7.5 × 9 inches, 484 pages, softcover
ISBN 978-1-941753-81-1

Design by IN-FO.CO
Published by Inventory Press & Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University

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How can alternative organizations and traditional institutions learn from one another? How have exhibition platforms created space for artists to generate learning environments? How have these practices changed assumptions about art institutions and artistic production? How can we think about the economic, ecological, and institutional sustainability of all of these practices?

Living to Learn, edited by Noah Simblist of Virginia Commonwealth University, presents the work of over seventy artists, curators, collectives, and scholars who address contemporary art as a site of learning in the twenty-first century. Building on earlier histories of education as civic service for the common good, it focuses on the last twenty-five years while exploring the future of art education as a practice unfolding both in and beyond school. The book’s case studies reveal how innovations in education have a dynamic relationship with artistic practice, alternative arts organizations, universities, museums, and biennials.

7.75 × 9.5 inches, 124 pages, hard cover
ISBN 978-1-941753-83-5

Design by IN-FO.CO
Published by Inventory Press, San José Museum of Art & Kohler Arts Center

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Featuring selections from six major series to date as well as new work made in Laos, The Imaginative Landscape traces Pao Houa Her's ever-deepening exploration into concepts of home and belonging. In the exhibition and catalogue, she brings together formal and vernacular photographic languages, working in black-and-white and color photography that takes the form of lightboxes, wheat-pasted images, and video, in addition to traditionally framed images. Rooted in the experience of her Hmong community, an ethnic group indigenous to Laos, and shaped by family lore passed down by her elders, Her investigates the potential of photography to create nonlinear narratives, exploring construction in both physical form and metaphor.

Accompanied by essays on the work by co-curator Lauren Schell Dickens and Alexander Supartono, and an interview with the artist by co-curator ​​Jodi Throckmorton, this catalogue explores Her’s work in genres of portraiture, landscape, still life and vernacular, as she photographs herself and those people and places around her through the tinted lens of diasporic longing, where Minnesota and California become stand-ins for Laos, plastic florals replace living tropics, ersatz and real meld together.

4.75 × 7.75 inches, 400 pages, softcover
ISBN 978-1-941753-53-8

Design by IN-FO.CO and Kevin McCaughey

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For anyone who wants to think graphically about the image's role today, this exploding book of ideas is essential reading. —Rick Poyner

Seeing <—> Making: Room for Thought both studies and presents the creative process of constructing ideas with images. By activating the techniques of montage, the book reveals a wide field of view and a space to engage new critical connection between a multiplicity of objects from the past and present. Realized through an intergenerational collaboration of three cultural producers committed to making theory visible, a transformative anthology of critical essays by Susan Buck-Morss anchors this kaleidoscopic project. Images and ideas sync with Buck-Morss’ perceptive texts on visual culture, history, politics, and aesthetics, fusing criticism with visual play and linking collective imagination and social action.

Building upon the methods and ways of seeing put forth by visual thinkers like Walter Benjamin and John Berger, designer Kevin McCaughey (Boot Boyz Biz), designer, editor, and publisher Adam Michaels (IN-FO.CO/Inventory Press), and renowned theorist Buck-Morss collectively assemble colliding material into new relation. What results is a (typo-) graphic articulation that thinks seriously about the stakes of ideation and reorients the space of the book in the service of a theory and philosophy that speaks the language of our image-based information age.

5.375 × 8.25 inches, 400 pages, softcover
ISBN 978-1-941753-71-2

Design by IN-FO.CO

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“Visual communication encompasses drawing, photography, three-dimensional modeling, and film; abstract and realistic forms, static and moving images, simple and complex ones as well. It extends to questions of visual perception such as the relationship between figure and ground, camouflage, moiré patterns, optical illusions, illusory motion, mirages, the persistence of vision, and afterimages. It includes every aspect of graphics, from the design of typographical fonts to newspaper page layouts, from exploration of the limits of word legibility to the techniques that facilitate the reading of texts. All these facets of visual communication share something in common: objectivity.”
—Bruno Munari

Design and Visual Communication—the first-ever English translation of Bruno Munari’s extraordinary Design e Comunicazione Visiva (1968)—remains an important guide to bridging design education and everyday life. Published after Munari served as visiting professor at Harvard’s Carpenter Center, Design and Visual Communication takes over fifty lessons, class materials, and even letters home in which he describes life in America, and transforms them into a book about the future of art, architecture, and design. Conceived as a living volume, the book was written as inspiration to current and future designers to push beyond the past, however recent, and develop new tools to see and understand tomorrow’s world.

The facsimile reprint is accompanied by new contextual annotations by Munari scholar and design historian Jeffrey Schnapp. These micro-interventions highlight the innovations that make this work as relevant today as when originally published.

4.5 × 7 inches, 240 pages, softcover
ISBN 978-1-941753-70-5

Design by IN-FO.CO

“But isn’t imagination also fantasy? And can’t fantastic images also assume the form of sounds? Musicians speak of sonic images, sound objects. How does one invent a fish tale, an air-cooled engine, a new plastic?… fantasy, invention, creativity think; imagination sees.”
—Bruno Munari

Never-before translated into English, Bruno Munari’s Fantasy (Fantasia, 1977), invites the reader to explore their own imagination, creativity, and fantasy through a journey in Munari’s mind and work experience. His theory of creativity, developed in conversation with the Reggio Emilia approach and the work of Jean Piaget, foregrounds the book’s journey through Munari’s own design processes, and his work for clients and with children.

