Published in June by Mark Batty, Poster Boy’s debut monograph, The War of Art!, celebrates his inventive reworking of commercial advertising. Poster Boy has undeniable wit, and he’s also neatly thread the fine line between cultural critic and vandal.

This weekend, Carmichael Gallery of Contemporary Art will launch the book in LA. The event includes book sales and a number of limited edition prints. No prizes for guessing the Carmichael’s thoughts on Poster Boy – proceeds from the sales will go to K.A.R.A.T.E., a new legal defense fund for street artists.

Images from the book, the flier for the event, and more information follow after the jump.

Typically, paper does not rank high among people’s conception of architectural materials.

Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, however, has made paper his primary material, simultaneously celebrating its strength and durability and its delicacy. Ban came to fame after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, his paper based solutions functioning as much needed temporary housing with great cost efficiency.

Ban studied in the United States and returned to Japan in 1985 to establish his practice. He currently maintains offices in Tokyo, Paris, and New York, and teaches at Kelo University. Ban is recipient of two World Architecture Awards (2001 and 2002) and the Architecture for Humanity Award (1999).

Shigeru Ban: Paper in Architecture is the first monograph to chronicle Ban’s innovative work. Forty of his permanent and temporary structures are featured though brilliant photography and concise text. An essay by Riichi Miyake neatly contextualizes Ban’s progression as an architect and his passion for innovation. The book serves as brilliant introduction to both the mind of Ban and the potential for paper in architecture.

Shigeru Ban: Paper in Architecture by Shigeru Ban, Rizzoli, 2009.

Widely acknowledged as France’s most important contemporary architect, Jean Nouvel has completed famed buildings from Paris to Minnesota. For Jean Nouvel: The Complete Works, Nouvel worked for 5 years with Taschen’s architectural editor Phillip Jodidio to create a two volume monograph. Each of the images and the graphic design of the books was chosen by the architect himself.

Forthcoming from Taschen. Page views after the jump.

Touted as “Koons for the Poor!” Taschen’s latest monograph explores the world of the Jeff Koons. Essay’s from Ingrid Sischy and Eckhard Schneider build context. Katy Sigel offers critical analysis of his work. The book is arranged chronologically. Available now from Taschen.

More page views from Jeff Koons after the jump.

Los Angeles native and New York-based visual artist Kehinde Wiley has firmly situated himself within art history’s portrait painting tradition. As a contemporary descendant of a long line of portraitists—including Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titian, Ingres, and others—Wiley engages the signs and visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, majestic, and sublime in his representation of urban black and brown men found throughout the world. By applying the visual vocabulary and conventions of glorification, wealth, prestige, and history to subject matter drawn from the urban fabric, Wiley makes his subjects and their stylistic references juxtaposed inversions of each other, imbuing his images with ambiguity and provocative perplexity.

In Black Light, his first monograph, Wiley’s larger-than-life figures disturb and interrupt tropes of portrait painting, often blurring the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representation and the critical portrayal of masculinity and physicality as it pertains to the view of black and brown young men. The models are dressed in their everyday clothing, most of which is based on far-reaching Western ideals of style, and are asked to assume poses found in paintings or sculptures representative of the history of their surroundings. This juxtaposition of the “old” inherited by the “new”—who often have no visual inheritance of which to speak—immediately provides a discourse that is at once visceral and cerebral in scope.

Black Light includes essays from Brian Keith Jackson and Krista A. Thompson. The book is forthcoming from PowerHouse.