Howard Smith

Albert Frey was in love with the desert and with architecture. By fully integrating his designs with nature in the small desert town of Palm Springs, Frey’s work became iconic on an international scale.
— Brad Dunning

A comprehensive volume on Swiss-American architect Albert Frey (1903-1998), Inventive Modernist tracks the scope and significance of Frey’s career, from his early days in Paris working with Le Corbusier to his rise as the iconic architect of Palm Springs. His unique “simple but severe” style of Desert Modernism cemented his legacy as one of the most influential architects, not only in California, but also in the United States and the world.

With full access to Frey’s various archives, the book provides many rare and previously unexhibited architectural models, drawings, films, photographs, and furniture, and offers an exceptional visual guide that goes far beyond the mere documentation of finished buildings. New academic research, in-depth essays, and a thorough, illustrated listing of the architect’s projects between 1925 and 1997, serve to contextualize Frey’s relevance today while securing his importance as a twentieth-century architectural master. Published to coincide with a far-reaching exhibition at Palm Springs Art Museum, Albert Frey: Inventive Modernist presents a scrupulously researched and lavishly illustrated publication on the architect’s life and work.

For all our sakes, I hope Deborah Roberts continues to stake a claim, through her work, for a more expansive view of Black children.

– Dawoud Bey

Deborah Roberts: 20 Years of Art/Work provides the definitive look at the artist’s practice over the past two decades. With newly commissioned texts and a thorough dive into Roberts’ archive, this monograph offers a comprehensive view of one of today’s most significant artists and social observers. An extensive plate section is accompanied by a personal, heartfelt foreword from Dawoud Bey on “the tragic mischaracterization of Black children”; an insightful essay from Ekow Eshun on the social and political histories of innocence, race, and the fractured nature of the contemporary Black experience; a celebratory tribute from Carolyn Jean Martin on the musicality, humility, and generosity of Roberts’ practice; and a free-ranging conversation between Roberts and Sarah Elizabeth Lewis.

Since the beginning of her artistic career, otherness has been at the center of Roberts’ consciousness. Her early ideals of race and beauty were shaped by and linked through Renaissance art and fashion magazines— mythical, heroic, beautiful, and powerful images that embodied a particular status not afforded equally to anyone Roberts knew. Influencing the way she viewed herself and other African Americans, those images led her to investigate the way their identities had been imagined and shaped by societal interpretations of beauty. Having one’s identity dismantled, marginalized and regulated to non-human status demanded action. This led Roberts to critically engage image-making in art history and pop-culture, and ultimately grapple with whatever power and authority these images have over the female figure.  

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.

Kyle Meyer’s project Interwoven is the perfect marriage of subject matter and process.

– Aline Smithson, Lenscratch

Kyle Meyer creates richly tactile artworks as conceptually layered and complicated as they are visually lush and intricate. In this debut monograph, Meyer’s portraits from his Interwoven series reflect an interest in infusing digital photography with traditional Swazi crafts and in giving voice to silenced members of the LGBTQ community, who are marginalized in Eswatini. Tension between the necessity of the individuals to hide their queerness for basic survival and their desire to express themselves openly inform both the subject and the means of fabricating Meyer’s unique works. 

Each work from the Interwoven series is labor-intensive, taking days or sometimes weeks to complete. Meyer often photographs his subjects wearing a traditional head wrap made from a vibrantly colored textile. He then produces a large-scale print of the portrait and hand-shreds the photograph, together with the fabric from the head wrap, weaving the strips into a complexly patterned, three-dimensional work. With the final portrait, Meyer presents each person’s individuality and beauty while using the fabric as a screen to protect their identity. Included in each copy of this book, you will find a unique piece of fabric torn from the remnants of the Interwoven project. It is intended to serve as a bookmark.