"A collection of quotations from the influential contemporary Iranian visual artist Shirin Neshat"--

A collection of fascinating and provocative quotations from the world-renowned performance artist Marina Abramović is arguably the most important and influential performance artist of our time. For decades, she has broken boundaries in iconic works such as The Artist Is Present (2010), where she sat in silence across from members of the public at the Museum of Modern Art for up to eight hours a day for three months, and Rhythm 0 (1974), a six-hour performance in which she stood next to a table holding seventy-two objects, including a scalpel and a loaded gun, and a sign suggesting audience members could do to her whatever they wanted. Gathered from interviews, lectures, writings, and other sources, Abramović-isms is a unique collection of quotations that offers a window into the mind of this iconic trailblazer. “Artists have to be free human beings. They have to have the complete freedom to express their ideas with no restrictions.” “Our body is an absolute replica of the Universe, and this is why I took to studying myself—by studying myself, I can understand everything else and everybody else.” “Beauty doesn’t have a definition. What is important is what moves you.” “Don’t ever call me the grandmother of performance art. Just call me a warrior.”

A collection of compelling quotations from JR—the renowned French photographer, street artist, and activist JR is perhaps best known for taking portraits of regular people, reproducing the images at a monumental scale, and pasting them on the sides of buildings in the subjects’ neighborhoods. Among his many other notable projects are a gigantic photo of a child peering over the top of the barrier at the US-Mexico border and an enormous mural of inmates that covers the ground of an outdoor exercise yard at a California prison. Collected from interviews, writings, and other sources, JR-isms is an inspiring and thought-provoking collection of quotations from the exciting artist and activist, whose work reaches far beyond the traditional art world, from the streets of New York to the suburbs of Paris and the favelas of Brazil. “I was writing my names on walls to say ‘I exist,’ then I started pasting pictures of people with their names to say they exist.” “Art is not supposed to change the world. It can offer a new perspective, a new look, break down the walls we build between us, and humanize the ‘other.’ ” “I always make sure in my art that I even confront my own perspective.” “You know what they say, that the criminal always goes back to the crime scene? It works the same for the artist. When you do something in the street, you come back to see how people approach it. No one knows it’s you, but you’re right there.”

A revelatory collection of the artist’s sketches and preparatory drawings, featuring many that have never been published before The great Russian modernist painter and theorist Wassily Kandinsky was one of the pioneers of abstraction in Western art. Few documents provide more insight into his evolution from figural to abstract art—or into the development of abstraction in the early twentieth century—than the pages of his sketchbooks. Featuring previously unpublished drawings, Wassily Kandinsky: The Sketchbooks is a comprehensive selection of hundreds of sketches from twelve notebooks Kandinsky kept between 1889 and 1935. Beginning with early figure studies, architectural sketches, and landscapes, the notebooks reveal a process of exploration that would lead Kandinsky from his first experiments in geometric abstraction to paintings that reshaped modernism. Demonstrating Kandinsky’s mastery of color, line, shape, composition, and movement, the book includes notes and preparatory studies for major paintings, such as the “analytical drawing” for Composition VII (1913), the first study for Several Circles (1926), and Study for Composition IX, a preliminary working of his 1936 masterpiece. Visually stunning, the book offers a remarkable, intimate look at how Kandinsky sought to discover nothing less than a spiritually transcendent form of art.

Understanding Photography packs an enormous amount of detail into a handy, attractive guide tracing the evolution of photography through a series of interconnected trends, groups, themes and movements – from the invention of the photographic process to the post-internet age. Organised chronologically, this is a uniquely international, comprehensive guide to photography with concise, readable and jargon-free but scholarly insight into major photographers, movements and themes of the past 170 years. In an age where photography is of more resonance and interest than ever before, Understanding Photography offers an in-depth and clear exposition of photography for the interested general reader or student.

A collection of essential quotations from the renowned fashion designer, DJ, and stylist Abloh-isms is a collection of essential quotations from American fashion designer, DJ, and stylist Virgil Abloh, who was a major creative figure in the worlds of pop culture and art. Abloh began his career as Kanye West’s creative director before founding the luxury streetwear label Off-White and becoming artistic director for Louis Vuitton, making Abloh the first American of African descent to hold that title at a French fashion house. Defying categorization, Abloh’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at museums and galleries, most notably in a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Gathered from interviews and other sources, this selection of compelling and memorable quotations from the designer reveals his thoughts on a wide range of subjects, including creativity, passion, innovation, race, and what it means to be an artist of his generation. Lively and thought-provoking, these quotes reflect Abloh’s unique perspective as a trailblazer in his fields. Select quotations from the book: “I believe that coincidence is key, but coincidence is energies coming towards each other. You have to be moving to meet it.” “Life is collaboration. Where I think art can be sort of misguided is that it propagates this idea of itself as a solo love affair—one person, one idea, no one else involved.” “Black influence has created a new ecosystem, which can grow and support different types of life that we couldn’t before."

Tracing the Iranian-born artist's personal journey in exile from her native Iran, this book presents Shirin Neshat's iconic early videos and photographs along with new work making its global debut. In the 1990s, Shirin Neshat's startling black-and-white videos of Iranian women won enormous praise for their poetic reflections on post-revolutionary life in her native country. Writing in the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl called her multi-screen video meditations on the culture of the chador in Islamic Iran "the first undoubtable masterpieces of video installation." Over the next twenty-five years Neshat's work has continued its passionate engagement with ancient and recent Iranian history, extending its reach to the universal experience of living in exile and the human impact of political revolution. This book connects Neshat's early video and photographic works--including haunting films such as Rapture, 1999 and Tooba, 2002--to her current projects which focus on the relation of home to exile and dreams such as The Home of My Eyes, 2015, and a new, never-before-seen project, Land of Dreams, 2019. It includes numerous stills from her series, Dreamers, in which she documents the lives of outsiders and exiles in the United States. This volume also includes essays by prominent Iranian cultural figures as well as an interview with the artist. Neshat has always been a voice for those whose individual freedoms are under attack. With this monograph, her audience will gain a deeper understanding of Neshat's own emotional, psychological, and political identities, and how they have helped her create compassionate portraits of the fraught and delicate spaces between attachment and alienation. Published with The Broad