Naomi Beckwith

Valerie Steele

Ekow Eshun

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Illinois

Seeing

Fashion world leader Duro Olowu applies his creative process and cosmopolitan eye to a major exhibition drawn from Chicago's great art collections. Nigerian-born British fashion designer Duro Olowu is internationally renowned for his womenswear label launched in 2004 that speaks to a cosmopolitan sensibility informed by his international background and a confident eye for visual disciplines from art to film to popular culture. Olowu's global viewpoint has translated into wildly popular platforms and projects from Instagram postings to revelatory curatorial projects in London and New York that position him at the transcultural crossroads of art, culture, and fashion. Now Olowu turns his gimlet eye on Chicago to curate a show drawn from that metropolis's public and private art collections, anchored by the MCA's holdings. Published on the occasion of Olowu's largest curatorial project, Duro Olowu: Seeing elucidates the designer-cum-curator's creative process as he imagines relationships between artists and objects across time, media, and geography: Naomi Beckwith illuminates Olowu's curatorial process, driven by a voracious appetite for contemporary art and culture brought together in sharp juxtapositions. Valerie Steele situates Olowu's designs within the contemporary fashion world. Ekow Eshun focuses on Olowu's role within Britain's black and Afro-Caribbean creative community. Thelma Golden interviews Olowu about his work as designer, curator, and chronicler of culture and style across the worlds of museums and fashion. And Lynette Yiadom-Boakye creates new fiction for this volume. Publishing with Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Duro Olowu

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Hazrat Inayat Khan

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

The Sufi Teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan

The first teacher to bring Islamic mysticism to the West presents music's divine nature and its connection to our daily lives in this poetic classic of Sufi literature
 
Music, according to Sufi teaching, is really a small expression of the overwhelming and perfect harmony of the whole universe--and that is the secret of its amazing power to move us. The Indian Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882-1927), the first teacher to bring the Islamic mystical tradition to the West, was an accomplished musician himself. His lucid exposition of music's divine nature has become a modern classic, beloved not only by those interested in Sufism but by musicians of all kinds.

The Mysticism of Sound and Music

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Ingrid Monson

Jazz Improvisation and Interaction

Saying Something

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Heather Darcy Bhandari

Jonathan Melber

Everything You Need to Know (And Do) as You Pursue Your Art Career

The most comprehensive guide of its kind, Art/Work gives artists of every level the tools they need to make it in an art world so competitive one dealer likens it to "The Sopranos, except nobody gets killed." Whether you're an art school grad looking for a gallery, a mid-career artist managing a busy studio, or someone just thinking about becoming a professional artist, this indispensable resource will help you build your career and protect yourself along the way.

Unlike other creative professionals, visual artists don't have agents or managers. You have to do it all yourself, at least until you find gallery representation -- and even then, there are important business and legal issues you need to understand to stay in control of your career and ensure you're being treated fairly. Heather Darcy Bhandari, a gallery director, and Jonathan Melber, an arts lawyer, walk you through these issues so that you can essentially act as your own manager and agent.

No matter what kind of artist you are -- or want to be -- this book will help you. Art/Work covers everything you need to know to succeed, saving you from having to learn it all the hard way -- and letting you spend more time making art.

Art/Work

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Wendy Hitchmough

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

An in-depth study of how the famed Bloomsbury Group expressed their liberal philosophies and collective identity in visual form "[Fascinating and wide-ranging. . . . Will be enjoyed by both Bloomsbury aficionados and newcomers alike."--Lucinda Willan, V&A Magazine The Bloomsbury Group was a loose collective of forward-thinking writers, artists, and intellectuals in London, with Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and E. M. Forster among its esteemed members. The group's works and radical beliefs, spanning literature, economics, politics, and non-normative relationships, changed the course of 20th-century culture and society. Although its members resisted definition, their art and dress imparted a coherent, distinctive group identity. Drawing on unpublished photographs and extensive new research, The Bloomsbury Look is the first in-depth analysis of how the Bloomsbury Group generated and broadcast its self-fashioned aesthetic. One chapter is dedicated to photography, which was essential to the group's visual narrative--from casual snapshots, to amateur studio portraits, to family albums. Others examine the Omega Workshops as a design center, and the evidence for its dress collections, spreading the Bloomsbury aesthetic to the general public. Finally, the book considers the group's extensive participation in 20th-century modernism as artists, models, curators, critics, and collectors.

