Situationist Funhouse

G.H. Hovagimyan

Stephen Zacks

G.H. Hovagimyan is an absurdist, a strategist, a serial collaborator, and nothing short of a cultural icon in the world of contemporary art, particularly as it relates to how artists have adopted the digital technological tools of our times, adapting them in his work for critique of art, popular culture, and social engagement.

Situationist Funhouse is a joyride through this history. The journey Stephen Zacks so meticulously documents and describes is not only an incredibly comprehensive ride through G.H.’s life work to date— Hovagimyan adopted G.H. as an acronym in the 1990s as a kind of gesture of personal rebirth and to ease others’ difficulty with his last name [pronounced ho-va-GIM-yan]—it also serves as a document that tracks a particular view on the alternative contemporary art scene of New York from the 1970s to the present day.

Author

Stephen Zacks is an advocacy journalist, architecture critic, urbanist, and organizer based in New York City. A graduate of Michigan State University and New School for Social Research with a bachelor’s degree in interdisciplinary humanities and a master’s in liberal studies, he founded Flint Public Art Project in 2011 and serves as president of the nonprofit Amplifier Inc., which promotes new conceptual frameworks and proven strategies to influence public policy and improve local and global governance. He has been published in the New York Times, Village Voice, Art in America, Abitare, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Dwell, the Architectural Review, Oculus, Landscape Architecture Magazine, Architectural Record, the Architect’s Newspaper, Brownstoner, Curbed, Monocle, Blueprint, Mic, Print, and Hyperallergic, and previously served as an editor at Metropolis. His projects have received awards from ArtPlace, Creative Capital, Warhol Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Graham Foundation, MacDowell Colony, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

$29.95

7" x 9" Portrait • 208pp • Softbound • 978-1-951541-99-6

World Rights: Available

Publication Date: Spring 2022

New York: Stilled Life

Portrait of a City in Lockdown

Gregory Peterson

Mid-March 2020: native New Yorker Gregory Peterson is on an early evening walk through the city, suddenly shut down by the coronavirus pandemic. Manhattan’s grand public spaces are bare. The monumental Lincoln Center Plaza is empty. The sounds of skates on ice and bustle of tourists and workers at Rockefeller Center are absent. Not a soul on Easter Sunday at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. Starkly silent, the city is stilled, as no one had ever seen it before.

Traveling on foot and by bike to avoid public transportation, Peterson took more than 400 photographs of over 200 locations in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens through the spring and summer of 2020. Using his iPhone 11, he captured myriad surreal landmarks—the United Nations Secretariat with no traffic, people, or flags, Grand Central Terminal without a person or even a car in sight, as well as gelled neighborhood streets, churches, shops, and other tourist destinations. Without people, these photos reveal the city’s primeval soul. They unveil a serene beauty most often obscured by the frenzy of our fast-paced lives. We see New York with new eyes.

During the height of the lockdown, Peterson also captures the city’s response to swelling Black Lives Matter protests that shook the world after the killing of George Floyd. For the first time in living memory, midtown Manhattan and other areas were boarded up following

Memorial Day due to fears of civil unrest as, documented in the chapter “Plywood New York.”

New York: Stilled Life is a comprehensive record of a unique, vanished moment; a memento of a time we all endured and how it changed us and our cities—perhaps forever.

Authors

Gregory Peterson is a corporate lawyer and noted art collector. A native, life-long New Yorker, he is a graduate of the High School of Music and Art (now the LaGuardia High of Music and the Performing Arts), where he studied oil painting and other media, and is an alumnus of Columbia College and Columbia Law School. Prior to becoming a lawyer he was a filmmaker and television producer.

Barry Bergdoll is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia University and the former Chief Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A specialist in the history of modern architecture, he curated numerous exhibitions at MoMA, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Musée d’Orsay, and other venues.

$50.00

9"x 11" Portrait • 204pp • Hardbound • 978-1-954081-26-0

World Rights: Available

Publication Date: Fall 2021