Try to Tell a Fish About Water

$40.00

In addition to her accomplishments as a gifted musician and songwriter, Norma Tanega was a noted gallerist, teacher, and a central figure in the vibrant and homegrown creative scene of Claremont, California. She was also a visual artist of astonishing originality. In Try to Tell a Fish About Water, the bold colors and gestural immediacy of Tanega’s paintings are presented for the first time alongside unseen photos, illustrations, journal entries, and other ephemera. Featuring reflections and remembrances from Norma’s friends and collaborators collaged alongside the visual roadmap, Try to Tell a Fish About Water is a thoughtful exploration of Tanega’s art career and a testament to a life spent immersed in creativity.

Norma Tanega was a musician, singer, songwriter, and painter who reached worldwide recognition after the release of her 1966 hit single, “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog.” In addition to her solo career, she was a songwriter for Dusty Springfield, and performed with a number of groups well into the 2000s. A painter throughout her life, Tanega first began exhibiting her work at the age of sixteen, and received her MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 1962, with her later work often supported by the Claremont Museum of Art. She passed away in December 2019 at the age of eighty.

Softcover
9 inches x 10 inches
150 pages , 172 images

After All is Said and Done: Taping the Grateful Dead, 1965-1995

After All is Said and Done: Taping the Grateful Dead, 1965-1995

$50.00

If any one musical act of the rock and roll era can be said to have transcended the simple categorization of “band,” the Grateful Dead is it: by the time they stopped performing in 1995, the Dead had become an international institution with a vast backing organization, a massive and devoted fanbase, and archival recordings both official and bootlegged. The cultural significance of these bootlegs—live concert cassettes which solidified the Dead’s legendary status even as they occupied a legal gray area for decades—is utterly unique in the annals of music, and the story of their creation, trading, and endless proliferation is a people’s history unto itself. Featuring dozens of interviews with tape enthusiasts and members of the Grateful Dead organization as well as the show stopping visuals from hundreds of archival cassette covers, After All Is Said and Done is artist Mark A. Rodriguez’s exploration of that history, a saga of homegrown psychedelia, anarchic graphic styles, and black market fandom as written in magnetic tape.

Mark A. Rodriguez is an artist who divides his time between Los Angeles and New Mexico. He has drawn from and expanded on his experiences as a collector to develop a sculptural practice that explores themes of cultural ownership, folk art, and technological obsolescence. Since getting his start collecting Grateful Dead cassettes in the mid-90s, more than 27,000 tapes have passed through his hands.

Hardcover
10 inches x 10.75 inches
332 pages, 625 images

Dense Magazine Issue 1

$27.00

emier issue of Dense! In 148 full-color pages, each issue clusters essays, interviews, visual stories, fictional accounts and tasty inserts around an event that pushes and pulls our readers in surprising directions.

Our first issue begins with the opening of the New Jersey Turnpike in November 1951. Seventy years later, we ask our contributors to unpack its complicated role in shaping the densest state in the U.S.

Our debut issue features these incredible contributors:

Anita Bakshi (author, educator & scholar) / Marshall Brown (artist & architect) / Nelson Chan (photographer) / Felecia Davis (architect, engineer & educator) / Ayanna Dozier (artist, filmmaker, curator & scholar) / Dalal Elsheikh (user experience designer, researcher & futurist) / Gabrielle Esperdy (historian, critic & educator) / Mindy Fullilove (author, social psychiatrist, & educator) / Daniel Hoffman (nutrition scientist & photographer) / Julie Langsam (multidisciplinary artist & photographer) / Joe Lanza (hunter) / David Maisel (photographer) / Chief Vincent Mann (Ramapough Lunaape Turtle Clan chief, educator & farmer) / Brian McGrath (author & urban design consultant) / Vaishnavi Reddy (architect) / SPURSE (research & design collective) / Shayna Strype (animator, actor & director) / University of Orange (free school of restoration urbanism) / Tommy Yang (designer, researcher & educator) / Susan Yelavich (author, critic, curator & educator) / Dana Yurcisin (photographer, filmmaker, songwriter & producer)

Details:

148 pages, offset-printed and perfect bound, full color on uncoated paper. Holographic foil illustration on cover. Carbon neutral printing.

