After years of making large charcoal drawings, James Drake (born 1946) found himself making drawings that were predominately white and airy, from which he extracted images using an exacto knife. The red charcoal drawings also collected here were made in response to the white cut out drawings. Published on the heels of a successful retrospective, this is the first monograph on Drake’s drawings. Read More
Lesley Dill is one of the most prominent artists working at the intersection of language and art. Experimenting with a wide range of tactile materials, she fuses poetry and images to create evocative mixed-media artworks and performances.
Inspired by her two-year sojourn in India and the illuminating aspects of diverse faith traditions, Dill interprets relationships between the physical and the spiritual. Her expressive artworks, layered with multiple meanings, also reference nature and human identity.
This book focuses on two bodies of the artist’s work: metallic sculptures such as Shimmer and the drawing-and-textile based installation, Encountering Sister Gertrude Morgan, which interprets the life of the New Orleans missionary and folk artist. Unified by layers of words, figures, and symbolic imagery, the artworks underline Dill’s desire to render transcendental experience into form. Read More
The work of southern artists is often infused with a deep sense of place and time. Whether inspired by the small town of the artist’s birth, the land, the waters-be it river, lake, or sea-the music, the people, or even the animals, that sense of place shows up in subtle, surprising, or literal ways, unique to each artist. One World, Two Artists shows how the Gulf Coast was a shared source of inspiration to two native artists: John Alexander and Walter Anderson. Read More
Overwhelmed by the destruction of Hurricane Katrina, Texas-based painter David Bates has chronicled the people and places along America’s bucolic Gulf Coast, making portraits of the people dispossessed by the disaster. Read More
For over 40 years, American artist James Surls (born 1943) has used sculpture and drawing as a personal language to document his life journey. Read More
Debbie Fleming Caffery has been making photographs of the people and culture of her native Louisiana for more than 30 years; this is her fourth book. Read More
Elemore Morgan, Jr. was a constant presence at the foot of PASA’s stages, drawing quietly as he observed and absorbed the great performances that have marked PASA’s 20 year history. Drawn to the Stage collects over 50 of these unique, rarely seen works in one simple presentation that reflects the generosity of spirit that characterized Elemore’s artistry and his leadership of the arts community in south Louisiana. Read More
In late September 2005, Robert Polidori traveled to New Orleans to record the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina and by the city’s broken levees. He found the streets deserted, and, without electricity, eerily dark. The next day he began to photograph, house by house: “All the places I went in, the doors were just open. They had been opened by what I collectively call “the army”, of maybe 20 National Guards from New Hampshire, 15 policemen from Minneapolis, 20 firefighters from New York… On maybe half of them or a third of them that I went in, I think that the occupants had been there prior. And some of them did leave certain funeral-like mementos before they left. Maybe right after the waters receded they had the chance to just–to go back to their place and just see, and realize there’s nothing worth saving.” Read More
An internationally acclaimed artist whose work has been honored with inclusion in both the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial, James Drake has explored political, social, and universal themes through the media of sculpture, video, installation, photography, and drawing. James Drake, the first monograph devoted to the artist, surveys thirty-five years of Drake’s work up to 2007.
