Böcker utgivna av Radius Books

The major monograph Howard Smith celebrates the far-reaching practice of the multifaceted African-American artist, designer, and collector who spent most of his creative life in Finland.Working with paper, pigments, wood, clay, textiles, and metal, Smith had both fine art and commercial practices. While he designed for industry—planning interior designs for corporate offices, public buildings and a ferry—he especially enjoyed recycling items like scrap metal, used cardboard, and castoff clothing, which he transformed into offbeat compositions. Howard Smith’s work displays an exuberance and generosity characteristic of the man. Immediately recognizable for bold gestures in line, plane, and mass, his creations embrace rich colors and contrasts in material and form. He referred to many of these forms as ‘glyphs,’ vibrant figures that often suggest the human form in posture of celebration.Exhibition schedule:Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, California(opening May 2025)National Nordic Museum, Helsinki, Finland(dates TBD)

The first monograph on Venezuelan multimedia artist Arturo Herrera in nearly twenty years, this comprehensive book takes a deep look at his diverse body of work.Most known for collage, felt sculpture, and wall painting, Herrera references the complex legacy of abstraction using modernist visual languages. Often employing found material and sourced elements, Herrera’s work incorporates discrete iconography and familiar imagery to provoke a multiplicity of references and readings. As his practice has evolved, the artist has become renowned for his colorful abstract mixed-media pieces that adapt and renew techniques of fragmentation and layering found in his earlier collage-based work.

Thirty-Six Views of the Moon is a meditative collection of nighttime exposures made with book pages from texts referencing the night sky spanning the last ten centuries.Drink wine and look at the moon and think of all the civilizations the moon has seen passing by…— Omar Khayyam, 11th-century mathematician and poetTaking his cue from Omar Khayyam’s poem, Ebtekar produces a vignette of windows to the moon, inviting us to shift the direction of our gaze. In his process, the artist works with a photographic glass plate negative of the moon from the Lick Observatory archives in Northern California, treating each book page with Potassium ferricyanide and Ammonium ferric citrate (cyanotype) to make the surface of the page light-sensitive. Then, Ebtekar exposes the pages overnight in the UV-light emitted by the moon.This project challenges viewers to imagine the the moon looking at us, seeing ourselves as the objects of the moon’s billion-year gaze. There are four unique editions to the work, each produced under the moonlight of a season (i.e. winter, spring, etc.), and each with its own unique bibliography. The artist’s proof is the only edition made with moonlight from all four seasons over the span of one year.

Mixing the contemporary with the ancient, MOSAICS spotlights ground-breaking emerging artist Cameron Welch.The inaugural monograph of multidisciplinary artist Cameron Welch presents a vivid, comprehensive look into a young artist’s practice. Welch’s work has straddled sculpture, collage, and textiles, but in early 2017, he shifted to mosaic as his primary medium. As a child, the artist was introduced to mosaic by his grandmother, an experience that has a lasting impact on the way he works the age-old medium to piece together disparate materials and histories. Welch treats mosaic as a physical manifestation of intertextuality, referring to the colliding contexts he unearths in the work as a kind of "infiltration."While Welch’s chosen medium evokes ancient traditions, the effect of his work is decidedly contemporary. His chaotic, jumbled compositions speak to the same anxiety felt in the Information Age, an era when unlimited information is available at the tap of a screen. Amidst the pictorial chaos of Welch’s mosaics, the figures who emerge range from familiar to foreign, comical to heroic. Frequently depicting himself and figures from his own life, Welch sheds light on unsung histories within the intricate topology of his creations. An incisive essay by Greek and Roman Art scholar Alexis Belis helps readers contextualize Welch’s work within historical and contemporary creative practice.

