Art reads

Zhou Brothers: 30 Years of Collaboration
Edited by Oskar Friedl (Hatje Cantz Publishers, $75)
In 2004, the Cultural Center and the Elmhurst Museum organized exhibitions of the Zhou Brothers' wonderfully expressive large-scale abstract work, and this monograph marks the occasion. The Zhou Brothers—Shan Zuo (b. 1952) and Da Huang (b. 1957)—were art stars in China during the 1980s who came to Chicago in 1986 with, as the story goes, thirty bucks in their pockets. For years, their work was informed by primitive motifs picked up largely from their studies of ancient Chinese cliff paintings. Dreams pop up frequently when it comes to the Zhou Brothers: The cliff imagery appeared in their dreams, they refer to their collaboration as a "dream dialogue" and, as one brother said, "We both have the same childhood dream of art." They've certainly nailed the American Dream—having recently opened an art center in a massive warehouse in Bridgeport.

The Wonder: Portraits of a Remembered City, Vol. 1
by Tony Fitzpatrick (Last Gasp, $26.95)
It's never tiring to look at Fitzpatrick's work, and his everlasting love of Chicago is our visual gain. This poet, former boxer and master printer packs a punch with each of his mixed media pieces here, drawn from his vast collection of ephemera—comic books, matchbook covers, science texts. Using a background palette of mostly saffron yellow, Fitzpatrick creates one-page visual stories, dense with imagery and full of humanity. In Chicago Working Girl, roses float around the centerpiece of a lady pulling on her fishnet stockings, the hand-written text running down one side like a border speaks of her "torrents of softness." It's a welcoming world Fitzpatrick creates, as a bit of collaged vintage text reads in one piece: "a friendly place, dependable."

Chicago Photographs
(LaSalle Bank Photography Collection, $65)
This is the third book in a series of five devoted to the bank's renowned collection of more than 4,000 photographs. Some of the greatest photographers of the 20th century took images of downtown Chicago, and this book shows us 47 of them by 30 artists including Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Thomas Struth, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Robert Frank, Vera Lutter and Walker Evans. But it's not all about great buildings and crowded, impersonal streets. This book also takes us into the neighborhoods with portraits and documentary images, reminding us, in work such as Jay Wolke's compassionate Social Services for Russian Immigrants, 1993, that a city is also the people.—Ruth Lopez