Wired: Contemporary Zulu Telephone Wire Baskets

This limited edition is produced on the occasion of Wired: Contemporary Zulu Telephone Wire Baskets (2025).

Custom wire sculpture (choice of color) in handmade fabric box
Designed by Marisa Fick-Jordaan in collaboration with Zulu telephone wire artists
Edition of 12
$2,500

All editions are accompanied by a copy of Wired. All proceeds directly support the title’s production and programming.

Learn more about the book here.

[His work] is full of large, ambitious, brilliantly executed mosaics full of so many disparate cultural references, snarling faces and masks and intimations of violence that it can initially be hard to focus.[…] To say that he might have discovered his artistic destiny is putting it mildly.

— Roberta Smith, The New York Times

The inaugural monograph of multidisciplinary artist Cameron Welch presents a vivid, comprehensive look into a young artist’s practice. Welch’s work has straddled sculpture, collage, and textiles, but in early 2017, he shifted to mosaic as his primary medium. As a child, the artist was introduced to mosaic by his grandmother, an experience that has a lasting impact on the way he works the age-old medium to piece together disparate materials and histories. Welch treats mosaic as a physical manifestation of intertextuality, referring to the colliding contexts he unearths in the work as a kind of “infiltration.”

While Welch’s chosen medium evokes ancient traditions, the effect of his work is decidedly contemporary. His chaotic, jumbled compositions speak to the same anxiety felt in the Information Age, an era when unlimited information is available at the tap of a screen. Amidst the pictorial chaos of Welch’s mosaics, the figures who emerge range from familiar to foreign, comical to heroic. Frequently depicting himself and figures from his own life, Welch sheds light on unsung histories within the intricate topology of his creations. An incisive essay by Greek and Roman Art scholar Alexis Belis helps readers contextualize Welch’s work within historical and contemporary creative practice.

While success for an artist is often measured by their ability to focus full-time on creating art, this book attests to the way day jobs can spur creative growth by providing artists with unexpected materials and methods…or a predictable paycheck that enables unpredictable ideas.
— Veronica Roberts

Of all the jobs I’ve had, my favorite day and night job is being an artist.
— Howardena Pindell

Day Jobs examines the overlooked impact of day jobs on the visual arts. Success for artists is often measured by their ability to quit a day job and focus full time on their practice. Yet these jobs can often spur creative growth by providing artists with new materials and methods, hands-on knowledge of a specific industry that becomes an area of artistic investigation, or a predictable paycheck and structure that enable unpredictable ideas.

The book comprises thirty-nine chapters, one for each included artist, with images of their work, commissioned essays, and interviews. Included are creative pioneers such as Larry Bell, Mark Bradford, Tishan Hsu, Howardena Pindell, and Julia Scher, who offer firsthand accounts of how their day jobs—as a frame shop technician, hair stylist, word processor, museum employee, and security systems installer, respectively—altered their artistic trajectories in surprisingly profound ways.

By examining the impact of day jobs on artists, Day Jobs seeks to demystify artistic production and overturn the romanticized concept of the artist sequestered in their studio, waiting for inspiration to strike. Conceived as a corrective to traditional art historical narratives, this book encourages us to more openly acknowledge the precarious and generative ways that economic and creative pursuits are intertwined.

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.

They invite us into a space where objects, stories, and people are made and remade; restored and reenvisioned every day of our lives.

– Margo Jefferson

Edited by Frank Maresca
Texts by Margo Jefferson, Faith Ringgold, Lyle Rexer
Photography by Ellen McDermott
Collection of Deborah Neff

Clothbound with jacket
12 x 9.75 inches
232 pages / 44 color images / 32 duotone images
ISBN: 9781934435892

Co-published with the Mingeo International Museum

Trade: $45.00
Now Rare: $250 $500