Many of the works reproduced in James Drake reflect the artist’s preoccupation with borders. Some have to do with the political border between the United States and Mexico and the inherent social and psychological tensions of people living in its extreme and unique environment. Other works explore the internal boundaries that people experience as a result of attitudes, prejudices, power, control, and arrogance. Jimmy Santiago Baca’s narrative poem Huitzilopochtli, a personal response to Drake’s work, provides a verbal counterpart to the artist’s theme of border-crossing. Read More
Dale Chihuly is the most famous and influential artist working in glass today. For more than four decades, he has been the leading figure in this unique art form, fusing traditional craft with fine art, fabrication with the natural environment. Now, in his first major San Francisco exhibition, Chihuly displays a vast array of artworks from many of his signature series (including the Baskets, Seaforms, Persians, Venetians, and more) at both the de Young and Legion of Honor museums. A career-spanning biographical essay by curator Timothy Anglin Burgard and stunning color photography of the works will captivate Chihuly’s myriad fans both new and old. Read More
The exuberant paintings and sculptures of maverick Texas artist David Bates (born 1952) combine modernist ideas about visual representation with American eclecticism, resulting in a body of work that is at once sophisticated, soulful and accessible. From his lush early paintings of the Arkansas nature reserve Grassy Lake, to his figural reliefs and sculptures created at a bronze-casting foundry in Washington, and his most recent body of work depicting survivors of Hurricane Katrina, this catalogue provides an in-depth look at the life and work of a unique and significant American artist and serves as the first full monograph of Bates’s work. The book is published in association with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which holds many of his works in its permanent collection. Read More
This book presents three decades of artwork by John Alexander (b. 1945), who draws upon the rich imagery of his East Texas heritage to create art with a national impact. Read More
This is a stunning portfolio of glass artist Dale Chihuly’s awesome creations, including his critically acclaimed Baskets, Seaforms, Chandeliers and Towers. Read More
In a powerful new body of photographs, sculpture and installation, John Waters continues his investigations of film history and contemporary politics. Primarily known as the filmmaker behind such cult classics as Pink Flamingos, Polyester and Pecker, Waters has been making “fine” art since the early 1990s. In it, he tackles both cinematic themes and political events by building narratives, frame by frame, from early commercial films. In this publication, Waters shares the method by which he constructs each work as if he were making a personal guidebook, so that his snapshots, color photographs and handwritten notes indicating composition are re-created as if in their original plastic organizational sleeves. Neither the art world, celebrity miscreants, politicians or Waters himself are spared in these incisive new works. An essay by Brenda Richardson examines Waters’s history, as well as each work, in brief and brilliant detail. Read More
For the past ten years, Birch has been documenting the African American culture of his native New Orleans in large-scale sculpture and drawings that emphasize body language, dress codes, and everyday rituals. His guileless polychrome sculptures evoke both social history and emotion. His use of talismans give the viewer a window to another time, be it through old construction nails symbolizing power and strength to a small West African paper mach, stool that stands apart as a symbol of nobility. Dedicated to the children of New Orleans, this is the first publication to examine Birch’s career whose re-imagining of African and Southern folk art inspires thought provoking discussions as well as contemporary sculpture and design. It includes two essays and an interview with the artist, as well as color reproductions of key works dating from 1968-2004. Read More
This beautifully illustrated book, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston, captures an extraordinarily creative period in Surls’s career-the two decades he lived and worked in Splendora, Texas. Read More
A retrospective of lively work from the New Orleans artist. Ida Rittenberg Kohlmeyer became one of the most prominent abstract artists in the South and started her career late, turning to art in her late thirties in search of a deeper meaning and purpose in life. She was primarily known as a New Orleans artist. She moved from an early figurative style in paintings of children to Abstract-Expressionism, influenced by a summer’s study in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with Hans Hofmann. In her lifetime she had major exhibitions at the National Museum of Women, the Mint Museum (Charlotte, NC), New Orleans Museum of Art and the High Museum of Art. Read More
A lush appreciation of the African American printmaker, sculptor, and painter acclaimed as one of New Orleans’s finest living artists. Read More
