CRAFT & CONCEPT: The Rematerialization of the Art Object, February 2006
Matthew Kangas
ISBN 1-877675-58-X, cloth, 460 pp., illust. $36.00
ISBN 1-877675-56-3, paper, 460 pp., illust. $28.00
"Matthew Kangas bring highly developed critical thinking and writing skills to capture the essence of the debate as to whether those working in craft media are artists or not. Covering all craft media with a special emphasis on ceramics, Kangas's expertise immeasurably repairs the dearth of knowledge with these essays and sets a high standard for scholarship. . . . His dedication and convictions will reassure students, teachers, curators, collectors and dealers that art objects are indeed legitimate fomrs of expression and need to take their rightful place in the visual arts of America."
--Michael W. Monroe, Executive Director and Chief Curator, Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, Washington

JOANNA FRUEH: RETROSPECTIVE — HER LIFE AND WORK, July 2005
Tanya Augsburg
ISBN 0-9764800-0-X, 72 pp., Color & B/W illust. $20.00
The most complete documentation of Frueh's performance art and scholarly work. In addition to Augsburg's essay there are "creative memoirs" by four artists (including Russell Dudley's memorable photographs of Frueh), who describe how Frueh's work has impacted their own, and Frueh's own contribution, "Perfect Garden" in which she segues from the personal to Rosetti to Voltaire to Harold Bloom to Griselda Pollock and more — all in praise of the perfect garden.

TRANQUIL POWER: THE ART AND LIFE OF PERLE FINE
Kathleen Housley
ISBN 1-877675-54-7; 256 pp.; paper; Color & B/W illust.; $28.00
"In Tranquil Power, an under-appreciated artist at last emerges as one of the most appealing masters of Abstract Expressionism. Fine's quiet confidence and artistic integrity, through years of economic hardship, and in the face of the prevailing antipathy to women painters, invest her with a heroism she would have denied."

Fine was instrumental in helping shape the direction of Abstract Expressionism with inclusion of her work in numerous solo exhibitions at prestigious New York galleries and in many groups shows at major museums. Her Tenth Street Studio in the heart of New York's art scene was a place where artists dropped in to exchange ideas. She was a close friend of de Kooning, Pollock, Lee Krasner and Kline, among others, and it was with their encouragement that she relocated to The Springs in East Hampton. It was there that she produced color-saturated "gentle paintings of near unspeakable beauty."

"[The book has] no sordid details about steamy affairs, just work, devotion, and the highs and lows of an artist's life." The world Perle Fine inhabited was a man's world. "Nevertheless, a number of gifted women in it persevered, survived, and gained recognition. Fine was notable among them, not as a woman artist, but as an artist of distinction." Book is profusely illustrated with the artist's works and photographs.

EPICENTER: ESSAYS ON NORTH AMERICAN ART
Matthew Kangas
ISBN 1-877675-55-6; 408 pp.; paper; color & B/W illust.; $25.00
"The most important art critic in the Northwest, Kangas's national profile will be clinched by his new collection . . . essays that challenge Abstract Expressionist critical cliches; discussion of the previously ignored Northwest School . . . is alone worth the price of admission."

In five sections: Reconsidering the New York School; Art in Public Places; Art Outside the Center; Canadian Art; and Late Modernism Kangas incorporates literary and art-critical theory as applied methods for better understanding and appreciating modern and contemporary art. Epicenter is a must for everyone interested in the relation between New York and the rest of the world, as well as for artists, collectors, curators and other visual arts professionals who seek a broader perspective onto the art of the past half-century.

"He writes about his subjects with prose that is cerebral, extravagant and even bombastic at times. . . . Back in Seattle after a period on the East Coast he found himself suffering from 'intellectual isolation' . . . with the Pacific Northwest defined in relation to what the New York-centric art had already deemed worthy in the art 'out west.' Kangas's dedicated writing has succeeded in establishing the importance of Northwest artists as major figures of the international art scene."

THE BARONESS, THE MOGUL, AND THE FORGOTTEN HISTORY OF THE FIRST GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
Rolph Scarlett's memoir in collaboration with (and as told to) Harriet Tannin
ISBN 1-877675-38-5, Color & b/w Illust., $25.00
Stories of Hilla Rebay, director of the Museum of Non-objective Painting from 1939 to 1952, (the earliest incarnation of the now-famous Solomon R. Guggenheim "global museum"), Solomon R. Guggenheim, financial supporter of the museum, Rudolf Bauer, represented by 350 paintings in the museum's collection, Peggy Guggenheim, Frank Lloyd Wright, James Johnson Sweeney who succeeded Rebay in the early 1950s as director of the Museum, Thomas Messer, who followed Sweeney, trustee Harry F. Guggenheim, critic Clement Greenberg, poet Delmore Schwartz, and artists Vasily Kandinsky, Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, Ralph Albert Blakelock, and Paul Gauguin.

OUT OF THE PICTURE: MILTON RESNICK AND THE NEW YORK SCHOOL
Edited and with Introduction by Geoffey Dorfman
ISBN 1-877675-47-4 paper, Color & b/w Illust., $28.00
ISBN 1-877675-48-2, Color & b/w Illust., $35.00
Recaptures the high period of American Modernism using Resnick as a means of gaining entry to the period. Talks and free-wheeling panels at the Artists' Club and the Studio School include leading intellectuals and artists such as Leo Steinberg, Ad Reinhardt, & De Kooning.

