Books

An in-depth tout of Philadelphia’s architectural history from the 1700s to the present day—for the general reader.   In Philadelphia Builds, architecture critic Michael J. Lewis explains why Philadelphia has produced so many extraordinary...

This special and unusual atlas is a marriage of science and art like no other. Our universe is brimming with secrets, and surprising curiosities. Here  readers will learn the answers to all the questions they've asked  themselves: What does...

This delightful little book pays homage to the cat through artfully curated Japanese poetry and prints. No one captures the graces and idiosyncrasies of cats quite like the painters, printmakers, and haiku masters of Japan. From the Edo to the Showa...

Through a carefully curated selection of quotations, images and interviews, Artists on Art  reveals what matters most to the masters. You'll discover how the  giants of the different artistic genres developed their distinctive  visual...

This is the book for answering all your tool questions, gaining knowledge before hiring a professional, or simply flipping through just for the joy of learning something new about the objects that shape our world. This expansive guide catalogs more than...

A visual and global chronicle of the triumphs, challenges, and impact of over 100 women in architecture, from early practitioners to contemporary leaders. Marion Mahony Griffin passed the architectural licensure exam in 1898 and created exquisite...

Discover the weird and wonderful stories of our colorful world! Why are wedding dresses white? And what is the Ketchup and Mustard Theory? The answers always come back to color. Color infuses our lives with meaning, manifesting in science, language,...

The adventures, mysteries and many lives of a Matisse masterpiece. Created in 1911, Henri Matisse’s The Red Studio would go on to become one of the most influential works in the history of modern art. The painting, which has hung in MoMA’s galleries...

How design can help foster the conditions for global peace: an intersectional visual conversation between activists, designers, architects and theorists. How might we collectively put our creative forces together to envision a future we want to live in...

A major new history of how African nations, starting in the 1960s, sought to reclaim the art looted by Western colonial powers. For decades, African nations have fought for the return of countless works of art stolen during the colonial era and placed...

How the urban spectator became the archetypal modern viewer and a central subject in late nineteenth-century French art. Gawkers explores how artists and writers in late nineteenth-century Paris represented the seductions, horrors, and banalities of...

An unprecedented look at the little-known paintings from Louise Bourgeois’s early years in New York that laid the groundwork for her sculptural practice. Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) is celebrated today for her sculptures. Less known are the paintings...

A groundbreaking insight into Gustave Courbet and his bold experiments in landscape painting. Between 1862 and 1866 Gustave Courbet embarked on a series of sensuous landscape paintings that would later inspire the likes of Monet, Pissarro, and Cézanne...

Evoking the sensory richness and ambitions of the beloved French artist’s work through a multifaceted exploration of his art, career, and legacy. Cezanne presents a new examination of the work of Paul Cezanne (1839–1906) across media and genres,...

An unparalleled reassessment of Pierre Bonnard, exploring his paintings, drawings, photography, and prints. As one of the founders of the post-Impressionist group the Nabis, French artist Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) is frequently seen as a transitional...

The first book to publish the entirety of Franz Kafka’s graphic output, including more than 100 newly discovered drawings. The year 2019 brought a sensational discovery: hundreds of drawings by the writer Franz Kafka (1883–1924) were found in a private...

The first major visual and cultural exploration of the legacy of La Malinche, simultaneously reviled as a traitor to her people and hailed as the mother of Mexico. An enslaved Indigenous girl who became Hernán Cortés’s interpreter and cultural...

BlackStar creates the spaces and resources needed to uplift the work of Black, Brown and Indigenous artists working outside of the confines of genre. We do this by producing year-round programs including film screenings, exhibitions, an annual film...

BlackStar creates the spaces and resources needed to uplift the work of Black, Brown and Indigenous artists working outside of the confines of genre. We do this by producing year-round programs including film screenings, exhibitions, an annual film...

How do homes serve as emblems of a moment, markers of the past, or articulations of future possibilities? The Spring 2020 issue of Aperture considers the meanings and forms of a home, and the relationships between architecture, design, and the domestic...

Michael Snow Photo-Centric focuses on a selection of the artist's photographic work from 1962 to the present. The book considers Snow's interest in late modernism's self-reflexivity and, specifically, his exploration of how the mechanics of photography...

Philadelphia’s diverse public libraries, universities, scholarly institutions, and museums hold numerous—but often little-known—treasures, including many hand-produced manuscripts decorated with miniature paintings. Presented in this catalogue are eighty...

Taiga (1723–1776) and his wife, Tokuyama Gyokuran (1727–1784), were preeminent artists in eighteenth-century Japan. This landmark book—the only comprehensive survey available in English—focuses on the lives and times of these artists and accompanies the...

Barns are iconic features of the American landscape.  Among the wide variety of American barns, the Pennsylvania barn holds a special place in the agricultural traditions of North America. Combining features found in Alpine Switzerland and the...

