**This title is on pre-sale. Ships late spring 2025. Special pre-publication price applied to all pre-orders using code OPENINGNIGHT at checkout.
Hardcover, 80 pages
9.5 in. x 7.5 in.
24.13 cm. x 19.05 cm
Golden Estates, an endearing work of humor and pathos, is a collection of artist Robert Ginder’s house paintings completed between 1984 and 2024.
Forty years in the making, this deadpan but beautiful project is a masterful documentation—and the apotheosis—of California vernacular architecture. Likened to Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji and Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Golden Estates captures a cultural moment through a society’s everyday structures.
These unique and ubiquitous southern California architectural marvels could be perceived as painted portraits of their occupants as much as they are portraits of the buildings, as if each is the beginning of a novella.
Overlaying that subject is a reverence for a central theme done in the style of the early Italian devotional paintings and the Spanish Colonial works of the early Americas. Gold physically stands-in for California light and venerates an otherwise commonplace subject. Instead of a Madonna or a Saint, these paintings focus on the fundamental human need for a home and all it means.
In this original book, published for the Hat & Beard Press California Artist Series, New York City-based Mark Rozzo, author/editor, and staff writer for Vanity Fair, interviewed the artist about his life and work.
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Robert Ginder grew up in East Compton, California, in the 1950s and experienced all of the lifestyle phenomena of Southern California: cars, surf, music, youth, and post-beat generation culture. He was focused on art from age five. Art was a currency, a means of surviving in a tough environment. Eventually it became his vocation.
After graduating from the Richard Neutra-designed Orange Coast College, Ginder moved further southward. He developed his style working in North County, San Diego, for several years. In 1978, he went to Europe where he re-discovered paintings that he had only seen in books, fostering the use of gilded skies in his work. It seemed an obvious step considering the history of gold in California and its resplendence of sunshine. At that time, many of the mainstays that became a part of his mature work fell into place.
Ginder was included in an emerging artist group show at the contemporary art museum in La Jolla in 1984. Soon after that, he started showing in San Diego, Los Angeles, and New York.
After living and working in New York and exhibiting bi-coastally for 30 years, he has recently returned to his Western roots and splits his time between Las Vegas and Southern California.
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Mark Rozzo is a writer at Vanity Fair and the author of the best-selling Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles (Ecco, 2022), cited by the LA Times as one of the 50 Best Hollywood Books of All Time. He has also contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Vogue, Gourmet, Architecutural Digest, and Air Mail, where he is editor-at-large. As a musician and songwriter, he has released albums, toured internationally, and created music for television, commercials, and films, including Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007). More recently, he wrote, performed, and produced the soundtracks for the Audible.com original comedy productions Stinker Lets Loose! (starring Jon Hamm) and Passable in Pink (starring Bob Odenkirk). His next book is a collaboration with the pioneering graffiti artist and foundational hip-hop figure Fab 5 Freddy (Fred Brathwaite), provisionally titled Everybody’s Fly (Viking). He teaches nonfiction writing at Columbia University, where he was awarded a 2005 National Arts Journalism Fellowship, and lives in New York City.
