Phyllis Alterman Franco: Collected Works (2024)
$55
Poem 88 Editions is pleased to announce the release of a new publication, Phyllis Alterman Franco: Collected Works. The book catalogues Atlanta artist Phyllis Franco’s oeuvre primarily from the 1980s to 2010 focusing on works on paper, three-dimensional objects, and paintings. Soft-bound and 305 pages in length, the book also contains a Publisher’s Note from Robin Bernat, an essay by art writer Beth Ward, and an Afterward by Franco’s middle child, Rebecca Franco Chalmers.
Franco, throughout her work, explored her own psyche, family dynamics, her environment, and the ephemeral in reflective bodies of water, rivers, oceans, woods, and domestic settings. A fixture in the Atlanta Jewish community and art community, Franco’s work was presented in exhibitions throughout her life. We hope in offering a thorough account of her work mostly gleaned from private collections, we may shed light on her remarkable output and introduce her to new audiences.
Tom Ventulett: Spaces, Works on Paper, 2005-2021(2023)
Tom Ventulett: Spaces catalogues the architects’ years-long watercolor practice. Four chapters devoted to architecture, flora, and birds showcase his remarkable adeptness and precision in rendering the natural world and man-made worlds. A Publisher’s Note by Robin Bernat and an essay from curator and artist Cynthia Farnell provide context for Ventulett’s achievement.
Tom Ventulett is an American architect based in Atlanta, Georgia. As a principal of Thompson,Ventulett, Stainback & Associates (TVS) for fifty-plus years, Ventulett completed remarkable projects inscale and function across the globe. Spaces, his first book of watercolors, spans the years 2005 - 2021.
A Wife’s Journey (2017)
Sue Sigmon Williams, $30
Poem 88 EDITIONS is pleased to announce the publication of A Wife's Journey by Sue Simon Williams. Written over the last two years, the book provides an honest and intriguing telling of William's self-discovery from the perspective of the freedoms and the confines of marriage and of motherhood. A native of Charlotte, North Carolina, Sue Sigmon graduated from The Women's College of the University of North Carolina and married Neil Williams in 1958. Three years later, with a law degree for Neil and two-year-old son, they moved to Atlanta for Neil to practice law. In this memoir, Sue gives her account of their life together as they and their son and daughter matured and found ways to enjoy and contribute to life around them. Sue's career as a singer, music educator, and writer as well as her and Neil's extensive civic involvement with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Trinity Presbyterian Church figure prominently in the book.
Soft-bound, 305 pages, the book is divided into ten chapters with foreward and afterward, and with 11 color and black and white images.
Saudade (2016)
Robin Bernat, $25.
Saudade is a collection of love poems some in sonnet form, others in quatrains. The title of the volume is a Portuguese word meaning a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia that is supposedly characteristic of the Portuguese or Brazilian temperament. Many of the poems touch on classical themes: love and loss, memory and anticipation. Influenced primarily by the confessional poets, the poems draw on Bernat's life experiences of requited and unrequited love, the sudden death of her partner in December 2000, and how that conjured memories of her father's death in 1979. On a lighter note, there are poems written for her two cats and happier poems written for her husband, Jon.
Saudade combines poetry with lush, arresting images to create something of a cross-breed between the traditional chapbook and an artist book. The books are small enough to fit in a coat pocket for easy contemplation.
about Robin Bernat:
Robin Bernat is foremost an artist and writer and secondarily the owner and curator of Poem 88 gallery in Atlanta, Georgia. Her work has been exhibited locally, regionally and nationally and has been collected by many important institutions including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Kemper Museum of Art, The High Musuem of Art, MOCA-GA and The Weatherspoon Museum. Working primarily in film and video, Bernat's work explores the fleeting and the provisional. Besides her self-published volumes, she has published monographs under the imprimatur of Circle B Press for artists Rick Berman and Susan Seydel Cofer and published a collection of images, Pictures Take You Places (2014) by Phillip March Jones under the imprimatur Poem 88 EDITIONS. She has also been a contributor to Art Papers Magazine and Burnaway. Through Poem 88, Bernat brings to the fore the work of significant and emerging artists in Atlanta and the Southeast many of whom were former classmates. She is a graduate of The University of Georgia and The Atlanta College of Art; in 2001, she was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.
Bright Star (2015)
Robin Bernat, $25
An artist book comprising found images with the text from John Keats' renown poem, Bright Star presents a richly layered interpretation of ideas from the Romantic era. The British Romantic poets are particularly inspirational for artist Robin Bernat in their devotion to the spiritual and natural worlds through lush, sensual imagery. Digitally printed and hand-stitched.
Pictures Take You Places (2014)
Phillip March Jones, $22
Pictures Take You Places (2014) by Phillip March Jones contains 52 full color postcards with caption on the reverse side presented in a match box format accompanied by an essay from the publisher. Pictures Take You Places is a daily photographic discipline, a sensitive index of the artist's encounters with beauty, serendipity and the ironic. While many of the images are quickly composed, remote and sometimes overly clever, the overall effect of the collection of images is more phenomenological. That is to say, taken as a whole, Jones seems to be saying something much more personal about his experience of each place and thing, and the resulting images reveal his intentionality. Formal aspects like composition, color arrangements and qualities of light serve a common purpose of capturing the poetic and the provisional. Amusing cultural markers, signs, and texts that lavish in the ironic are, instead, upended by the persistent inclusion of beauty and even the sublime. Desolation weighs on every image lending the collection a supremely post-apocalyptic intensity. Taken primarily in the United States and Europe and uploaded daily to TUMBLR, Mr. Jones' photos reveal his present surroundings and are made immediately and instantaneously available for viewing and reviewing through electronic media. The book is a distillation of a year's worth of image-making shared across continents and free of editorial commentary.
about Mr. Jones:
Phillip March Jones is an artist, writer, and curator who splits his time between Lexington, Kentucky and New York City. He is founder of Institute 193, a non-profit contemporary art space and publisher in Lexington, Kentucky and director of Andrew Edlin, a gallery located on New York's Lower East Side. His works and writing have been published by Vanderbilt Press, Dust-to-Digital, and the Jargon Society, among others.