The Bloomsbury Look

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Jennifer Lewis

Sketch, Paint, and Doodle Towards One Creative Goal

How satisfying would it be to complete 100 drawings? With 100 Days of Drawing, author Jennifer Orkin Lewis (@augustwren) sets you up for success. A practitioner of daily drawing for four years straight, Lewis divides this sketchbook into 25 of her favorite subjects and techniques. Doodle faces on objects, patterns on tea cups, animals in outfits, people in fanciful headdresses and much more; each new theme is fun and rewarding, regardless of your skill level. Lewis also nudges you past the blank page by providing creative prompts and interesting backgrounds to draw on and shows you how to experiment with markers, gel pens, and colored pencils. Your own interpretation of her prompts will make your sketchbook completely unique. Just like her first book, Draw Every Day, Draw Every Way, this sketchbook has a removable jacket and an exposed binding that lies perfectly flat.

100 Days of Drawing (Guided Sketchbook)

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Faythe Levine

Sam Macon

Ed Ruscha

There was a time-as recently as the 1980s-when storefronts, murals, banners, barn signs, billboards, and even street signs were all hand-lettered with brush and paint. But, like many skilled trades, the sign industry has been overrun by the techno-fueled promise of quicker and cheaper. The resulting proliferation of computer-designed, die-cut vinyl lettering and inkjet printers has ushered a creeping sameness into our visual landscape. Fortunately, there is a growing trend to seek out traditional sign painters and a renaissance in the trade. In 2010 filmmakers Faythe Levine, coauthor of Handmade Nation, and Sam Macon began documenting these dedicated practitioners, their time-honored methods, and their appreciation for quality and craftsmanship. Sign Painters, the first anecdotal history of the craft, features stories and photographs of more than two dozen sign painters working in cities throughout the United States.

Sign Painters

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Errol Morris

Fascinating book from esteemed author and filmmaker Errol Morris on the nature of truth in photography. Must read if photography is your wheelhouse 

Observations on the Mysteries of Photography

In Believing is Seeing Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris turns his eye to the nature of truth in photography. In his inimitable style, Morris untangles the mysteries behind an eclectic range of documentary photographs, from the ambrotype of three children found clasped in the hands of an unknown soldier at Gettysburg to the indelible portraits of the WPA photography project. Each essay in the book presents the reader with a conundrum and investigates the relationship between photographs and the real world they supposedly record. With his keen sense of irony, skepticism, and humor, Morris reveals in this investigations how photographs can obscure as much as they reveal and how what we see is often determined by our beliefs.

Believing Is Seeing

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Forty Photographers on Process and Practice

Photo Work

Munro Leaf

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Ferdinand likes to sit quietly and smell the flowers, but one day he gets stung by a bee and his snorting and stomping convince everyone that he is the fiercest of bulls.

The Story of Ferdinand

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John Lewis

Andrew Aydin

A first-hand account of the author's lifelong struggle for civil and human rights spans his youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., and the birth of the Nashville Student Movement.

March: Book One

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Tom Kristensen

Carl Malmberg

Morten Høi Jensen

A longtime cult-classic in Denmark, this novel about dissolution and despair has been out of print in the US for over eighty years until now. Ole Jastrau is the very model of an enterprising and ambitious young man of letters, poised on the brink of what is sure to be a distinguished career as a critic. In fact he is teetering on the brink of an emotional and moral abyss. Bored with his beautiful wife and chafing at the burdens of fatherhood, disdainful of the commercialism and political opportunism of the newspaper he works for, he feels more and more that his life lacks meaning. He flirts with Catholicism and flirts with Communism, but somehow he doesn’t have the makings of a true believer. Then he takes up with the bottle, a truly meaningful relationship. “Slowly and quietly,” he intends to go to the dogs. Jastrau’s romance with self-destruction will take him through all the circles of hell. The process will be anything but slow and quiet.

