Rhyming text and photographs show that art is much more than just what can be hung on a wall or set on a pedestal. By the author of No One Saw. Simultaneous.

A MASTERFUL BOOK ABOUT BREATHING LIFE INTO ART AND ART INTO LIFE "Stephen Nachmanovitch's The Art of Is is a philosophical meditation on living, living fully, living in the present. To the author, an improvisation is a co-creation that arises out of listening and mutual attentiveness, out of a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity. It is a product of the nervous system, bigger than the brain and bigger than the body; it is a once-in-a-lifetime encounter, unprecedented and unrepeatable. Drawing from the wisdom of the ages, The Art of Is not only gives the reader an inside view of the states of mind that give rise to improvisation, it is also a celebration of the power of the human spirit, which — when exercised with love, immense patience, and discipline — is an antidote to hate." — Yo-Yo Ma, cellist

Writer Tami Lewis Brown and illustrator Keith Negley present a joyful picture book biography of modern art icon Keith Haring, celebrating the ways his life embodied the message: art is for everyone. Art is life... and life is art. Keith Haring believed that art should be enjoyed by everyone. When Keith first moved to New York City, he rode the subway and noticed how the crowds were bored and brusque, and that the subways were decayed and dreary. He thought the people of New York needed liberating, illuminating, and radiating art. So he bought a stick of white chalk and started drawing...

In her funny, idiosyncratic, and propulsive new novel, Art Is Everything, Yxta Maya Murray offers us a portrait of a Chicana artist as a woman on the margins. L.A. native Amanda Ruiz is a successful performance artist who is madly in love with her girlfriend, a wealthy and pragmatic actuary named Xōchitl. Everything seems under control: Amanda’s grumpy father is living peacefully in Koreatown; Amanda is about to enjoy a residency at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and, once she gets her NEA, she’s going to film a groundbreaking autocritical documentary in Mexico. But then everything starts to fall apart when Xōchitl’s biological clock begins beeping, Amanda’s father dies, and she endures a sexual assault. What happens to an artist when her emotional support vanishes along with her feelings of safety and her finances? Written as a series of web posts, Instagram essays, Snapchat freakouts, rejected Yelp reviews, Facebook screeds, and SmugMug streams-of-consciousness that merge volcanic confession with eagle-eyed art criticism, Art Is Everything shows us the painful but joyous development of a mid-career artist whose world implodes just as she has a breakthrough.

In 2008, Thomas "TomSka" Ridgewell uploaded a short animated film to YouTube; he called it asdfmovie. It has since been viewed more than 50 million times and has spawned eight sequels and many, many dedicated fans. Now, for the first time, the weird and wonderful world of asdf has exploded onto the page in ART IS DEAD, a book conceived and written by Tom and illustrated by Matt Ley. Featuring much-loved characters from the films, as well as brand-new, never-before-seen comics and bonus material - including the asdf origin story and Tom's own sketches - ART IS DEAD is a comic book like no other. Expect trains, potatoes, suicidal muffins and jokes about "death, destruction and things talking that don't normally talk", all wrapped up in book so awkwardly shaped it will make your shelves look weird. (Sorry about that.)

One of America's most celebrated art critics offers a lively meditation on the nature of art.

Whose Art Is It? is the story of sculptor John Ahearn, a white artist in a black and Hispanic neighborhood of the South Bronx, and of the people he cast for a series of public sculptures commissioned for an intersection outside a police station. Jane Kramer, telling this story, raises one of the most urgent questions of our time: How do we live in a society we share with people who are, often by their own definitions, "different?" Ahearn's subjects were "not the best of the neighborhood." They were a junkie, a hustler, and a street kid. Their images sparked a controversy throughout the community--and New York itself--over issues of white representations of people of color and the appropriateness of particular images as civic art. The sculptures, cast in bronze and painted, were up for only five days before Ahearn removed them. This compelling narrative raises questions about community and public art policies, about stereotypes and multiculturalism. With wit, drama, sympathy, and circumspection, Kramer draws the reader into the multicultural debate, challenging our assumptions about art, image, and their relation to community. Her portrait of the South Bronx takes the argument to its grass roots--provocative, surprising in its contradictions and complexities and not at all easy to resolve. Accompanied by an introduction by Catharine R. Stimpson exploring the issues of artistic freedom, "political correctness," and multiculturalism, Whose Art Is It? is a lively and accessible introduction to the ongoing debate on representation and private expression in the public sphere.