Bringing together more than forty works from the United States and Europe, this exhibition examines Barbara Chase-Riboud’s artistic career, focusing primarily on her important Malcolm X sculptures. Five works from that series—among them the Museum’s...

The paperback boxed set of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel in its original two-volume format, re-released to include a sixteen-page booklet designed by the artist. Acclaimed as “the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about...

Faith Ringgold is a critically acclaimed and key figure of postwar American art, whose unique methods of visual storytelling have documented and advanced art historical, feminist, and civil rights  movements for more than half a century...

In the annals of popular protest in America, these have been shining  hours, achieved entirely outside the conventional arena of orderly  protest, white paper activism and the timid bleats of the professional leadership of big labor...

Long out of print, this seminal collection of essays and photographs by artist, theorist and filmmaker, Allan Sekula was originally published by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1984. Sekula sought to portray the inextricable bond between...

In this 1978 Caldecott Honor Book, award-winning author and illustrator David Macaulay explores the history and construction of castles in a richly illustrated resource for curious young readers. The word itself conjures up mystery, romance, intrigue,...

There has recently been a sharp increase in cases where corporations  have been sued by street and graffiti artists because their artworks had  been used and exploited without the artists' authorisation, for example in advertising campaigns, as...

Storied Stone weaves together memories and scholarship to offer an illuminating  perspective on one of the most striking museum spaces. While visiting Madurai,  Tamil Nadu, in 1913, the Philadelphian Adeline Pepper Gibson purchased over sixty...

Many people would love to learn to draw for pleasure, but don't know where to start. Being faced with a blank page can be daunting - even for a professional artist. In Sketchbook Challenge, illustrator Molly Egan shares prompts and ideas to get you...

 Afro-Atlantic Histories brings together a selection of more than 400 works and documents by more than 200 artists from the 16th to the 21st centuries that express and analyze the ebbs and flows between Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe...

An exciting insight into the workings of artists and museums, Making a Great Exhibition is a colorful and playful introduction geared to children ages 3-7 How does an artist make a sculpture or a painting? What tools do they use? What happens to the...

In A Black Gaze, Tina Campt examines Black contemporary artists who are shifting the very nature of our interactions with the visual through their creation and curation of a distinctively Black gaze. Their work—from Deana Lawson’s disarmingly intimate...

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) was a radical sculptor whose unorthodox approach to multiplication, assemblage, industrial production, and serial repetition challenged classical sculptural traditions and provided a definitive break in the history of art...

A groundbreaking survey of the school of  expressive, symbolic landscape painting that gave rise to American  modernism—newly revised and updated. This magnificent volume, featuring more than 750 illustrations, is the first definitive account...

An unprecedented portrait of the hidden patterns in human society—visualized through the world of data. Award-winning geographer-designer team James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti transform enormous datasets into rich maps and cutting-edge visualizations. In...

One of the greatest portrait artists of the 20th century, Alice Neel's vibrant, expressionistic paintings revealed a breath-taking depth of emotion within her subjects. From works exploring loss and grief, to communist political art, Neel's work pushed...

These women changed art forever - told in colourful graphic novel form, this is the story of four pioneers of feminist art: Judy Chicago,  Faith Ringold, Ana Mendieta, and the Guerilla Girls. Each made their mark in their own powerful way. Judy...

While birth often brings great joy, making babies  is a knotty enterprise. The designed objects that surround us when it  comes to menstruation, birth control, conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood vary as oddly, messily, and...

Follow photographer Frédéric Chaubin as he embarks on a unique, century-spanning journey through Europe. Featuring images of more than 200 buildings in 21 countries, Stone Age presents the history and architecture of the most dramatic medieval castles of...

Compiled by Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas, Eyes Open is a sourcebook of photography ideas for kids—to engage with the world through the camera. Twenty-three enticing projects help inspire a process of discovery and new ways of telling stories and...

Friedlander's social landscape is a who's who of postwar American photography.  In the 1960s and '70s, Lee Friedlander (born 1934) developed his signature  approach to documenting the American “social landscape”: deadpan,...

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Emma Amos (1937 – 2020) was a distinguished painter and printmaker. She is best known for her bold and colorful mixed-media paintings that create visual tapestries in which she examines the intersection of race, class,...

Edited by H. Richard Dietrich III and Deborah M. Rebuck with contributions by David L. Barquist, Edward S. Cooke Jr., Michael P. Dyer, Kathleen A. Foster, Morrison H. Heckscher, Philip C. Mead, Lisa Minardi, Deborah M. Rebuck, and William S. Reese This...

A wide-ranging retrospective that reveals a master printer’s own photographs to be technically brilliant work of remarkable breadth and complexity.This book presents the first in-depth survey of photographs by Richard Benson (1943–2017), who...

