Polly Apfelbaum: For the Love of Una Hale
This publication is a comprehensive document of Polly Apfelbaum’s 2020-22 ceramics residency at Arcadia University and resulting installations (exhibited in the spring of 2022) in conjunction with a curated survey of works by folk artist David Ellinger (1913-2003). The book features over 160 illustrations, including color photographs of each of the 63 ceramic works Apfelbaum presented as well as multiple installation views along with documentation of two wallpaper projects. Reproductions of 40 works by Ellinger are also included.
Texts by: Tessa Bachi Hass, Wayne Koestenbaum, Lisa Minardi, Ezra Shales, Jenni Sorkin, David Pagel and Jenelle Porter with a transcription of a conversation between Apfelbaum, Shales, Elizabeth Ferrell, Gregg Moore, and Rachel Geisinger.
Edited by Richard Torchia and Katy Donoghue with an introduction by Torchia and an artist glossary by Donoghue. Designed by Conny Purtill, Purtill Family Business. Major funding provided by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.
Retail price: $45.00
Additional details:
Publisher: Arcadia Exhibitions, Arcadia University
City: Glenside, Pennsylvania
Pages: 200
Dimensions: 12 x 10 inches
Hardcover
Binding: Smyth-sewn
Printing: 4-color offset
ISBN: 978-0-9762154-8-6
The catalog is available for purchase in Spruance Gallery.
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David Kettner: After the Fall
This large format publication includes reproductions of 66 collages dating between 2013 and 2023. The book features the transcription of a conversation between London-based collage artist John Stezaker and Kettner, who have been corresponding since 2013.
It also includes seven short texts by Philadelphia-based artist and writer Eileen Neff, whom Kettner has known since 1975 as a teaching colleague, and an introduction by exhibition curator Richard Torchia. The publication has been generously funded by the Edna W. Andrade Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation.
Retail price: $40.00
Additional details:
Publisher: Arcadia Exhibitions
City: Glenside, Pennsylvania
Pages: 120
Dimensions: 11 x 11 inches
Paperback (card stock)
Binding: Smyth-sewn
Printing: 4-color offset
Book is available for purchase in Spruance Gallery.
Purchase Online
Pati Hill: Photocopier
“This publication [accompanied] a traveling exhibition that [reintroduced] the singular practice of Pati Hill (1921–2014). Untrained as an artist, Hill was a published novelist and poet before she began experimenting with the photocopier as an artist’s tool in the early 1970s. She was not alone in recognizing the creative possibilities of what she called ‘a found instrument, a saxophone without directions;’ however, her literal approach to the medium—‘having come to copying from writing’—coupled with her lucid texts about it, have proved prescient, especially regarding xerography’s potential for self-publishing and image-sharing that we take for granted today.
“Unlike many who experimented with this instant-duplication process—a technology whose convenience, affordability, and use of plain paper made it revolutionary—Hill sustained her commitment to xerography for 40 years.” (From the Preface by Richard Torchia).
Includes reproductions of the artist’s work as well as essays by Richard Torchia, Anthony Bailey, Marilyn McCray, Zachary See, Thomas McGonigle, Michelle Cotton, Sue Pierce, Matthew J. Rigilano, Fouzia Chakour, Thomas Devaney, Francesca Ferrari, Jessica Hough, Zachary Fruit, and Marie-Cécile Miessner. Major funding provided by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.
Retail Price: $30
Publisher: Arcadia Exhibitions
City: Glenside, Pennsylvania
Pages: 198
Dimensions: 10 x 13 inches
Softcover
ISBN 9780976215479
Book is available for purchase in Spruance Gallery.
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Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn
This fully illustrated catalog features four commissioned essays appearing both in English and in Chinese translation. In addition to a comprehensive, first-hand account of the place of ceramics within Ai Weiwei’s larger multi-disciplinary practice by Philip Tinari, the book includes a text by critic Dario Gamboni (examining Ai’s strategies within the legacy of iconoclasm); an essay situating Ai’s work within the tradition of Chinese ceramics by Stacey Pierson (a noted scholar in the field), and a text by Glenn Adamson (head of graduate studies in the research department at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London) exploring Ai’s ongoing iterations of his Coca-Cola Vase.
