University of California Press Blog

They Called Me Mayer July Wins the Samuel and Rose Cohen Memorial Award!

Congratulations to Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, authors of They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust, for winning the Samuel and Rose Cohen Memorial Award in Biography/Memoir from the Canadian Jewish Book Award jury at the Koffler Centre for the Arts. The Canadian Jewish Book Awards celebrates exceptional Canadian writing that touches upon Jewish culture, where this year marks the 20th Anniversary of the prestigious awards. The award-winning book showcases Kirshenblatt's paintings, and along with his daughter Barbara, provides commentary on his childhood memories of pre-World War II Poland. To learn more about the authors and the book, you can read the book's blog here.

Weegee's Naked City, 63 Years Later

The photographer Weegee's camera was the eye of the night; with his eerily accurate timing and nocturnal hours, he provided the curious with a porthole to Manhattan's midnight world. He was one of the first tabloid photographers, showcasing bloodstained gangsters, tenement residents, and fur-draped celebrities, and his book Naked City made him famous. As authors Anthony Lee and Richard Meyer discuss in Weegee and Naked City, there are many ways to interpret Weegee's influence, and his work gains meaning when it is viewed in the social and artistic context of the 1930s and 40s. He helped establish photography in the art world, but also exposed the social problems of urban life, and played a gritty, underworld character in his own tabloid story. For the nostalgic or curious who wish to see if the ghosts of Weegee's Naked City still walk the streets, The New York Times Weekend Explorer has created an audio walking tour of Weegee's old haunts, from his room above a gun shop to the Bowery, Washington Square Park, and the scenes of some of his famous photographs.

Weegee and Naked City

Having a penchant for animal prints occasionally pays off. As The New York Times reported, in 2003 two women picked up a zebra print trunk at a Kentucky yard sale. It  turned out to be a treasure chest, stuffed with letters and prints belonging to Arthur Fellig, aka Weegee, the legendary papparrazzo of the streets. During the 1930s and 40s, Weegee's sensational photographs of New York's murder scenes, teeming tenements, and ordinary citizens redefined photojournalism forever. His 1945 book Naked City, which visually chronicles New York's grit and glitz, thrilled contemporary readers and remains one of the most popular and influential photography books of all time. In Weegee and Naked City, authors Anthony W. Lee and Richard Meyer analyze the book's appeal. Their interpretations show how several factors, including Weegee's lowbrow character and audiences' hunger for human-interest stories, shaped his work and drove his immense popularity.

FREE COMIC BOOKS! KRAZY!

Tomorrow, May 3, is Free Comic Book Day! Walk in the door of any participating comic book store from San Francisco to South Africa, and stuff your pockets with all the free comics you can grab. After you devour the latest Jughead adventure, expand your visual imagination further by pre-ordering Bruce Grenville’s KRAZY!, an art exhibit in book form, curated by this planet’s experts on comics, graphic novels, video games, manga and visual art. Whether your life is more R. Crumb than Superman, or more The Simpsons than The Sims, KRAZY! will zap you from your reading chair to the outer reaches of the graphic universe, where anime heroines blast laser-wielding transformers, and your Sims alter ego improves her hunger level with a pixelated turkey.

KRAZY! will be available in August. If you can't wait until then to fill your head with KRAZYness, head to the Vancouver Art Gallery between May 17 and September 7 for the exhibit KRAZY!: The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art.

Phantom Sightings Exhibit Opens this Sunday at Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement—the companion exhibit to the recent UC Press book by Rita Gonzalez, Howard N. Fox, and Chon A. Noriega—opens its doors this Sunday, April 6, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

Phantom Sightings is LACMA's largest-ever collection of Chicano art, and it is one of the first exhibitions to focus on the current generation of contemporary Chicano artists. As the curators describe, rather than trying to define Chicano art or represent an entire population, the exhibit displays the work of this artistic generation and conceptualizes many facets of Chicano experience since the 1970s. The art defies categorization, invites challenge, inspires curiosity, playfulness and imagination, and evokes a surreal, dreamlike presence just below the surface.

See the Exhibit:
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, April 6 - September 1, 2008
Tamayo Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City, October-December 2008
El Museo del Barrio and the Americas Society, New York, March-May 2009
Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Summer 2009

UC Press Spring 2008 catalog cover: Carlee Fernandez, Bear Head and Arms Study I, 2004.  C-print, 30 x 42". Courtesy of the artist and Acuna-Hansen Gallery, Los Angeles. From Phantom Sightings, page 39.

Art Is Life

Together, Gerald and Sara Murphy created a life as unexpected and beautiful as any artistic masterpiece. Their letters, even in old age, reveal their deep-rooted and tender devotion. Their imagination and generosity, planted in the rich creative soil of 1920s Paris, inspired and supported the artistic scene of that singular time and place. In Making It New, Deborah Rothschild resurrects the Murphys’ charmed era in a collage of essays, letters, photographs, and paintings.

 

Book Launch for They Called Me Mayer July

The Jewish Community Center of San Francisco will be hosting a book launch party for Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's new book, They Called Me Mayer July, on September 5th at 8pm. This will be the precursor to an exhibition of Mayer Kirshenblatt's artwork at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley that will run from September 10th to January 13th.

Mayer Kirshenblatt, who was born in 1916 and left Poland for Canada in 1934, taught himself to paint at age 73. Since then, he has made it his mission to remember the world of his childhood in living color, "lest future generations know more about how Jews died than how they lived." This volume presents his lively paintings woven together with a marvelous narrative created from interviews that took place over forty years between Mayer and his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Together, father and daughter draw readers into a lost world—we roam the streets and courtyards of the town of Apt, witness details of daily life, and meet those who lived and worked there. This moving collaboration—a unique blend of memoir, oral history, and artistic interpretation—is at once a labor of love, a tribute to a distinctive imagination, and a brilliant portrait of life in one Jewish home town.

The attached video is an adaptation of a piece that was produced for the accompanying exhibit.

Know Before You Go

Do you remember those dark days when well-read travelers were forced to learn about their future destinations from brisk summaries in the backs of geography books and ominous-looking brochures that appeared in the mail? Be prepared to forget.

On September 24, the Travel Magazine section of the New York Times ran an article on how to spend 24 hours in the “real” Los Angeles. The piece aimed to point naive out-of-towners towards the best of old Hollywood as well as some of the newer locales favored by celebrities. It also gave a suggested reading list for those wanting to freshen up on their LA history. Among such classics as You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again and City of Quartz, UC Press’s new title Pop LA: Art and the City in the 1960s was listed at number two.

Two more recently released UC Press titles join Pop LA in seeking to educate travelers beyond ordinary guidebooks. Designed for the international art tourist, Destination Art is the first comprehensive look at more than two hundred major modern and contemporary art sites around the world. In addition to listing practical information, such as directions to the sites and admission fees, this lushly illustrated book includes essays exploring fifty key destinations in depth.

Those more history-inclined travelers who are heading to Rome might want to grab the upcoming Rome and Environs: An Archaelogical Guide, which brings the masterful native scholarship of Filippo Coarelli to an English-language audience for the first time, complete with plenty of maps.

Being an educated tourist will never be the same.