Her second monograph with Radius, Victoria Sambunaris: Transformation of a Landscape shares the nuance and majesty of the artist’s practice in a large-scale book format.Based in New York, Victoria Sambunaris structures her life around a photographic journey traversing the American landscape for several months per year. Equipped with a 5×7-inch field camera, a video camera, and research material, she crosses the country alone tenting on top of her car. Her project-based photographs document the continuing transformation of the American landscape with specific attention given to expanding political, technological, and industrial interventions.Part of her ongoing, twenty-four-year series “Taxonomy of a Landscape,” this book encompasses the past decade of work, including collected ephemera that form the essential and incidental elements of her practice as a photographer and researcher. Also featured are archival documentation of experiences and observations on the road, such as snapshots, maps, road logs, journals, geology and history books, mineral specimens, and artifacts.

The last in a trilogy of books on the American condition, Model Citizens considers the United States as a case study into a global phenomenon: How have staging, performance, and roleplay come to inform thinking about citizenship in a violent land whose people no longer agree on what is true?Jarringly juxtaposed images from apparently unrelated sites—such as US Border Patrol Academy training scenarios, “Save America” rallies, and history museums—illuminate systems that reconcile, justify, or distract from the harsh realities of life in a polarized, militarized society. The design accentuates slippages: images flow across French-fold page turns, just as Cornwall’s practice questions the role of documentary photography in an era of splintered realities. The Model Citizens project was awarded the 2023 Prix Elysée, a biennial juried prize for mid-career photographers, sponsored by the Photo Elysée Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland. The award also includes a grant for a concurrent publication in both English and French (Citoyens Modèles, Éditions Textuel, 2024). Both editions will be released to coincide with Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles in July 2024.

When art critic David Pagel realized he had written five reviews about John Sonsini over the past thirty years, this book project was born. Even though he had been covering the work of the Los Angeles-based painter for three decades, they had never met until they began collaborating on this project. The unique, intimate compilation brings together an extensive essay by Pagel--including facsimile reproductions of the original five articles--along with illustrations, plates, and archival pieces that cover Sonsini's artistic trajectory, from early works to his most recent watercolors and large-scale commissions. Broad Reminders provides a rambling, joyful, engaging look into the world of art and artists, critics, and creators.

On April 15, 2019, fire devastated the iconic Notre Dame cathedral of Paris. In Tomas van Houtryve: 36 Views of Notre Dame, the viewer accompanies the artist on his exclusive journey covering the restoration of this cultural icon. After the bells fell silent and the charred structure was fenced off from the public, van Houtryve gained rare privileged access to Notre Dame and the teams working to save the monument from ruin. For over a year, the photographer explored the sacred, the grotesque, and the graceful, turning the reconstruction into a prism for self expression while documenting a historical moment of devastation and rebirth.

The first career survey on a leading chronicler of the American SouthExamining the deep emotional relationship between people and place, Louisiana-based photographer Debbie Fleming Caffery (born 1948) is recognized as a leading chronicler of the American South. Her shadowy, blurred, black-and-white images thoughtfully reveal shared human experience‿childhood, spirituality, labor‿and ultimately bring darkness to light. Debbie Fleming Caffery: Come to Light immortalizes in book form the artist‿s first major career retrospective presented at the New Orleans Museum of Art. The publication is her most comprehensive to date, showcasing projects produced in the American South and West, as well as in France and Mexico, and is the first to feature all series from across the course of her career.

Working between activism and performance, Pinder creates texts and diagrams exploring the interdependence of art and politicsAs the commercialization and popularity of the "Black struggle" in mainstream culture continues, artists and creatives are being challenged to reinvent and refocus their approach to activism with the explicit intention of helping people understand race dynamics. Jefferson Pinder: The Black Subversive decodes the Chicago-based artist‿s performance work and uniquely straddles the subtle boundaries of activism and drama, challenging art audiences and civilians alike. Functioning as an "instruction manual" for subversive work, the book poetically reveals the inner workings of Pinder's performative practice. Enthralled by mid-20th-century "cut-away illustrations," Pinder (born 1970) develops texts and diagrams that reveal the connection between art and politics and the inner workings of a politicized performance practice in which every artistic choice is imbued with symbolism and meaning. In addition to performance documentation and insight into the research that informs the artist‿s work, the book includes essays by scholars Carlos Sirah, Jordana Saggese and Isaiah Wooden.

