Other Books

The first title in Aperture’s Vision & Justice Book Series—featuring a collection of award-winning short essays by Maurice Berger that explore the intersections of photography, race, and visual culture. Created and coedited by Drs. Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis, the series reexamines and redresses historical narratives of photography, race, and justice.

Edited by Marvin Heiferman, Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images examines the transformational role photography plays in shaping ideas and attitudes about race and how photographic images have been instrumental in both perpetuating and combating racial stereotypes. Written between 2012 and 2019 and first presented as a monthly feature on the New York Times Lens blog, Berger’s incisive essays help readers see a bigger picture about race through storytelling. By directing attention to the most revealing aspects of images, Berger makes complex issues comprehensible, vivid, and engaging. The essays illuminate a range of images, issues, and events: the modern civil rights movement; African American–, Latinx–, Asian American–, and Native American photography; and pivotal moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when race, photography, and visual culture intersected. They also examine the full spectrum of photographic imaging: from amateur to professional pictures, from snapshots to fine art, from mugshots to celebrated icons of photojournalism.

Race Stories collects together Berger’s reader-friendly essays in their breadth and brilliance to encourage a broad range of readers to look at and think about photographs in order to better understand themselves and the diverse world around them.

Co-published by Aperture and the New York Times

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 312
Number of images: 189
Publication date: 2024-12-17
Measurements: 6.7 x 9.5 x 1 inches

Contributors

Maurice Berger (1956–2020; born in New York) was a cultural historian, curator, and writer, who spent much of his career studying and teaching racial literacy through innovative visual literacy projects. In influential essays, books, and provocative museum exhibitions, Berger gathered and presented compelling photographic images to engage and challenge readers and viewers into reconsidering both cultural and personal assumptions and prejudices. His books include White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (2000) and For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (2010), which was also one of the premier projects mounted by the National Museum of African American History and Culture. He received honors and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Association of Art Museum Curators, and Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and was nominated for an Emmy Award. 

Marvin Heiferman is an independent curator, writer, and organizer for projects about photography and visual culture for institutions s the Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian Institution, International Center of Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, and the New Museum. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Gagosian Gallery, CNN, Artforum, Design Observer, Aperture, and BOMB. 

Visit the world’s most comprehensive and compelling museum in a single book – the ultimate gallery in your own home

Housing the finest art collection ever assembled, this classic format of Phaidon’s bestselling The Art Museum offers the ultimate museum experience without the boundaries of space and time. The rooms and galleries that live within this volume display more than 1,600 artworks, expertly selected from the original collection, including paintings, sculpture, textiles, photographs, installations, performances, videos, prints, ceramics, manuscripts, metalwork, and jewelwork.

The artworks included were carefully selected by a team of 28 curators, critics, art historians and artists who contributed their expertise to create this revolutionary 'virtual' museum. These experts came from such institutions as: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The British Museum, London; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu; the University of California, Berkley; LaTrobe University, Melbourne; the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London; and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

Works originate from the Palaeolithic era to the present and come from all around the globe and include both iconic and lesser-known pieces. This extraordinary book takes the reader on a tour around the world and through the ages, presenting the finest examples of human creativity within its covers – a dream museum without the boundaries of walls.

• Format: Hardback
• Size: 305 × 238 mm (12 × 9 3/8 in)
• Pages: 584 pp
• Illustrations: 1640 illustrations

As featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Curbed, Teen Vogue, CNN Style, and domino

Visit the world’s greatest museum without leaving your home through this imaginary art museum – a visually spectacular survey of world art for middle-grade readers, curated in collaboration with a global team of experts and educators

This imaginary art museum is an educational and inspiring experience without the constraints of space and time. Discover beautiful reproductions from pre-history to the present, arranged in easy-to-navigate, color-coded wings, galleries, and rooms, each with an informative narrative guide. Marvel at its remarkable range of styles and mediums – from classic to contemporary, and from paintings and sculptures to photographs and textiles. With a fold-out museum map and floor plans to follow, and interactive cross-referencing activities, this museum-in-a-book spotlights the iconic and important works and movements in art history and provides the perfect introduction to the history of human creativity.

