Other Books

by Jeffrey K. Smith

Drawing makes you happy! 

This boldly illustrated handbook offers easy-to-follow drawing exercises—some thought-provoking, some meditative, all fun—inspired by art-therapy practices. Each page features an activity written by artist and activist Tim Shaw and brought to life with colorful art from Spanish illustration duo Cachetejack, offering readers simple strategies for boosting their confidence, reducing stress, and expressing themselves in meaningful and joyful new ways. 

With a distinctive, modern aesthetic, Draw & Be Happy will resonate with both new and experienced artists looking for fulfillment through creativity.

Almost Lost Arts features the stories of 20 artisans who have devoted their lives to preserving traditional techniques. From globemakers and bookmenders to cassette tape manufacturers and neon sign makers, the profiled artisans represent a diverse mix of media, ages, genders, and cultural backgrounds.

Gorgeous photographs reveal these craftspeople's studios from places like Oaxaca, Kyoto, Milan, and Tennessee.

• Each maker is accompanied by an in-depth profile telling their story

• Features two essays that discuss the challenges and rewards of engaging deeply with the past

• An inspiration to makers, collectors, and history lovers

Almost Lost Arts is a celebration of tactile beauty and a tribute to human ingenuity. This book takes readers in-depth with each artisan and explores how people around the world are saving traditional arts from obscurity.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., is one of the most famous pieces of civic architecture in the world. But most people are not as familiar with the reserved college student who entered and won the design competition to build it. This accessible biography tells the story of Maya Lin, from her struggle to stick with her vision of the memorial to the wide variety of works she has created since then. The carefully researched text, paired with ample photos, crosses multiple interests—American history, civic activism, art history, and cultural diversity—and offers a timely celebration of the memorial's 35th anniversary as well as providing an important contribution to the current discussion of the role of women and minorities in society.

By Ronni Baer ; with essays by Henk van Nierop, Herman Roodenburg, Eric Jan Sluijter, Marieke de Winkel, and Sanny de Zoete ; essays translated by Diane Webb.

The Dutch Republic in the 17th century was home to one of the greatest flowerings of painting in the history of Western art. Freed from the constraints of royal and church patronage, artists created a rich outpouring of works that circulated through an open market to patrons and customers at every level of Dutch society. The closely observed details of daily life captured in portraits, genre scenes and landscapes offer a wealth of information about the possessions, activities and circumstances that distinguished members of the social classes, from the nobility to the urban poor. The dazzling array of paintings gathered here--by artists such as Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch and Gerard ter Borch, as well as Rembrandt and Vermeer--illuminated by essays from leading scholars, invites us to explore a vibrant early modern society and its reflection in a golden age of brilliant painting.

• Hardcover, 344 pages

by Claire Chao  & Isabel Sun Chao 

A high position bestowed by China's empress dowager grants power and wealth to the Sun family. For Isabel, growing up in glamorous 1930s and '40s Shanghai, it is a life of utmost privilege. But while her scholar father and fashionable mother shelter her from civil war and Japanese occupation, they cannot shield the family forever.

Lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched, Remembering Shanghai follows five generations from a hardscrabble village to vibrant Shanghai to the bright lights of Hong Kong. By turns harrowing and heartwarming, this vivid memoir explores identity, loss and the unpredictable nature of life against the epic backdrop of a nation and a people in turmoil.

by Rachel Z. DeLue

Arthur Dove, often credited as America’s first abstract painter, created dynamic and evocative images inspired by his surroundings, from the farmland of upstate New York to the North Shore of Long Island. But his interests were not limited to nature. Challenging earlier accounts that view him as simply a landscape painter, Arthur Dove: Always Connect reveals for the first time the artist’s intense engagement with language, the nature of social interaction, and scientific and technological advances.

Rachael Z. DeLue rejects the traditional assumption that Dove can only be understood in terms of his nature paintings and association with photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz and his circle. Instead, she uncovers deep and complex connections between Dove’s work and his world, including avant-garde literature, popular music, meteorology, mathematics, aviation, and World War II. Arthur Dove also offers the first sustained account of Dove’s Dadaesque multimedia projects and the first explorations of his animal imagery and the role of humor in his art. Beautifully illustrated with works from all periods of Dove’s career, this book presents a new vision of one of America’s most innovative and captivating artists—and reimagines how the story of modern art in the United States might be told.

