Books
Barbara Brandon-Croft’s Comics Tell It Like It Is
Where I’m Coming From was the first nationally syndicated comics strip by a Black woman cartoonist.
book reviews
Books
Artist, Activist, and Ex-Nun Corita Kent Gets a New Monograph
As a nun who embraced both pop culture and contemporary art, Corita Kent refracted the messages of religion through the populist medium of printmaking, leaving a legacy of vibrant art that is just now being fully explored. A new book from Prestel, Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent, published in
Books
The Grotesque Beauty of Wangechi Mutu
Culled from old medical illustrations and National Geographic, pornographic, motorcycle, and fashion magazine clippings, Wangechi Mutu's writhing female figures have a dangerous beauty to them, one that's grotesque and alluring all at once. A traveling exhibition — recently closed at Duke's Nasher M
Books
Five Decades of Tough Love and Leather
In Nancy Grossman: Tough Life Diary (Prestel, 2012), performer Elizabeth Streb relays an anecdote about artist Nancy Grossman startling her by wearing a monkey fur jacket. It's one of those images that has an unsettling, visceral nature to it, like striding through life in a skin ripped from another
Books
Grafting Graffiti Style Onto Skin
Graffiti and tattoos seem like total opposities. One is ephemeral, lasting only until it's painted over by the city or other writers, the other is forever, or at least unless you decide to rip the ink back out of your skin. Yet there's been abundant crossover in the aesthetic style, but what's more
Books
An Appreciation for the Often Hilarious, Usually Horrible, World of Bad Graffiti
Who cares about bad graffiti or street art? The spray paint scrawls of ill-chosen tag names ("Piggy Nasty," "Pony Tail," "Tricky Trout, Jr."), reckless vulgarity (penises and boobs drawn on absolutely everything), and sad drawings that barely shape into the animal, face, or whatever they're trying t
Books
Irving Harper, a Mid-Century Designer Whose Playful Paper Art Deserves A Look
You've probably seen Irving Harper's work even if you don't know his name. His "Ball Clock" made for the Howard Miller Clock Company is an icon of mid-century Atomic Age design; his Marshmallow Sofa, created in the 1950s/60s for Herman Miller, is a continuously popular and curious piece of furniture
Books
Exploring Gender in an Unexpected Package
Jai Arun Ravine’s The Spiderboi Files: Volume 1 is a careful, intentional work of book art with themes that reverberate delicately through the book’s physical structure. Its content rattles a cage of constructs: commercialism, California and gender identity.