A revised edition of the classic little book, which has over 500,000  copies in print. New material and illustrations make the book even more  accessible to readers who are interested in mindfulness, in seizing the moment, in staying steady in...

Philadelphia—where more than three centuries of history come alive—is not one but several cities and you can experience all of them if you know where to look. Tucked amid the glass-and-steel skyscrapers stand the brick-and-mortar buildings of the...

In the fascinating Encyclopedia of Witchcraft folklore expert Judika Illes introduces readers to the mystical world of witchcraft.  Here are mythic witches, modern witches, sacred goddess witches, even  demon witches, male and female witches,...

For serious readers and dabblers alike, the acclaimed author of the Encyclopedia of 5000 Spells offers the essential book for working with supernatural beings. Spirits permeate every corner of our culture, and the Encyclopedia of Spirits explains who...

Once dismissed as a rusting industrial has-been—the “Next  Detroit”—Philadelphia has enjoyed an astonishing comeback in the 21st century. Over the past two decades, Inga Saffron has served as the  premier chronicler of the city’s physical...

AMC's Best Day Hikes Near Philadelphia offers 50 of the region's best hikes for all levels. Ideal for families, tourists, and locals alike, this easy-to-use guide will help hikers explore Eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware year-round, from...

Native America is a special issue about photography and Indigenous lives, guest edited by the artist Wendy Red Star. As debates around nationalism and borders in North America reach a fever pitch, Aperture magazine releases “Native America,” a special...

Communication Arts Typography Annual 11 features the award-winning projects from their 11th Annual Typography Competition, plus in-depth profiles of Prague-based photographer Bet Orten, Portland, Oregon–based design firm OMFGCO, Brooklyn-based...

With special emphasis on Berks and Lehigh Counties, PA, this groundbreaking work is an unparalleled presentation of the area's most publically-acclaimed regional folk art, known as Hex Signs or Barn Stars. This valuable collection offers the rare...

In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century. Funny Weather brings together a career’s...

John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and the most influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the Sunday Times critic commented: "This is an eye-opener in...

This series of paintings seamlessly fuses contemporary basketball  imagery with Edo-period Japanese art and culture, with captivating results. Each image riffs on a classic Japanese painting or subject, adding a surprisingly weighty visual twist as...

Jasper Johns (b. 1930) is one of the most influential artists living today . Over the past 65 years, he has produced a radical and varied body of work marked by constant reinvention. Inspired by the artist’s long-standing fascination with mirroring and...

Extra Bold is the inclusive, practical, and informative career handbook for designers that we've all been waiting for. Written collaboratively by a diverse team of authors, the book opens with critical essays that rethink design principles and practices...

The 'Masters of Photography' series is a new approach to photography how-to. Each volume is dedicated to the work of one key photographer who, through a series of bite-sized lessons and ideas, tells you everything you always wanted to know about their...

Good design, like good storytelling, brings ideas to life. The latest book from award-winning writer Ellen Lupton is a playbook for creative thinking, showing designers how to use storytelling techniques to create satisfying graphics, products, services...

Many people say they can't draw, but everyone can. Still Life Drawing reminds us that putting pen to paper is a simple pleasure, available to anyone. And when it comes to combining colors, playing with pattern and  exploring shapes, there are no...

Inspiring Young Minds to Love and Enjoy Art Everyone tells children that art matters— but the truth is that very often it's hard to know why it really does. Museum visits can feel like a chore as does having to learn the names of the big artists we're...

Offers a unique personal perspective on the journey of collecting  American art and antiques Start with House, Finish with a Collection is the story of how a couple's use of American art and antiques evolved  from furnishing a house into a...

Few product designs have the staying power of creations by Dieter Rams.  Almost everything produced by the most influential designer of the twentieth century is today considered a classic. This new and revised edition...

Hold your place in any book with this wood bookmark from Homer's Two Sailboats in the museum collection. Homer's love of the sea was a rich source of themes while closely observing the fishermen, the sea, and the marine weather. Homer’s skill as a...

You won't loose your place in a book with artist Severin Roesen's Still Life with Bird's Nest  reproduced on this bookmark.  A lavish depiction of flowers is crowded with blooms from every season.  Daylilies, irises, lilacs, morning...

While it is easy to lose time when reading a good page turner, you won't loose your place with this bookmark detailing the face of a tall case clock in the museum's Early American Art collection. German-born watch- and clockmaker Frederick Dominick...

Keep your place marked with this angel bookmark.  This detail from a chest of drawers in the museum's Pennsylvania German Furniture collection is found in our Early American Art Galleries.  Furniture painted with this decoration is known as...

Mark your place with Paul Revere's teapot as you enjoy Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn. Longfellow popularized Paul Revere,  an 18th-century American activist and artisan, in "Paul Revere's Ride", a poem first published in 1861,...