Curated in collaboration with the team of experts and educators behind Phaidon’s groundbreaking global bestseller The Art Museum, which won acclaim from the New York Times, The Times, NPR, Vogue, and more – and a starred Library Journal review. Every single piece in this book was selected to illustrate important historical, cultural, and artistic facts, not only in order to give children a comprehensive foundation in world art history, but to also share with them the idea that art history is a culmination of 40,000 years of people sharing themes, ideas, techniques and incredible creativity across time and space. With its lavish page size and over 300 wonderfully diverse artworks, this book is the ultimate resource for all art-hungry children and their parents.

• Format: Hardback
• Size: 305 × 250 mm (12 × 9 7/8 in)
• Pages: 232 pp
• Illustrations: 310 illustrations

Five of Monet’s most beloved works spring to life in this vivid and brilliantly engineered collection of pop-up scenes.

One of the joys of a Monet painting is the sense of being fully immersed in a beautiful setting. Now fans of the great artist have an intriguing new way to dive into five of his most enduring paintings: Garden at Sainte-Adresse, Poppy Field, Waterlilies and Japanese Bridge, The Artist’s House at Argenteuil, and The Bridge at Argenteuil.

Each spread opens as a flat layout with a brief description of the painting and its historical context. As readers pull down the explanatory panel, a three-dimensional rendering pops up, and Monet’s exquisitely detailed flowers, waterlilies, clouds, trees, and people come alive.

Whether readers are appreciating Monet’s masterful use of color, brushstrokes, and light and shadow, or merely savoring the pleasures of the French countryside, this meticulously crafted and engineered book offers a thrilling new way to experience the artistic genius of this Impressionist icon.

Published on Nov 19, 2024 | 10 Pages | 8-2/5 x 10-2/3

by Kit Brooks (Author), Katherine Roeder (Author)

This cleverly designed book about Katsushika Hokusai’s The Sazaidō of Gohyakurakanji and James McNeill Whistler's Variations in Flesh Colour and Green - The Balcony, also includes drawing, collage, coloring and press-out activities.

With a presentation that divides the book into two equal parts, A Tale of Two Balconies investigates the elements that make each of these artworks—both in the collection of the National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution—unique. Exploring the depicted locations of each (in Edo Japan and Victorian England) enables deeper insight as the authors examine the idea of the balcony itself as a construct at once both private and public – creating a view and juxtaposing the different cultural domains both within and beyond the balcony railing.

This stunning book is double-fronted, so readers can begin reading from either side. A carefully-designed centre section includes immersive creative activities in which readers actively engage with the themes of perspective and recollection through their own art-making activities – collage, drawing, colouring, or building a pop-out Hokusai diorama and Victorian Whistler toy theatre.

• Publication date: October 24, 2024
• 172 pages
• Kit Brooks is Curator of Asian Art at the Princeton University Art Museum

• Publication date: May 2, 2024
• 302 pages

This landmark publication accompanies an international touring exhibition devoted to Black figuration in painting from the 1920s to now, featuring artists from Africa and the African diaspora.

Published to accompany a major exhibition at Zeitz MOCAA, CapeTown, When We See Us presents a comprehensive exploration of Black representation through portraiture and figuration, celebrating Black subjectivity and Black consciousness from Pan-African and Pan-Diasporic perspectives.

In the past decade, figurative painting by Black artists has risento a new prominence in the field of contemporary art. This timely and revelatory book highlights the many ways in which artists critically engage with notions of blackness, contributing to the critical discourse on topics such as Pan-Africanism, the Civil Rights Movement, African Liberation and Independence movements, the Anti-Apartheid and Black Consciousness mobilizations, Decoloniality, and Black Lives Matter.

With a primary focus on figurative painting, When We See Us explores how Black artists have imagined, positioned, memorialized, and asserted African and African diasporic experiences from the early 20th century to the present day. Featuring more than 200 works of art―and contributions from well-known writers such as Ken Bugul, Maaza Mengiste, Robin Coste Lewis, and Bill Kouelany―When We See Us is a major contribution to our understanding of Black art that will appeal to anyone interested in modern and contemporary figurative art and Black cultural history.