A revelatory examination of Fratt‿s five-decade explorations of color, landscape and abstractionThis is the first major monograph on the prolific yet underrecognized American painter Dorothy Fratt (1923‿2017). Born in Washington, DC, and associated with the Washington Color School in the early 1950s, Fratt moved to Arizona in 1958 and forged her own style of abstraction more closely tied to the American Southwest. Although Fratt‿s paintings are often classified as Color Field and Abstract Expressionist, her use of color and rendering of landscape idiosyncratically emotes atmosphere, gesture and mood on her own terms. Spanning five decades of the artist‿s oeuvre, Dorothy Fratt includes a selection of foundational early works alongside numerous paintings that exemplify Fratt‿s vibrant, distinct style. The book also features a biography, ephemera from Fratt‿s life and a conversation with artists Teresa Baker, Caroline Kent and Rebecca Ward.

Atoui‿s recent collective sonic adventures explore the physical transmission of sound and its reception in the human bodyPublished for the 2022 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize exhibitions at the Contemporary Austin and the FLAG Art Foundation, Tarek Atoui: The Whisperers documents the Paris-based artist/composer‿s recent sound-based installations rooted in the idea that sound requires transmission through physical materials and in relation to perceiving bodies. Atoui (born 1980) asks questions such as: What happens to sound as it travels through materials like metal, wood and water? How can we perceive sound by listening not only with our ears but also with our whole bodies? Atoui works with other musicians, composers and instrument makers around the world to develop custom materials he calls "tools for listening," which conduct and amplify sounds in multisensory ways. He also invites participation from people where his projects are located, involving musicians and nonmusicians alike. In addition to installation documentation, Tarek Atoui: The Whisperers includes interviews with Atoui, texts by the artist and essays by the curators.

"Celia Álvarez Mñuoz: Enlightenment" features her Enlightenment series of artists' books and installations, with an essay by Isabel Casso, Assistant Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

A meditative journey through an iconic American painter‿s lifelong investigation of rhythmic line repetitionAmerican painter Max Cole (born 1937) is known for her gray-toned canvases that use repetitive lines to construct minimalist, abstract compositions. This volume features a selection of new paintings and works on paper from a recent survey exhibition at SITE, Santa Fe.

Transformative minimalism: surveying Larsen‿s ingenious synthesis of worn patina and geometric rigorThis is the first monograph on Sante Fe‿based sculptor Ted Larsen (born 1964), bringing together over 15 years of creative output. Since 2001, Larsen has sought alternative and salvaged materials in his abstract constructions with the "hope of bringing purist shapes and surfaces back down to earth." This quest takes Larsen to sites such as the metal scrapyard, where he mines the raw material for his work by sawing off sections of older-model vehicles. The works‿ surfaces, which hold a strongly patinated palette, are unmodified; the colors of the metal that skin the objects‿the rusty off-white of an old pickup truck or the vibrant yellow of a decommissioned school bus‿are exactly as he found them. Calling to mind both architecture and the reductive forms associated with Minimalism, Larsen‿s works upend and defy classification.

A meditation on our uneasy relationship to the hotel as a liminal spaceAlex Yudzon (born 1977) creates ephemeral installations using only the furniture found inside his hotel rooms, which he stacks into precarious configurations, transforming these generic interiors into hallucinatory worlds where the laws of physics are suspended and dormant emotions released.

The fruition of decades of labor, Vicuña‿s poetical works on the cosmologies and myths of the deer are now realized in a gorgeously designed artist‿s bookInspired initially by Jerome Rothenberg‿s translation Flower World Variations, which Cecilia Vicuña (born 1948) first encountered in 1985, Cecilia Vicuña: Deer Book brings together nearly 40 years of the artist‿s poetry, "poethical" translations and drawings related to cosmologies and mythologies surrounding the deer, and sacrificial dance in cultures around the world. Woven like one of her quipu installations, Vicuña‿s texts‿which include original compositions in Spanish as well as English translations by Daniel Borzutzky‿become meditations on translation, not just of the sacred nature of this animal but on how our understandings of ceremony and ritual are transformed by this ongoing process. Taken as inspiration rather than conundrum, the impossibility of translation opens up poetic possibilities for Vicuña as she continues her lifelong exploration into the nature of communication across eras and distant lands, languages and shared symbols within Indigenous spiritualities.

