For almost forty years Eli Levin has colorfully portrayed Santa Fe night life in his original etchings and engravings. Here is the complete collection of these prints accompanied by informative and amusing commentary.

Eli Levin: Scenes of Santa Fe Night Life (The Santa Fe Printmakers Series)

Bell, Robert

James Mann (eds.)

Bell Tower Editions

William Gonzales: Santa Fe - Etched in Memory

Bell, Robert, James Mann

Mildred Tolbert: Among the Taos Moderns

Robert, Bell

James, Mann

Mildred Tolbert

"100 Santa Fe Etchers" by Robert Bell, author; Sami Keats, photographer; James Mann, author; Cayley Bell, photographer. ©2008 Bell Tower Editions. Soft Cover. ISBN 978-0-9802278-0-2. 244 pages, 102 artist portrait photographs, 109 artwork illustrations. All images printed in high quality duotone process on heavy weight paper. Intaglio printing technique essay by Dr. Robert Bell. Art essay by James Mann Ph.D. Limited printing of only 2,300 copies of the soft cover by Bell Tower Editions, a small publishing house in Santa Fe, New Mexico. FORMAT: Artist portrait and short biographical sketch on each left hand page with corresponding sample of their artwork on the facing right hand page. Relevant quotes from important 19th century etchers interspersed throughout the book.

100 Santa Fe Etchers

Essentially a picture book, A Fine Frenzy illustrates the work of Elmer Schooley, Ray Drew, Paul Volckening, and Harry Leippe, the primary artists and teachers of the 1960s at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Schooley, Drew, Volckening, and Leippe expressed themselves uncommonly well in art and language, and these pages reveal their character along with their intelligence and humor. Resisting movements and trends, Schooley, Drew, Volckening, and Leippe remained grounded in the traditions of classical art, while producing prints, paintings, watercolors, ceramics, sculpture and jewelry that defined their own modernity. They taught through example and through their art, demonstrating superb execution, high educational standards, and personal commitment to students. Their legacy lies in the many accomplished artists and teachers who were their students and in the admiration and understanding of art they inspired in so many students of that era. Renaissance thinkers and American individualists, they were the Highlands art faculty in the 1960s.

A Fine Frenzy: New Mexico Highlands University Artists and Teachers in the1960s

Arts & Photography

Orem, Elizabeth

Diederichsen, Mark

History & Criticism

Puff

Children's Books

Bell, Arthur

Animals

Tombstone Confidential is a satire on mortality and contemporary culture, grounded in today’s ingrained disregard for the relatively imminent approach and finality of one’s death. An essentially comic work, at the same time the book is one long memento mori, filling a loosely narrative framework sequenced as a wandering journey across the United States. The poem unfolds panoramically through a wide variety of setting and reference, as it embodies the aesthetic position set forth by the author’s Manifesto of Vandalism: that in today’s diverse and chaotic culture, the most competent and valuable art will be that which makes the fullest and richest use of the entire range of culture at all levels.With 10,000 lines of rhymed pentameter quatrains, Tombstone Confidential offers an individual reconstitution of the art of poetry. From beginning to end, the book is addressed in the second person to a fictive reader, whose mock persona thus becomes the clueless protagonist of the narrative. The implied speaker of the poem is equally problematic, serving as the rambling yet relentless accuser of the reader’s fictional life of ignorance and crime. With a doppelganger leitmotif, the action turns from hell to Hollywood, from national parks to space exploration, from Thunder Road to Las Vegas, the Wild West to the Rolling Stones, vampire culture to cannibalism, sports to sex, the Blue Ridge to the Golden Gate.

Tombstone Confidential

Literature & Fiction

Mann, James

Poetry

The Manifesto of Vandalism is essential reading for those interested in understanding the condition of the contemporary fine arts and the nature of their most advanced developments. The author’s intention is to identify and define the most important new work in the fine arts, and to establish a critical framework upon and within which to base such judgements. Thus the book proposes, devises, and exemplifies a radically original discourse for the evaluation of recently and newly created works of art, a discourse which nevertheless bases its arguments on a historical overview of art since the Renaissance. The discourse employs new and unprecedented nomenclature upon which it is predicated, including a clear rationale for the term Vandalism itself. The argument initially focuses on the paradigmatic difference between art created before and after the birth of Romanticism around 1800. Demonstrating that two centuries of culturally dismantling activity brought the fine arts by 2000 to a state of complete artistic impoverishment, Mann concludes that the inevitable work at the present innovative frontier is to reconstitute the several fine arts upon and beyond the high-cultural ruins of Post-modernism. This discussion concentrates on visual art as representative of the remaining fine arts, albeit with a chapter on contemporary poetry. (The book’s publication is accompanied by that of the author’s long poem Tombstone Confidential, soon to be available from the same publisher.) The author’s presentation builds upon the critical rationale he established through a series of painting exhibitions he originated as Curator of the Las Vegas Art Museum, exhibitions which bore the general title Art After Post-modernism. His reasoning includes a clear and well-defined use of the term Post-modernism itself, a highly specific denotation not previously advanced. The wholly new aesthetic Mann identifies and defines represents a clear break with the most prominent art of the recent past, which is still engaged in the intellectually diminishing effort to fully dismantle and destroy the cultural tradition out of which it is created. In contrast, the new art which this manifesto recognizes is involved in the innovative reconstitution of art, and accordingly it represents a distinct new frontier in the development of contemporary art. Since over the course of the last two centuries, Western art broke down and discarded, via analytic dismantlement, all its former historical attributes, all the characteristics of its now former tradition, fine art therefore can only be reconstituted by emerging anew as part of an entirely different, far broader cultural context, one which can rightly be considered global. This new art rises in the wake of Post-modernism as a total exploitation of expressive resources and potential, an entirely emergent aesthetic for incorporating many different kinds of artistic manifestation from the widest practical range of cultural levels and cultural origins.

Manifesto of Vandalism

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Bell Tower Editions publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bell Tower Editions