Powerful photographs by internationally acclaimed photographers Anderson & Low of young men and women who are training for both the sports field and the battlefield while studying at America’s three famed military academies – West Point, Annapolis and Colorado Springs. Arresting juxtapositions of cadets in their military dress – from formal to fatigues – and in the uniforms of their chosen sports, including swimming, track events, football, gymnastics and basketball, among others, reveal subtle similarities and differences between the roles assumed by such disciplined and dedicated individuals. A modern interpretation of the hero as represented by the classically inspired iconography of the athlete and the warrior. Read More
Both Polly Joseph and Debbie Fleming Caffery are women of Southern Louisiana and together they formed an intimate, isolated bond initated by photography and matured into an unlikely friendship. The details of Polly’s life, present and past, became a collection of fables Caffery drank in like the dust-filled air and the deep, articulated shadows that surrounded them. Caffery’s photographs transmit mystery and truth through the story, body, and home of Polly: they are a collective portrait of unspeakable power Read More
James Surls is one of America’s foremost living sculptors and one of the most fascinating creative forces on the international art scene in the last several decades. This volume is the first full-length examination of the art and life of James Surls. In a seminal essay, art historian Mark Thistlethwaite discusses Surls’s personal history, beginning in East Texas and continuing in the Colorado meadows. Read More
Moroles Granite Sculpture by Jan Ernst Adlmann, Peter C. Marzio (Introduction), Herring Press Inc.: 2004, 255pp. (hardcover) Over 328 illustrations in color, 50 black and white drawings. Introduction by Peter C. Marzio, Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Biography, List of Exhibitions including a Chronological Catalog. Read More
Once crowned The Pope of Trash by William Burroughs, and now hailed as the genius behind the smash-hit Broadway musical Hairspray, John Waters (b. 1946) is not only a controversial director, but also a powerful, perceptive visual artist. This book, published on the occasion of his first major museum exhibition, surveys his still photographic works made over the past decade, and also features stills from his seldom-seen no-budget films and objects from Waters’s personal collection that reflect his fascination with photographic imagery, the mass media, and outrageous expressions of American popular culture. Read More
Ida Kohlmeyer: Systems of Color – A chronology , bibliography, and listing of exhibitions, collections, and commissions complete this comprehensive treatment of an important second-generation abstract expressionist, and one of the first of a generation of influential women artists to emerge in the second half of the 20th century. Read More
The first complete monograph on sculptor Richard Jolley, an artist best known for his works in glass, but also an experimenter with paper and mixed-media installations. Read More
The fascinating work of a figurative artist whose meticulously detailed paintings and sculptural assemblages present icons of popular culture as well as people from Louisiana’s diverse population. Read More
Chihuly Drawing chronicles five decades of Dale Chihuly’s work on paper. This dynamic collection is a fascinating study of variety. Many of the drawings are drenched in thick, bold layers. Others are more elusive—just a hint of form sketched with a fistful of pencils or a confidently manipulated charcoal. Over the years his style has evolved, becoming more abstract, more elaborate, and, in some cases, much larger. But there are no rules; a technique that Chihuly favored a decade before may resurface again. The excitement of Chihuly’s work on paper is in its unpredictability, and that in two dimensions Chihuly is free to let his grandest schemes come to fruition. Above all, Chihuly’s work on paper revels in the monumental creativity that is essentially Chihuly. Read More
One of the most accomplished artists of the twentieth century, Paul Cadmus is best known for his provocative satires of American life. He first gained national recognition in 1934 when his bawdy painting The Fleet’s In! was barred from a Public Works of Art exhibition in Washington, D.C. For more than six decades following, Cadmus led a career as a meticulous craftsman devoted to Renaissance-era traditions of figurative realism. But his drawings of the male nude, which always formed the heart of his work, were often overlooked. Read More
Debbie Fleming Caffery’s images can be seen as articles of faith. The relentless insistence of subject and symbol in these images is assuredly their greatest strength. This vigor results from a tension that can be both visual and emotional. In this marshy no-man’s-land between description and illusion, her photographs serve as an able guide to truths that are better sensed than seen. Read More
Artist Dale Chihuly’s forty-year career continues to surprise and astound as he radically transforms perceptions about the medium of glass. In this beautifully illustrated book, you will see Chihuly’s extraordinary installations at the Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago. He has taken glass well beyond the traditional display case, out into nature itself. Read More
