Skateboards

Artists skateboards (some produced posthumously) by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Bill Burns, Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Keith Haring, Mike Kelley, Harmony Korine, Yayoi Kusama, Faith Ringold, and Christopher Wool. 

Keith Haring | Luna Luna, A Poetic Extravaganza!

Keith Haring 

Luna Luna, A Poetic Extravaganza!

Langley, UK:  Van der Meer Paper Design Limited, 1986

30.5 x 30.5 cm. [folded],  61 x 30.5 cm. [unfolded]

Edition of 2000 

Almost three decades before Banksy’s Dismaland, Austrian artist André Heller created Luna Luna - an open-air museum and amusement park in Hamburg, Germany, in the summer of 1987. The project was an attempt to "create a travelling terrain of modern art, that in the centuries-old principle of the fairground involves people of all ages and educational levels in playful acts”. He commissioned thirty-two of the "most important artists of the period” to design the attractions. 

Participating artists included Jean-Michel Basquiat, Salvador Dalí, Sonia Delaunay, David Hockney,  Roy Lichtenstein,  Kenny Scharf, Jean Tinguely, Roland Topor, and Keith Haring, who created a merry-go-round [see below]. 

The artists received $10,000 each, with Heller arguing "Listen, you are constantly getting the greatest commissions, everyone wants your paintings or sculptures, but I am inviting you to take a trip back to your own childhood. You can design your very own amusement park, just as you think would be right today.”

The event featured a reflective fun-house pavilion by Salvador Dalí, and "enchanted tree" by David Hockney, a boldly coloured glass labyrinth by Roy Lichtenstein, and a Ferris wheel by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Philip Glass composed the music for Lichtenstein’s labyrinth . Karajan recorded with the Berlin Philharmonic for Hockney's room and Basquiat chose the album Tutu by Miles Davis to accompany the Ferris Wheel ride. 

After decades in storage, the works were restored and new works were commissioned for Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, which embarked on a global tour in 2023 with funding from Toronto singer Drake. 

This pop-up 3D offset cardstock multiple commemorating Haring’s carousel was produced in an edition of 2000, most of which were said to have been accidentally destroyed immediately after the fair. Estimates are that fewer than 200 copies remain. 

The work can be had for €950, from the Copyright Bookshop, here. 

Criterion Sale

All Criterion 4K discs, including preorders, are 30% off through February 22. 

https://www.criterion.com/shop/collection/498-4k-discs?utm_source=braze&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4K-sale&utm_term=feb-2026&utm_content=launch-banner

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings 1981 - 1984

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings 1981 - 1984

Edinburgh, Scotland: The Fruitmarket Gallery, 1984

[48] pp.,  29.5 x 22 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

Rare and very expensive catalogue for Basquiat's first European solo exhibition which premiered at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh and then travelled to ICA London and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam the following year. The title is said to be designed by the artist. 

Artists' Notebooks

"The publication of archival facsimiles as mass-media art books raises issues of privacy and audience, in terms not just of making private sketches and notes public but also of wide access to materials that would otherwise remain behind closed doors, available only to researchers and institutions. When a sketchbook is more preparatory and less private, access to it is still often limited to visiting an exhibition or an archive, a very different experience from reading a facsimile. Even archives that offer online access still remain somewhat exclusive, resources only for those in the know, or even only those with institutional affiliations. In a 2008 interview, Whitney admitted to not formally exhibiting his sketchbooks: “I have a sketchbook that I draw in all the time. But I don’t really show them.”3 In 2017, though, to accompany an exhibition of his drawings at Lisson Gallery, New York, Whitney published a facsimile sketchbook, a slim, 120-page paperback.4 According to the gallery, a priority of this publication was affordability: it was priced at $30 so that students could buy it. Making the unique available and affordable, this sketchbook circumvents issues of access, functioning instead in the spirit and ethos of artists’ books as a democratic multiple for the masses."

[...]

"Lee Lozano was an artist well-known for playing with notions of public and private. Published as a facsimile by Primary Information in 2010, her “Laboratory Notebooks” span 1967–70. Early on in the book, Lozano writes, “I have started to document everything because I cannot give up my love of ideas.”15 To read through its pages is to engage with both work in progress, diary entries, and finished works. According to James Hoff, a cofounder of Primary Information, while Lozano was still living she and her assistant unbound this notebook (as Haring did his), xeroxed its pages for her records, and then began selling them off individually. She treated these pages, then, as finished works, and this was certainly the case in her series of “language pieces,” which she made directly in her notebooks before removing them for sale. Yet each book is labeled “private” on the cover."

- Megan N Liberty