• Publisher: ‎Thames & Hudson (March 28, 2023)
• Language: ‎English
• Hardcover: ‎336 pages
• Item Weight: ‎4.06 pounds
• Dimensions: ‎8.6 x 1.4 x 11.4 inches

In 1929, Louise Nevelson was a disappointed housewife with a young son, surrounded by New York's vibrant artistic community but unable to fully engage with it. By 1950, she was an artist living on her own, financially dependent on her family, but she had received a glimmer of recognition from the establishment: inclusion in three group shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1980, Nevelson celebrated her second Whitney retrospective. Her work was held in public collections aroundthe world and her massive steel sculptures appeared in public spaces in seventeen states.

The story of Nevelson's artistic, spiritual, even physical transformation (she developed a taste for outrageous outfits and false eyelashes made of mink) is inseparable from major historical and cultural shifts of the twentieth century. Art historian and psychoanalyst Laurie Wilson brings a unique perspective to Nevelson's story, drawing on hours of interviews she conducted with Nevelson and her circle. Over one hundred images, many of them drawn from personal archives and never before published, make this the most comprehensive biography--both in terms of visuals and narrative detail--of this remarkable artist.Format: Flexibound

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0500297371
• ISBN13: 9780500297377
• Release Date: July 2023
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson
• Length: 512 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.4" x 9.1"

The art of the past can seem very far away, obscured both by time and by knotty academic theory. Foregrounding the experience of the contemporary viewer, Look Again shows how this need not be the case. From the spectacular theatrics of Bosch to the harmonious simplicity of Cézanne, Ossian Ward tackles some of history’s greatest art in all its dynamism, horror and beauty. Ward’s simple, ten-step programme acts as an aid to looking, breaking down the often obscure strategies of the Old Masters into intuitive categories – from Art as Honesty to Art as Vision.

Look Again’s novel approach is influenced by John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, but is here updated for the art world of the 21st century. Key to this book is an emphasis on ways not simply of looking at Old Masters, but also of experiencing them. Just as contemporary art should be judged by how it moves us, cajoles us and envelops us, so too can the great paintings of the world be seen as immersive, captivating, even participatory experiences.

Ward does not deny the specific complexities and barriers associated with looking at art from other eras. Instead he offers readers a new formula to help illuminate this kind of art. His method not only provides the viewer with the tools to interpret a work of art, but also assumes that we hold some of this knowledge within ourselves already. In other words, everyone can share the enriching experience of Old Master paintings.

• Format: Flexibound
• Size: 19.6 x 14.8 cm
• Extent: 176 pp
• Publication date: 25 April 2019
• ISBN: 9780500239674

• Pages: 352
• Publisher: Abbeville Publishing Group
• Imprint: Abbeville Press
• Series: Tiny Folio
• Publication Date: 1st July 2004

Edited & Designed by Ian Sternthal

Sternthal Books is proud to present ‘Odili Donald Odita’ – a visually enticing survey that spans over twenty years of Odili Donald Odita’s exciting career. Odili’s vibrant abstract paintings blur the borderlines of American, African, and Western European traditions of abstract paintings, which according to Rob Storr, has led him to “rejuvenate abstract painting 100 years after its invention – and in the process create a culturally syncretic idiom that is all his own.” The book will emphasize the political and aesthetic importance of Odili’s visually astounding paintings and installations by presenting them alongside a trove of accompanying visual materials – including images from photographic archives he has collected, drawings, installations, and geometric studies.

Odili Donald Odita is a hard cover comprehensive monograph of the artist’s work – spanning from his early mixed media collages from the early 1990’s – to his latest three dimensional painting installations and more. Odili’s vibrant abstract paintings blur the borderlines of American, African, and Western European traditions, which according to Rob Storr, has led him to “rejuvenate abstract painting 100 years after its invention – and in the process create a culturally syncretic idiom that is all his own.”

The book’s discreet black and white cover betrays a striking panoply of colors, papers, and formats that make up the book’s 400+ pages. Mixing and layering drawings, geometric studies, paintings, installations, and texts creates momentary connections between different images – echoing Odita’s thirty year artistic pursuit of fusing disparate and separate colors into spiritually unified spaces.

Inspired both by African and American Design, the book mixes his paintings with a trove of materials from the ‘Black Album’, a collection of ads, photographs, and media clippings related to race and Black American culture that he has been collecting for years. This intermixing contextualizes Odita’s abstract expressionism within a political context of struggle, race, and diaspora, resulting in a timely meditation on race in America.

