AQUARIAN SPECIAL !

January 20 – February 18, 2012:

All AQUARIANS take 10% all purchases at the shop.

Join your fellow AQUARIANS Humphrey Bogart, Lisa Marie Presley, Farrah Fawcett, Alice Cooper, Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Henry Rollins, Leah Kreger, Jennifer Jason Leigh, John McEnroe, Yoko Ono, Joe Pesci, Franklin D. Roosevelt, James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, Fredrico Fellini, Susan Sontag
Boris Yeltsin, James Joyce and millions of others while also supporting Spoonbill & filling your bare shelves with delectables. 

 

Love from the Staff of Spoonbill & Sugartown, since 1999. 

 

 fine print: I.D. Required; no books placed on hold; in-store purchases only. 

 

BOB NICKAS THROUGH THE YEARS

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Spoonbill & Sugartown welcomes curator & author BOB NICKAS on the occasion of the publication of his:

Bob Nickas: Catalog of the Exhibition: 1984-2011, 2^nd Cannons Pub., 2011. 166 pages; $50.00.

THURSDAY EVENING OCTOBER 27, 7:30 -9:00 PM

Spoonbill & Sugartown, Booksellers, 218 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn NY

Tel. 718.387.7322. Contact: Miles Bellamy. Admission is Free.

This book brings together new texts written to accompany 79 exhibitions organized by Bob Nickas between 1984 and 2011. Nickas chose one work to represent the memory of each exhibition, and through this visual “lens” he reflects on his activity as a curator, offering many behind-the-scenes views to the art world of the 1980s and 90s, as well as intimate recollections of the artists he worked with, and the art works he encountered over the years. The book, then, can be seen as a sort of memoir. Always placing the artists and their works within a social milieu, while also aware of how art travels across time, he reminds us that both lead multiple lives, as an exhibition can reanimate a work from the past, and occasion the discovery of forgotten and marginalized figures among those who are very well-known. This retrospective catalog is in many ways an ideal exhibition—or collection—27 years in the making.

With 150 color and black-and-white reproductions, the book features works by:

Vito Acconci. Richard Aldrich. John M Armleder. Barry X Ball. Lisa Beck. Alan Belcher. Ben Berlow. Walead Beshty. Huma Bhabha. Doug Biggert. Marcel Broodthaers. Henri Cartier Bresson. Graham Caldwell. Vija Celmins. Art Chantry. Larry Clark. Verne Dawson. Jules de Balincourt. Jessica Diamond. Trisha Donnelly. Moira Dryer. Gardar Eide Einarsson. William Gedney. Robert Gober. Wayne Gonzales. Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Peter Halley. Richard Hawkins. Adam Helms. Eva Hesse. Peter Hujar. Jacob Kassay. On Kawara. Yves Klein, Louise Lawler. Mark Leckey. Sherrie Levine. Judy Linn. Lee Lozano. Chris Martin. Allan McCollum. McDermott & McGoughAdam McEwen. Ryan McGinley. John Miller. Olivier Mosset. Dave Muller. Chuck Nanney. Bruce Nauman. Cady Noland. Amy O’Neill. Steven Parrino. Laurie Parsons. Raymond Pettibon. Jean Prouvé. David Ratcliff. Alex Rose. Sally Ross. Allen Ruppersberg. Sam Samore. Tom Sandberg. Joan Semmel. Stephen Shore. Harry Smith. Jack Smith. Robert Smithson. Mark Stahl. Haim Steinbach. RudolfStingel. Lily van der Stokker. Aaron Suggs. Philip Taaffe. Paul Thek. Wolfgang Tillmans. Betty Tompkins, Josh Tonsfeldt. John Tremblay, Alan Uglow. Kelley Walker. Jeff Wall. Joan Wallace. Wallace & Donohue. Dan Walsh. Andy Warhol. Christopher Wool.

. .

PROUST!RILKE!THOREAU!…SEARLS!

Author & Translator Damion Searls presents three of his books, translations of Rainer Maria Rilke and Marcel Proust and his recent edition of the Journals of Henry David Thoreau.