Havoc

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Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

An updated version of the classic book

A complete guide to Bird Feeding

Collectors item covering American Crafts 

Women’s Day Book of American Needlework 

Vintage likely 1900’s hand coloring on Photographs, with photos and descriptions. A rare and unusual book

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Campanas popular art library

The Teacher of Photograph Painting

C. J. Chivers

“A classic of war reporting...The author’s stories give heart-rending meaning to the lives and deaths of these men and women, even if policymakers generally have not.” —The New York Times Pulitzer Prize winner C.J. Chivers’s unvarnished account of modern combat, told through the eyes of the fighters who have waged America’s longest wars. More than 2.7 million Americans have served in Afghanistan or Iraq since September 11, 2001. C.J. Chivers reported from both wars from their beginnings. The Fighters vividly conveys the physical and emotional experience of war as lived by six combatants: a fighter pilot, a corpsman, a scout helicopter pilot, a grunt, an infantry officer, and a Special Forces sergeant. Chivers captures their courage, commitment, sense of purpose, and ultimately their suffering, frustration, and moral confusion as new enemies arise and invasions give way to counterinsurgency duties for which American forces were often not prepared. The Fighters is a tour de force, a portrait of modern warfare that parts from slogans to do for American troops what Stephen Ambrose did for the G.I.s of World War II and Michael Herr for the grunts in Vietnam. Told with the empathy and understanding of an author who is himself an infantry veteran, The Fighters presents the long arc of two wars.

The Fighters

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Lawrence Wright

Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

Examines the Church of Scientology; discusses the esoteric cosmology, the auditing process for determining an inductee's state of being, and the Bridge for Total Freedom; and details how the church pursues celebrities.

Going Clear

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Christine Ammer

Senior moment. Think outside the box. Idioms like these can't be understood just from the words that make them up. The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms explores the meanings of idioms, including phrasal verbs such as kick back, proverbs such as too many cooks spoil the broth, interjections such as tough beans, and figures of speech such as elephant in the room. Since the publication of the first edition 15 years ago, author Christine Ammer has made extensive revisions that reflect new historical scholarship and changes in the English language. This second edition defines over 10,000 idiomatic expressions in greater detail than any other dictionary available today. English language learners will find this dictionary especially useful.

The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, Second Edition

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Thomas McEvilley

Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism

McEvilley (art criticism and writing, School of Visual Arts, New York City) presents revised versions of essays published between 1981 and 2002, along with three major new essays that introduce and bring them together. Focusing on the origins of anti-art, and the development of performance and conceptual art, the essays trace artistic movements fro

The Triumph of Anti-Art

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Perri Knize

A Piano Odyssey

A fascinating, lyrical memoir about one woman's obsessive search for the perfect piano-and about finding and pursuing passion at any ageHow can a particular piano be so seductive that someone would turn her life upside down to answer its call? How does music change human consciousness and transport us to rapture? What makes it beautiful? In this elegantly written and heartfelt account, Perri Knize explores these questions with a music lover's ardor, a poet's inspiration, and a reporter's thirst for knowledge.The daughter of a professional musician, Knize was raised in a home saturated in classical music, but years have passed since she last played the instrument that mesmerized her most: the piano. Surprised by a sudden, belated realization that she is meant to devote her life to the instrument, she finds a teacher and soon decides to buy a piano of her own.What begins as a search for a modestly priced upright leads Knize through dozens of piano stores all over the country, and eventually ends in a New York City showroom where she falls madly in love with the sound of a rare and pricey German grand."At the touch of the keys, I am swept away by powerful waves of sound," Knize writes. "The middle section is smoky and mysterious, as if rising from the larynx of a great contralto. The treble is bell-like and sparkling, full of color, a shimmering northern lights. A soul seems to reside in the belly of this piano, and it reaches out to touch mine, igniting a spark of desire that quickly catches fire."The seduction is complete. But the piano far exceeds Knize's budget. After a long and painful dalliance, she refinances her house to purchase the instrument that has transfixed her. The dealer ships it to her home in Montana, and she counts the days until its arrival. When at last she sits down to play, almost delirious with anticipation, the magical sound is gone and the tone is dead and dull. Devastated, she calls in one piano technician after another to "fix" it, but no one can.So begins the author's epic quest to restore her piano to its rightful sound, and to understand its elusive power. This journey leads her into an international subculture of piano aficionados -- concert artists, passionate amateurs, dealers, technicians, composers, and builders -- intriguing characters all, whose lives have also been transformed by the spell of a piano. Along the way she plays hundreds of pianos, new and vintage, rare and common, always listening for the bewitching tone she once heard from her own grand, a sound she cannot forget.In New York, she visits the high-strung technician who prepared her piano for the showroom, and learns how a wire tightened just so, or an artfully softened hammer can transform an unremarkable instrument into one that touches listeners to their core. In Germany, she watches the workers who built her piano shape wood, iron, wool, and steel into musical instruments, and learns why each has its own unique voice. In Austria, she hikes the Alps to learn how trees are selected to build pianos, and how they are grown and harvested. With each step of her journey, Knize draws ever-closer to uncovering the reason her piano's sound vanished, how to get it back, and the deeper secret of how music leads us to a direct experience of the nature of reality.Beautifully composed, passionately performed,Grand Obsessionis itself a musical masterpiece.