The curatorial essays were laid out on spreads from Ebony Magazine, and while the images and captions were preserved,  the original texts were erased and replaced with new ones, with Odili’s work appearing on smaller shiny papers reminiscent of the detachable mail in subscription advertisements in magazines from the 80’s and 90’s.

Texts by Stamatina Gregory, Gregory Volk, and Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, and a conversation between Odili and Ian Sternthal.

• HardBound sewn signatures
• Silkscreen on cloth
• 22,9 x 30.5 mm, 408 Pages

by Carolyn L. Mazloomi

Contemporary quilt artists trace the path of Black history in the United States with 97 original works exploring important events, places, people, and ideas over 400 years. Arranged in chronological order, quilt themes include the first enslaved people brought to the US by Dutch traders in 1619, the brave souls marching for civil rights, the ascendant influence of African American culture on the American cultural landscape, and the election of the first African American president. Other quilts commemorate and celebrate cultural milestones and memories, such as the first African American teacher, the Buffalo Soldiers, the first black man to play Othello on Broadway, Muhammed Ali, and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The 69 artists who contributed works for this curated collection provide narrative explaining the important stories and histories behind the quilts.

• Size: 8.5in x 11.0in 
• Pages:208
• 97 color images
• Binding: Hardback

by John Gosslee

This one-of-a-kind compendium features a selection of women artists and architects who have made groundbreaking contributions to contemporary art. Profiling an international cross section of artists, 50 Contemporary Women Artists presents fresh perspectives on feminism and notions of cultural power. Using a variety of mediums, the artists in this book address themes of social, cultural, political, environmental, and psychological issues.  Included are works by five MacArthur Foundation Fellows that activate an ongoing dialogue about contemporary practices. Readers receive a unique glimpse of seminal works such as Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, as well as brand-new pieces inspired by the Women’s March on Washington in 2017. Complete with a foreword by Elizabeth Sackler, PhD, this compilation is ideal for educators, students, curators, collectors, and all those who support the arts.

• Size: 8.5in x 11.0in
• Pages:360 
• 334 color illustrations
• Binding: Hardback

by Julie Steiner

A playful room-by-room "bird-watching" guide to the Albert C. Barnes galleries. Rumor has it that Dr. Barnes put a bird in every room of his famed collection. But is this really true, and if so, why? The Barnes Foundation collection offers an astounding array of art, focusing on post-impressionist and early modern masters: Renoir, Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse. However, interspersed among these notable greats is a different kind of collection that incorporates folk art, pottery, furniture, and ironwork from cultures around the world. The instructional collection is built around a philosophy of individual interpretation, and following the birds from one room to another offers you an accessible starting point for uncovering the educational methods Dr. Barnes used to encourage students to look at art. This lighthearted tour weaves art, history, and lessons on the collection into a delightful search for birds hiding in the gallery.

• Size: 8.0in x 8.0in
• Pages:160
• 124 color images
• Binding: Hardback

The second volume in Thames & Hudson’s monographic series on global architect Sir David Adjaye, winner of the 2021 RIBA royal gold medal

Following on from Adjaye – Works: Houses, Pavilions, Installations, Buildings, 1995–2007, published by Thames & Hudson in 2020, this book covers the impressive portfolio of work created by the architect between 2007 and 2015. During the years covered in this book, Adjaye became interested in developing an architecture that was more expansive, taking him outside Europe to work on major projects such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver and the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo. Designing buildings around the globe, including two projects connected with the post-Katrina reconstruction programme in New Orleans, Adjaye carefully tailored his approach to each place, sensitive to the important role architecture plays in affirming a sense of community and identity.

Adjaye: Works 2007–2015 brings together these recent projects and presents them with new analyses and personal insights from the architect, including detailed drawing and site plans and stunning color photography, demonstrating the originality of Adjaye’s talents. 

• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 300
• Artwork: 500 illustrations
• Size: 10.5 in x 10.5 in x 1.2 in
• Published: October 18th, 2022

Wesleyan Poetry Series

A profound and uplifting meditation on the meanings of race and belonging in America

Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (2012)

Smart, grounded, and lyrical, Evie Shockley's the new black integrates powerful ideas about "blackness," past and present, through the medium of beautifully crafted verse. the new black sees our racial past inevitably shaping our contemporary moment, but struggles to remember and reckon with the impact of generational shifts: what seemed impossible to people not many years ago—for example, the election of an African American president—will have always been a part of the world of children born in the new millennium. 

