making the map was really fun; for some reason, I really enjoyed it.
A detail of the map from Art of Armor.
What were the next maps you made?
The year after The Arts of Africa we did a much smaller, less-detailed map of Japan for the book Dreams and Diversions. Then we worked on a few small figure illustrations. The next big one—which is probably one of my favorite maps—was for the Art of Armor.
Why is this one your favorite?
It was more detailed and, because of the book’s design, it allowed me to be more stylized. I also had a full, double-page spread to work with. This book included a timeline, so I designed the timeline and map to match. I got to come up with icons and keys myself, so I drew little daimyo castles. It’s gratifying to take the maps and adjust them to complement the design of the book—in this case, the black and orange of the map plays with the Japanese lacquer and the rusty orange colors of the armor.
The map of Australia in Ancestral Modern: Australian Aboriginal Art is very detailed. Tell me about your design process.
I made this map right after Art of Armor, and I wanted to make sure it didn’t look the same. I really like the dark background of the Art of Armor map, but I didn’t want to go that route again. With this one, I picked up the color from the text and tried to make the elements reflect the aboriginal art, with the repeating lines and dots.
A detail of the map from Ancestral Modern.
What books tend to include maps?
So far, it’s been books with specific regional information. The Arts of Africa and Ancestral Modern are good examples—they want to show where in the area art came from. With Ancestral Modern, topography plays into in the actual works of art. We’re working on a book now about French faience and porcelain, and the map will show locations of the manufactories. We’re also working on a book about van Gogh, and that map will include biographical information about where the artist lived and how those regions influenced his art.
This image shows the steps taken to create a street map of van Gogh’s nineteenth-century Paris.
What do you like about designing maps?
I love maps; I think they ground the story. And making maps seems so simple—it’s just an infographic—but there really is an art to it. It’s not that you’re coming up with something new, but you get to decide how you will take the information and present it. That’s when it starts to become fun.
If you could design any map, what would it be?
I would probably do a non-fictional place. I’d like to try my hand at making a map look antique. So far, my maps have been very clean—just information. They look very modern. But some of the maps we’ve had made in the past look almost painted. I think painting a map digitally would be a fun challenge.
This comparison of styles shows a modern design (left) and a traditional design (right) of a map referencing eighteenth-century French ceramic manufactories.
“[Day] is one of the rare photographers who has something to say, and he knows exactly how to say it.” — Robert Demachy*
Boston photographer F. Holland Day advocated for the acceptance of photography as fine art. In the early 1900s, he gained international recognition as a leader in the Pictorialist movement—a style of photography that resisted the notion of photographs as mere records of reality. From intimate portraits of friends to stylized photographs of models in costume, Day’s work demonstrated his ability to create and capture scenes with as much detail and emotion as an artist working with paint.
The current exhibition at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Making a Presence: F. Holland Day in Artistic Photography, explores Day’s dynamic persona through a variety of pictures, including photographs by Day and portraits of the artist taken by his contemporaries. The photographs reveal Day’s diverse interests, independent spirit, and elaborate imagination.
Marquand Books produced the exhibition catalogue for Making a Presence: F. Holland Day in Artistic Photography. The 132-page book, designed by Zach Hooker, presents more than ninety color illustrations and includes essays by Trevor Fairbrother, the curator of the exhibition.
To learn more about Making a Presence: F. Holland Day in Artistic Photography, visit the Addison Gallery of American Art. To pre-order a copy of the exhibition catalogue, visit Yale University Press.
* Trevor Fairbrother, Making a Presence: F. Holland Day in Artistic Photography. (Andover: Addison Gallery of American Art, 2012), 15.
photography by Jeremy Linden
“I want to remain vulnerable to beauty. I want to be stopped in my tracks by something I call beautiful that I have never noticed or seen before.”
— Barbara Rogers
This month Hudson Hills Press will release Barbara Rogers: The Imperative of Beauty. The book documents Barbara Rogers’s development as an artist and teacher and chronicles her use of figurative, abstract, and ornamental forms.
Nature is a prominent subject in Rogers’s work, and she explores its nourishing and destructive powers. Vibrant colors, animals, and people compose her early paintings, while abstract and ornamental forms take center stage in her recent works. Present throughout her work is Rogers’s pursuit of beauty: “Through my paintings, I am reclaiming a space for beauty in the midst of everyday life; I seek to create a place of respite, reflection, and contemplation.”
Marquand Books produced The Imperative of Beauty. Designed by Zach Hooker, the 224-page book includes more than 150 color illustrations and features essays by Paul Eli Ivey and interviews with Rogers by Marilyn Zeitlin. Visit Roger’s website to learn more about her life and work. To purchase The Imperative of Beauty, visit Hudson Hills Press.
Photography by Jeremy Linden
On Monday, The New York Times featured an article on the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, their current exhibition, and their book A Glorious Enterprise.
The book’s true fascination comes in its color photographs and illustrations, scores of them. We see naturalists in the field, the tools they used and the specimens they returned—legions of stuffed birds, minerals, mushrooms and insects … the story of the Academy of Natural Sciences engrosses. Its collections, sampled here, are valuable, and the attitude of its founders—that satisfying one’s curiosity about the natural world is celebratory activity—is refreshing.
