Bold, Cautious, True: Walt Whitman and American Art of the Civil War Era
Based on an exhibition of the same name, this substantial book interweaves the art, the poetry, and the political history of a crucial decade in America’s past - the 1860s. Written by Kevin Sharp, curator of the exhibition, the book covers Walt Whitman’s years of caring for the wounded in Washington military hospitals and includes heartfelt poems he wrote about this experience.
Landscapes of the Hudson River School add to the book’s many colorful illustrations of paintings, historical photographs, prints, cartoons, and sculpture. A selection of Winslow Homer’s paintings, as well as etchings for Harper’s Weekly, depict the human side of the Civil War. Sensitive paintings and photographs show Abraham Lincoln through the years, as he takes on the ever increasing burdens of the Presidency. Among the many artists represented are genre painters Eastman Johnson, Enoch Perry Wood, William D. Washington, Thomas Waterman Wood, and Thomas Satterwhite Noble.
Hardcover, 2009
180 pp; 102 illustrations
Price: $40 members, $50 non-members
Dress Codes: Clothing as Metaphor
This exhibition includes the work of a growing number of international artists who, since the 1990s, have used clothing in conceptual ways to explore ideas about race, ethnicity, gender, globalization, war, and violence.
The sculptures and installations in Dress Codes were at turns serious, satirical, amazing, and beautiful. Although some of the artists used clothing as a medium, others chose such unusual materials as buttons, doilies, plastic scraps, shoes, and dollar bills. Curator Barbara Bloemink’s catalogue essay decodes their sometimes subtle messages.
32 pages, 21 full-page color illustrations
Price: $10 members, $15 non-members
Lichtenstein in Process
This exhibition presented 65 works on paper and board, offering a rare glimpse into Lichtenstein’s step-by-step artistic choices. These works from the 1980s and 90s displayed Lichtenstein's signature use of primary colors, Benday dots, slanting stripes, and heavy black outlines.
Like the exhibition, the catalogue follows the artist's creative process from sketchbook to drawing to large color collage. Avis Berman, who directed the oral history program of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, has compiled excerpts from interviews with Lichtenstein and his assistants. Photos of the artist at work animate the text.
44 pages; over 50 color illustrations; 10 photographs
Price: $15 members, $20 non-members
Conversations in Clay
Clay: primordial, oozy, fundamental. It is not difficult to picture its origins. Thousands of years ago, someone noticed how it hardened and dried in the sun, and fashioned it into a useful item like a cup or a bowl. How long did it take before the human urge for beauty took hold, and the utilitarian became art? We can't know the answer precisely, but we do know that as far back as 24,000 BC clay was formed into animal and human figures and baked.
Conversations in Clay focuses on ten contemporary artists who are individually pushing the boundaries of the medium.
48 pages in color
Price: $20.00 each
All Things Bright and Beautiful (2008) Catalog No. 58
All Things Bright & Beautiful: California Impressionist Paintings from The Irvine Museum
Impressionism found fertile ground in California during the first decades of the twentieth century. Emerging some thirty years after Monet painted Impression: Sunrise (1872), the canvas that gave the school its name, California’s plein-air movement can justly be called Impressionism’s Indian summer, remarkable not only for its belatedness, but also for its fervor. The companion book to a traveling exhibition, All Things Bright & Beautiful includes 69 color illustrations, along with four essays by leading authorities, which chronicle the course of Impressionist painting in California, its relationship to earlier and contemporaneous schools, and the importance of artistic interchange among artists who moved in a out of the state.
SOLD OUT
202 pages
Price: $25.00 each
