The first book to focus on experimental artist and designer Robert Paige

Robert Earl Paige is one of the most iconic artists and designers from Chicago’s South Side. A multidisciplinary artist and arts educator, he works across textile design, painting, collage, and sculpture. During the 1970s, he brought West African–inspired patterns to U.S. shoppers through the Dakkabar fabrics collection available at Sears, Roebuck, leading to the inclusion of Black culture in home design.

Published in conjunction with Paige’s exhibition at Hyde Park Art Center in 2024, this fully illustrated book includes reproductions of the artist’s handpainted scarves, collages, and rugs made during the past sixty years, along with new ceramic tiles, collages, and textiles.

A catalog produced to document and augment the exhibition Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden: Shrouds by Faheem Majeed presented at Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago in the summer of 2021. The exhibition included a commissioned installation that furthered Majeed’s investigation of culturally specific institutions by focusing on the history and memory of the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC), the preeminent institution in Chicago dedicated to the city’s Black artists since 1940. A monumental charcoal rubbing of the SSCAC facade was the central focus of his first large-scale solo exhibition that also included his ongoing series of reused wooden planks repurposed from the SSCAC’s Margaret Burroughs Gallery entitled Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden.

A lyric investigation of the Mexican modernist writer Salvador Novo. The book centers around an investigation and reclaiming of Los Anales, the original, derogatory nickname given to Novo and his compadres in the modernist group Los Contemporáneos. Fall 2022. Distributed by SPD.

“The speaker of the poems of Joel Craig’s HUMANOID floats and careens in the interstices between tract housing, breaking news, love, and existential questions regarding time in the Anthropocene, so called. The difference between what we want to hear and the alternative is terrifying, but it is also where life is now. This book says such things.”—Lucy Ives. Fall 2022. Distributed by SPD.

Fall 2022: Extending her ongoing musical project Mandorla Awakening, Nicole Mitchell Gantt explores inequity, the musical legacies of jazz, creative music, and intercultural collaboration to guide readers towards an alternative society that disrupts binaries, hierarchies, and western ideas of progress. Distributed by University of Minnesota Press.

Spring of 2021: The Wall of Respect, a 1967 public artwork, depicted black heroes and heroines in the areas of music, art, literature, politics, and sports. No sign indicates its existence today, but the wall sparked a nationwide mural movement, platformed community engagement, and was a seminal work of the black arts movement. While the wall needs to be marked, this new publication, Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect, (Edited by Romi Crawford) argues against making a monument of the original site. Instead, editor Romi Crawford asked a range of artists, designers, and architects—each with differing degrees of proximity to the wall’s legacy—to realize antiheroic and unstatic strategies for commemoration.