Anonymous, detail of The Bear-faced Lady (c. 1680s), mezzotint, British Museum, London. ©Trustees of the British Museum.

English Prints: Looking Over the Overlooked

Swoon, Alixa and Naima (2008), blockprint with handcoloring and cut paper on exterior wall, Philadelphia. Building now demolished.

Street Art: Prints and Precedents

Pavel Petrovich Sokolov-Skalia, Nikolai Ernestovich Radlov, and Samuil Iakovlvich Marshak, Fascist Reports, False Reports, TASS No. 0536 (August 17, 1942), stencil, 177.2 x 87 cm

Picturing War: What Is It Good For?

Pavel Sokolov-Skalia, detail of Hail the All-Soviet Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (TASS 828/828A) (October 1943), stencil, Ne boltai! Collection.

Artful Coercion: The Aesthetic Extremes of Stencil in Wartime

Carsten Höller

The process behind Carsten Höller’s Birds and Canaries poses challenging ethical questions about what it means to be a creator. For centuries the goal of artists was to represent nature; many even attempted to locate divinity there. Höller has gone further, edging into the realm of Bio Art by generating his own species, and the knowledge that his birds were born to be extinct adds a tragic character to their portraits.

Enrique Chagoya

Like each of Chagoya’s prior codices, Escape from Fantasylandia: An Illegal Alien’s Survival Guide leads us on a path into a foreign world, providing just enough familiar material to entice—we become anthropologists of our own time, seeing ourselves through the lens of the other. Chagoya revives the ancient codex form as a thoroughly engaging and enriching entertainment: amusing, erudite, clever, and poignant.

On The Wall

Wallpaper is constantly adapting to fashion, economies and society. This book describes its development from single sheets to paper rolls, from hand printing to mechanical rotary printing, from a luxury affordable only by the elite to a product for everyone.  At Prangins, roughly 100 different motifs were found, dating back over the course of 150 years.

Josiah McElheny

In these photogravures, based on McElheny’s photographs of the chandeliers at the Metropolitan Opera House, the subject are in some places recognizable as earthly objects, but elsewhere could almost be traces of explosions, or, in the artist’s words, “galaxies inhabiting the universe.”