The book chronicles the museum’s 200-year history of collection and research. It was produced by Marquand Books and designed by Jeff Wincapaw. To purchase A Glorious Enterprise, visit the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Exhibition catalogues and other art books line the shelves at Marquand Books. We asked our design director, Jeff Wincapaw, to select a title and discuss its design process with us. He chose the exhibition catalogue Willie Doherty: Requisite Distance, produced by Marquand Books for the Dallas Museum of Art in 2009.
The exhibition was significant; for the first time, Doherty’s media installation Ghost Story was shown together with photographs he’d taken in Ireland during the 1990s. The exhibition separated the works into adjoined rooms. The catalogue takes its design cues from both the nature of Doherty’s work and the layout of the exhibition itself.
What makes this book different from others you’ve worked on?
The exhibition had two parts we needed to include in the catalogue: a series of photographs and a video installation. The challenge was to bring both segments of the exhibition together in a book and to somehow recreate the movement of the film on the page.
How did this influence the design?
Well, we wanted to bring the experience of the exhibit to the catalogue. To simulate the rhythm of the film and create emotional responses for the reader, we varied the sizes of the video stills, how many were on a page, and so on.
To separate the two parts of the book, we used a formal white backgound for the photographs and a dark gray for the film’s still photos. The gray makes it feels like you’re in a theater—everything but the image fades into the background.
In what way did the subject matter shape the design?
The format of the book conforms to Doherty’s photographs and film. Overall, the design is restrained. The typography is neutral, understated. An essay separates the photographs from Ghost Story, and once into the film portion of the book, it is primarily pictorial. There aren’t page numbers. We kept it as minimal as possible in an effort to present the work cinematically.
The subject matter is beautiful, but it’s also discomforting. The pictures from the film are moody and, subconciously, a bit unsettling. We wanted them to pop off the page, so we used a gloss finish on the photographs, which helps to illuminate them.
To purchase a copy of Willie Doherty: Requisite Distance, visit Yale University Press online.
photography by Jeremy Linden
Last Friday, the L.A. Times featured an article on the Norton Simon Museum’s current exhibition, Proof: The Rise of Printmaking in California. Highlighting works from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, the exhibition chronicles the revival of printmaking in the United States.
Marquand Books produced the 256-page exhibition catalogue that was edited by the show’s curator, Leah Lehmbeck. Proof illuminates the history of California’s postwar printmaking boom through essays, illustrations, and a chronology that identifies key people and events of the movement.
Proof: The Rise of Printmaking in Southern California opened October 1, 2011 and runs through April 2, 2012. To learn more about the exhibition, visit the Norton Simon Museum online.
photography by Jeremy Linden
The Bellevue Art Museum’s current exhibition Knitted, Knotted, Twisted & Twined highlights more than ninety pieces of jewelry by local artist Mary Lee Hu. The show chronicles Hu’s work from the 1960s to the present and focuses on the original techniques she brought to the worlds of jewelry and metalwork.
Employing fiber techniques like twining and weaving, Hu manipulates metal as if it were textile. Her methods cause light to reflect off her jewelry in deliberate, mesmerizing ways. By wrapping wire and folding metals, she constructs textured neckpieces, earrings, bracelets, and brooches, as well as several small animals—a lizard, turtle, and squid are a few of the creatures displayed.
The 128-page exhibition catalogue, designed by Jeff Wincapaw, was produced by Marquand Books and features more than eighty color illustrations. Essays by Janet Koplos and Jeannine Falino illuminate Hu’s journey in metalwork and jewelry design.
To learn more about the Knitted, Knotted, Twisted & Twined exhibition and catalogue, visit the Bellevue Arts Museum online.
[Traylor] was beautiful to see—so right with himself and at peace—as the rich imagery of his long life welled up into his drawings and paintings.
—Charles Shannon, 1985*
The High Museum of Art is currently showing the exhibit Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibit, a collaboration of the two museums, showcases over sixty works by the self-taught, Alabama artist Bill Traylor.
Born into slavery around 1854, Traylor grew up in rural Alabama. In 1928 he moved to Montgomery where he survived on the streets of Monroe Avenue, working and living in meager conditions. When he was eighty years old and physically unable to work, he started to draw. On the sidewalks of Montgomery, he used crayons, graphite pencils, and poster paint on pieces of old cardboard to create pictures of rural and urban life.
Charles Shannon, a Montgomery artist, befriended Traylor in 1939. He soon championed his work, buying and preserving most of Traylor’s drawings. For nearly forty years, Shannon protected Traylor’s art, convinced the drawings deserved to be in museums alongside works by mainstream artists. Finally, in the late 1970’s, the drawings were introduced to the public and are now regarded as important examples of American art.
The exhibition catalogue, produced by Marquand Books, allows the reader a close view of the textural, temporal qualities of Traylor’s work. Essays by Susan Mitchell Crawley and Leslie H. Paisely explore both the history of the artist’s life, as well as the history of preserving his works. The 111-page catalogue includes portraits of the artist and selected works from the collections of the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and the High Museum of Art.
To learn more about the exhibition or to purchase the catalogue, visit the High Museum of Art online.
* Margaret Lynne Ausfeld, Susan Mitchell Crawley. Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. (New York: Prestel, 2012), 13.
photography by Jeremy Linden
