Through large-scale installation, sculpture, photography, printmaking, and painting, Sonny Assu merges the aesthetics of Indigenous iconography with a pop-art sensibility. This stunning retrospective spans over a decade of Assu's career, highlighting more than 120 full-color works, including several never-before-exhibited pieces.

Through analytical essays and personal narratives, Candice Hopkins, Marianne Nicolson, Richard Van Camp, and Ellyn Walker provide brilliant commentary on Assu's practice, its meaning in the context of contemporary art, and its wider significance in the struggle for Indigenous cultural and political autonomy. Exploring themes of Indigenous rights, consumerism, branding, humor, and the ways in which history informs contemporary ideas and identities, Sonny Assu: A Selective History is the first major full-scale book to pay tribute to this important, prolific, and vibrant figure in the contemporary art world.

SONNY ASSU was raised in North Delta, BC, over 150 miles away from his ancestral home on Vancouver Island. At the age of eight, he discovered his Kwakwaka'wakw heritage, which would later become the conceptual focal point of his contemporary art practice. Assu graduated from Emily Carr University in 2002 and was the recipient of their distinguished alumni award in 2006. His work can be found in the National Gallery of Canada, Seattle Art Museum, Vancouver Art Gallery, Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Burke Museum at the University of Washington, and various other public and private collections across Canada, the United States, and the UK. In 2016, Assu and his family moved "home" to unceded Ligwilda'xw territory (Campbell River, BC).

History of Illustration covers image-making and print history from around the world, spanning from the ancient to the modern. Hundreds of color images show illustrations within their social, cultural, and technical context, while they are ordered from the past to the present. Readers will be able to analyze images for their displayed techniques, cultural standards, and ideas to appreciate the art form. This essential guide is the first history of illustration written by an international team of illustration historians, practitioners, and educators.

Landscape art in the early 19th century was guided by two rival concepts: the picturesque, which emphasized touristic pleasures and visual delight, and the sublime, an aesthetic category rooted in notions of fear and danger. British artists including J.M.W. Turner and John Constable raised landscape painting to new heights and their work reached global audiences through the circulation of engravings. Thomas Cole, born in England, emigrated to the United States in 1818, and first absorbed the picturesque and sublime through print media. Cole transformed British and continental European traditions to create a distinctive American form of landscape painting. The authors here explore the role of prints as agents of artistic transmission and look closely at how Cole’s own creative process was driven by works on paper such as drawings, notebooks, letters, and manuscripts. Also considered is the importance of the parallel works of William Guy Wall, best known for his pioneering Hudson River Portfolio. Beautifully illustrated with works on paper ranging from watercolors to etchings, mezzotints, aquatints, engravings, and lithographs, as well as notable paintings, this book offers important insights into Cole’s formulation of a profound new category in art—the American sublime.

Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor in the History of Art at Yale University. Gillian Forrester is senior curator of historic fine art at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. Jennifer Raab is assistant professor in the history of art at Yale University. Sophie Lynford and Nicholas Robbins are doctoral candidates in the history of art at Yale University.

Anticipated publication April 17, 2018

The catalog for the exhibition, About Prints: The Legacy of Stanley William Hayter and Atelier 17, explores Hayter’s ideas about contemporary printmaking and the artists who created these works. Using Hayter’s own checklist of important prints the catalog/exhibition looks at why these images are innovative or essential to understanding how the graphic arts were being transformed throughout the 20th century. Prints by recognizable artists such as Picasso, Marc Chagall, and Henry Moore are examined along with other important visionaries such as Andre Masson, Max Ernst and Joan Miro. Technical innovators like Karl Schrag, Arthur Deshaies, and Krishna Reddy are also represented in the catalog/exhibition along with Helen Phillips, Mauricio Lasansky and S. W. Hayter.

In 1559 and 1561, the Antwerp print publisher Hieronymus Cock issued an unprecedented series of landscape prints known today simply as the Small Landscapes. The forty-four prints included in the series offer views of the local countryside surrounding Antwerp in simple, unembellished compositions. At a time when vast panoramic and allegorical landscapes dominated the art market, the Small Landscapes represent a striking innovation. This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the significance of the Small Landscapes in early modern print culture. It charts a diachronic history of the series over the century it was in active circulation, from 1559 to the middle of the seventeenth century. Adopting the lifespan of the prints as the framework of the study, Alexandra Onuf analyzes the successive states of the plates and the changes to the series as a whole in order to reveal the shifting artistic and contextual valences of the images at their different moments and places of publication. This unique case study allows for a new perspective on the trajectory of print publishing over the course of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries across multiple publishing houses, highlighting the seminal importance of print publishers in the creation and dissemination of visual imagery and cultural ideas. Looking at other visual materials and contemporary sources – including texts as diverse as humanist poetry and plays, agricultural manuals, polemical broadsheets, and peasant songs – Onuf situates the Small Landscapes within the larger cultural discourse on rural land and the meaning of the local in the turbulent early modern Netherlands. The study focuses new attention on the active and reciprocal intersections between printed pictures and broader cultural, economic and political phenomena.