HIGH DRAMA: THE NEW YORK CITYSCAPES, OF GEORGIA O'KEEFFE AND MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE
Peter R. Kalb, Introduction by Linda Nochlin
ISBN 1-877675-44-x paper, Color & b/w Illust., $21.00
The 1920s saw a new urban realism favoring the compositional structure of the city over the appearance of its citizens — a breaking away from the earlier Ashcan school of narrative works and the frenetic scenes of the Cubists. Leading this movement was the painter, O'Keeffe at mid-decade and the photographer Bourke-White by its end. Both women cast themselves as independent modern artists while transforming how to look at the city.

ART & POLITICS IN THE 1930S: AMERICANISM, MARXISM & MODERNISM
Susan Platt, Introduction by Matthew Baigell
ISBN 1-877675-28-8 paper, Illust., $27.00
ISBN 1-877675-29-6 cloth, Illust., $38.00
A history of cultural activism in the 1930s and '40s; the artists and writer/critics committed to radical social change — employing modernist devices for purposes of populist appeal. Chapters on Stieglitz, Katherine Dreier, Alain Locke, Thomas Benton, Stuart Davis, Alfred Barr, and Clement Greenberg among many others.

GRADIVA'S MIRROR: REFLECTIONS ON WOMEN, SURREALISM, & ART HISTORY
Betty Ann Brown, Introduction by Gloria F. Orenstein
ISBN 1-877675-37-7 paper, Color & b/w Illust., $27.00
ISBN 1-877675 45-8 cloth, Color & b/w Illust., $35.00
The book advances the study of Surrealism featuring eleven women artists and their contributions to the movement. The author uses imaginary conversaziones with them to end each of the three sections paralleling the major periods of Surrealism.

POSTMODERN HERETICS: CATHOLIC IMAGINATION IN CONTEMPORARY ART, FEB. 2004
Eleanor Heartney
ISBN 1-877675-50-4, Illust., $24.00
In this brave and urgently needed study, Eleanor Heartney explains how the work of many of the most controversial artists of recent decades has frequently been due to the "incarnational consciousness" rooted in their Catholic upbringing. The view that our identity as human beings derives from our bodily condition is inseparable from Catholic doctrine, but its implementation in works of art is often out of phase with the attitudes and beliefs of some members of the religious community, who react to the art as blasphemous and transgressive. Thus the history of post-modernist art has often been a story of bitter conflict. It may be too much to hope that Heartney's compassionate and deeply informed analysis will bring these conflicts to an end, but it has the power to raise the discourse to a new level of healing understanding if read in the spirit in which it is intended. For any reader, however, it a valuable and indispensible contribution to the appreciation of contemporary art in some of its most extreme and difficult manifestations.

DUCHAMP: DOMESTIC PATTERNS, COVERS, & THREADS
W. Bowdoin Davis, Jr., Preface by Alan Cheuse
ISBN 1-877675-40-7 paper, Illust., $20.00
ISBN 1-877675-41-5 cloth, Illust., $28.00
An exciting work of detection unlocking Duchamp's mysterious Munich stay. This book reveals a stunning new source for the French master's enigmatic iconography, one that entwines the industrial with the erotic. —Barbara Stafford

MUTINY AND THE MAINSTREAM: TALK THAT CHANGED ART, 1975-1990
Edited by Judy Seigel
ISBN 1-877675-05-9 paper, $22.00
On-the-spot reports, interviews and panel discussions capture artists', curators', dealers' and collectors' perspectives as they wrangle with ideas and each other. It's the real history of contemporary art.

CAMERA FIENDS AND KODAK GIRLS I: 50 SELECTIONS BY AND ABOUT WOMEN IN PHOTOGRAPHY, 1840-1930
Edited and with an introductory essay by Peter E. Palmquist
ISBN 1-877675-00-8 paper, Illust., $14.90
A celebration of women in photography — the pioneers — many famous, some less familiar — presented through poems, memoirs, lectures, and essays.

CAMERA FIENDS AND KODAK GIRLS II: 60 SELECTIONS BY AND ABOUT WOMEN IN PHOTOGRAPHY, 1855-1965
Edited and with an introductory essay by Peter E. Palmquist
ISBN 1-877-675-15-6 paper, Illust., $18.00
This second volume of women in photography has serious and fanciful selections — commercial applications, photojournalism, and subjects of artistic concerns. Included are many of the best-known women in photography such as Berenice Abbott, Catherine Weed Barnes, Margaret Bourke-White, Therese Bonney, Annie Brigman, Gertrude Kasebier, and Nancy Newhall.

TARNISHED SILVER: AFTER THE PHOTO BOOM, ESSAYS AND LECTURES 1979-1989
A.D. Coleman, Introduction by James L. Enyeart
ISBN 1-877675-20-2 paper, Illust., $20.00
Enlarges one's awareness to the significance of photography in relation to our cul-ture during this transformative period. Selected lectures and essays concentrate on themes of justice and fairness. (Kraszna-krausz photography book award,1997)

BEYOND WALLS AND WARS: ART, POLITICS, AND MULTICULTURALISM
Edited and with an introductory essay by Kim Levin
ISBN 1-877675-11-3 paper, Illust., $15.50
Thought provoking book addresses the problematic relationships between modernism, colonialism, totalitarianism, and the effects of politics on art and art on politics. Art critics from 28 countries challenge these issues and more.