Tomas van Houtryve: 36 Views of Notre Dame

I am increasingly interested in the residual power of the past to inhabit material remains…Manifest is an effort to seek out the artifacts and material evidence of the American construct and representation of race.

— Wendel A. White

Manifest | Thirteen Colonies is the culmination of a multiyear journey by photographer Wendel A. White to find and document African American material culture in the libraries, museums, and archives of the thirteen original English colonies and Washington, DC. This “personal reliquary of Black agency and racial oppression stored in public collections” includes both singular objects connected to significant figures (a lock of Frederick Douglass’s hair, Malcolm X’s tape recorder) and more quotidian materials (a hair straightening comb, a pressed corsage). Given the same photographic treatment—each object centered on a stark black background and captured with a shallow depth of field—the distinction between the “significant” and the “quotidian” dissolves, as White makes it clear they are all important pieces of forensic evidence of Black life and history in the United States.

New essays by Cheryl Finley, Ilisa Barbash, and Leigh Raiford provide historical and sociological context for the objects in White’s images, while conversations with Deborah Willis and Brenda Dione Tindaldelve into White’s personal history, his life as a photographer, and the bodies of work that led to Manifest | Thirteen Colonies.

… his masterpiece, the grandest exploration of pure color and form in a seven-decade career spent testing the boundaries of both.

— M. H. Miller, The New York Times

Envisioned by Ellsworth Kelly as a site for joy and contemplation, Austin is a cornerstone of the Blanton Museum of Art’s permanent collection and a new icon for the city in which it stands. This comprehensive book provides a thorough look at the project, from its inception to its current position as one of the artist’s most important and enduring works. Though mostly abstract, Kelly’s work is deeply rooted in his love of nature and his close observation of the world around him, and Austin’s design elements are no exception. 

An essay by Carter E. Foster, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Blanton Museum of Art, sheds light on how Austin fits with Kelly’s wider practice.

This book is now RARE | $150

Her series question the notion of gender and the customs of our Western culture.

– Fisheye Magazine

In The Hunt, artist Céline Bodin creates a brief encyclopedia of female hairstyles across various periods in time, within the framework of Western culture. The series reflects upon the pictorial qualities of hair: studying its materiality, its ability to convey identity, also recalling the Victorian “hair medallion”—a small, decorative keepsake made from an ornate curl of a loved one’s hair, a pre-photographic memento that draws connections between portraiture, identity, and memory. The figures appear as ornate statues, each characterized by the aesthetic associations and revisited stereotypes ofx their hairstyle. The anonymity of the images presented in The Hunt activates the mind’s associative aptitude, drawing upon one’s own fantasies and projections of sensuality, innocence, order, freedom, frivolity, and social rank. Echoing classical art, these images refer to a mystical icon rather than presenting a portrait of an individual.

Learn more about the accompanying limited edition HERE.

With his pictures, he homes in on the historical amnesia that envelops not just the Mexican-American War but so much else of America’s past, effectively enabling our new era of intolerance.

– Simon Romero, New York Times

There is no photographic record of the period when Mexico ruled what is now the American West. To visualize the people and places from the remarkable yet unseen Mexican era, photographer Tomas van Houtryve photographed the region with glass plates and a nineteenth-century wooden camera. Van Houtryve pairs portraits of direct descendants of early inhabitants of the West—mestizo, Afro-Latin, indigenous, Crypto-Jewish—with photographs of landscapes along the original border and architecture from the Mexican period. This book challenges dominant Western mythologies and questions the role that photographs (both present and missing) have played in shaping the identity of the West.

This book has four covers, each featuring a different portrait on the front and a landscape on the back. Trade copies are chosen at random; for signed copies, please choose either Bernadette, Dorothy, Gomeo, or Nathan below.