Over the last two decades, photographer Greg Gorman has carved out a classically refined style that is uniquely his own. In his portraits of Streisand, DiCaprio, De Niro, and Travolta, his fine art work, and his major ad campaigns, Gorman’s images suggest a mastery of the medium that few have rivaled. Continuing his exploration of the male nude, Just Between Us is a highly charged work focused exclusively on one model. During a year of shooting, an unusually collaborative relationship evolved between artist and subject. What unfolds is a photographic narrative unfettered by convention — a bold compilation of images unmatched for its candor and sexuality. 250 photographs are featured. Read More
From the resplendent towers in Chihuly in the Light of Jerusalem 2000 to the overhead sculpture made of more than two thousand handblown forms in the lobby of the Bellagio Resort in Las Vegas, the audacity and inventiveness of Dale Chihuly’s vision come across on every page of this 348-page volume. A splendid companion to Chihuly, which offers a general overview, this new book, with its focus on his most imposing creations and its essays by Barbara Rose and Dale M. Lanzone, will delight all art lovers, collectors, curators, and artists. Read More
Three years ago, photographer Greg Gorman created for powerHouse Books the most personal work of his career. This epic artist’s project features carefully selected young men—not big or overly built—who exemplify for Gorman a perfected state, allowing him to frame grace, beauty, and elegance in the form of the male nude. Included amongst the 212 portraits are many of Gorman’s friends and acquaintances, as well as professional models, many of whom had never posed nude before. The initial release of the book went on to become a best-seller. Read More
John Waters, famed underground director of such outrageous, cult classics as Pink Flamingos, Polyester, Hairspray, Cry Baby and Serial Mom, “re-directs” forgotten art films, obscure melodramas, lurid pot-boilers and his own early films in the form of photographic story boards made up of stills. The resulting work is this brilliant twist-off from Waters’ absurd, comic view of life, and the images are as funny and delightfully edged as the very best of his films. Waters shakes the fantasies of normalcy into a new, often delicious, taste of Heaven. 165 photos, 150 in color. Read More
For more than 30 years, Dale Chihuly’s work, principally in glass (but occasionally including such unconventional media as neon and ice), has challenged traditional distinctions between craft and art. Chihuly’s oeuvre is notable for its vibrancy of color, the boldness of its shape and execution, and, in recent years, its studied mimicry of natural forms, from cacti to seaweed and jellyfish. Read More
Bound like an artist’s sketchbook this book documents the culmination of this amazing artistic odyssey that took the artist from his Seattle Boathouse hot shop to Nuutajarvi, Finland; Waterford, Ireland; Monterrey, Mexico; and finally Venice to blow glass. In the factories in those locations, Chihuly and his team of American glass blowers worked with native artisans more accustomed to making functional objects than art. Together they created the 14 chandeliers that graced the campos and canals of Venice for a remarkable time in September 1996. Read More
Lin Emery: Borrowing The Forces Of Nature by Edward Lucie-Smith, New Orleans Museum of Art, 1996 Read More
Paul Cadmus by Lincoln Kirstein, Paul Cadmus, Pomegranate: March 1992, 144 pp. (paperback) Paul Cadmus has worked over six decades in a style that transcends fashion. A master of classic design, form and technique, he has created an impressive body of work reflecting his own unique and powerful vision. Following solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan [...] Read More
These works by American artist and painter David Bates show his affinity with the people and surroundings of the Arkansas and East Texas region. Read More
Lin Emery
Inspired by the forms and forces of nature, Lin Emery’s gracefully undulating kinetic culpture—constructed of highly polished abstract metal shapes—adorn museums and outdoor public spaces around the world. “I love the natural movement of the trees on the levees, the river, and anything in nature,” Emery says. The flowing motion of her structures are also propelled by natural forces; she began using water to power her structures 30 years ago and later utilized wind to also generate movement in her creations. The resulting revolving, twirling, and linked elements evoke plants, trees, clouds, or water. This publication covers the life and majestic sculptures created during a career of nearly 60 years from her education working in clay under Ossip Zadkine in Paris, to her move in the 1950s to New Orleans and her explorations in bronze, aluminum, nickel, and other metals. Emery has been a dedicated student to the craft of metal working since the beginning of her career. In the early years when the metal working studios in New Orleans wouldn’t accept women into their program, she went up to New York to learn welding techniques and to develop her skills. Read More