Grand Obsession

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Marguerite Yourcenar

Grace Frick

Beautiful book by the incredible Marguerite Yourcenar

Both an exploration of character and a reflection on the meaning of history, Memoirs of Hadrian has received international acclaim since its first publication in France in 1951. In it, Marguerite Yourcenar reimagines the Emperor Hadrian's arduous boyhood, his triumphs and reversals, and finally, as emperor, his gradual reordering of a war-torn world, writing with the imaginative insight of a great writer of the twentieth century while crafting a prose style as elegant and precise as those of the Latin stylists of Hadrian's own era.

Memoirs of Hadrian

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Alberto Manguel

Excellent condition with protective plastic cover

Inspired by the process of creating a library for his fifteenth-century home near the Loire, in France, Alberto Manguel, the acclaimed writer on books and reading, has taken up the subject of libraries. “Libraries,” he says, “have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been seduced by their labyrinthine logic.” In this personal, deliberately unsystematic, and wide-ranging book, he offers a captivating meditation on the meaning of libraries.

 

Manguel, a guide of irrepressible enthusiasm, conducts a unique library tour that extends from his childhood bookshelves to the “complete” libraries of the Internet, from Ancient Egypt and Greece to the Arab world, from China and Rome to Google. He ponders the doomed library of Alexandria as well as the personal libraries of Charles Dickens, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He recounts stories of people who have struggled against tyranny to preserve freedom of thought—the Polish librarian who smuggled books to safety as the Nazis began their destruction of Jewish libraries; the Afghani bookseller who kept his store open through decades of unrest. Oral “memory libraries” kept alive by prisoners, libraries of banned books, the imaginary library of Count Dracula, the library of books never written—Manguel illuminates the mysteries of libraries as no other writer could. With scores of wonderful images throughout, The Library at Night is a fascinating voyage through Manguel’s mind, memory, and vast knowledge of books and civilizations.

The Library at Night

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Bevis Hillier

Bought new 1971. An excellent resource book 

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts

The World of Art Deco

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Alice Walker

Meditation and Wandering As the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm's Way

This gorgeous collection gathers Alice Walker’s wide-ranging meditations—many of them previously unpublished—on our intertwined personal, spiritual, and political destinies. For the millions of her devoted fans, and for readers of Walker’s bestselling 2006 book, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, here is a brand new "gift of words" that invites readers on a journey of political awakening and spiritual insight. The Cushion in the Road finds the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, poet, essayist, and activist at the height of her literary powers, sharing fresh vantages and a deepening engagement with our world. Walker writes that "we are beyond a rigid category of color, sex, or spirituality if we are truly alive," and the pieces in The Cushion in the Road illustrate this idea beautifully. Visiting themes she has addressed throughout her career—including racism, Africa, Palestinian solidarity, and Cuba—as well as addressing emergent issues, such as the presidency of Barack Obama on health care, Walker explores her conflicting impulses to retreat into inner contemplation and to remain deeply engaged with the world. Rich with humor and wisdom, and informed by Walker’s unique eye for the details of human and natural experience, The Cushion in the Road will please longtime Walker fans as well as those who are new to her work.

The Cushion in the Road

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Globearts Reads

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Naomi Beckwith; Valerie Steele; Ekow Eshun; Lynette Yiadom-Boakye