Size:

7.5" x 9.5" x .75"

Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group

$60.00

Abstract painting meets theosophical spirituality in 1930s New Mexico: the first book on a radical, astonishingly prescient episode in American modernism

Founded in Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, in 1938, at a time when social realism reigned in American art, the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG) sought to promote abstract art that pursued enlightenment and spiritual illumination. The nine original members of the Transcendental Painting Group were Emil Bisttram, Robert Gribbroek, Lawren Harris, Raymond Jonson, William Lumpkins, Florence Miller Pierce, Agnes Pelton, Horace Towner Pierce and Stuart Walker. They were later joined by Ed Garman. Despite the quality of their works, these Southwest artists have been neglected in most surveys of American art, their paintings rarely exhibited outside of New Mexico. Faced with the double disadvantage of being an openly spiritual movement from the wrong side of the Mississippi, the TPG has remained a secret mostly known only to cognoscenti.

Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group aims to address this slight, claiming the group’s artists as crucial contributors to an alternative through-line in 20th-century abstraction, one with renewed relevance today. This volume provides a broad perspective on the group’s work, positioning it within the history of modern painting and 20th-century American art. Essays examine the TPG in light of their international artistic peers; their involvement with esoteric thought and Theosophy; the group’s sources in the culture and landscape of the American Southwest; and the experience of its two female members.

The Little Mermaid Illustrated by Yayoi Kusama

$45.00

This definitive study of the 1980s Jamaican Dancehall scene features hundreds of exclusive photographs and an accompanying text that capture a vibrant, globally influential and yet rarely documented culture that has mixed music, fashion and lifestyle since its inception.

With unprecedented access to the incredibly exciting music scene during this period, Beth Lesser’s photographs and text are a unique way into a previously hidden culture.

Dancehall is at the center of Jamaican musical and cultural life. From its roots in Kingston in the 1950s to its heyday in the 1980s, Dancehall has conquered the globe, spreading to the USA, UK, Canada, Japan, Europe and beyond.

This jam-packed visual history tells the story from its roots to its heights from the vantage of the true, respected insider. In the early 1980s, as Jamaica was in the throes of political and gang violence, Beth Lesser ventured where few others dared, and this book is a never-before-seen record of the exciting, dangerous world of Dancehall.

12 in x 12 in

216 pages

Don Chadwick Photography 1961–2005

$44.00

‘I look at a great tragedy, and I see in it a chance for survival. A photograph is a document of what happened, but I try to do it in a very refined way with the camera, composition, light, and shadow’.
—Don Chadwick

Don Chadwick is one of the foremost industrial designers of our times, focused on furniture and seating and the innovation of new production techniques. For decades, Chadwick has also been a prolific photographer, documenting his surroundings with a curious eye: the culture, growth, decay, and technical wonders around him, the wear and tear of manufactured materials, the shaping of Los Angeles, his home city, by social tensions and natural disasters.

In the tradition of Charles Eames and George Nelson, Chadwick has used photography as a form of design research, where specific relationships and aesthetics are reflected back into his production. In this sense, Don Chadwick Photography 1961–2005 presents a unique way of seeing, and fills in a missing chapter of global design history.

Edited by Jonathan Olivares. Texts by Olivares and Bobbye Tigerman.

Published by Apartamento Publishing S.L.
July 2019
First edition
Dimensions: 200x280mm
Pages: 144
Binding: hard cover

Faye Toogood: Assemblage 6, Unlearning

$36.00

This book captures the raw moment of inception behind a designer’s collection. Assemblage 6 started off with almost 300 maquettes: chairs, lamps, stools, or daybeds made of wire, cardboard, tape, and canvas, or the everyday materials to be found in Faye Toogood’s studio. But having lined up these rather crude, almost childlike maquettes, the collection, in essence, was decided. Seventeen were chosen to be scaled up to life-size works, and here we have an immersive journey through all the original maquettes and their occasional passage into the real world of furniture/sculpture, a book that plays with the sense of dissimulation evident in the final artworks, or the fact that some objects are not always what they seem at first glance.

