Few art forms are as universally popular as Japanese samurai armor. Graphic, bold, refined, and theatrical, this exquisitely crafted material has inspired designers and artists for centuries. From Yoshitoshi, the father of modern Japanese manga style, to George Lucas’s iconic Star Wars costuming, its influence is thoroughly integrated into our cultural aesthetic.
Marquand Books produced English and French editions of Art of Armor: Samurai Armor from the Ann and Gabriel Barbier-Mueller Collection. Published in association with Yale University Press, this 320-page book showcases more than 300 images. These illustrations allow readers to see the intricacies of samurai armor, and captions include the weight and measurements for each piece. Jeff Wincapaw of Marquand Books designed the book, and Brad Flowers photographed the work. Essays were written by John Anderson, Ian Bottomley, Sachiko Hori, Gregory Irvine, Eric Meulien, Morihiro Ogawa, John Stevenson, and Stephen Turnbull; Bernard Fournier-Bourdier authored the catalogue entries.
The Barbier-Mueller collection is currently on display at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris until the end of this month. The show then opens in April at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Quebec and will be on view until January 2013. In Dallas, the Barbier-Muellers renovated a former Catholic school into a handsome museum, where the collection will be permanently housed.
Marquand Books recently produced the monograph Radcliffe Bailey: Memory as Medicine for the High Museum of Art, distributed by Prestel Publishing. It’s the first mid-career publication for the artist, featuring five essays and about 70 works, some never before seen. The exhibition in Atlanta has received positive press from several national media outlets, including a recent feature in the New York Times:
Now 42, [Bailey] has built a successful career as an artist largely out of his fascination with the city’s history as the crossroads of the South, and with the past more generally — as is evident in “Radcliffe Bailey: Memory as Medicine,” his largest museum show to date, which opened last week at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. His mixed-media paintings and installations incorporate objects steeped in history — including tintypes of distant family members, African figurines, disassembled piano keys and Georgia red clay — and suggest stories of the black Atlantic diaspora and migrations more universal and spiritual.
Bailey grapples with big ideas in his art, including the past, race, and community, and he does so using intricate and distinct techniques framed by family. Born in 1968 in New Jersey, Bailey moved to Atlanta as a young child. The culture of that city has influenced his work as much as his African American heritage.
Congratulations to our partners at iocolor. They handled the pre-press, engineering, and production for this astonishing and important book. The six-volume encyclopedia on the art and science of modern cooking is the subject of a spirited review in the New York Times:
In the end, I can only smile, shake my head and bow to him and his crew for their work of unprecedented scope and ambition.
A good overview of the project and interview with co-author Nathan Myhrvold was featured on Weekend Edition last Saturday.
The color and resolution standards involved in printing the book are discussed here.
Marquand Books is thrilled to announce the publication of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, published with the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust. The first book-length publication about Wright’s masterpiece since the 1980s features an introduction by New Yorker architecture critic and Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Goldberger.
For more details and ordering information, click here.
The new Mighty Tieton Web site has just been launched. Home to Marquand Editions|Tieton’s growing line of gift products carried in museum and gift shops nationally, fresh businesses and events keep popping up in Tieton.
A new addition everyone at Marquand Books is excited about is the installion of a 1920s vintage Smyth Stitcher to bind short-run editions of hand-printed and digital books.
The celebrated exhibition, Fleeting Beauty: Japanese Woodblock Printscloses July 4 at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. If you’re in the Seattle-area and haven’t been to the show, which includes Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa, now is the time.
Marquand produced the exhibition catalogue, featuring prints from renowned ukiyo-e artists of the 18th and 19th centuries.
MFA Houston’s exhibition, Alice Neel: Painted Truths continues to enjoy wide media attention. Marquand Books produced the exhibition’s accompanying catalogue, distributed by Yale University Press.
Neel’s career was profiled in last Sunday’s New York Times:
She focused on the least fashionable of realist genres, portraiture, which had long since been declared dead, bringing to it an electrifying verve.