Brilliantly illuminating one of the least-understood areas of American history, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin now traces our fraught relationship with China back to its roots: the unforgiving nineteenth-century seas that separated a brash, rising...

Today, people carry powerful computers in our pockets and call them “phones.” A generation ago, people were amazed that the processing power of a mainframe computer could be contained in a beige box on a desk. This book is a celebration of...

How to Rule at Photography features 50 bite-size tips and tricks to help you improve your photo skills with your phone's camera. Creating brilliant photos with your phone isn't as hard as you might think, and the easy-to-follow advice in this book goes...

YES!! That poet and that poem!  This is a special edition of the poem "The Hill We Climb," read at the inauguration of the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden, on January 20, 2021.On January 20, 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and...

From the paperclip to the Eames Lounge Chair, the hundreds of everyday  objects included in The Design Book span the last five centuries and  shape our society in indelible ways. This extraordinary collection  includes classic pieces by...

Famed sociologist, writer, and Black rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois fundamentally changed the representation of Black Americans with his exhibition of data visualizations at the 1900 Paris Exposition.  Beautiful in design and powerful in content,...

Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 , one of the best  known and immediately recognizable paintings in the history of 20th century art,  "is famous," as the critic Robert Hughes astutely observed, "for being famous." Indeed,...

Many scholars have called Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay on women artists the first real attempt at a feminist history of art. In her revolutionary essay, Nochlin refused to answer the question of why there had been no “great women...

Whirr, buzz, hum. Before busy machines in factories turned out most of what we need and use, people crafted these  items by hand. From a globe to a pie crimper, a butter churn to a rocking horse, this unique collection highlights fourteen...

The Backyard Birdwatcher’s Bible is that rare type of book, one that is as packed with information as it is pleasing to look at. An elegant aesthetic is paired with practical tips on identifying, attracting, and caring for backyard birds, as well as...

Spanning over 60 years of Jasper Johns’s (b. 1930) prolific career, this spectacular publication is the most comprehensive and definitive study of the artist’s work to date. Written by noted Johns expert Roberta Bernstein, the book explores...

One of Europe’s most influential contemporary artists, Michelangelo Pistoletto (born 1933) has persistently investigated and expanded the role of the spectator in art since the 1950s through painting, sculpture, and performance. His present...

This fully illustrated catalogue features entries on more than one  hundred significant works by artists including Stieglitz Circle painters Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Arthur Dove;  Precisionists Charles Demuth, Ralston...

Yoshitoshi (1839–1892) was the last great woodblock print master of the Ukiyo-e tradition, and One Hundred Aspects of the Moon is regarded as his greatest achievement. The only complete set of the series, in the collection of the Museum of International...

The Rookwood Pottery was probably the most famous company making art pottery in the United States in the late nineteenth century into the twentieth century, achieving an international reputation and consistently promoting artistic innovation. Proud that...

For almost fifty years, Senga Nengudi has shaped an œuvre that  inhabits a specific and unique place between sculpture, dance, and  performance. And that work has been widely recognized as groundbreaking.  Her iconic R.S.V.P...

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is fortunate to have a collection of Italian drawings that encompasses a broad sweep of Italy’s art history, from the Renaissance to Futurism to the contemporary, and includes works by such famed artists as Batoni,...

This text accompanies the first museum survey of the mature work of Warren Rohrer, one of the premiere abstract artists to work in Philadelphia in the 20th century, bringing together 32 large-scale paintings from the years 1972 to 1993. This selection...

In the late eighteenth century, mineralogist Abraham Gottlob Werner devised a standardized color scheme that allowed him to describe even the subtlest of chromatic differences with consistent terminology. His scheme was then adapted by an Edinburgh...

Ever since his self-proclamation as part of the “New York Five,”  Richard Meier has risen through one top commission after another to the dizzy heights of architectural stardom. From Madison Square Garden to Shenzhen, China, his sleek, luminously...

Discover the audacious futurism of Zaha Hadid. As the first woman to win both the Pritzker Prize for architecture and the RIBA Royal Gold Medal,  Hadid broke the rules and re-defined the game, despite some saying her  designs were unbuildable...

Acclaimed as the “father of skyscrapers,” the quintessentially American icon Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect of aspiration. He believed in giving cultivated American life its fitting architectural equivalent and applied his idealism to structures...

Even in his unrealized projects, Le Corbusier redefined modern living, synthesizing functionalism, expressionism, and expansive urban thinking  from Switzerland to Chandigarh, India. This book provides a succinct  introduction to his...

Over the course of his artistic career, Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) transformed not only his own style, but the course of art history. From early figurative and landscape painting, he went on to pioneer a  spiritual, emotive, rhythmic use of color...

Never lose your page again with this bookmark that reproduces Steinlen's Le Chat Noir.  Known best for his works celebrating the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris, Steinlen included cats in many of his illustrations, and even published a book of his...