Arturo Herrera: Works 1992-2024

Blending art and design in a multitude of mediums and integrating references to Black cultural history with the modern tradition of abstraction, Howard Smith is a crucial addition to the story of Western art.

— Adam Lerner / Director, Palm Springs Art Museum

This volume is the first significant monograph dedicated to the multifaceted practice of Howard Smith, a Black artist, designer, and collector born in the United States who spent most of his creative life in Finland, where he is more well known.

Smith worked across media—cut paper, screenprints, wood, metal, textiles, ceramics, and found objects—always balancing his life as an artist with his work in the commercial realm, which included designing interiors, murals, curtains, and tableware. Drawing on numerous influences and pictorial languages, including Finnish informalism, mid-century modernism, the Black Power movement in the US, and African masks, Smith developed a polyglot vocabulary and aesthetic sensibility that permeated all of his work regardless of the context, transcending boundaries between media, between the art and design worlds, and between the two countries he called home.

Howard Smith is a bilingual publication with essays by both American and Finnish scholars appearing in both English and Finnish. The book contains conversations with Ken Erwin (a close friend of Smith) and Erna Aaltonen, Smith’s widow, providing a more intimate glimpse into the life of this artist-designer, who, until recently, has gone largely unrecognized in the US.

Breaking the Binding provides the definitive volume on an influential yet under-studied artist and contributes to the growing field of scholarship on contemporary Latinx and Conceptual art.

Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding is the first major publication devoted to the career of this seminal Latinx artist, who was born in El Paso, TX, in 1937. Accompanying her first museum career retrospective (Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, March 16-August 13, 2023), this volume surveys the artist’s decades of colorful photo and text-based artworks, book projects, large-scale installations, public works, and unpublished, associated archival materials. Color images and scholarly texts illuminate the artist’s themes—childhood learning and perception, bicultural and bilingual experience, youthful slips of mind and tongue—and her often playful, first-person approach using conceptual tools. Resulting artworks are at once intimate and cerebral, analytical and joyful—reflecting the complexities of childhood, especially on a bicultural and bilingual border. Alongside images, the book features a conversation between Álvarez Muñoz and longtime interlocuter and friend Roberto Tejada, as well as essays by the exhibition co-curators Kate Green and Isabel Casso, and Josh Franco, Head of Collecting at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

The domestic heart of Isermann’s design-oriented paintings, sculptures, and installations beats in ways not always immediately evident but nonetheless essential to the art’s success. Sometimes it sneaks up when least expected.

– Christopher Knight

A comprehensive monograph spanning the forty-year career of Palm Springs–based, queer artist Jim Isermann, this title shows the artist’s first twenty years of extensive, chronological research of postwar art and design filtered through popular culture and consumerism, followed by twenty years of site-specific public projects and a studio practice of labor-intensive painting, sculpture, and the occasional product design project.

In 1980, there were no guidebooks to California design—or what we now call “Mid-Century Modern.” Isermann constructed his own timeline, object by object, from thrift stores, flea markets and swap meets, making bodies of work that included latch hook rugs paired with painting, stained glass window panels, and handsewn fabric wall hangings. By 1999, the artist had his first computer, and so began the second twenty years of his career, with complex digitally designed patterns that found their form in commercially manufactured modules. Isermann continues to be inspired by the unpredictable, serendipitous moments that breathe life into his work.

“…a sculptor and painter of an interior world, radiant with the innocence of childhood, steeped in the darkness of loss, ever unsettled.”

— Leah Ollman, Los Angeles Times

Artwork, Archival notes, and Introduction by Enrique Martínez Celaya
Essay by Daniel A. Siedell
Texts by Matthew Biro, Peter Boswell, Michael W. Darling, John Felstiner, Ivan Gaskell, Thomas McEvilley, Charles Merewether, Frances K. Pohl, Mary Rakow, Michael Slenske, Abigail Solomon-Godeau

Hardcover with jacket
9 x 12 inches
400 pages / 293 images
ISBN: 9781942185055

Rare - $150