Inventory Press – serie

A long-overdue English translation of Munari's seminal tract on the everyday value of architecture and design educationThe first ever English translation of Bruno Munari's Design and Visual Communication (1968) fills a gap in Munari's output for the English-speaking world and provides a highly relevant guide to bridging architecture and design education and everyday life.Published in 1968 after Munari was invited to the Carpenter Center at Harvard to teach, the book transforms over 50 lessons, class materials and letters addressed to the city of Milan, into a book on the future of art, architecture and design. Conceived as a living volume, the book is written to inspire current and future designers to push beyond past events, however recent, and develop new tools to see and understand tomorrow's world.Accompanying the facsimile reproduction of the original volume are in-depth contextual annotations by Jeffrey Schnapp. As a Munari scholar and design historian, Schnapp has spent years unearthing the radical potential of critical historical material. His annotations and micro-interventions throughout the facsimile reprint seek to fulfill Munari's call for an evolution of the book in form and content and highlight how this work is as relevant today as when originally published.Bruno Munari (1907–98) was an Italian artist, designer and inventor who contributed fundamentals to many fields of visual arts (painting, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphic design) in modernism, futurism, and concrete art and in nonvisual arts (literature, poetry) with his research on games, didactic method, movement, tactile learning, kinesthetic learning and creativity.

A *New* Program for Graphic Design is the first Communication Design textbook expressly of and for the 21st century. Synthesizing the pragmatic with the experimental, this volume builds upon mid- to late-20th-century pedagogical models to convey advanced principles of contemporary design in an understandable form for students of all levels. David Reinfurt, a graphic designer, writer, educator and one half of design collaboration Dexter Sinister, has developed a graphic design curriculum at Princeton University in which three courses provide a broad and comprehensive introduction to the field for undergraduate students coming from a range of other disciplines. These courses Typography, Gestalt and Interface are the foundation of this book. Through a series of in-depth historical case studies (from Benjamin Franklin to the Macintosh computer) and assignments that progressively build in complexity, A *New* Program for Graphic Design serves as a practical guide for designers looking to understand and shape the increasingly networked world of information and design. As a cofounder of O-R-G inc. (2000), Dexter Sinister (2006) and The Serving Library (2012), graphic designer and teacher David Reinfurt (born 1971) has been involved in several studios and collectives that have reimagined graphic design, publishing and archiving in the 21st century. His work is included in the collections of the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, but can also be accessed on a daily basis: he was the lead designer for the New York City MTA Metrocard vending machine interface, still in use today. Reinfurt teaches at Princeton University.

Jordan Peele's powerful thriller Get Out debuted in 2017 to enormous public and critical acclaim, a Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? for the age of Obama and Trump that scared audiences and skewered white liberal pieties at the same time. Rather than rely on popular archetypes, Peele weaves together the material realities and daily manifestations of horror with sociopolitical fears and elements of true suspense, and combines them with pitch-perfect satire and a timely cultural critique. This companion paperback to the film presents the Peele's Oscar-winning screenplay alongside supplementary material. Featuring an essay by author and scholar Tananarive Due and in-depth annotations by the director, this publication is richly illustrated with more than 150 stills from the motion picture and presents alternate endings, deleted scenes and an inside look at the concepts and behind-the-scenes production of the film. Continuing in the legacy of 1960s paperbacks that documented the era's most significant avant-garde films such as Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin/Feminin and Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventurra Get Out is an indispensable guide to this pioneering and groundbreaking cinematic work.Jordan Peele (born 1979) is an American actor, comedian, writer, producer and director. Peele's directorial debut, Get Out (2017), earned him an Academy Award for Best Original screenplay as well as nominations for Best Picture and Best Director. In 2012, Peele founded Monkeypaw Productions, which amplifies marginalized voices and cultivates artistic, thought-provoking projects across film, television and digital platforms, including Peele's follow-up to Get Out, the thriller Us (2019).

Renowned philosopher Susan Buck-Morss collaborates with Boot Boyz Biz's Kevin McCaughey and Inventory Press' Adam Michaels on this experimental image-text update of McLuhan and BenjaminRenowned philosopher Susan Buck-Morss collaborates with Kevin McCaughey of Boot Boyz Biz and Adam Michaels of Inventory Press on this experimental image-text renewal of McLuhan, Berger and Benjamin.Seeing <―> Making: Room for Thought both studies and presents the creative process of constructing ideas with images. By activating the techniques of montage and analogy, the book reveals a wide field of view and a space to engage new critical connections between a multiplicity of objects from the past and present. Realized through an intergenerational collaboration of three cultural producers committed to making theory visible, a transformative anthology of critical essays by Susan Buck-Morss anchors this kaleidoscopic project. Images and ideas sync with Buck-Morss’ perceptive texts on visual culture, history, politics and aesthetics, fusing criticism with visual play and linking collective imagination and social action.In both design and content, Seeing <—> Making: Room for Thought builds upon the dynamic sensorium of Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore's book The Medium Is the Massage, Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and John Berger's Ways of Seeing. This innovative volume brings Buck-Morss’ more experimental, visually engaged work to the fore in a way that has not been available in the usual contexts within which her writing has appeared.

