EMAIL US ABOUT THIS PROJECT

• Author: [apply]
• Project Manager: [apply]
• Editor: [apply]
• Publicist: [apply]
• Designer: [apply]
• Bookstore Sponsor: [apply]

PROJECT STATUS [?]: This book has been proposed as a project and is now seeking team members. Using the links at left, apply to join the team and help make this book happen.

No artist has had as profound an impact on the course of art history, nor has displayed such persistent output and influence as artist Pablo Picasso. Undead Picasso: Eating Art's Brains is the story of this conquest.

For Picasso, what we thought we knew about perspective, the single-point we felt to be most dear, was just the delicious, juicy gray matter of our art-historical brains from which this brash young Spaniard would feast. And once initially sated, in the dark, dank, wee hours of the 20th Century, the artist would put brush to canvas and touch off a revolution in art and a torrent of his own artistic output that wouldn't stop for some seventy years and to this day, nearly four decades after his death, still gnaws at us.

Undead Picasso: Eating Art's Brains is a proposal for a book not yet written. We are looking for an author, or authors to take on the task. It might be a new biography, it might be a series of essays, it might be a mash-up in the style of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. You tell us. The only thing for certain is that it will be good, it will be unrelenting and it will be terrifying, just like the artist himself.

Publisher's Note

This project proposal stems from this off-hand Twitter exchange between @bookavore from WORD bookstore, Brooklyn, @Bookdwarf from Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, and ourselves:

@bookavore Hey publishers, so you know, I am basically vetoing all vampire & zombie books on principle at this point.

@Bookdwarf Agreed. Get off the vampire/zombie bandwagon publishers! My personal fav was gay zombie erotica.

@holartbooks So I should halt publication of Undead Picasso: Eating Art's Brains?!

@Bookdwarf Ooh, no. I'd like to see that one!

So, here you go. And though yes, it's unlikely to see the light of print, if someone out there can actually come up with a viable text (and our vote would be for something in the horror-pulp-non-fiction genre) we'd totally publish it. Just couldn't count on WORD carrying it in their store.

DOWNLOAD A SAMPLE OF THE MANUSCRIPT

CONTACT THE PROJECT TEAM

• Author & Project Manager:
  Roland Salazar Rose
• Editor: Jef Taylor
• Publicist: [apply]
• Designer: Benjie Nelson
• Bookstore Sponsor: [apply]
• DVD Editor/Designer: Jef Taylor

PROJECT STATUS: This book has been proposed as a project and is now seeking team members. Using the links at left, apply to join the team and help make this book happen.

My Father’s Room gives my images a platform--a voice--capturing those memories in my life that facilitate in appreciating my art. Part one focus on being in my father’s room in Mexico. The value in having a “sacred space” in which to become more human is expressed. Part two regresses: it is about my earlier artistic years in Europe.

A DVD with 1,000 images, The Four Seasons of the Master Myth, is currently being produced that might hopefully accompany the book. It is about images and words, displaying my artistic philosophy and my struggle in life with the competing forces of normalcy and bohemian living.

DOWNLOAD A SAMPLE OF THE MANUSCRIPT

CONTACT THE PROJECT TEAM

• Author & Project Manager:
  Laura Eklund
  
• Editor: [apply]
• Publicist: [apply]
• Designer: [apply]
• Bookstore Sponsor: [apply]

PROJECT STATUS: This book has been proposed as a project and is now seeking team members. Using the links at left, apply to join the team and help make this book happen.

I propose to write a multi-genre book that includes journal entries, poems about art, prose poems that all tie around the artistic process of painting and being a visual artist.

I have already written most of the book, I just need to assemble it, which is what I am doing now. The only thing I haven't completed for the book is essays on the process of painting (but I am working on it now), to be included as a "forward" in the book.

What is unique is I am a published poet and an established painter that is represented in a gallery, and I am also a professor who teaches art history. What makes this powerful is I am going to be expressive about painting as an artist but can also tap into other resources as poet and professor.

The purpose is the explore the process of painting-from the inside out, not as the voice of an art critic or scholar, but in a kind of synthesis, a synthetic voice that is aware of itself as poet, teacher, and painter. To do this-the way I am going to structure the book is to have a varied modality.

To realize this approach I have creative renderings to the process that are expressive of the process. Therefore, in a way abstracted or figurative modes of writing which attempt to express and define or even map out the inductive and intuitive process with paint and brush at the easel. With the journal entries I allow myself a more cognitive and reflective approach and a more expository yet highly reflective approach to the search and exploration.

This book will also include several essays about this process, because in a way, the essay is a “trying out.”

This is a very exciting project and a fully realized one, that I wander if its even been done before. Sure, I have read many artists’ journals. What is more interesting than getting inside the mind of an artist? Not much, in my opinion. I have already gotten a book designer for my project, and am also good at marketing my work.

