Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Penns – serie

An artist’s attempts at achieving personal happiness, from meditation to pharmaceuticalsAustrian-born, New York-based graphic designer, typographer and artist Stefan Sagmeister (born 1962) often tests and transgresses the boundary between art and design, through his imaginative implementation of typography. The Happy Film Pitch Book both documents Sagmeister’s touring exhibition, The Happy Show, and anticipates his ongoing feature length film, The Happy Film. In both projects, Sagmeister undergoes a series of self-experiments (each experiment lasting three months)--with meditation, cognitive therapy, and mood-altering pharmaceuticals--attempting to improve his personal happiness. I am usually rather bored with definitions,” Sagmeister says. “Happiness, however, is just such a big subject that it might be worth a try to pin it down.” The Happy Show, Sagmeister’s first museum show in the United States, documents his adventures in video, print, infographics, sculpture and interactive installations, most of which were custom-made for this exhibition. Here, Sagmeister offers his own witty and poignant thoughts and reasons for his ten-year exploration of happiness. Throughout the book, Sagmeister’s trademark maxims serve as access points to a larger exploration of happiness, its cultural significance, our constant pursuit of it and its notoriously ephemeral nature.

Architect Peter Eisenman and landscape architect Laurie Olin have been collaborating since 1980 on projects both built and unbuilt. Their key works include the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. This first book on their important and unusually egalitarian working relationship offers a revealing look at the development of a 25-year collaboration, beginning with the title work, a recent site-specific environmental installation, and continuing through a survey of their portfolio. Each of the two also maintains an individual practice and teaches: Olin is the Practice Professor of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Across the Open Field, Essays Drawn on the English Landscape, and co-author of Vizcaya, An American Villa and its Makers. Peter Eisenman was the first Irwin S. Chanin Distinguished Professor of Architecture at The Cooper Union and is currently the Louis I. Kahn Professor of Architecture at Yale. His books include Diagram Diaries and Chora L Works, co-authored with Jacques Derrida. Fertilizers includes essays by each of them, an interview and many seldom-seen images.

Philadelphia is home to two major art institutions, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art. Philadelphia artist Virgil Marti (born 1962) recently curated a show for the ICA of objects chosen from the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection; Set Pieces brings these objects together, shedding light both on the Museum’s outstanding collection of objects and on the roots of Marti’s own opulent, design-based aesthetic. Texts by I.C.A. Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner, Philadelphia Museum curator Joseph Risehl, gallerist Lia Gangitano (Participant Inc.) and Philadelphia-based poet Thomas Devaney round out the volume.

A firsthand account of the 1980s Los Angeles art scene by groundbreaking artist Ulysses JenkinsWritten in 1990 and published as a limited-edition artist’s book in collaboration with Rosanna Albertini in 2018, this memoir by video artist Ulysses Jenkins (born 1946) details his family history, his formative years as a muralist in the 1970s and his experiments as an early practitioner of performance and video art.Doggerel Life also captures the flourishing artist communities of Los Angeles, including Jenkins’ collaborations with the influential Studio Z (alongside figures such as David Hammons, Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger); his founding of the media collective Video Venice News; and his time studying at Otis Art Institute with Charles White, Chris Burden and Betye Saar.