We’re thrilled to announce our third subscription of books and printed projects: Baragouin, Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures, Music Book, The Youngest Day, and our first X Projects edition, Funny Money. These publications play with the nature of language, examine contributions to post-modern dance, ponder painting as meditation, consider the LA art scene from a Berlin POV, and take a hard but humorous look at the state of US politics. Baragouin, Music Book and Funny Money will ship in time for the holidays and our two latest publications, Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures and The Youngest Day, are expected to ship in January.*

Baragouin is an artists’ book by Los Angeles and Berlin-based artist Kim Schoen. The book is a companion piece to a video work of the same name, filmed in a now-closed residential sculpture showroom in Los Angeles. The video Baragouin presents these sculptures—which are copies of copies of original works of art—as an important collection of art and records their “voices”—a pastiche of verbal nonsense and phonetically imitated sounds of languages from around the world. Baragouin is designed by Ella Gold and includes an essay and “provenance” work by Edward Sterrett.

Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures is the first monograph dedicated to the pivotal work of African American choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings. A foundational figure in American dance, Cummings bridged postmodern dance experimentation and Black cultural traditions. Through her unique movement vocabulary, which she called "moving pictures," Cummings combined the visual imagery of photography and the kinetic energy of movement in order to explore the emotional details of daily rituals and the intimacy of Black home life. Bringing together reprints, an extended biography, a chronology of her work, rarely seen documentation, and new research, this book begins to contextualize Cummings’s practice at the intersection of dance, moving image, and art histories.

Music Book is a 64-page facsimile artist’s book by Sarah Cain, comprising a series of colorful abstractions painted directly over a collection of vintage sheet music. Music Book is an extension of Cain’s works on paper that balance her installation and large-scale painting practice: these works are intimate meditations; intricate and small-scale. The book is co-published by X Artists' Books and the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum on the occasion of Cain's exhibition, Sarah Cain—Enter the Center.

Funny Money, an edition by Los Angeles artist Jesse Velasquez, is a contemporary meditation on capitalism in the United States and the value placed on corporate prosperity over care of the environment or people. A child of Mexican immigrants, Velasquez’s holistic and humorous worldview was shaped by ideological clashes within his masculine and Catholic East LA upbringing. Funny Money is the first edition of XAB’s X Projects initiative, which explores the creation of artworks, editions, and ideas outside the confines of traditional book publishing.

The Youngest Day is a 20-page Berliner format newspaper that captures the spirit of the exhibition, with the same name, curated by artist Mathew Hale at carlier|gebauer in Berlin in the summer of 2021. This publication, like the exhibition itself, is a personal reflection by Hale on the peculiarities of living and making art in Los Angeles—a city “at the back of the world’s day”—and on how it would be to experience such work in the contrasting city of Berlin. Designed by Santiago da Silva, this newsprint publication explores the work of all twenty-four artists that participated in The Youngest Day exhibition and includes personalized mastheads designed by Hale in tribute to each.