I already have a strong base for an audience and that comes through exposure I have on the east coast, from my website and my weekly blog. The website, my published book, and my galleries will find my book very interesting. I imagine this book may be interesting and marketable to a professor who teaches studio art. I am in a consistent effort to expand my own audience, and I am good at the marketing end. I think this press is just perfect for me, because I want to be involved in getting my book out there.

I do want to say I am involved with art professionals at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, who will likely to an interest in my book. I know my colleagues and my galleries will take an interest in this. I think this has book has great potential. I have a website www.lauraeklund.com I get many hits every day, at least 10. I can sell my book off my website as well.

DOWNLOAD A SAMPLE OF THE MANUSCRIPT

CONTACT THE PROJECT TEAM

• Author & Project Manager:
  Judith Sornberger
  
• Editor: [apply]
• Publicist: [apply]
• Designer: [apply]
• Bookstore Sponsor: [apply]

PROJECT STATUS: This book has been proposed as a project and is now seeking team members. Using the links at left, apply to join the team and help make this book happen.

This collection of poems addresses and seeks to interact with paintings depicting the woman called the Virgin Mary. Although the New Testament offers scant information of Mary's life, artists of subsequent ages haven't seemed to be able to get enough of painting her, relying on apocryphal sources, folk tales, and their own imaginations to fill in the blanks. The forty or so poems in this collection engage with Mary as both historical woman and mythical figure as depicted in paintings. The collection begins with her girlhood, and winds through her roles as the chosen one, the young mother, the pieta, and the queen of heaven.

The poems respond to and enlarge on themes from paintings by well-known artists such as Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, Massaccio, Vermeer and Van Gogh, as well as lesser known painters such as 19th century artist Lilly Martin Spencer and contemporary artists and illustrators such as Carol Mothner, Kamal Youssef, Kathleen Ace and Julie Vivas. One section focuses on the goddess-like paintings of Polish artist Wislawa Kwiatkowska. The collection also considers art by unknown southwestern artists and by Peruvian tapestry artists who created arpilleras in remembrance of those who have been "disappeared."

The poems in this collection--like the paintings that inspired them--are diverse in tone, sometimes addressing Mary as she appears in the painting, other times musing on her plight. Some are humorous, most are more serious. However, all of the poems seek to understand Mary from a contemporary perspective, even as they view her through artwork ranging across centuries.

Notes on the Project:

A number of these poems have been published individually in literary journals; therefore, I am confident that they can stand on their own. However, it would be divine (pardon the pun) to include reproductions of some of the paintings that inspired them.

DOWNLOAD A SAMPLE OF THE MANUSCRIPT

CONTACT THE PROJECT TEAM

• Author & Project Manager: Elizabeth Bernays
  
• Editor: [apply]
• Publicist: [apply]
• Designer: [apply] 
• Bookstore Sponsor: [apply] 

PROJECT STATUS: This project is currently active and underway, but seeking a publicist and bookstore sponsor. Using the links at left, apply to join the team and help make this book happen.

House of Pictures is a series of essays, individually inspired by pictures that hang on the walls of a home in Tucson, Arizona. The essays combine memoir, philosophy, and some elements about the picture. Two themes link the essays: the role of art in the home, and what is the meaning of home.

About half of the essays have been published in small literary journals and a couple of them have won small literary awards.

DOWNLOAD A SAMPLE OF THE MANUSCRIPT

CONTACT THE PROJECT TEAM

• Author: Alice Bolstridge
• Project Manager: [apply]
• Editor: [apply]
• Publicist: [apply]
• Designer: [apply]
• Bookstore Sponsor: [apply]

PROJECT STATUS: This book has been proposed as a project and is now seeking team members. Using the links at left, apply to join the team and help make this book happen.

Holy Family is a novel about an aging unschooled artist, Amelia Hardy, the narrator. Not religious, she is nevertheless fascinated from childhood by the Holy Family as a subject for art. She lives in the family farmhouse where she grew up and takes care of Justin, her youngest brother, mentally disabled all his adult life with schizophrenia. Justin’s care becomes increasingly difficult, and her other siblings—Eliza, Thurston, Willard, and Carl—urge her to give up his care and place him in a nursing home. Amelia’s distress about Justin’s care is fed by memories of other major conflicts in the family and community over three generations. These conflicts fuel her art work which is described throughout the novel.

From earliest childhood, Amelia draws, colors, and paints. At book’s end she is planning her magnum opus, 13 panels depicting a Holy Family in the center surrounded by community, farming, and wilderness scenes. I view these characters and this setting as a microcosm of society’s ills, a landscape and cultural climate that expose primal fears, rages, and loves which drive human relationships and remain mostly lost to consciousness while simultaneously bleeding through in individual expression. Amelia’s landscapes and portraits are colored by these emotions, and as she ages, and as her care of Justin becomes more difficult, her drive to express grows more insistent. It is a major plot complication. In these ways, Holy Family is something of a philosophical novel, dramatizing the role of art in experience and the interplay between cultural and personal expressions of experience.

