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Portrait of Kathy Acker

“Portrait of Kathy Acker” (1978) is a limited edition print by Jimmy DeSana. Printed posthumously and signed by the artist’s estate, this work was selected from a series of portraits the artist took of famed writer and friend Kathy Acker. “Portrait of Kathy Acker” (1978) is part of a larger series of commercial photographs of Downtown celebrities that DeSana carried out in the late 1970s alongside his work for artists’ magazines and periodicals like FILE, X Magazine, and SoHo Weekly News, as well as for musicians such as the Talking Heads and James Chance. This body of work also appeared in the artist’s first exhibition at Steffanoti Gallery (1979) and in P.S.1’s legendary New York/New Wave (1981).

Printed in an edition of 75, this 5 x 7” pigment print comes with a copy of Salvation, DeSana’s posthumous artist book, which was published by Primary Information in spring 2024.

Jimmy DeSana (1949-1990) grew up in Atlanta, GA, and earned his bachelor’s degree from the Georgia State University in 1972 before relocating to New York’s East Village in the early 1970s. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Jimmy DeSana & Paul P.—Ruins of Rooms, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany, 2024 and The Sodomite Invasion: Experimentation, Politics and Sexuality in the work of Jimmy DeSana and Marlon T. Riggs, Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver, Canada, 2020. DeSana’s work can be found in numerous public collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. A major retrospective of DeSana’s work was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 2022, accompanied by a catalogue co-published by the Brooklyn Museum and DelMonico Books.

5 x 7 inches
Pigment print
Edition of 75 + 5 APs
Stamped by the Artist’s Estate
August 2024

Portrait of Kathy Acker

“Portrait of Kathy Acker” (1978) is a limited edition print by Jimmy DeSana. Printed posthumously and signed by the artist’s estate, this work was selected from a series of portraits the artist took of famed writer and friend Kathy Acker. “Portrait of Kathy Acker” (1978) is part of a larger series of commercial photographs of Downtown celebrities that DeSana carried out in the late 1970s alongside his work for artists’ magazines and periodicals like FILE, X Magazine, and SoHo Weekly News, as well as for musicians such as the Talking Heads and James Chance. This body of work also appeared in the artist’s first exhibition at Steffanoti Gallery (1979) and in P.S.1’s legendary New York/New Wave (1981).

Printed in an edition of 75, this 5 x 7” pigment print comes with a copy of Salvation, DeSana’s posthumous artist book, which was published by Primary Information in spring 2024.

Jimmy DeSana (1949-1990) grew up in Atlanta, GA, and earned his bachelor’s degree from the Georgia State University in 1972 before relocating to New York’s East Village in the early 1970s. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Jimmy DeSana & Paul P.—Ruins of Rooms, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany, 2024 and The Sodomite Invasion: Experimentation, Politics and Sexuality in the work of Jimmy DeSana and Marlon T. Riggs, Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver, Canada, 2020. DeSana’s work can be found in numerous public collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. A major retrospective of DeSana’s work was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 2022, accompanied by a catalogue co-published by the Brooklyn Museum and DelMonico Books.

5 x 7 inches
Pigment print
Edition of 75 + 5 APs
Stamped by the Artist’s Estate
August 2024

Salvation

Salvation is a previously-unpublished artist book by Jimmy DeSana that he conceptualized shortly before his death in 1990. The publication contains 44 of the artist’s late photographic abstractions that quietly and poetically meditate on loss, death, and nothingness. Depicted within the works are images of relics, body parts, flowers, and fruits that DeSana altered using collage and darkroom manipulations to create pictures that are both intimate and other-worldly. Salvation provides a nuanced and sophisticated counterpoint to the prevailing work around HIV/AIDS at the time, which tended to favor bold political statements.

Variations of many of the works in this book were first presented at DeSana’s last show with Pat Hearn Gallery in 1988. Shortly thereafter, the artist began assembling a maquette of Salvation, using black and white images as place holders for the color works that he intended to comprise the final layout of the publication. Sadly, he was unable to fully realize Salvation in his lifetime, but on his deathbed, he dictated instructions to his longtime friend Laurie Simmons for completing the work; instructions which she noted on each page of the single-copy maquette. With these notes, Simmons was able to match extant slides  and sequencing. Simmons’ studio chose color gels from DeSana’s archive for each corresponding black and white image in the assembly of the publication. Thankfully, due to this recuperative work, Salvation—long-considered to be DeSana’s last major work—is now available for the first time, with every step taken to honor and embody DeSana’s original vision.

