Selected Publications & Print Ephemera from the LACE Archives 1978–2008.

From its founding in 1978, LACE — Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions — was a pivotal, artist-run organization committed to presenting the work of Southern California artists and highlighting bleeding-edge work. Both a treasure-trove and a grab-bag, this book reproduces a wealth of archival material from LACE’s first three decades. Flyers, postcards, memoirs, catalogs, posters, invitations: the editors have chosen an engrossing selection, including well-known names like Lita Albuquerque, Paul McCarthy, Red Grooms and Mike Kelley, and lesser-known but equally worthy artists. As Liz Kotz writes in her introduction, for a new generation of art historians, movements like Minimalism, Happenings and Conceptual Art are just names; the archive allows them to experience the history first-hand. And if you were around at the time, this book is as deeply satisfying as going through that box of stuff you have kept since college days.

Since the 1960s, Los Angeles has been a hub for groundbreaking art. This slim volume features work by Bas Jan Ader, Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Douglas Huebler, Larry Johnson, Mike Kelley, William Leavitt, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Maria Nordman, Raymond Pettibon, Stephen Prina, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha and Christopher Williams.

A survey of his career from 1974 to the present, Everything Must Go is the first catalogue to incorporate the full range of Jim Shaw’s profoundly original and idiosyncratic work. From the massive 170-piece multimedia work My Mirage to his Thrift Store Paintings, Dream Drawings, and Dream Objects, Shaw has created a fantastic visual narrative that references diverse outside sources, moments of personal history, and fragments of our collective cultural consciousness. His highly individualized “outsider” perspective has established Shaw as a seminal figure in Europe and the United States, and he has contributed significantly to the influence of Los Angeles in the international art community. Essays by Amy Gerstler, Doug Harvey, Mike Kelley, Noëllie Roussel, and Fabrice Stroun.

The historical relationship between art and language has often occasioned lively and compelling work. Area Sneaks, a new print and online journal, seeks to touch the live wire where language and visual art meet.

Gertrude Stein’s Paris artist salon, Velemir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Tatlin’s constructive collaboration, Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci’s editorial partnership, Augusto de Campos’s concrete engagement with Brazilian modernism and Mike Kelley’s interest in systems of literary knowledge have each provided potential models of positive exchange between artists and writers. Area Sneaks hopes to maintain this dialogue by creating a fellowship of discourse within an open community of contemporary artists and writers.

Benevolent area-sneaks get lost in the kitchens and are found to impede the circulation of the knife-cleaning machine.

—Charles Dickens