Notes on the Project:

Four stories from this book have been published. In a review of An Intricate Weave, which includes another story from the novel, Publishers Weekly (March 10, 1997) says, “Although outstanding authors such as Lucille Clifton, Julia Alvarez and Alice Walker are represented, many contributors are lesser known but write with talent and sensitivity. Alice Bolstridge offers a haunting fictional description of a young girl overwhelmed by family problems . . . .”

Some readers of this book see it as grim, but I believe Amelia’s vision is ultimately a comic one. She never gives up hope; her sense of life’s value remains affirmative; her strength and survival attest to that; and she often reviews her heritage and herself with some degree of humor, however dark the undertones.

DOWNLOAD A SAMPLE of Owen Smith's "Re:Considering"

DOWNLOAD A SAMPLE of Ursula Meyer's "Conceptual Art"

CONTACT THE PROJECT TEAM

• Project Manager: Krista Molnar
• Editor/Author: Owen Smith
  
• Publicist: [apply]
• Designer: [apply]
• Bookstore Sponsor: [apply]

PROJECT STATUS: This project got underway, but is seeking a publicist, designer and bookstore sponsor. Using the links at left, apply to join the team and help make this book happen.

"[O]ne doesn't want to insist that the conceptualist movement is without point. It may, indeed, be heralding the complete collapse of art into philosophy. Several possibilities suggest themselves. Perhaps we should now leave art to philosophers who would seem to be, on this thesis, especially well suited to the tasks of "framing propositions," "advancing investigations," "initiating inquiries," etc. Or perhaps we should recognize that a Hegelian dialectical apocalypse is coming to pass, and that the apologia pro vita artis conceptualis documented in this anthology signals the death of art." --The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1974

Artist and author, Ursula Meyer originally wrote and edited Conceptual Art in 1972. Though reviewers of the time were convinced neither of the budding movement's viability, nor of Meyer's analysis of it in her introductory essay, they did concede the book's value as a "small, cheap, portable museum" of post-object art as it captured the conceptual work of some 40 different artists of the time. 25 years after its original publication, Conceptual Art has establish its place in the canon, Meyer's thesis endures, and only the book itself has fallen (needlessly) out of print.

Thanks to artist Alex Klein for reminding us of Meyer's book in her essay "Remembering and Forgetting Conceptual Art", posted at Words Without Pictures, April 2008.

Project Notes:

For this project, contemporary artist, professor and author Owen Smith proposes: "updating and expanding the basic project as it is concerned with presenting and documenting the forms and nature of conceptual art.... the basic idea is to create a contemporary version of the book in which updates or analogs of the past work in contemporary form are gathered and presented in an homage to Meyer's classic edition."

The team could potentially produce this project in two separate volumes (one classic, one new); or as a single, bound volume with the texts interspersed; or in a single volume of only the new text, subsequently packaged with vintage copies of Meyer's original. One of the first tasks for the team will be to contact the author's estate to determine copyright status and seek their approval of the project.

DOWNLOAD A SAMPLE OF THE MANUSCRIPT

CONTACT THE PROJECT TEAM

• Project Manager: [apply]
• Editor: Anna Nickila
• Publicist: [apply]
• Designer: [apply]
• Bookstore Sponsor: [apply]

PROJECT STATUS: This book has been proposed as a project and is now seeking team members. Using the links at left, apply to join the team and help make this book happen.

"As a first-hand account of life with one of the major artists of our century [Max Ernst, 1891-1976], as the autobiography of a distinctive and original American painter [Dorothea Tanning, b.1910], and as a poetic evocation of the ways in which dream and reality can mate and mingle [Dada/Surrealism], Birthday is a book to read and re-read, an 'Alice in Wonderland' for grown-ups." —The New York Times

Project Notes:

First published in 1986, Birthday is out of print, but still in copyright. If an interested team were to form, their first step would be to contact the author (perhaps through the previous publisher, or a more recent publisher of another of her books) to determine copyright status and seek her approval of the project.

DOWNLOAD A SAMPLE OF THE MANUSCRIPT

CONTACT THE PROJECT TEAM

• Project Manager: [apply]
• Editor: [apply]
• Publicist: [apply]
• Designer: [apply]
• Bookstore Sponsor: [apply]

PROJECT STATUS: This project was proposed by the Hol Editors and is open for anyone to take the lead on. Using the links at left, apply to join the team and help make this book happen.

Comprised of essays published primarily in The New Yorker from the 1970s to mid-90s -- covering photographers Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Richard Avedon, William Eggleston, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and more -- Diana & Nikon is the complete collection of Janet Malcolm's writings on photography.

"I admit to an acolytes devotion to Malcolm, to a thirst for everything she writes. There's a thrill to reading her that comes from the moments when her writing breaks ever so subtly with the decorum of journalistic worldliness to hint at something personal, painful even, about Malcolm herself." —photographer and writer Moyra Davey, Long Life Cool White

Project Notes:

First published in 1980 and then expanded and reissued in 1997, Diana & Nikon has again fallen out of print. If an interested team were to form, their first step would be to contact the author to determine copyright status and seek her involvement in the project.