Stretched across city walls and along rooftops, Stephen Powers's colorful large-scale murals sneak up on you. "Open your eyes / I see the sunrise," "If you were here I'd be home," "Forever begins when you say yes." What at first looks like nothing as much as an advertisement suddenly becomes something grander and more mysterious—a hand-painted love letter at billboard size. Combining community activism and public art, Powers and his team of sign mechanics collaborate with a neighborhood's residents to create visual jingles— sincere and often poignant affirmations and confessions that reflect the collective hopes and dreams of the host community. A Love Letter to the City gathers the artist's powerful public art project for the first time, including murals on the walls and rooftops of Brooklyn and Syracuse, New York; Philadelphia; Dublin and Belfast, Ireland; São Paolo, Brazil, and Johannesburg, South Africa.

This classic of American Indian ethnography, originally published in 1877, is again available in its complete form. In the summers of 1871 and 1872 Powers visited Indian groups in the northern two-thirds of California. A journalist by profession, he was untrained in ethnography, but was nonetheless an astonishingly intelligent observer who had a gift for writing in a spirited manner. He reported faithfully what he heard and portrayed accurately what he saw among the native survivors of Gold Rush days in a series of seventeen articles published mostly in The Overland Monthly. These were partly unwritten, added to, and reorganized by Powers to be published in 1877 as a report of the U.S. Geographical Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region. Powers’ book is still basic and is referred to by everyone who deals with native cultures. The 1877 edition was not large, and Tribes of California is at last reprinted in response to growing demand for this rare volume. For this edition all of the original illustrations have been retained and the basic text printed in facsimile. Professor Robert F. Heizer has provided annotations throughout and an introduction to indicate contemporary thought about the volume.

Presents photographs of graffiti, and provides information about some of the people who create the urban art form.

Philadelphia native, Steve (ESPO) Powers arrived in New York in the early 90s, immersing himself in the citys vibrant Graffiti scene and quickly developing a unique, conceptually driven style all his own. By the end of the decade he started his own studio practice and launched a distinguished career both as a fine artist and a commercial illustrator. With the publication of Steve Powers Is A Studio Gangster, Powers records 5 years of paintings that distill the complete range of human emotion into readily recalled and related memes. These visual archetypes are aptly described by Powers as a synthesis of word and image to create a new emotional revelation. This book is published on the occasion of his Fall 2007 exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. Powers is a 2008 Fulbright scholar and has shown at Deitch Projects, the 49th Biennale, the Luggage Store and the Liverpool Biannual in 2004.