Seattle-based bookstore Wessel and Lieberman recently featured Marquand’s letterpress chapbook series on their blog. On Spines and Memories, the first in the collection, was written by Ed Marquand and printed and hand-bound in Tieton, WA. The occasional series will feature essays contributed by writers, curators, and book publishing professionals.
20 of 500 limited edition copies are available via the W+L website here.
Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Koreaopens at LACMA on Sunday. The exhibit features a wide variety of modern art from twelve artists, including video and multimedia, an installation using boxes and bubble wrap, and a piece made up of hundreds of neon plastic bowls and bins.
(The exhibit) can be viewed as a fascinating exploration either of the process of self-invention or of the artist as self-promoter. Either way, it should arouse sharp reactions. It includes portraits by Man Ray, Francis Picabia and Alfred Stieglitz, as well as self-portraits by Duchamp. There is also a portrait by Andy Warhol, another artist who knew how to mold his public image.
If you go, be sure to check out the accompanying catalog Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture, produced by Marquand Books, also found on-line through MIT Press.
March 27-August 2, Eighth and F streets N.W., Washington, D.C. Open daily from 11:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Call (202) 633-8300 for more information.
Not just a formalist, Ms. Akerman also takes on hot-button themes like racism in the American South, illegal immigration in the Southwest and a terrorism in the Mideast. As a political artist she can be heavy-handedly predictable or unexpectedly illuminating.
Currently based in Paris, Akerman’s latest work is featured in her first solo museum exhibition, “Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space,” which has traveled to the Blaffer Gallery at the Art Museum of the University of Houston and the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, MA.
The exhibit of five video installations is currently on view at the Miami Art Museum until January 25, 2009, when it will move to the Contemporary Art Museum of Saint Louis in May of 2009.
The show and accompanying book highlight art from 39 Salish nations, from basketry and weaving to photographs and paintings. Seattle Times art critic Sheila Farr wrote a nice piece on the exhibit, which opens Friday with a lecture by curator Barbara Brotherton at 7 p.m.
In 2006, we began work on a series of exhibition catalogs highlighting the partnership between the Louvre Museum in Paris and the High Museum in Atlanta, recently featured on CNN travel. We’re pleased to announce that the sixth and final book in the series, The Louvre and the Masterpiece, is now available.
In conjunction with the exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Marquand Books is pleased to present the book Franz West, To Build a House You Start with the Roof. Designer Beverly Joel has conjured up a bold, surprising design to accompany the Austrian artist’s intellectually singular paintings and sculpture. If you’re in the Baltimore-Washington area, be sure to visit the West retrospective, hanging until January 4, 2009. For more info, check out the Baltimore Sun article here. The exhibit will also be featured at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, March 15-June 7, 2009.
At Marquand Books, we believe in the power of strong images and text, well presented in books about art, art history, architecture, design, photography, and world culture.
In order to share this passion with you, the staff at Marquand Books is pleased to announce the launch of a blog devoted to art and design books—their creation, publication, distribution, and impact on our collective culture.
We want you to know a little bit about the work we do, both in our Seattle office and in our book arts studio in Tieton, Washington. We’d like to engage our readers by posting interviews with designers and editors—our own and those at other publishing firms—and with art directors, bookstore owners, museum publications directors, curators, and production managers to get their take on developments and issues in our shared profession. We’ll also invite architects, artists, photographers, and other creative professionals to discuss which illustrated books have made significant impressions on them and influenced their work.
We urge you to engage with and comment on what you read. Content will be updated frequently, so check back often.
Marquand Books produced English and French editions of Art of Armor: Samurai Armor from the Ann and Gabriel Barbier-Mueller Collection. Published in association with Yale University Press, this 320-page book showcases more than 300 images. These illustrations allow readers to see the intricacies of samurai armor, and captions include the weight and measurements for each piece. Jeff Wincapaw of Marquand Books designed the book, and Brad Flowers photographed the work. Essays were written by John Anderson, Ian Bottomley, Sachiko Hori, Gregory Irvine, Eric Meulien, Morihiro Ogawa, John Stevenson, and Stephen Turnbull; Bernard Fournier-Bourdier authored the catalogue entries.