The publication also includes the first English translation of an interview with Ai originally published in his White Cover Book (1995), the second in an influential trio of volumes that marked the re-emergence of the contemporary art scene in the mid-1990s. The exhibition catalog was produced in collaboration with Office for Discourse Engineering, a Beijing-based editorial studio. Major funding provided by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.
Retail Price: $30
Additional details:
Publisher: Arcadia Exhibitions
City: Glenside, Pennsylvania
Pages: 123
Hardcover
ISBN 978-9881736772
Book is available for purchase in Spruance Gallery.
Purchase Online
JG: a Film Project by Tacita Dean
An unprecedented departure from Dean’s previous 16mm films, JG tries to respond to British author J.G. Ballard’s challenge—posed to her shortly before he died—that Dean should “treat the Spiral Jetty as a mystery her film would solve.”
Key Stroke is a collaborative artists’ book (32 pages) featuring color photographs that Dean took on location in the saline landscapes of Utah and central California with Ballard’s 35mm camera, given to her by Claire Walsh, Ballard’s partner of 40 years, as well as facsimiles of a manuscript by British novelist Will Self produced on Ballard’s manual Olympus typewriter, also provided by Walsh.
A second publication (48 pages) includes stills from the film, facsimiles of Dean’s correspondence with Ballard, short texts by Jeremy Millar, Claire Walsh, Tacita Dean, and Richard Torchia.
Retail Price: $30
Additional details:
Publisher: Arcadia Exhibitions
City: Glenside, Pennsylvania
Pages: 80
Softcover
ISBN 978-0976215448
Book is available for purchase in Spruance Gallery.
Olafur Eliasson: Your Colour Memory
“Olafur Eliasson’s Your Colour Memory offered viewers an unprecedented way to exercise the experience of their own after images. Despite its generous and fascinating profusion of optical effects, the larger goal of this work was not to demonstrate the beguiling physiology of color vision, but rather, as with all of Eliasson’s projects, to encourage a critical form of self-awareness—a condition the artist refers to as ‘seeing yourself seeing’.” (From the Afterword by Richard Torchia.)
Includes photographs of the exhibition as well as essays by Jonathan Crary, M.G. Minnaert, Josef Albers, Anders Michelson, Boris Oicherman, Luc Steels, John Siegfried, Olafur Eliasson, and an Afterword by Richard Torchia.
Retail Price: $30
Additional details:
Publisher: Arcadia Exhibitions
City: Glenside, Pennsylvania
Pages: 96
Hardcover
ISBN 978-0976215424
Book is available for purchase in Spruance Gallery.
Moscow Plastic Arts
Moscow Plastic Arts documents an exhibition of the same name presenting new photographs by Ithaca-based artist Nick Muellner. The twenty ink-jet prints that compromised the exhibition depict views of construction sites in and around Moscow taken during the artist’s visits there in 2003 and 2005. As a group, they evoke both the Soviet celebration of labor imagery and the austerity of American Minimalist sculpture, specifically the work of Barry Le Va, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, and others. The book includes photographs from the artist as well as a short essay entitled “Trouble with Monuments.”
Retail Price: $20
Additional details:
Publisher: Arcadia Exhibitions
City: Glenside, Pennsylvania
Pages: 48
Softcover
ISBN 0-9762154-0-3
Book is available for purchase in Spruance Gallery.
The Sea & The Sky
Michael Blodget, Vija Clemins, Thomas Chimes, Seoungho Cho, Linda Connor, Russel Crotty, Tacita Dean, Elger Esser, Spencer Finch, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Andreas Gursky, Richard Harrod, Willie McKeown, Michael Light, Garry Fabian Miller, Richard Misrach, Donald Moffett, Stephen Murphy, Eileen Neff, Robert Nesbit, Thomas Ruff, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Judith Taylor, Grace Weir, Bradley Wind.
