In Conversation With: Richard Wagener
Printmaker and book artist Richard Wagener talks about his creative process and the wood engravings that he has published under his Mixolydian Editions imprint. He will discuss his work on the numerous fine press editions of Arion Press, Peter Koch Printers, Nawakum Press, and others. And Wagener will be in conversation with Book Club of […]
Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books
A cross between a book exhibition and a conceptual art installation, this exhibition consists of a collection of books that do not really exist. Curated by Reid Byers, the exhibition includes approximately 100 books and associated arealia from his collection—all simulacra created with a team of printers, bookbinders, artists, and calligraphers—of lost books that have […]
Unnatural Habitat: The Native and Exotic Wildlife of Los Angeles
Within the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles and its suburbs, residents coexist—often unknowingly—with a bustling mosaic of native and introduced wildlife. Conservationist Craig Stanford, whose research has taken him around the world, now takes a deep dive into the natural history of his Southern California home. Stanford’s informed and vivid accounts of more than 150 […]
The Man Beneath the Paint: California Impressionist Tilden Daken
The Man Beneath the Paint: California Impressionist Tilden Daken is the untold, multifaceted story of one of the most adventurous and prolific landscape painters of the American West. California Impressionist Tilden Daken (1876–1935), famous in his day, painted in every California state park and national park in the West—from the redwood forests to the High […]
Medieval & Renaissance Manuscripts: Designing the Book
Before the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century, books were designed, written, and illustrated by hand. Today these handmade manuscripts are highly valued, and greatly sought after by collectors and institutions around the world. This presentation addresses two aspects of illustration in medieval and Renaissance manuscripts before the dominance […]
Cast Out of Eden
John Muir is widely and rightly lauded as the nature mystic who added wilderness to the United States’ vision of itself, largely through the system of national parks and wild areas his writings and public advocacy helped create. That vision, however, came at a cost: the conquest and dispossession of the tribal peoples who had […]
Also On View: Unique and Unexpected Museums of Greater Los Angeles
Also On View: Unique and Unexpected Museums of Greater Los Angeles celebrates LA’s most fascinating and under-appreciated collections, from the deeply culturally significant–such as the Garifuna Museum—to the highly specific and unusual, like the City of Los Angeles’s Streetlight Museum. There are more than 750 museums in the greater Los Angeles area, many of which […]
Representation, Reason and Rewilding in the State of Fire
On January 6th, best-selling author of The California Field Atlas, Obi Kaufmann, returns to the San Francisco Book Club to present his latest in the Field Atlas series, The State of Fire: Why California Burns. In his artful yet analytical work, Obi Kaufmann asks: How do we live with fire? What makes fire essential to […]
Mothers and Fathers of the Digital Archive: The Endangered Archives Programme in Iquitos, Peru
Across North American and European imaginaries, the Amazon River Basin has figured as both a region rich in “natural resources” ready for the taking, and, consequently, a geography of lands and peoples in need of saving. Both Amazonian exploration and salvation have been characterized by a hyper-masculine discourse of evangelists, explorers, and entrepreneurs seeking both […]
Bibliophiles Beware: The Situationist International and the Art & Politics of Cultural Hijacking
Active between 1957 and 1972, The Situationist International (S.I.) was a revolutionary alliance of artists, intellectuals, architects and political theorists that is hailed as the “last avant-garde” of the 20th century. One of the organization’s core concepts is that of détournement, which can be understood as the subversion of established cultural commodities as a means […]