Arts, Architecture & Design Books

Abloh-isms is a collection of essential quotations from American fashion designer, DJ, and stylist Virgil Abloh, who has established himself as a major creative figure in the worlds of pop culture and art. Abloh began his career as Kanye West's...

The first comprehensive account of how and why architects learned to communicate through colour.Architectural draw traces the use of colour in European architectural drawings and prints, revealing how this phenomenon reflected the professional anxieties...

A brief guide to the real science of interstellar travel.With known exoplanets now numbering in the thousands and initiatives like 100 Year Starship and Breakthrough Starshot advancing the idea of interstellar travel, the age-old dream of venturing forth...

Eating and drinking can be aesthetic experiences as well as sensory ones. The Hungry Eye takes readers from antiquity to the Renaissance to explore the central role of food and drink in literature, art, philosophy, religion, and statecraft.In this...

Few direct clues exist to the everyday lives and beliefs of ordinary Jews in antiquity. Prevailing perspectives on ancient Jewish life have been shaped largely by the voices of intellectual and social elites, preserved in the writings of Philo and...

Anchorage Press' Top 10 for 2020 Keith Haring remains one of the most important and celebrated artists of his generation and beyond. Through his signature bold graphic line drawings of figures and forms dancing and grooving, Haring's...

The first investigation of how race and gender shaped the presentation and marketing of Modernist decor in postwar America.In the world of interior design, mid-century Modernism has left an indelible mark still seen and felt today in countless...

Contemporary artist Roni Horn first visited Iceland in 1975 at the age of nineteen, and since then, the island's treeless expanse has had an enduring hold on Horn's creative work. Through a series of remarkable and poetic reflections, vignettes,...

Computational models of urbanism - smart cities that use data-driven planning and algorithmic administration - promise to deliver new urban efficiencies and conveniences. Yet these models limit our understanding of what we can know about a city. A City...

Mashable's 20 Books from 2020 That Make Great GiftsIn the course of making Human Flow, his epic feature documentary about the global refugee crisis, the artist Ai Weiwei and his collaborators interviewed more than 600 refugees, aid workers,...

The legendary splendor of Genoese baroque artGenoa completed its transformation from a faded maritime power into a thriving banking center for Europe in the seventeenth century. The wealth accumulated by its leading families spurred investment in the...

The first major history of the bravura movement in European paintingThe painterly style known as bravura emerged in sixteenth-century Venice and spread throughout Europe during the seventeenth century. While earlier artistic movements presented a...

An outstanding anthology in which notable musicians, artists, scientists, thinkers, poets, and more- from Gustavo Dudamel and Carrie Mae Weems to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Paul Muldoon-explore the influence of music on their lives and workWhat happens when...

A richly illustrated celebration of the paintings of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle ObamaFrom the moment of their unveiling at the National Portrait Gallery in early 2018, the portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama have become two of the...

The last three decades have seen a massive expansion of China's visual culture industries, from architecture and graphic design to fine art and fashion. New ideologies of creativity and creative practices have reshaped the training of a new generation of...

Antiques & Arts Weekly Holiday Books Round-up 2020 How artists created an aesthetic of 'positive barbarism' in a world devastated by World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb.In Brutal Aesthetics, leading art historian and...

The first book to put the sacred and sensuous bronze statues from India's Chola dynasty in social context From the ninth through the thirteenth century, the Chola dynasty of southern India produced thousands of statues of Hindu deities, whose...

As Featured on Wall Street Journal's Holiday Books Round-up Nature The enduring influence of naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt on American art, culture, and politics.Alexander von Humboldt (17691859) was one of the most influential...

'A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns,' wrote the British mathematician G. H. Hardy. In Do Not Erase, photographer Jessica Wynne presents remarkable examples of this idea through images of...

A rich history of underwater filmmaking and how it has profoundly influenced the aesthetics of movies and public perception of the oceans.In The Underwater Eye, Margaret Cohen tells the fascinating story of how the development of modern diving equipment...

A classic work on radical aesthetics by one of the great philosophers of the early twentieth century No work of philosopher and essayist Jose Ortega y Gasset has been more frequently cited, admired, or criticized than his response to modernism, "The...

A photographic study of the land that served as the main testing site for American nuclear devices for four decadesMore nuclear bombs have been detonated in America than in any other country in the world. Between 1951 and 1992, the Nevada National...

The untold story of Michelangelo's final decades-and his transformation into one of the greatest architects of the Italian RenaissanceAs he entered his seventies, the great Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo despaired that his productive years were...

A meditation on how environmental change and the passage of time transform the meaning of site-specific art.In the decades after World War II, artists and designers of the land art movement used the natural landscape to create monumental site-specific...