By turning life and work into a classroom, Munari unlocks a path through imagination in order to access his, and in turn our, deepest sense of play. The facsimile reprint is accompanied by new contextual annotations by Munari scholar and design historian Jeffrey Schnapp. These micro-interventions highlight the innovations that make this work as relevant today as when originally published.

6 × 9 inches, 256 pages, softcover
ISBN 978-1-941753-72-9

Design by IN-FO.CO

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Event updates here: a-co-program-for-graphic-design.org

“Over the years, David has shown me that design isn’t just about aesthetics or function—it’s about collaboration, experimentation, and constantly questioning what design can be. A *Co-* Program for Graphic Design is a fundamental exploration into the history of design, how it has shaped our society and reveals the often overlooked power that design holds in shaping our future.”
—Martine Syms, Artist and filmmaker

“'All together now,' as The Beatles sang in 1967. Those three simple words seem to be at the core of David Reinfurt’s argument, as he convincingly shows that graphic design, as a living practice, exists exactly in the intersection of multiplicity (‘All’), collectivity (‘Together’), and modernity (‘Now’).”
—Experimental Jetset, Graphic design studio

From ancient Rome to outer space, A *Co-* Program for Graphic Design features contributions by Danielle Aubert, Tauba Auerbach, Barbara Glauber, Shannon Harvey, Adam Michaels, Philip Ording, and Adam Pendleton. This collectively driven text expands David Reinfurt’s pragmatic and experimental approach to pedagogy into a collaborative project that weaves together a multiplicity of voices to present a polyphonic approach to design history and teaching.

This book extends Reinfurt’s highly acclaimed A *New* Program for Graphic Design to include material from three new Princeton University courses (Circulation, Multiplicity, and Research) expressly designed for online teaching.

These courses present a *co-*llaborative and *co-*operative way of telling and teaching design history, taking on subjects from the Detroit Printing Co-op, Corita Kent, and Charles and Ray Eames, to Marshall McLuhan, Sylvia Harris, and Virgil Abloh. Through a series of in-depth historical case studies and assignments that progressively build in complexity, the book serves as a practical guide to visually understanding the history—and shaping the future—of our designed world.

6.75 × 9.5 inches, 608 pages
ISBN 978-1-941753-51-4

Design by Laura Coombs

“This invaluable research tool will hugely expand, update, and perhaps even revolutionize the feminist discourse. It might even be considered a work of conceptual art in itself."
—Lucy R. Lippard, author of Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972

“This book served as my doorway to cyberfeminism and I now see what an energetic continent awaits me. Anywhere I stepped it burned my hair off, it’s that brilliantly intense."
—Kevin Kelly, founding editor Wired magazine

In Cyberfeminism Index, hackers, scholars, artists, and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology. When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex, and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.

The creation and use of the Cyberfeminism Index is a social and political act. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it, and pushes it into plain sight. Edited by designer, professor, and researcher Mindy Seu, it includes more than 700 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, and bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art.

Both a vital introduction for laypeople and a robust resource guide for educators, Cyberfeminism Index—an anti-canon, of sorts—celebrates the multiplicity of practices that fall under this imperfect categorization and makes visible cyberfeminism’s long-ignored origins and its expansive legacy.

“You can use it as a reference, follow a thread, or just access it at random and it delivers wit and wisdom from over three decades of one of the most politically and intellectually challenging movements of our era. What happens between sexed flesh and gendered tech? More than ever we all need to know."
—McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto

“This is an archive perfectly suited to its material: at ease with impermanence, richly appreciative of contradiction, and expansive in scope. Mindy Seu and her cohort of collaborators celebrate the polyrhythmic chorus of voices that have made cyberfeminist thought so delightfully difficult to define—and invite new, kaleidoscopic reinterpretations of our last three decades of life online."
—Claire L. Evans, author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet

“The Cyberfeminism Index celebrates, troubles, and critiques the histories and futures of struggle against networked patriarchy—from its first libidinous eruptions to tenacious tactical disruptions and mutations. For theorists and hegemony hackers alike the Index offers an inspirational and educational resource for the urgent work of glitching and decolonizing intersectional internets now."
—Ruth Catlow, founder of Furtherfield

7 3/4 × 11 3/4 inches, 208 pages, hardcover
ISBN 978-1-941753-06-4

Design by Project Projects
Co-produced by Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Bétonsalon–Centre d’art et de recherche, Paris
Co-published by Inventory Press and Koenig Books


Rare / Last Available Copies

Elephant Child is a natural extension of the artistic practice of New York-based French artist Camille Henrot. Originated during an Artist Research Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, which laid the groundwork for her 2013 video Grosse Fatigue and the subsequent installation The Pale Fox (2014–15), Elephant Child represents the culmination of a long-term inquiry into the human effort to make the universe comprehensible. The book contains an original text by Henrot written with Clara Meister and Michael Connor, documentation, sketches, and research materials. An interview between Henrot and social anthropologist Monique Jeudy-Ballini offers insight into Henrot’s characteristic approach of knowledge production and organization. Ultimately, the book is an object of high universalist ambition—devoid of authority, creating instead a vivid prismatic image of the realm of thought.