All of the poems here, whether sonnet, mesostic, or deconstructed blues, exhibit a formal flair. They speak to the changes we have experienced as a society in the last few decades—changes that often challenge our past strategies for resisting racism and, for African Americans, ways of relating to one another. The poems embrace a formal ambiguity that echoes the uncertainty these shifts produce, while reveling in language play that enables readers to "laugh to keep from crying." They move through nostalgia, even as they insist on being alive to the present and point longingly towards possible futures. 

Check for the online reader's companion at http://http://thenewblack.site.wesleyan.edu.

• Publication date: March 15, 2012
• Paperback

Wesleyan Poetry Series

Evie Shockley's new poems invite us to dream—and work—toward a more capacious "we"

In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious "we." How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley's poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth.

• Publication date: March 23, 2023
• Paperback

The first extended monograph on Saar, featuring older and more recent works, gorgeously bound in cloth with embossed details

Drawing inspiration from the imagery of African, Caribbean and Latin American folk art as well as found objects and her own upbringing in a multiracial artist family, Los Angeles artist Alison Saar (born 1956) creates works that reflect on the duality of body and spirit within the context of a larger cultural setting, focusing in particular on black womanhood. In life-size wooden sculptures and mixed-media portraits, Saar crafts complex narratives about diasporic identity.

This publication accompanied an exhibition co-organized by the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College in Claremont, California and the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California. Alongside photographic reproductions of Saar’s work, the clothbound catalog contains an interview between Saar and the exhibit’s co-curator, never-before-published photographs from the artist’s childhood and poetry by Camille Dungy, Harryette Mullen and Evie Shockley.

Edited with text and interview by Okwui Enwezor. Foreword by Artur Walther, Jean-Marc Patras. Text by Quentin Bajac, Yves Chatap, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Terry Smith, Claire Staebler, James Thomas.

Autoportrait is the first comprehensive survey of the multifaceted oeuvre of Nigerian photographer Samuel Fosso (born 1962). Since the mid-1970s, Fosso has focused on self-portraiture and performance, envisioning variations of identity in the postcolonial era. From Fosso’s early black-and-white self-portraits from the 1970s to his recent exercises in self-presentation, highlights include the vibrant series Tati (1997), in which he playfully inhabits African and African American characters and archetypes; and the magisterial portraits of African Spirits (2008), where he poses as icons of the pan-African liberation and Civil Rights movements, such as Angela Davis, Martin Luther King, Jr., Patrice Lumumba and Nelson Mandela.

This landmark monograph demonstrates Fosso’s unique departure from the traditions of West African studio photography, established in the 1950s and ’60s by modern masters Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé. By charting his conceptual practice of self-portraiture, and sustained engagement with notions of sexuality, gender and self-representation, this book reveals an unprecedented photographic project.

BOOK FORMAT:
Cloth, 9.5 x 11 in. / 188 pgs / 32 color / 47 bw.

50 Pioneers Defining African Art for the Twenty-First Century

With African artists attracting sizable audience numbers to museums, setting sky-high auction records, and appearing in mainstream press, it has become impossible to overlook the cultural significance of contemporary African art today. Author and curator Osei Bonsu's engaging profiles of leading African artists—along with gorgeous full-color reproductions of their work—introduce readers to a generation of movers and shakers whose innovative artwork reflects on Africa as both an idea and an experience. Using diverse forms, languages, and expressions to articulate what it means to be a part of the world, these artists generate alternate histories and imaginative futures—work that is both personal and political, universal and incredibly specific. Their work helps define contemporary African art as a vast artistic and cultural movement.

The book includes a stellar roster of artists: Amoako Boafo, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Bronwyn Katz—from household names to up-and-coming artists, African Art Now features some of the most exciting artists working today.

Over the past two decades, contemporary African art has become part of the global mainstream, inspiring countless exhibitions, fairs, and auctions around the world. And yet, African art remains overlooked as an area of dedicated study due to continued academic and cultural bias. This book shines a spotlight on the artists whose wide-ranging accomplishments represent the shifting dynamics and boundless possibilities of African art today. 

• Hardcover
• Pages: 240
• Publication Date: 10/18/2022