An urban history of modern Britain, and how the built environment shaped the nation's politicsFoundations is a history of twentieth-century Britain told through the rise, fall, and reinvention of six different types of urban space: the industrial estate,...

How Lewis Carroll's photographs of children gave visual form to evolving ideas about childhood in the Victorian eraLewis Carroll began photographing children in the mid-nineteenth century, at a time when the young medium of photography was opening up new...

A pathbreaking history of art that uses digital research and economic tools to reveal enduring inequities in the formation of the art historical canon. Painting by Numbers presents a groundbreaking blend of art historical and social scientific methods to...

The first major English-language biography of Francisco Goya y Lucientes, who ushered in the modern era.The life of Francisco Goya (1746-1828) coincided with an age of transformation in Spanish history that brought upheavals in the country's...

A sweeping exploration of animals in Japanese art and culture across sixteen centuriesFew countries have devoted as much artistic energy to the depiction of animal life as Japan. Drawing upon the country's unique spiritual heritage, rich literary...

How science changed the way artists understand reality Exploring the Invisible shows how modern art expresses the first secular, scientific worldview in human history. Now fully revised and expanded, this richly illustrated book describes two...

The first study of album-making in the Ottoman empire during the seventeenth century, demonstrating the period's experimentation, eclecticism, and global outlookThe Album of the World Emperor examines an extraordinary piece of art: an album of paintings,...

A bold reorientation of art history that bridges the divide between fine art and material culture through an examination of objects and their usesArt history is often viewed through cultural or national lenses that define some works as fine art while...

A new approach to late Ottoman visual culture and its place in the worldWith its idiosyncratic yet unmistakable adaptation of European Baroque models, the eighteenth-century architecture of Istanbul has frequently been dismissed by modern observers as...

Writings on human life and the refugee crisis by the most important political artist of our time Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) is widely known as an artist across media: sculpture, installation, photography, performance, and architecture. He is also one...

An enthralling exploration of the biologically richest island on Earth, featuring more than 200 spectacular colour images by award-winning National Geographic photographer Tim LamanIn this beautiful book, Bruce Beehler, a renowned...

A fascinating history of marginalized identities in the medieval worldWhile the term "intersectionality" was coined in 1989, the existence of marginalized identities extends back over millennia. Byzantine Intersectionality reveals the fascinating,...

A novel interpretation of architecture, ugliness, and the social consequences of aesthetic judgmentWhen buildings are deemed ugly, what are the consequences? In Ugliness and Judgment, Timothy Hyde considers the role of aesthetic judgment-and its concern...

An in-depth history of the Stalinist skyscraperIn the early years of the Cold War, the skyline of Moscow was forever transformed by a citywide skyscraper building project. As the steel girders of the monumental towers went up, the centuries-old...

Neither art nor philosophy was kind to beauty during the twentieth century. Much modern art disdains beauty, and many philosophers deeply suspect that beauty merely paints over or distracts us from horrors. Intellectuals consigned the passions of beauty...

How the nature illustrations of a Renaissance polymath reflect his turbulent ageThis pathbreaking and stunningly illustrated book recovers the intersections between natural history, politics, art, and philosophy in the late sixteenth-century Low...

An exploration of the artistic and cultural influences that shaped writer and illustrator Edward GoreyThe illustrator, designer, and writer Edward Gorey (1925-2000) is beloved for his droll, surreal, and slightly sinister drawings. While he is perhaps...

How music has influenced mathematics, physics, and astronomy from ancient Greece to the twentieth centuryMusic is filled with mathematical elements, the works of Bach are often said to possess a math-like logic, and Igor Stravinsky said "musical form is...

A stunning portrait of the nocturnal moths of Central and South America by famed American photographer Emmet Gowin American photographer Emmet Gowin (b. 1941) is best known for his portraits of his wife, Edith, and their family, as well as for his images...

The most pervasive gods in ancient Rome had no traditional mythology attached to them, nor was their worship organized by elites. Throughout the Roman world, neighborhood street corners, farm boundaries, and household hearths featured small shrines to...

Photography Reinvented brings together thirty-five works by eighteen critically acclaimed artists who, through innovative experimentation and visionary conceptual scope, have changed the course of contemporary photography. From the seemingly objective,...

The first book to explore the role of images in philosophical thought and teaching in the early modern period Delving into the intersections between artistic images and philosophical knowledge in Europe from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth...

What is Chinese painting? When did it begin? And what are the different associations of this term in China and the West? In Chinese Painting and Its Audiences, which is based on the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts given at the National Gallery of...

In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried fifty-eight shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that made the boom in global trade possible. The Box tells the dramatic...