I am excited to announce the publication of Rooms: The Works and Life of JJ Manford, my biography of my long-time friend and partner in creative crime, JJ Manford, American artist extraordinaire.

A joint production by JJ and I and our respective staffs which began in spring of 2022, this customized printed, 200 page book will be published in its first limited edition of 1000 in January by Aminori, the renowned Riga-based art book publisher and gallery.

Rooms is designed by Anna Aizsilniece, the noted Latvian artist and book designer.

As many if not most of you know, JJ is of the rising stars of the New York art scene. His remarkable work and exquisite style, which has been described as “psychedelic realism,” has been featured in The New Yorker, Art Net and numerous other publications. His “lush interiors,” to paraphrase The New Yorker, hang in various museums, including ICA Miami and Everson Museum of Art of Syracuse, as well as many distinguished private collections—including my own!

Last year Artsy, the leading art news site, called JJ one of the most sought out artists in America. Rooms helps explains why.

Why Rooms my friends ask? And why now?

Because I wanted to give my extraordinarily accomplished and gifted friend of 20 years plus a great book, I tell them, a book that showcases his artistic achievement, while putting that achievement in the context of his life and times.

I believe I have succeeded—or should I say we, because Rooms is very much a collaboration.

Rooms is not the first creative fruit of my two decade long friendship with JJ. As Cornellians of a certain age will recall, JJ and I worked together on C Town Blues, the serialized novel about my adventures and misadventures as a Cornell undergraduate during the hazy-crazy late 60s and early 70s I published in The Cornell Daily Sun between 2004 and 2006, for which JJ provided the brilliant Hogarth-like illustrations.

JJ also curated My World, the sprawling 70 image retrospective of my photography--my most ambitious ever--which I mounted at Cornell’s Fine Arts Library, which JJ curated in 2006. Then there was The Points of Our Compass/Dissolving Lucien, the joint exhibit which we showed the following year at the Gershwin Hotel, the quixotic “art hotel” I wrote about for The New York Times.

To be sure, JJ and I have done a lot of stuff together over the years.

Still Rooms, my eighth, and fourth “major” book--that is one written with a view towards “adding to the record,” in this case the annals of contemporary art--is on a different level than anything we have attempted before.

Mind, Rooms is considerably bigger and more ambitious than either of us contemplated when the idea for it emerged from a transatlantic Skype chat in April, 2022, when I called to congratulate my one-time assistant and fellow Cornell Dada varsity alumnus on his recent success.

Perhaps it was time to think about doing a book.

Why not?

Why not indeed?

Although I had had some experience with writing biographies, I had never assayed a biography of an artist.

Then again, that was part of the challenge, as well as the incentive. After all, art has always been a part of my life. My grandparents, Flory and Myrtil Frank, were art dealers. In a way I grew up at the Museum of Modern Art.

To be honest, I only had a vague idea of the sort of book I wanted to produce when our transatlantic literary odyssey began two years ago.

All I knew, really, is that I wanted it to be different from the run of the mill coffee table art book.

And better.

And, I daresay, Rooms is.

Verily, to paraphrase the venerable Certs breath-cum-candy mint, Rooms is two books in one!

Book I-“The Life”—a triptych, consists of three parts, “The Points of Our Compass,” an essay about the history of my relationship with JJ, and “Finding the Zone,” a longer, 21,000 word portrait of the artist himself, from his roots in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, through his Cornell years and beyond, as told by the artist, featuring excerpts from interviews with the 20 odd friends, family and associates of JJ I interviewed for the book, including his beloved mother, Barbara Manford and his wife and principal creative partner, Elisa Soliven.

Last but not least, there is “Finding the Zone,” an extended conversation with JJ about his remarkable, color-intensive process. Book I also includes over 80 illustrations, including many of my own photographs of JJ, as well as the portfolio that Olya Frank, the noted professional photographer, specially shot for the book. Taken together these comprise a running parallel visual documentary for that part of Rooms.

Book II—the ravishing second half of Rooms, features over 100 reproductions of JJ’s expansive body of work, which we have divided into five connecting virtual exhibit halls, or rooms (hence the title): Hatchings/2002-2006, which contains the wide ranging aesthetic excursions of his college years; Finding the Zone/2006-2012, comprising the abstract/conceptual works of his Bohemian post-collegiate era; Nova Nights/2013-2016, the wild, Imagist-flavored oeuvre of his Hunter MFA period; Outside Looking In/2016-2019, the calmer meditations of his late 20s, as gravitated back to a representational style; and Entering the Rectangle/2019-2023, the lavish, wildly popular geometrically precise interiors of the artistic sector in which the painter currently resides, and has found his apotheosis.

Taken together, the whole, as the saying goes, is indeed greater than the sum of its parts.

Rooms, you will readily agree when you read and examine this double-barreled tome, is more than a book: it’s a revelation.

You will excuse my enthusiasm. I assure you it is genuine.

And yes, as JJ and our respective devoted and resourceful associates, Anna Sicova and Marta Lee, as well as our friends at Aminori will confirm, the process of producing and coordinating such an ambitious work, mostly over the net, no less in two distant time zones, has been an odyssey.

And what a wild ride it has been. Check out the photos!

No, it hasn’t been easy. And yes, there have been times when the long suffering members of our Magnificent Seven transatlantic team, including the artist and myself, have had to check our oxygen regulators on our bumpy, high-altitude, long distance flight.

Nevertheless, here we are 20 months, five thousand odd emails, several dozen Zoom meetings, and three excursions to New York, including several nights sleeping over at JJ’s studio so I could properly imbibe his painterly vibes (true story)—later, none the worse for wear.

And, as you will see when you receive this living work of literary fine art, we have delivered.

Thank you! And thank you JJ Manford for the honor and privilege of bringing Rooms to fruition.

Gordon F. Sander

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