Jimmy DeSana (1949-1990) grew up in Atlanta, GA, and received his bachelor’s degree from the Georgia State University in 1972 before relocating to New York’s East Village in the early 1970s. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include The Sodomite Invasion: Experimentation, Politics and Sexuality in the work of Jimmy DeSana and Marlon T. Riggs, Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver, Canada, 2020, and Remainders, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY, 2016. DeSana’s work can be found in numerous public collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. A major retrospective of DeSana’s work was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 2022, accompanied by a catalogue co-published by the Brooklyn Museum and DelMonico Books.

48 pages
8.5 x 10.5 inches
Paperback
April 2024
ISBN: 9798988573630

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Editor: James Hoff and Laurie Simmons Studio
Designer: Rick Myers

Laurie Simmons Studio is Danielle Bartholomew, Laurie Simmons, and Mary Simpson.

 

Sketchbook, September 1977

Sketchbook, September 1977 is an early journal by Greer Lankton written during her time as an art student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It offers key insights into the artist’s mind before her move to New York in 1978, where she would go on to have a prolific career making lifelike dolls, theatrical sets, photographs, drawings, and paintings.

Containing drawings, behavioral diagrams, and occasionally confessional writing, the journal is a record of imagining the body and mind reconciled through transformation. In these pages, the nineteen-year-old turns an inquisitive, sociological eye toward the emotional landscape and somatic effects of her days recorded here—the time period leading up to her decision to undergo hormone treatment and gender-affirming surgery in 1979. Lankton reflects with raw vulnerability and keen self-awareness on critical questions of self-image, social perception, gender normativity, and human behavior.

The book also includes an afterword by Lankton’s lifelong friend, Joyce Randall Senechal. Sketchbook, September 1977 is one of the earliest of Greer Lankton’s journals, sketchbooks, and daybooks to appear in the artist’s archives housed in the Department of Film at The Museum of Modern Art. The majority of Lankton’s papers and archives are housed at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh.

Greer Lankton (1958-1996) was born in Flint, Michigan. After moving to New York, she became an important figure of the East Village art scene, presenting her work in key exhibitions like New York/New Wave at PS1 and Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing at Artists Space as well as in solo and group exhibitions at legendary East Village galleries Civilian Warfare and Gracie Mansion. She participated in the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale in 1995. Lankton relocated to Chicago in 1990 and her final work, It’s all about ME, Not You, was completed in 1996 and is on permanent view at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh.

160 pages
5.5 x 8.5 inches
Paperback
September 2023
ISBN: 9798987624913

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Managing Editor: Rachel Valinsky
Managing Designer: Siiri Tännler

Dear Jean Pierre

Dear Jean Pierre collects David Wojnarowicz’s transatlantic correspondence to his Parisian lover Jean Pierre Delage between 1979 and 1982. Capturing a truly foundational moment for Wojnarowicz’s artistic and literary practice, these letters not only reveal his captivating personality—and its concomitant tenderness, compassion, and neuroses—but also index the development of the visual language that would go on to define him as one of the preeminent artists of his generation.

Through this collection, readers are introduced to Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud series, the band 3 Teens Kill 4, the publication of his first photographs, his early friendship with Peter Hujar, his participation in the then-emerging East Village art and music scenes, and the preparations for the publication of his first book. Included with these writings are postcards, drawings, xeroxes, photographs, collages, flyers, ephemera, and contact sheets that showcase some of the artist’s iconic images and work, such as the Burning House motif and Untitled (Genet, after Brassai).

Beyond these milestones, the book offers a striking portrayal of Wojnarowicz as a twenty-something, detailing his day-to-day life with the type of unbridled earnestness that comes with that age and the softness of love and longing. This disarming tenderness provides a picture of a young man just beginning to find his voice in the world and the love he has found in it.

Although the two exchanged letters in equal measure, Delage’s correspondences have largely been lost, leaving us with only a revelatory glimpse into the internal world of Wojnarowicz during what turned out to be his formative years.

David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. Wojnarowicz channeled a vast accumulation of raw images, sounds, memories and lived experiences into a powerful voice that was an undeniable presence in the New York City art scene of the 1970s, 80s and early 90s. Through his several volumes of fiction, poetry, memoirs, painting, photography, installation, sculpture, film and performance, Wojnarowicz left a legacy, affirming art’s vivifying power in a society he viewed as alienating and corrosive. His use of blunt semiotics and graphic illustrations exposed what he felt the mainstream repressed: poverty, abuse of power, blind nationalism, greed, homophobia and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS-related complications on July 22, 1992 at the age of 37.

616 pages
8.5 x 11 inches
Paperback
August 2023
ISBN: 9781737797951

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Editor: James Hoff
Designer: Pacific
Copy editor: Allison Dubinsky