The first-ever English translation of Bruno Munari’s classic treatise on creativity, replete with new contextualizing annotations “But isn’t imagination also fantasy? And can’t fantastic images also assume the form of sounds? Musicians speak of sonic images, sound objects. How does one invent a fish tale, an air-cooled engine, a new plastic? ... fantasy, invention, creativity think; imagination sees.”Never before translated into English, Bruno Munari’s Fantasy, originally published in Italian in 1977, invites the reader to explore their own imagination, creativity and fantasy through a journey into Munari’s mind and work. His theory of creativity, developed in conversation with the Reggio Emilia Approach (a self-guided approach to education) and the work of Jean Piaget (a Swiss developmental psychologist who proffered a theory termed “genetic epistemology”) foregrounds the book’s journey through Munari’s design processes, both working for clients and teaching design principles to children. By turning both life and work into a classroom, Munari unlocks a path through imagination in order to access his, and in turn the reader’s, deepest sense of play.The facsimile reprint is accompanied by new contextual annotations by Munari scholar and design historian Jeffrey Schnapp. These microinterventions highlight the innovations that make this work as relevant today as when originally published. Bruno Munari (1907–98) was an Italian artist, designer and inventor who contributed fundamentals to many fields of visual arts (painting, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphic design) in Modernism, Futurism and Concrete art, as well as to nonvisual arts (literature, poetry) through his research on games, didactic method, movement, tactile learning, kinesthetic learning and creativity.

Three new graphic design courses, detailed in this volume, comprise a critical companion to Reinfurt’s bestselling DIY textbook, A *New* Program for Graphic DesignThis volume expands David Reinfurt’s uniquely pragmatic and experimental approach to pedagogy into a collaborative project that weaves together a multiplicity of voices to present a polyphonic approach to design history and teaching. Three of Reinfurt’s new Princeton University graphic design courses—C-i-r-c-u-l-a-t-i-o-n, M-u-l-t-p-l-i-c-i-t-y and R-e-s-e-a-r-c-h—developed explicitly in the context of remote teaching and in light of urgent realignments around whose stories get told and who does the telling, are presented in this follow-up to A *New* Program for Graphic Design (Inventory Press/D.A.P., 2018). C-i-r-c-u-l-a-t-i-o-n examines the distribution networks for graphic design including electronic and conventional means. M-u-l-t-p-l-i-c-i-t-y, taught with mathematics professor Philip Ording, explores graphic design from the perspective of topology and topology through the practice of graphic design. R-e-s-e-a-r-c-h is an advanced graphic design class which cultivates an exploratory and expansive design process and investigates what the term ""design research"" has meant at different points in design history.From these separate angles comes a collaborative and cooperative way of telling and teaching design history, taking on subjects from the Detroit Printing Co-op, Corita Kent and Charles and Ray Eames, to Giuseppe Peano, Marshall McLuhan, Sylvia Harris and Virgil Abloh. Through a series of in-depth historical case studies and assignments that progressively build in complexity, the book serves as a practical guide to visually understanding the history—and shaping the future—of our designed world.David Reinfurt is an independent graphic designer and writer based in New York City. He worked as an interaction designer at IDEO from 1995 to 1997, where he was the lead designer for the MTA Metrocard vending machine interface. In 2000, Reinfurt formed the graphic design practice O-R-G inc., followed by Dexter Sinister in 2006 and the Serving Library in 2012. He has taught at Princeton University since 2010.

Marsh’s multichannel visual interventions articulate the criticality of infrastructure, the technological image, spatial expansion, surveillance, collective labor and much morePublished with Press Enter.Part reader, part monograph, part visual essay, She Moves Me synthesizes the installation and performance pieces of Canadian artist Lynne Marsh (born 1969). Marsh’s filmed and choreographed interventions look behind the scenes, underscoring the camera’s power to delineate social spaces.

Social ecologies, witchcraft and hydrofeminism—a voyage through four decades of ecofeminist artPublished with The Brick.Inspired by four decades of ecofeminist thought and action in art, Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism presents firsthand accounts and critical assessments of the life and work of pioneering artists associated with the movement. Through bountiful essays, poems, artworks and archival materials, the reader examines each artist's contributions to the protean philosophy. Through its survey approach, Life on Earth addresses an impressive breadth of ecofeminism's concerns, including social ecologies, the commons, Indigenous cosmologies, lesbian separatism, witchcraft, hydrofeminism, plant knowledge, science fiction and speculative futures, among others. Artists include: Alliance of the Southern Triangle (A.S.T.), Alicia Barney Caldas, Meech Boakye, Carolina Caycedo, Francesca Gabbiani, Masumi Hayashi, Institute of Queer Ecology, Kite, Leslie Labowitz Starus, Maria Maea, Otobong Nkanga, yétúndé olagbaju, Alicia Piller, Aviva Rahmani, Tabita Rezaire, Yo-E Ryou, Emilija Škarnulyt?, A.L. Steiner.