 

Monday, October 24 at 8PM, Spoonbill & Sugartown, Booksellers, 218 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn. 718-387-7322. Contact: sugar@spoonbillbooks.com

 

 

Editor and translator Damion Searls <http://www.damionsearls.com/> is

responsible for three of our favorite new classics in recent years: Henry

David Thoreau’s The Journal, abridged from fourteen volumes down to one NYRB Classic (2009); visionary and personal little-known writings by Rainer Maria Rilke in The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams (Godine, 2010);  and now a new translation of Marcel Proust’s On Reading (Hesperus, 2011), an essay on a topic close to our hearts and a perfect prelude to Proust’s  masterpiece.

 

To celebrate the publication of his Proust translation, Searls will be in

the store to read from all three books and discuss the surprising

connections among these modern greats.

 

Damion Searls is a translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch and a writer in English. He has translated many of Europe’s greatest writers, including Proust, Rilke, Robert Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Kurt Schwitters, Peter Handke, Jon Fosse, Christa Wolf, and Nescio, edited a new abridged edition of Thoreau’s Journal, and produced a lost work of Melville’s.

 

Searls grew up in New York City, studied German philosophy at Harvard and American literature at UC Berkeley, and has receivedwriting and translating awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, PEN Center USA, the Netherland America Foundation, the University of California, and the Austrian, Belgian, and Dutch governments. He lives with his wife and son in Brooklyn.

Damion Searls

 

McKenzie Wark on the Situationists

SITUATIONISTS UNITE!

McKenzie Wark presents his new book The Beach Beneath the Street A Fresh Historyof the Situationist International(Verso, 2011) on Wednesday night, June 8 at 8PM,Spoonbill & Sugartown, Booksellers, 218 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn 11211. Telephone 718-387-7322.
Admission is Free but Seating is Limited. For info please call or email sugar@spoonbillbooks.com!

Over fifty years after the Situationist International appeared, its legacy continues
to inspire activists, artists and theorists around the world. Such a legend has
accrued to this movement that the story of the SI now demands to be told in a contemporaryvoice capable of putting it into the context of twenty-first-century struggles.

McKenzie Wark delves into the Situationists’ unacknowledged diversity, revealing a world as rich in practice as it is in theory. Tracing the group’s development from the bohemian Paris of the ’50s to the explosive days of May ’68, Wark’s take on the Situationists is biographically and historically rich, presenting the group as an ensemble creation, rather than the brainchild and dominion of its most famous member, Guy Debord. Roaming through Europe and the lives of those who made up the movement-including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michèle Bernstein, Alex Trocchi and Jacqueline De Jong-Wark uncovers an international movement riven with conflicting passions.

Accessible to those who have only just discovered the Situationists and filled with new insights, The Beach Beneath the Street rereads the group’s history in the light of our contemporary experience of communications, architecture, and everyday life. The Situationists tried to escape the world of twentieth-century spectacle and failed in the attempt. Wark argues that they may still help us to escape the twenty-first century, while we still can …

McKenzie Wark is the author of A Hacker Manifesto,Gamer Theory, 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International and The Beach Beneath the Street, among other books. He teaches at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City.

Dave Hardy with Special Edition book @ Spoonbill

Please Join us to celebrate the release of Dave Hardy’s It’s grey, it’s grey, a book made through the generous support of Art in General. May 24th at 7:30 PM, Spoonbill & Sugartown Books, 218 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn.
The first 25 copies will be packaged in an original work by the artist.

Introduction by Anne Barlow, texts by Nina Horisaki-Christens and Eve Meltzer, design by Jeff Lai. Published by Art in General.

The publication grew out of a new commissions project at Art in General and developed into an artwork of it’s own, using the ethos of the Whole Earth Catalog to frame the artist’s research photos, recent work and texts.
Dave Hardy’s sculptures present the familiar anew, creating objects stripped of their utility and reconditioned as strange propositions. His work plays with the ambiguity of the re-contextualized, using the language and techniques of mass production in the construction of unique hand-made pieces. The shingled facade of It’s grey it’s grey serves as metaphor for the artist’s other work: a faked surface obstructing a potentially subjective interior, a lighted sign full of blanks and advertising nothing, a leaking barrier, a constellation that does not keep the outside out or the inside in.