• Hardcover

by Kathryn Watterson (Author), Cornel West (Foreword)

 I Hear My People Singing shines a light on a small but historic black neighborhood at the heart of one of the most elite and world-renowned Ivy-League towns―Princeton, New Jersey. The vivid first-person accounts of more than fifty black residents detail aspects of their lives throughout the twentieth century. Their stories show that the roots of Princeton’s African American community are as deeply intertwined with the town and university as they are with the history of the United States, the legacies of slavery, and the nation’s current conversations on race.

Drawn from an oral history collaboration with residents of the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood, Princeton undergraduates, and their professor, Kathryn Watterson, neighbors speak candidly about Jim Crow segregation, the consequences of school integration, World Wars I and II, and the struggles for equal opportunities and civil rights. Despite three centuries of legal and economic obstacles, African American residents have created a flourishing, ethical, and humane neighborhood in which to raise their children, care for the sick and elderly, worship, stand their ground, and celebrate life. Abundantly filled with photographs, I Hear My People Singing personalizes the injustices faced by generations of black Princetonians―including the famed Paul Robeson―and highlights the community’s remarkable achievements. The introductions to each chapter provide historical context, as does the book’s foreword by noted scholar, theologian, and activist Cornel West.

An intimate testament of the black community’s resilience and ingenuity, I Hear My People Singing adds a never-before-compiled account of poignant black experience to an American narrative that needs to be heard now more than ever. 

• Hardcover

 Anatomy: Exploring the Human Body is a visually compelling survey of more than 5,000 years of image-making. Through 300 remarkable works, selected and curated by an international panel of anatomists, curators, academics, and specialists, the book chronicles the intriguing visual history of human anatomy, showcasing its amazing complexity and our ongoing fascination with the systems and functions of our bodies. Exploring individual parts of the human body from head to toe, and revealing the intricate functions of body systems, such as the nerves, muscles, organs, digestive system, brain, and senses, this authoritative book presents iconic examples alongside rarely seen, breathtaking works. The 300 entries are arranged with juxtapositions of contrasting and complementary illustrations to allow for thought-provoking, lively, and stimulating reading. 

 Art AIDS America is the first comprehensive overview and reconsideration of 30 years of art made in response to the AIDS epidemic in the United States. This book foregrounds the role of HIV/AIDS in shifting the development of American art away from the cool conceptual foundations of postmodernism and toward a new, more insistently political and autobiographical voice. Art AIDS America surveys more than 100 works of American art from the early 1980s to the present, reintroducing and exploring the whole spectrum of artistic responses to HIV/AIDS, from in-your-face activism to quiet elegy. 

 For 500 years the holy city of Vrindavan in northern India has been a haven for India's dispossessed widows.  Their ultimate dream is to reach Moksha--heaven--where they will find freedom from the cycle of death and rebirth and live surrounded by their gods forever. Fazal Sheikh's photographs capture the meditative mood of the city and his portraits of the widows convey their sense of acceptance of life's nearing its end and a longing for what is to come. 

A Material Legacy: The Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Collection of Contemporary Art (Duke University Press) is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2016.

Comprised of more than 30 large-scale works in two- and  three-dimensions and drawn entirely from the Nancy A. Nasher and David  J. Haemisegger Collection, A Material Legacy is a  multi-generational exhibition that illustrates the material impulse found in contemporary art-making practices. Nearly all of the works in  the exhibition have been made in the previous decade, providing an almost real-time glimpse into the varied approaches and innovative techniques of art being made in the second decade of the 21st century. The exhibition reveals the various ways in which contemporary artists manifest a material tendency,  from the politically-charged works of Ivan Navarro and Kara Walker, the  formal complexity of Tony Cragg, and the ascetic repetition of Sol  Lewitt, to the colorful exuberance of Katharina Grosse and Elliot  Hundley, among many others. 

• Hardcover, 112 pages
• 100 color illustrations

By Dawn's Early Light: Jewish Contributions to American Culture from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War

By Dawn's Early Light: Jewish Contributions to American Culture from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War by Leonard L. Milberg is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2016. 

