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100 books match the query 'Monographs' and 5 start with i

cover of I Am an Architect: Paul R. Williams and His Archive

I Am an Architect

Paul R. Williams and His Archive

LeRonn P. Brooks

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 0

Discover the visionary legacy of the groundbreaking architect Paul R. Williams, FAIA, one of the most prolific Black architects of the 20th century.

Paul R. Williams (1894–1980), among the first Black members of the American Institute of Architects, was a defining force in shaping the city of Los Angeles and Southern California, yet his impact was undoubtedly global.

Threading together Williams’s biography, social histories of Los Angeles, and transformations in the profession, this richly researched monograph traces his remarkable career against the evolving landscape of Los Angeles and the wider architectural world.

  • Presents the first research-driven monograph on preeminent architect Paul R. Williams.
  • Features nearly 200 images, including many never-before published drawings, renderings, and archival materials.
  • Williams’s expansive oeuvre spans everything from early residential commissions in the 1920s to civic, religious, commercial, and cultural landmarks that came to define Los Angeles’s identity at midcentury.
  • Examines the intersection of race, space, and professional practice in twentieth-century American architecture.
  • Highlights Williams’s commitment to designing for Black communities and advancing social change through architecture.

Step into the world of a visionary who transformed cities and challenged barriers—this volume invites you to get to know Paul R. Williams and the enduring power of architecture to shape society.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the Fisher Museum of Art at the University of Southern California from August 18, 2026, to March 13, 2027, Los Angeles County Museum of Art from November 15, 2026, to May 31, 2027, and Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center from December 15, 2026, to March 14, 2027.

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cover of I Love My Selfie

I Love My Selfie

Essay by Ilan Stavans / Auto-Portraits by ADÁL

Duke University Press, 2017

What explains our current obsession with selfies? In I Love My Selfie noted cultural critic Ilan Stavans explores the selfie's historical and cultural roots by discussing everything from Greek mythology and Shakespeare to Andy Warhol, James Franco, and Pope Francis. He sees selfies as tools people use to disguise or present themselves as spontaneous and casual. This collaboration includes a portfolio of fifty autoportraits by the artist ADÁL; he and Stavans use them as a way to question the notion of the self and to engage with artists, celebrities, technology, identity, and politics. Provocative and engaging, I Love My Selfie will change the way readers think about this unavoidable phenomenon of twenty-first-century life.
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cover of Inventing Nadar: A History of Photographic Firsts

Inventing Nadar

A History of Photographic Firsts

Emily Doucet

Duke University Press, 2025

Félix Nadar took the first aerial photograph in 1858, so the story goes. The evidence, Emily Doucet notes, is mixed. In Inventing Nadar, Doucet analyzes the historical and material production of the nineteenth-century Parisian photographer’s famous and numerous photographic firsts. Focusing on these oft-labeled groundbreaking elements of his career, she deconstructs Nadar’s legacy as a prime protagonist in the history of photography by interrogating the media techniques used to construct his invention narratives. Doucet highlights this highly mediated process as one that canonized novel applications of photography as discrete techniques with single authors and inventors. Looking to this process of mediation through the institutions and individuals that shaped Nadar’s archives, Doucet unpacks assumptions of Nadar as a master of early photography and shows how the medium is enmeshed in larger histories of media, science, and technology. The result is both a new account of Nadar’s place in photographic history and a critical study of how stories of innovation take shape.
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cover of Irina Nakhova: Museum on the Edge

Irina Nakhova

Museum on the Edge

Jane A. Sharp

Rutgers University Press, 2019

Throughout her extensive career, Russian conceptual artist Irina Nakhova has frequently pushed the limits of what constitutes art and how we experience the art museum. One of her famous early pieces, for instance, transformed a room in her very own Moscow apartment into an art installation.
 
Released in conjunction with Nakhova’s first museum retrospective exhibition in the United States, this book includes many full-color illustrations of her work, spanning the entirety of her forty-year career and demonstrating her facility with a variety of media. It also includes essays by a variety of world-renowned curators and art historians, each cataloging Nakhova’s artistic innovations and exploring how she deals with themes of everyday life, memory, viewer engagement, and moral responsibility. It concludes with a new interview with Nakhova herself, giving new insight into her creative process and artistic goals. Irina Nakhova: Museum on the Edge provides a vivid look at the work of a visionary artist. Published in partnership with the Zimmerli Museum.
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cover of Isa Genzken: Sculpture as World Receiver

Isa Genzken

Sculpture as World Receiver

Lisa Lee

University of Chicago Press, 2017

The work of German sculptor Isa Genzken is brilliantly receptive to the ever-shifting conditions of modern life. In this first book devoted to the artist, Lisa Lee reflects on Genzken’s tendency to think across media, attending to sculptures, photographs, drawings, and films from the entire span of her four-decade career, from student projects in the mid-1970s to recent works seen in Genzken’s studio.
           
Through penetrating analyses of individual works as well as archival and interview material from the artist herself, Lee establishes four major themes in Genzken’s oeuvre: embodied perception, architecture and built space, the commodity, and the body. Contextualizing the sculptor’s engagement with fellow artists, such as Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman, Lee situates Genzken within a critical and historical framework that begins in politically fraught 1960s West Germany and extends to the globalized present. Here we see how Genzken tests the relevance of the utopian aspirations and formal innovations of the early twentieth century by submitting them to homage and travesty. Sure to set the standard for future studies of Genzken’s work, Isa Genzken is essential for anyone interested in contemporary art.
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