Dave Hardy’s work has been included in the exhibitions Make It Now at Sculpture Center, Un balance at Jack Shainman, and Greater New York 2005 at MoMA PS1. He has had solo exhibitions internationally at Living Room D Lyx, Malmö, Sweden, as well as solo exhibitions at Southern Exposure in San Francisco, and at La Mama Galleria and Art in General in New York. Hardy is also one half of the collaborative effort SPIRIT TOURS with Siebren Versteeg. Hardy lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Amy Cutler Book Release @ Spoonbill May 16

Pleas Join us to celebrate the release of Amy Cutler’s new monograph, Turtle Fur. May 16th at 7 PM, Spoonbill & Sugartown Books, 218 Bedford Ave, Bklyn.

AMY CUTLER  TURTLE FUR

Introduction by Laura Steward, texts by Aimee Bender, interview by Aimee Bender with the artist. Published by Hatje Cantz.

During the past decade, Amy Cutler (*1974 in Poughkeepsie, New York) has become internationally known for exquisitely detailed narrative works of art. Set in a richly imagined universe, created through a pastiche of memories, observations and insights, they are populated mostly by women engaged in enigmatic tasks and impossible situations: tigers are mended and restriped; figures emerge from the rocky crags of a fjord.

With faces that are both resolute and introspective, Cutler’s women symbolize the emotional complexities of real life situations. This publication will premiere new paintings, drawings, and prints, also including a selection of earlier works and a special section devoted to Alterations, a sculpture installation created for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid.

Amy Cutler is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York.

Hans Hofmann @ Spoonbill

Author Tina Dickey Presents

Color Creates Light: Studies with Hans Hofmann

Tuesday May 3, 8PM

Spoonbill & Sugartown, Booksellers

218 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn 718.387.7322

Victoria, BC – March 26, 2011. Artists tell the story of a charismatic teacher and his ideas in Color Creates Light: Studies with Hans Hofmann by Tina Dickey, recently released by Trillistar Books.  The author will tbe present to discuss and sign the book.  A second event will be held on May 5 from 5-7 PM at Ameringer McEnery Yohe, 525 West 22nd Street, Manhattan.

The Hofmann school was one of the first schools of modern art when it opened in Munich in 1915. From the early thirties until 1958, despite poverty, world wars, oblivion, and immigration, Hofmann’s schools in New York and Provincetown became a nexus of visual experimentation for generations of students, who included collectors, critics, curators, dealers, and hundreds of influential artists and teachers, generating not just a variety of art movements, but also economic and cultural growth. This book, according to Jed Perl of The New Republic, represents “the missing chapter in the history of the period.”

A contributor to numerous books and exhibition catalogs related to Hofmann and his former students in the United States, Canada, Spain, and Germany, artist and author Tina Dickey has served as editor of the Hans Hofmann Catalogue Raisonné (1997–2006) and chief research consultant for the PBS documentary Hans Hofmann: Artist/Teacher, Teacher/Artist (2002).

Dickey had studied painting for a decade with former Hofmann students when she discovered Hofmann’s mimeographed lectures in 1990. She used the lectures as a basis for an oral history, now held in the Archives of American Art.

“As a painter, I’d ask questions that wouldn’t occur to art historians,” she says. “I thought that if Hofmann’s ideas could come alive through his students’ voices, future artists would have a ‘Rosetta Stone,’ for Hofmann could be considered a conduit. He was an abstract painter, yet his ideas were based on older traditions.” Over two decades of research and revision, the artists’ voices— poetic, humorous, metaphorical— coalesced into “a visual common sense,” Dickey recalls. “We seize reality through relationships of space, light, and movement. Hofmann showed how these relationships create a parallel world in art.”      More info: colorcreateslight.com

Food Trucks Event at Spoonbill

Spoonbill & Sugartown Books will celebrate the release of Heather Shouse’s FOOD TRUCKS on Tuesday April 26th at 6:00. Beer courtesy of the Brooklyn Brewery. Endless Summer will be parked out front.

Please drop by!

Will Oldham and Ben Chasny perform Slow Fade

Anthony Blasko @ Spoonbill Books