"For all our sakes, I hope Deborah Roberts continues to stake a claim, through her work, for a more expansive view of Black children." ‿Dawoud BeyThe definitive look at two decades of work by Austin-based artist Deborah Roberts (born 1962) with newly commissioned texts and a thorough dive into her archive, this monograph offers a comprehensive view of one of today‿s most significant social observers. An extensive plate section is accompanied by a heartfelt foreword from Dawoud Bey on "the tragic mischaracterization of Black children"; an insightful essay from Ekow Eshun on the social and political histories of innocence, race and the fractured nature of the contemporary Black experience; a celebratory tribute from author and artist Carolyn Jean Martin on the musicality, humility and generosity of Roberts‿ practice; and a free-ranging conversation between Roberts and cultural historian Sarah Elizabeth Lewis. By using images from American history, Black culture, pop culture and Black history, Roberts critiques perceptions of ideal beauty and challenges stereotypes. She combines found and manipulated images with hand-drawn and painted details to create hybrid figures, often young girls and increasingly Black boys, whose well-being and futures are equally threatened because of the double standard of boyhood and criminality that is projected upon them at such a young age. Each child has character and agency to find their own way amid the complicated narratives of American, African American and art history. Deborah Roberts (born 1962) is a mixed-media artist whose work challenges the notion of ideal beauty. Her work has been exhibited internationally across the US and Europe, and is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum; The Studio Museum in Harlem; LACMA, Los Angeles; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX, among other institutions. Roberts received her MFA from Syracuse University. She lives and works in Austin, Texas, and is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Jones‿ multisensory art ingeniously weaves connections between Minimalism, music and the Black avant-gardeThis volume explores the interdisciplinary practice of Hudson-based artist Jennie C. Jones (born 1968), which moves viewers through both visual and auditory engagement. Aurally altering the spaces in which her paintings, sculptures and installations are on view, Jones‿ work encourages viewers to anticipate sound even in the quietest of environments. As she explains, "I always say [the artworks are] active even when there‿s no sound in the room; they are affecting the subtlest of sounds in the space‿dampening and absorbing even the human voice."Conceptually, Jones‿ practice reflects on the legacies of modernism and Minimalism while underscoring the connection between Minimalism and music, illuminating the influence of the Black avant-garde. Bringing this multisensory experience to book form, Jones unites documentation of recent exhibitions‿including Dynamics, her expansive show at the Guggenheim Museum (2022)‿with excerpts of text, poetry and conversations to create a "score" that reveals the layers of Jones‿ artwork. Part artist‿s book and part primer, this lyrical volume unfolds in movements, like a printed and bound evening of poetry, prose and music.

From Alison Rossiter: "In honor of Anna Atkins who was the first person to illustrate a book with photographs, I have produced 'Compendium 1898-1919', a chronology of 12 assemblages made from the earliest expired photographic papers in my collection. The exact expiration dates of these papers pinpoint their location on a timeline and coexist with events in world history. No matter what the light-sensitive materials have endured through dormant years, they still respond to chemical development, and the resulting photographic tones are evidence of experience. Physical damage, moisture, and mold produce tonal changes when developed, and I consider these effects to be subject matter." This book, a co-publication with the New York Public Library and Yossi Milo, includes all 12 works from the series at actual scale, along with close-up details, photographed by Peter Riesett, Head Photographer, Digital Imaging Unit, New York Public Library. The reference dates, which cover world events such as World War II, and art-historical references like Picasso's Blue Period, will also be included as a reference key in the back of the book. Co-published with New York Public Library & Yossi Milo.

