Albert Frey: Inventive Modernist

I think John Sonsini may be the greatest portrait painter in the country.
— David Pagel, Los Angeles Times

What I want is for the portrait to be like a thumbprint on a water glass—a broad reminder that someone has been there.
— John Sonsini

When art critic David Pagel realized he had written five reviews about John Sonsini over the past thirty years, this book project was born. Even though he had been covering the work of the Los Angeles-based painter for three decades, they had never met until they began collaborating on this project. The unique, intimate compilation brings together an extensive essay by Pagel—including facsimile reproductions of the original five articles—along with illustrations, plates, and archival pieces that cover Sonsini’s artistic trajectory, from early works to his most recent watercolors and large-scale commissions. Broad Reminders provides a rambling, joyful, engaging look into the world of art and artists, critics, and creators.

LeWitt’s work calls our attention to the disparity between the world of language and that of objects and actions. By focusing on the disjunction between these terms, LeWitt bridged the gap between Minimalism and Conceptual art.

— Saul Ostrow, BOMB

Sol LeWitt: Not to Be Sold for More Than $100 explores the little-known but fascinating body of conceptualist pioneer Sol LeWitt’s folded, torn, and cut paper works, which he created from approximately 1971 to 1980. LeWitt referred to these works as the “R” drawings (for rip) and also as “hundred dollar drawings,” since he wanted them to be sold for $100 in perpetuity. “His wall drawings were already selling for thousands of dollars, so he wanted to have some artwork that everybody could buy,” notes Jason Rulnick. Thanks to extensive research throughout various private and public collections around the world, this volume includes over 100 color plates. In the high-flying commerciality of the contemporary art world, LeWitt’s intention and foresight for this body of work resonates more than ever.

…Corday aligns her compositions to the scale of the cosmos, somehow always connected to the out-there. She constantly reminds us that we, and the eyes and skin with which we might perceive her sculpture, are made of stardust. There’s no real difference between the materiality of the cosmos and ourselves.

This monograph covers the past twenty years of New York-based artist Christine Corday’s practice. Corday combines her interests in the sciences and fine arts to paint, sculpt, draw and design. Her artistic approach consists of manipulation of matter into different states, producing massive sculptures that viewers are meant to experience through touch, leaving memories on the surface of her work. 

As an artist, I give images form, making breath visible. While painting, writing, and working with glass, I pay attention to the possibly transformative gift of an image.

— Judy Tuwaletstiwa

Near White Sands, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, at 5:29:45 am Mountain War Time, a nuclear fireball sucked the white sand of the Jornada del Muerto desert high into a still dark sky. The melted sand returned to the earth as a rain of molten glass. Scientists named these glass shards Trinitite, after the site, Trinity. At the time, artist Judy Tuwaletstiwa was 4 years old. Haunted by the specter the United States released in detonating atomic bombs in New Mexico, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tuwaletstiwa turned to sand and fire to explore this primal creative/destructive act. 

The artist writes: “The raw material that becomes glass holds an interaction of wind, water, fire and earth, the organic creative process lived over geologic time. This transformative process continues to live in my studio through how I work with glass.” A follow-up book to her sold-out Mapping Water (2007), Glass weaves a story of her discoveries and explorations while working with glass over the past four years based on her work over the past 45 years in fiber, paint and writing. Tuwaletstiwa’s use of glass on canvas and paper is at once refined and surprising—a truly revolutionary response to a well-known medium. The highly personal combination of text and images in this book bridges fine art and craft, technology and nature, the political and the aesthetic, the conceptual and the material.