Peter Paul Rubens and the Counter-Reformation crisis of the Beati Moderni (Routledge, 2017), takes up the question of the issues of the implication of imprinted and imprinting images and objects—including engravings, drawings, paintings, sculptures, deathmasks, and wax seals—in the formation of recent saints—or 'Beati moderni' (modern Blesseds) as they were called—in the new environment of increased strictures and censorship that developed after the Council of Trent with respect to legal canonization procedures and cultic devotion to the saints. A particular focus on how the new regulations pertained to the creation of emerging cults of those not yet canonized, including Filippo Neri, founder of the Oratorians. Centrally involved in the book is a revisionist account of the fate and meaning of altarpiece paintings infamously commissioned and then rejected by the Roman Oratorians from Rubens. The book offers the first comparative study of Jesuit and Oratorian imprints of their respective would-be saints, and the controversy they ignited across Church hierarchies.

This anthology, the first of its kind, presents thirty-two texts on contemporary prints and printmaking written from the mid-1980s to the present by authors from across the world. The texts range from history and criticism to creative writing. More than a general survey, they provide a critical topography of artistic printmaking during the period. The book is directed at an audience of international stakeholders in the field of contemporary print, printmaking and printmedia, including art students, practising artists, museum curators, critics, educationalists, print publishers and print scholars. It expands debate in the field and will act as a starting point for further research.

Ruth Pelzer-Montada is an artist and Lecturer in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh. (*Forthcoming June 2018)

In the nineteenth century, new image-making methods like steel engraving and lithography caused a surge in the publication of illustrated books in the United States. Yet even before the widespread use of these technologies, Americans had already established the illustrated book format as central to the nation’s literary culture. In The Portrait and the Book, Megan Walsh argues that colonial-era author portraits, such as Benjamin Franklin’s and Phillis Wheatley’s frontispieces; political portraits that circulated during the debates over the Constitution, such as those of the Founders by Charles Willson Peale; and portraits of beloved fictional characters in the 1790s, such as those of Samuel Richardson’s heroine Pamela, shaped readers’ conceptions of American literature.

Illustrations played a key role in American literary culture despite the fact there was little demand for books by American writers. Indeed, most of the illustrated books bought, sold, and shared by Americans were either imported British works or reprinted versions of those imported editions. As a result, in addition to embellishing books, illustrations provided readers with crucial information about the country’s status as a former colony.

Through an examination of readers’ portrait-collecting habits, writers’ employment of ekphrasis, printers’ efforts to secure American-made illustrations for periodicals, and engravers’ reproductions of British book illustrations, Walsh uncovers in late eighteenth-century America a dynamic but forgotten visual culture that was inextricably tied to the printing industry and to the early US literary imagination.

The chateau of Fontainebleau, transformed into a magnificent palace during the reign of François I, was the birthplace of many of the greatest artistic innovations of the French Renaissance. The highly wrought, ornate decoration conceived for the interiors by the Italian artists Rosso Fiorentino and Francesco Primaticcio would have a profound effect on the course of French art. The prints that were produced at the palace in the 1540s became one of the main vehicles for the dissemination of this Fontainebleau style throughout France and beyond. Prints at the Court of Fontainebleau, c. 1542-47, to be published in three volumes in Sound & Vision’s Studies in Prints and Printmaking series, examines the etchings, engravings and woodcuts that were executed at the French court in a spurt of activity that lasted approximately five years. Known collectively as the School of Fontainebleau, these prints are particularly intriguing, not least for their lack of identifying inscriptions, their unusual, often amateurish appearance, and the total absence of documentary evidence on the circumstances of their production.

Throughout his career, Henri Matisse used imagery as a means of engaging critically with poetry and prose by a diverse range of authors. Kathryn Brown offers a groundbreaking account of Matisse's position in the literary cross-currents of 20th-century France and explores ways in which reading influenced the artist's work in a range of media. This study argues that the livre d'artiste became the privileged means by which Matisse enfolded literature into his own idiom and demonstrated the centrality of his aesthetic to modernist debates about authorship and creativity. By tracing the compositional and interpretive choices that Matisse made as a painter, print maker, and reader in the field of book production, this study offers a new theoretical account of visual art's capacity to function as a form of literary criticism and extends debates about the gendering of 20th-century bibliophilia. Brown also demonstrates the importance of Matisse's self-placement in relation to the French literary canon in the charged political climate of the Second World War and its aftermath. Through a combination of archival resources, art history, and literary criticism, this study offers a new interpretation of Matisse's artist's books and will be of interest to art historians, literary scholars, and researchers in book history and modernism.