The Man Booker–nominated author Sophie Mackintosh opens with this idea in her short story, while the book closes on an essay by the independent writer and curator Glenn Adamson, who ultimately provides context for the collection and process as a whole.

Published by Apartamento Publishing S.L.
First edition, March 2021
Dimensions: 145 x 220mm
Pages: 448
Binding: paperback with gilding

The House of Xavier Corberó

$68.00

Xavier Corberó (1935–2017) is among the foremost Spanish artists of the last century. His sculptures in rough-hewn stone, marble, and bronze gave form to ideas running through a circle of contemporary surrealist artists, including Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Joan Miró, but with pieces distinctly his own. His works are widely and internationally celebrated in institutions like London’s V&A and New York’s The Met, but maybe his greatest artwork is located on the outskirts of Barcelona in the form of the home he built for himself over a period of five decades, a series of labyrinthine rooms, levels, buildings, and arches that he continually added to whenever money came his way, conceiving new plans on morning strolls with the local builder.

The House of Xavier Corberó, edited by his daughter Ana Corberó, is the first publication to explore this home in Esplugues de Llobregat, which soon looks to be sold. With original photography by Daniel Riera, it also features a series of texts by long-time friends and colleagues of the artist: the architects Ricardo Bofill and Josep Acebillo, program director at World Architecture Festival Paul Finch, artist and journalist Celia Lyttelton, RBTA director Pablo Bofill, as well as an interview with Corberó himself by the filmmaker Albert Moya, originally published in issue #16 of Apartamento magazine.

Release date: December 14 2021

Published by Apartamento Publishing S.L.
First edition, December 2021
Dimensions: 240 x 285mm
Binding: hardcover
Pages: 224

Berlin Living Rooms

$48.00

‘When I received an invitation from the American Academy in Berlin to spend a few months in the German capital, I knew it would be my last chance to at last make Berlin Living Rooms. The Berlin of 2014 was a far cry from the divided and battered Berlin of the 1960s and 1970s I had known. It was now a glorious city where all the young people of the world wanted to move and where many famous artists had chosen to work. The Berliner Luft was still contagious. I embarked on my voyeuristic journey with the gusto and curiosity of a new visitor’.

—Dominique Nabokov

After re-releasing Paris Living Rooms and New York Living Rooms, we’re excited to launch the reprint of our sold-out publication Berlin Living Rooms, by Dominique Nabokov. Over the years we’ve developed a close relationship with Dominique, after featuring a selection of her beautiful interior photos from Paris Living Rooms (2002) and New York Living Rooms (1998) in issue #5 of the magazine. We’ve had the privilege of publishing the third instalment in a project that has evolved for more than 20 years to become a sort of holy trinity of interior photography books.

Berlin Living Rooms features original photography by Dominique Nabokov and texts by American novelist Darryl Pinckney and ZEIT magazin editor Christoph Amend.

Release date: October 18

Published by Apartamento Publishing S.L.
October 2021
Third edition

Dimensions: 240 x 285mm
Binding: Hard cover
Pages: 120

New York Living Rooms

$48.00

New York Living Rooms is the first instalment in Dominique Nabokov’s holy trinity of interior photography works, re-issued by Apartamento Publishing more than two decades after it was first published in 1998. Originally commissioned as a photo essay for the New Yorker in 1995, it offers a frank and intimate study of the interior living spaces of some of the city’s most fabled cultural figures, including Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Louise Bourgeois, Francesco Clemente, Allen Ginsberg, and Joan Didion.

With nothing added and nothing altered, Nabokov calls these images her interior ‘portraits’. Some spaces are indulgent and ostentatious, others shelter the bare necessities, but Nabokov simply records them all for her fellow voyeurs and leaves us to decipher the rest. Long out of print, this updated edition brings back to life an era of New York City history, seen through Nabokov’s original Polaroid photos and the original introduction by English poet James Fenton. It also sets the stage for the following editions in Paris and Berlin, which Apartamento will be re-issuing later in 2021.

Published by Apartamento Publishing S.L.
First edition, June 2021
Dimensions: 240 x 285mm
Binding: Hard cover
Pages: 116