Chronicling 10 years of the duo's collaborative practice and their influential artist-run performance and theater spaces in BerlinThis book, German Theater 2010–2022, is the first monograph on the work of the artist duo Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff. Their manifold practices play out, live test and fictionalize the mechanisms that shape creative communities. Chronicling over a decade of production in Berlin, the book is organized around the influential bar and theater spaces they ran there: Times Bar (2011–12), New Theater (2013–15), Grüner Salon at the Volksbühne (2017–18) and TV Bar (2019–22). Rooted in a renewed conceptual approach to photography, Henkel and Pitegoff’s oeuvre spins an allegory of this historical moment in which precarity and gentrification are two sides of the same coin. Their photographs, plays, writings and films address the complexity of collective action, painting a deadpan picture of the social and economic systems that sustain communal exchanges and their eminently fragile autonomy.Calla Henkel (born 1988) is from Minneapolis and based in Berlin and Los Angeles. She is the author of Other People's Clothes (Doubleday, 2022) and Scrap (The Overlook Press, 2024). She has staged plays at Volksbühne Berlin and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and her artistic work with Max Pitegoff has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. Together with Pitegoff, she operates New Theater Hollywood in Los Angeles.Max Pitegoff (born 1987) is from Buffalo, New York, and based in Berlin and Los Angeles. His work with Calla Henkel has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. Together with Henkel, he operates New Theater Hollywood in Los Angeles.

The first ever major monograph dedicated to Coulter Fussell, the artist creating "quilt-works" sourced from networks of exchange and reuse in the American SoutheastPublished with Mississippi Museum of Art.This catalog accompanies the first museum survey of work by emerging Mississippi-based artist Coulter Fussell (born 1977). Fussell's "quilt-works" are multidimensional landscapes of the American South. Often referencing specific regional geographies, her assemblages are materially grounded in rural networks of exchange and reuse: they are constructed entirely from textiles, printed matter and other items donated by neighbors in Fussell's hometown of Columbus, Georgia, and Mississippi's Yalobusha County, where the artist now lives. Across artwork images and a series of essays, The Proving Ground traces how the "ground" mutates across Fussell's works. Often using the compositional elements of landscape to create parallels between environmental and interpersonal terrains, Fussell's art questions the perceptual, psychological and cultural "grounds" that frame our experience, determine our sense of place and shape what we believe.

A compilation of the designer and architectural theorist's writings on the interstices of art, architecture and cities from the past 30 yearsIn this comprehensive survey of his writing to date, Los Angeles–based designer and architectural theorist Joe Day (born 1967), who leads Deegan-Day Design LLC and serves on the design and history/theory faculty at SCI-Arc, examines the intersections of architecture, contemporary art and urbanism as interdependent visual and spatial disciplines. Including pieces for both academic and general readership, letters, reviews, public addresses and responses, Essays offers a full account of Day's 30-year critical development, and a revealing look at LA's built environment and intellectual climate at the turn of the millennium.Organized in three chronological sequences—"Transgressions," "Situations" and "Reactions"—this collection begins with nominalist observations on art and architecture, then turns to writing on cities, and concludes with responses to major works and figures including Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Mike Davis and Rosalind Krauss, as well as many more recent protagonists.

Cut, paste and Riot Grrrl: on the gloriously energetic paintings of Molly Zuckerman-HartungComic Relief is the first museum monograph of the work of artist Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, reviewing over twenty years of her art and life. Created as a catalogue for a major survey of Zuckerman-Hartung ‘s practice at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, the book acts as both a record of the exhibition and the artist’s wide-ranging body of work—from her involvement in the underground punk Riot Grrrl scene to her work as a painter and creator of layered, multimedia objects.Playfully engaging the aesthetic details of Riot Grrrl zines and vintage feminist theory texts, the book serves as the first in-depth exploration and celebration of the artist’s work. Taken as a whole, Comic Relief presents the art historical intersections within Zuckerman-Hartung’s practice, the enduring cultural and aesthetic implications of Riot Grrrl’s radical feminism, as well as broader questions about the current landscape of contemporary art, queer aesthetics, and abstract painting.In addition to dozens of images, many of which are in print for the first time, the book features a foreword by Blaffer Art Museum director Steven Matijcio and writing from Kate Nesin, a leading postwar art historian; Lisa Darms, Riot Grrrl archivist and writer; Annie Bielski, artist and former student of Zuckerman-Hartung; and Tyler Blackwell, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Associate Curator at the Blaffer.