Dogs on Rocks is a volume of new photographs of William Wegman's famous Weimaraners, taken while he was in residence at The Acadia Summer Arts Program in Maine or at his own home in Maine. Many of these stunning shots--of the dogs alone, in pairs or in groups--take advantage of the breathtaking vistas of Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island, where the program is located. Wegman's formal portraits of the animals are framed by the natural beauty and muted tones of the island's forest and rocky beach. "I don't feel lonely when I'm around them," Wegman has said about his beloved dogs, "But I love also listening to them. I always make sure I spend some time just seeing what they're really doing. Especially outside, you know, when you're alone with them. Because so many people, including myself, fill in a whole vocabulary for them that is ours and not theirs. I remember spending some time for the first time with Man Ray, my first dog. I didn't talk that day. I just listened to what he was listening to, the whole aura of smells and sounds and sights and things that he was picking up on during that day." The Acadia Summer Arts Program was founded by Marion Boulton Stroud, the founder of The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, where she is the Artistic Director. William Wegman was born in 1943 in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Though he studied painting, Wegman gradually began to develop an interest in photography and video, the mediums for which he remains known. In the early 1970s, he moved to Southern California and began a long and fruitful collaboration with his first dog, Man Ray--who endeared himself to the art world with his deadpan presence. Wegman has added several dogs to his cast in the course of his nearly 40-year career. In addition to maintaining a presence in the art world, he has published a number of children's books and has created film and video works for Saturday Night Live and Sesame Street. He lives and works in New York City and Maine.

William Wegman: Dogs on Rocks

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

A.S.A.P.

This collection of short stories by groundbreaking curator and author Marcia Tucker--who died in 2006 at the age of 66--was produced during her many residencies at The Acadia Summer Arts Program in Maine. Tucker was the founder of New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art, where she served as Director from its inception in 1977 until 1999. Her motto, "Act first, think later--that way you'll have something to think about," was a guiding principle in running the institution, where she organized such major exhibitions as A Labor of Love (1996) and Bad Girls (1994). After resigning from her post in 1999, Tucker continued to write, teach, lecture--and perform occasional stand-up comedy. Upon her death, Lisa Phillips, the current Director of the New Museum wrote, "In her life and in her work, which were very intertwined, she was a kind of magnet who understood the power of people and brought them together around shared passions. She was and still is a force to be reckoned with."

Marcia Tucker: Three Stories

Literature & Fiction

Tucker, Marcia

Short Stories & Anthologies

Lexicon is a facsimile cloth edition of an antiquarian Latin-Greek dictionary which the internationally celebrated South African artist William Kentridge (born 1954) has embellished with black ink drawings of what might seem at first to be animal silhouettes. In reproducing the work (which is uncollected elsewhere), this beautifully designed artist's book mischievously pits the model of the flipbook against the fragility of the antiquarian original, and flipping its pages animates Kentridge's lively, spiky drawings into a continuously morphing image that transforms from a cat to a coffee pot over the course of the book's 160 pages. This image is based on a disintegrating sculpture that reflects the artist's interest in the instability of objecthood. Lexiconis accompanied by a DVD containing a short film in which Kentridge flips the pages himself.

William Kentridge: Lexicon (A.S.A.P.)

History & Criticism

In 2004, John Currin (born 1962) began a large-scale painting that would eventually be titled “The Dogwood Thieves.” What ensued was six years of humorous missteps, uncomfortable second-guesses and painterly faux pas, all visually presented here in 39 previously unreproduced and no longer extant iterations of a single painting. John Currin: The Dogwood Thieves is an entertaining portrait of the sometimes agonizing artistic process, and follows the artist’s initial inspiration from the photograph of a magazine advertisement to what would become dozens of paintings atop paintings. Currin shows how he went about changing night skies into ocean horizons, how a Russian bra evolved upon a pair of bare breasts and why his wife’s face underwent a lengthy transformation and traded features with a 1980s newscaster and then a 1970s Danish porn star. It also displays the delicate balancing act Currin maintains more generally in his work as he maneuvers between a broad range of cultural references, from women’s magazine photography and photorealist kitsch to Renaissance oil painting drapery and personal narrative. Combining visual documentation with a lecture Currin gave at the Acadia Summer Arts Program in 2010, this book is, as the artist puts it, “partly just to show kind of what I go through to make a painting,” but “also to dispel any notion that it’s a good thing to work on a painting for six years.”

John Currin: The Dogwood Thieves (A.S.A.P.)

Currin, John

"What makes something a work of art?" This was the question that philosopher Arthur C. Danto (1924–2013) asked himself after seeing Andy Warhol’s "Brillo Box" at a 1964 exhibition at the Stable Gallery in New York City. The philosophy of art was not Danto’s primary area of inquiry at the time, but Warhol’s work prompted him to return to this question over several decades. Danto, professor of philosophy at Columbia University since the 1960s and art critic at The Nation from 1984 to 2009, delivered the previously unpublished lectures presented in this volume at the Acadia Summer Arts Program in Mount Desert Island, Maine, from 1997 through 2009. They explicate the ideas that he set forth in professional philosophical papers and books, including The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), which describes his philosophy of art. Informal yet deeply thought-provoking, these lectures explore how Danto analyzed art through a philosophical lens, yielding an approach that differs from most other contemporary art criticism. Danto’s thoughts on art go beyond formal analysis and taste judgments, instead focusing on questions about the nature of art and attempting to define what a work of art is. These lectures present some of his most notable ideas in terms that those with no training in philosophy can readily understand.

Arthur C. Danto: Remarks on Art and Philosophy

Danto, Arthur

Limited numbered and signed edition. One of 300.

The Mexican Pig Bandit

James Cumley

The Woman Who Climbed to the Sky (SIGNED)

Margaret Coel

The Eagle Catcher - 10th Anniversary Edition

Coel, Margaret

The Eagle Catcher 10th Anniversary Collector's Edition

Margaret

Coel

"A dramatic short story of justice both old and new from the New York Times-bestselling author of Cold Wind. The West is not the way it's portrayed in the movies. But when a man from the East brings trouble for Nate Romanowski and his friend Joe Pickett, a little frontier-style justice may be just what's called for. An exciting new addition to the series that People hails for "combining harrowing adrenaline rushes with complex morality, humor, and a landscape described so vibrantly it seems to have a life all its own."

The Master Falconer

C.J. Box

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