Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Billboards

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.

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.

wild and playful, full of surprises and gifts in every page.
i touch it, as a living animal.
let’s pray the deer will help us bring back the dance.

— Cecilia Vicuña

Inspired initially by Jerome Rothenberg’s translation Flower World Variations, which Cecilia Vicuña first encountered in 1985, Deer Book brings together nearly forty years of the artist’s poetry, “poethical” translations, and drawings related to cosmologies and mythologies surrounding the deer, and sacrificial dance in cultures around the world.

Woven like one of her quipu installations, Vicuña’s texts—which include original compositions in Spanish as well as English translations by Daniel Borzutzky—become meditations on translation, not just of the sacred nature of this animal but on how our understandings of ceremony and ritual are transformed, by this ongoing process. Taken as inspiration rather than conundrum, the impossibility of translation opens up poetic possibilities for Vicuña as she continues her lifelong exploration into the nature of communication across eras and distant lands, languages and shared symbols within Indigenous spiritualities.

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.