Nicole Rudick Knihy

A biography by Nicole Rudick told in Saint Phalle's own words, assembled from rare and unseen materialsKnown best for her exuberant, often large-scale sculptural works that celebrate the abundance and complexity of female desire, imagination and creativity, Niki de Saint Phalle viewed making art as a ritual, a performance―a process connecting life to art. This unconventional, illuminated biography, told in the first person in Saint Phalle's voice and her own hand, dilates large and small moments in Saint Phalle's life which she sometimes reveals with great candor, at other times carefully unwinding her secrets. Nicole Rudick, in a kind of collaboration with the artist, has assembled a gorgeous and detailed mosaic of Saint Phalle's visual and textual works from a trove of paintings, drawings, sketches and writings, many previously unpublished or long unavailable, that trace her mistakes and successes, her passions and her radical sense of joy. Saint Phalle's invocation―her "bringing to life"―writes Rudick, "is an apt summation of the overlap of Saint Phalle’s life and art: both a bringing into existence and a bringing to bear. These are visions from the frontiers of consciousness."

A delicate, dreamlike, and lushly detailed comics collection by a contemporary artist whose work explores the enmeshment of the human and non-human worlds. For years, Aidan Koch’s comics have been pushing the boundaries of the medium, reimagining what a comic can look like and how it can tell a story. Koch has been living and working in the desert of California, turning her focus toward the ways humans and the natural world converge. Spiral and Other Stories is a triumph of that continuing process. Using watercolors, pencils, crayons, charcoals, and collage, Koch builds worlds of dense detail and vast open spaces, urgent scrawled text and long silences, telling a series of stories about people and the places they inhabit. Characters yearn for each other, even as they’re pulled toward different lives. Rivers dance together, then diverge as they make their way to the sea. With an accompanying essay by the author and critic Nicole Rudick, who explores Koch’s craft and her move into environmentally focused comics, Spiral and Other Stories is a showcase of Koch’s mastery of comics as a medium that can contain astonishing forms and offer new kinds of storytelling for our uncertain times.