This 352-page catalogue, with 13 scholarly essays, discusses how Jews began to speak publicly the colonial period. At the dawn of the Republic, they were new to American public life. Yet as the United  States started its grand experiment with liberty, and began to invent a culture of its own. Jews, too, began a grand experiment of living as  equals. In a society that promised exceptional freedom, this was both liberating and confounding. As individuals, they were free to  participate as full citizens in the hurly-burly of the new nation’s  political and social life. But as members of a group that sought to  remain distinctive, freedom was daunting. In response to the challenges  of liberty, Jews adopted and adapted American and Jewish artistic idioms  to express themselves in new ways as Americans and as Jews. In the  process, they invented American Jewish culture, and contributed to the  flowering of American culture during the earliest days of the Republic. 

The exhibition, organized by the Princeton University Library, featured more than 160 books, maps, manuscripts, prints, and paintings, including  some of the earliest novels, plays, scientific treatises, and religious  works produced by Jews in the United States.    

• Paperback
• 75 full-color illustrations  

Gainsborough's Family Album is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum  in 2019.   

Spanning more than four decades, Gainsborough's family portraits chart the period from the mid-1740s, when he plied his trade in his native Suffolk, to his most successful latter years at his luxuriously appointed studio in London's West End. Alongside this story of a provincial 18th-century artist's rise to fame and fortune runs a more private narrative, about the role of portraiture in the promotion of family values, at a time when these were assuming a recognizably modern form. 

In the first of three introductory essays, David H. Solkin writes on Gainsborough himself, placing his family portraits in the context of earlier practice. Ann Bermingham explores Gainsborough's portraits of  his daughters, with particular reference to two finished double  portraits painted seven years apart and the tragic story arising from  them. Susan Sloman discusses Margaret's role as her husband's business  manager, its effect on the family dynamic and hence the visual representation of its members. 

• Hardcover

This volume features a total of 83 vintage prints by eight Magnum photographers―Werner Bischof, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Ernst Haas, Erich Lessing, Jean Marquis, Inge Morath, and Marc Riboud―in large-format reproductions, around the theme of “photographic humanism”: people and their everyday surroundings, photographed unsensationally by committed photojournalists who believed in educating and bettering the world through their work.

This book explores a once-popular picture story by Gordon Parks and the extraordinary chain of events it prompted. Published in Life magazine in June 1961 as “Poverty: Freedom’s Fearful Foe,” this empathetic photo-essay profiled the da Silva family, living in a hillside favela near a wealthy enclave of Rio de Janeiro. Focused primarily on the eldest son Flavio, an industrious 12-year-old suffering from crippling asthma, Parks’ story elicited more than 3,000 letters and $25,000 in donations from Life readers to help the family and the favela.

Houses or domestic buildings are often among the first projects young architects design. For David Adjaye, such early commissions connected him to a rising generation of creators with whom he shared a range of sensibilities. His artistry, clever use of space, and inexpensive, unexpected materials resulted in many innovative and widely published houses. 

This monograph presents the fifteen finest and most recent examples, from Africa to Brooklyn, from desolate farmlands to urban jungles. Chronicled through informed descriptions and detailed and photographically rich visual documentation, the results testify to the importance of Adjaye’s growing inventiveness and provide powerful ideas for residential architecture.

300+ illustrations, 250+ in color 

 Through its thematic organization into six chapters―Realism and Beyond, Post-Pop Landscapes, New Romanticism, Constructed Realities, Abstracted Topographies, and Complicated Vistas―the book affords a generous window into the very best of contemporary landscape painting, from Cecily Brown’s sensual, fleshy landscapes to Peter Doig’s magic realist renderings of Trinidad, Maureen Gallace’s serene views of beach cottages and the foaming ocean, David Hockney’s radiant capturings of seasonal change in the English countryside, Julie Mehretu’s dynamically cartographic abstractions, Alexis Rockman’s mural-sized, postapocalyptic dioramas, and far beyond. 

 "Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, Ninth Street Women is the impassioned, wild, sometimes tragic, always exhilarating chronicle of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstract painting -- not as muses but as artists. From their cold-water lofts, where they worked, drank, fought, and loved, these pioneers burst open the door to the art world for themselves and countless others to come." 

Chigusa and the Art of Tea is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum October 2014 - February 2015.

This innovative book narrates the history of a single object―a tea-leaf storage jar created in southern China during the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries―and describes how its role changed after it was imported to Japan and passed from owner to owner there. In Japan, where the jar was in constant use for more than seven hundred years, it was transformed from a humble vessel into a celebrated object used in chanoyu (often translated in English as tea ceremony), renowned for its aesthetic and functional qualities, and awarded the name Chigusa.