Aerial and on-site photographs made at a classified military site in the Great Salt Lake Desert by David Maisel, author of Black MapsDavid Maisel's (born 1961) Proving Ground comprises aerial and on-site photographs made at Dugway Proving Ground, a classified military site covering nearly 800,000 acres in Utah's Great Salt Lake Desert. A primary mission of Dugway is to develop, test and implement chemical and biological weaponry and defense programs. After more than a decade of inquiry, Maisel was granted access to this facility in order to photograph the terrain, the testing facilities and other aspects of the site.Maisel began by photographing at ground level, focusing on structures related to the testing of chemical warfare dispersal patterns. He then moved to an aerial perspective to create images that resemble large-scale minimalist drawings inscribed on the land. Maisel's work at Dugway also includes photographs of the newly minted WSLAT (Whole System Live Agent Test) facility, which is devoted to identification and neutralization of chemical and biological toxins that can be weaponized by terrorists or rogue nations.

Published in conjunction with exhibitions held at the Phoenix Art Museum in 2018

Laura Carpenter was instrumental in bringing contemporary art to Santa Fe in the mid-1990s. She began her career as a gallerist in Dallas, Texas, showing artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Martin Puryear. Upon her arrival in Santa Fe, she held solo shows for the likes of Kiki Smith, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Juan Muñoz and Susan Rothenberg, transforming the Santa Fe art world. Ellsworth Kelly, John Chamberlain, Ed Ruscha, Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois and Marina Arbamovic all had shows or came to support fellow artists. Carpenter was also a founder of SITE, helping to permanently establish Santa Fe as a premier destination for contemporary art. Through the lens of Carpenter's experience, this book presents a combination of personal anecdotes, interviews and archival material—from Carpenter as well as critics, curators, art dealers, collectors and artists—to create a historical snapshot of this pivotal time in Santa Fe.

Photography is omnipresent; everyone is photographing everything. How do artists and writers reconcile this voracious urge to photograph with a photographic aesthetic and methodology that has tended to value "less is more"?One pairs artists and writers to think about this question. Eight photographers-Marco Breuer, Thomas Joshua Cooper, John Gossage, Trevor Paglen, Alison Rossiter, Victoria Sambunaris, Rebecca Norris Webb and James Welling-were asked to submit one image on the theme of minimalism. Eight writers-David Campany, Teju Cole, Christie Davis, John D'Agata, Michael Fried, Darius Himes, Leah Ollman and Laura Steward-were enlisted to respond to those submissions, each paired with a specific image. The results offer a probing assessment of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's maxim: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Over the course of five decades, California-based painter Max Cole (born 1937) has refined her visual language into a series of vertical and horizontal lines, and a restrained palette of gray, black and white.With up to 80 layers of paint, her paintings also comprise areas of unpainted linen, subtly interchanging the texture of paint with the texture of fabric. Upon closer inspection, these paintings reveal tiny, imperfect hatch marks that, when examined from afar, oscillate. As Cole says, "The result is quiet, inward and meditative, transcending the physical." Cole developed as an artist in Los Angeles in 1964-78, began showing at Sidney Janis in 1977, and then moved to New York, while also maintaining a studio in Germany and exhibiting in Europe during the '80s and '90s. She now lives and works in the Sierra foothills of northern California. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA and Albright-Knox Art Gallery. This volume presents an overview of Cole's career over the past half-century.

This series by photographer Justin Kimball (born 1961) features small towns in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Ohio brought to the brink of obsolescence by the recent financial downturn, capturing their streets, residents and landscapes in photographs both sensitive to their subjects and compositionally striking. While imbued with social and political subtext, Kimball's images--of ramshackle buildings against a landscape, a mother and baby on their front porch, roadside church signs and teenagers playing a game of pickup basketball--carry a broader significance. In his depiction of communities faced by hardship, Kimball examines the persistence of hope and the concept of what it means to be human in our modern world. His photographs document a growing--yet often overlooked--portion of the American landscape, providing an impressive portrait of the present day.