“‘The Sea & the Sky’ [was] a traveling exhibition focusing on the ocean, atmosphere, and cosmos as subjects for contemporary works by twenty-four American, European, and Asian artists. A transatlantic collaboration arising from contemporary curatorial interests, the show developed from a series of spirited exchanges begun in the fall of 1998.” (From the foreword by Patrick T. Murphy and Richard Torchia.)
This illustrated catalog documents the artworks from the show, and contains an essay by Susan Stewart entitled “What Thought is Like,” as well as a conversation between curators Patrick T. Murphy and Richard Torchia.
Retail Price: $20
Additional details:
Publisher: Arcadia Exhibitions
City: Glenside, Pennsylvania
Pages: 47
Softcover
LoC# 99-076684
Book is available for purchase in Spruance Gallery.
Period Room and Other Projects: Amy Hauft
“The occasion of Period Room: A Project by Amy Hauft provides an ideal opportunity to study the fascinating evolution of a sculptor who has worked intensively in the area of installation since the mid-1980s. Considered within the space of this volume, the work’s expansive application of scale, explicit relationship to the site, and liminal references to texts (both visual and literary) assume not only a legible consistency and internal logic, but a singular generosity.” (From the Foreword and Acknowledgements by Richard Torchia.) Includes photographs of the artist’s works as well as essays by Patricia C. Phillips, Gregory Volk, and Connie Butler.
Retail Price: $20
Additional details:
Publisher: Arcadia Exhibitions
City: Glenside, Pennsylvania
Pages: 47
Softcover
ISBN 98074008
Book is available for purchase in Spruance Gallery.
Blue (NY)
“In the fall of 1997, the Beaver College Art Gallery [now Arcadia Exhibitions] introduced Blue (NY) a series of photographs by Donald Moffett depicting cloudless expanses of sky above Manhattan. Presented in diverse formats (glazed and unglazed, with and without mats, bordered in black or white frames, or laminated to aluminum and mounted flush to the wall), the work was distinguished by its multiplicity of interpretations” (Richard Torchia, Curator.) Includes photographs of the artist’s work as well as an essay by Torchia.
Retail Price: $20
Additional details:
Publisher: Arcadia Exhibitions
City: Glenside, Pennsylvania
Pages: 47
Softcover
ISBN 98074008
Book is available for purchase in Spruance Gallery.
Withering Heights
“This is the first publication dedicated to [Tristan] Lowe’s 18-year artistic practice. Invited to establish the scope and parameters of the monograph, Lowe developed the book in a way to express his belief in the priority of immediate sensation while at the same time recognizing the ability of his projects to address his belief in the priority of immediate sensation while at the same recognizing the ability of his projects to address a range of subjects across the fields of literature, science, design, and popular culture.” (From the Afterword & Acknowledgements by Richard Torchia.)
Includes extensive photographs of Lowe’s work as well as an essay entitled Truffle Hunting and Pheromone Tales by Alex Baker.
Retail Price: $10
Additional details:
Publisher: Arcadia Exhibitions
City: Glenside, Pennsylvania
Pages: 50
Softcover
ISBN 0976215411
Book is available for purchase in Spruance Gallery.
Daisy Youngblood
“While pursuing a rather solitary creative path, Daisy Youngblood has produced a singularly powerful body of work. Informed by Jungian symbolism and Buddhist philosophy, Youngblood’s sculpture is infused with a remarkable spiritual energy. These intensely felt clay vessels are a form of portrait that characteristically conflates human and animal imagery; in them, extreme simplification of form produces an amplification of substance.” (From the Introduction by Paula Marincola.) This exhibition was part of a series produced in response to Clay in Philadelphia ’92, a city-wide celebration of ceramic arts sponsored by The Philadelphia Ceramic Consortium and administered by The Clay Studio.
Includes photographs of the artist’s work as well as an essay by Judith Stein and notes from the artist.
Retail Price: $20
Additional details:
Publisher: Arcadia Exhibitions
City: Glenside, Pennsylvania
Pages: 22
Softcover
LoC# 91-78419
Book is available for purchase in Spruance Gallery.