Aller captures the infinitely shifting colors and textures of water, sand and skyThis new project by German-born photographer Renate Aller is an extension of the ongoing series and book Oceanscapes (2010). Aller has continued to make images of the ocean from a single vantage point--for which she is internationally known--but for the last several years, she has also photographed sand dunes in New Mexico and Colorado. She has now paired the resulting images in a fascinating new series that continues her investigation into the relationship between romanticism, memory and landscape in the context of our current sociopolitical awareness. There is both a visual and visceral relationship between the two bodies of work. The desert images also capture visitors to the dunes, who engage in beach activities far away from any large body of water. And while these parallel realities are from completely different locations, the simultaneous, multiple activities on the sloping sand hills appears as if layers of different people and activities were choreographed next to rolling waves of the sea. Aller's first combination of these images was in book form, for a mammoth handmade book that was 36 inches wide. The overwhelming success of that publication has inspired this new trade edition, which features the largest binding that can be mechanically bound, and includes an expanded selection of the work. Born in Germany, Renate Aller lives and works in New York. Ocean and Desert is her third monograph published with Radius Books, following Dicotyledon and the long-term project Oceanscapes-One View-Ten Years. Pieces from that series and other site-specific artworks are in the collections of corporate institutions, private collectors and museums, including the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Yale University Art Gallery, Conneticut; the George Eastman House, Rochester; New Britain Museum of American Art; Hamburger Kunsthalle; and the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison.

A photographic encyclopedia of Western female hairstyles across the agesIn The Hunt, London-based French photographer Céline Bodin (born 1990) creates a concise survey of female hairstyles across various periods in time, within the framework of Western culture. The series reflects upon the pictorial qualities of hair: studying its materiality and its ability to convey identity, while also recalling the Victorian "hair medallion"--a small, decorative keepsake made from an ornate curl of a loved one's hair, a pre-photographic memento that draws connections between portraiture, identity and memory. The figures appear as ornate statues, each characterized by the aesthetic associations and revisited stereotypes of their hairstyle. The anonymity of the images presented in The Hunt activates the mind's associative aptitude, drawing upon one's own fantasies and projections of sensuality, innocence, order, freedom, frivolity and social rank. Echoing classical art, these images refer to a mystical icon rather than presenting a portrait of an individual.

Swazi craft meets digital photography in Kyle Meyer's astounding woven photos of a silenced LGBTQ communityKyle Meyer (born 1985) has worked between eSwatini (formerly Swaziland) and New York City since 2009, creating richly tactile artworks as conceptually complex as they are visually lush. In this debut monograph, Meyer's portraits from his Interwoven series fuse digital photography with traditional Swazi crafts, giving voice to silenced members of the LGBTQ community. Tension between the necessity of the individuals to hide their queerness for basic survival and their desire to express themselves openly inform both the subject and the means of fabricating Meyer's unique works.Each piece from the Interwoven series is labor-intensive, taking days or sometimes weeks to complete. Meyer often photographs his subjects wearing a traditional headwrap made from a vibrantly colored textile. He then produces a print of the portrait and shreds it, together with the fabric from the headwrap, weaving the strips into patterned three-dimensional works. The final portrait presents each person's individuality while using the fabric as a screen to protect their identity. Included in each copy of this book is a unique piece of fabric torn from the remnants of the Interwoven project, intended to serve as a bookmark.

A multimedia portrait of a fictional woman artist caught between two culturesIn her latest body of work, multimedia artist Shirin Neshat (born 1957) turns her focus to the American West. With more than 100 photographs, a two-channel video installation and a feature film, Neshat creates a multilayered look at contemporary America through the eyes of a fictionalized artist. Monumental black-and-white photographs are transformed through Neshat's use of Farsi text and images that have been hand-drawn onto the picture. The texts represent Neshat's interpretation of the dreams of the sitter, with references to ancient myths and ideologies. Neshat works and experiments with photography, video and film, imbuing them with highly poetic and politically charged images and narratives that question issues of power, religion, race, gender and the relationship between the past and present, occident and orient, individual and collective through the lens of her personal experiences as an Iranian woman living in exile.