Books

This abundantly illustrated book is an illuminating exploration of the impact of medieval imagery on three hundred years of visual culture.From the soaring castles of Sleeping Beauty to the bloody battles of Game of Thrones, from...

An illustrated guide to the fantastic world of Japanese myths: retelling the stories and exploring how Japanese mythology has changed over time, as new gods, heroes, and spirits have entered the  canon. While people around the world love Japan’s...

A green cloud and a white tree? Who is responsible for illustrating this book? True Colors begins innocently with two friends, their dog, and their kite, but each time the story gets started, more colors seem to go awry. The narrator implores the reader...

It's a freestanding globe! This read-aloud introduction to geography for young children folds back and creates a globe. Children are invited to identify and experience the Earth's amazing geography through rhyming verse and lush illustrations: from...

Kiss My Genders celebrates more than 30 international artists whose work explores and challenges traditional gender categories. The book features works from the late 1960s through to the present, and focuses on artists who draw on their own experiences...

The most influential architectural essays written since the Renaissance, copiously illustrated and neatly organized chronologically and by country. Discover the theories behind the structures in which we live, work, and play. From Alberti and Palladio to...

In this volume, Jens Müller traces 130 years of graphic design,  designers, and developments from the late 19th century through the economic boom after World War II until today. Year-by-year spreads are combined with in-depth features on dozens of...

The definitive and fully illustrated guide to the Bayeux  Tapestry. The full history of the events leading up to the Battle of  Hastings and the story of the tapestry itself. Most people know that the Bayeux Tapestry depicts the moment when...

Pioneering Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander is one of the most influential artists working today. Sikander is widely celebrated for expanding and subverting miniature painting to explore gender roles and sexuality, cultural identity, racial...

A sweeping look at Chinese art across the millennia that upends traditional perspectives and offers new pathways for art history. Throughout Chinese history, dynastic time—the organization of history through the lens of successive dynasties—has been the...

This follow-up to the wildly successful Wiccapedia, written by  the two authors of that book, gives readers a broader knowledge of  Wicca, nature magick, and spellcraft today. Includes a four-color insert  on pentacle magick! With more...

The Japanese woodblock print is a phenomenon with no Western equivalent. Breathtaking landscapes exist alongside blush-inducing erotica, ghosts and demons torment the living, and sumo wrestlers and kabuki actors are rock stars. This condensed edition...

Edward Hicks (1780–1849) was the creator of one of the most familiar scenes in American art: the Peaceable Kingdom, which depicts a realm where wild and flesh-eating animals come together with defenseless creatures, and will not harm them. Because Hicks...

Infographics provide graphic visual representations of information or knowledge intended to present data quickly and concisely to a broad swath of users of different skills, abilities and backgrounds. Infographic Design explores the building blocks of...

Judith Joy Ross: Photographs 1978–2015 is an illuminating retrospective that explores the life and career of a revered American photographer, illustrated by two hundred of her images, many never before seen or published. The work of Judith Joy Ross...

A detailed look at the ambition and artistic legacy of Emperor Maximilian I and his passion for armor and chivalry. Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (1459–1519) crafted a public persona and personal mythology that earned him the romantic sobriquet...

Guest edited by Dr. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Vision & Justice addresses the role of photography in the African American experience. This award-winning issue of Aperture magazine was released in summer 2016, in a political moment defined by the close of...

One of Mexico's most important modern artists, Juan Soriano (1920?2006) served as a link between the nationalist imagery of the Mexican muralists and the experimental vanguard of the 1950s and 1960s known as "La Ruptura". This fascinating book, which...

This pioneering book stands as the most comprehensive treatment of the lives, ideas, and art works of the remarkable group of women who were an essential part of the Surrealist movement. Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, and Dorothea Tanning, among many...

Though she was widely known for her supernatural fictions, Lee hasn’t gained the recognition she so clearly deserves for her contributions in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy of empathy, and art criticism. An early follower of Walter Pater, her work...

Our inaugural print issue was released in Spring 2021. This issue features 100 pages of interviews, essays, reviews, and artwork. Interviews highlight artists Shinique Smith, Christa David, Raisa Kabir, Soyoung Kim, Ashante Kindle, and more. Essays...

This feminist retelling of the history of photography puts women in the picture—and, more importantly, behind the camera! In ten thematic, chronological sections, Tate Modern curator Emma Lewis explores the vital role women artists have played in...

In Black, Brown + Latinx Design Educators, Kelly Walters collects twelve deeply personal interviews with graphic design educators of color who teach at colleges and universities across the United States and Canada. The book centers the unique narratives...

An  intimate look at the life and career of the Dada hero known for the  unique joy of her work across mediums, authored by her great-niece and  buttressed with archival material.  Even when  performing at Zurich’s Cabaret...

Interested in history and traditional pioneer kitchens, early cooking  methods, and original metals used in pots during the early years of  America, Sara became obsessed with the crafts of copper- and tin-smithing for kitchenware—specialty...

In Delaware society at the beginning of this period, to be a woman meant to engage in the activities performed by women, including diplomacy, rather than to be defined by biological sex. Among the Delaware, being a "woman" was therefore a...

This book is the first to chronicle the lives of African American women in the urban north during the early years of the republic. A Fragile Freedom  investigates how African American women in Philadelphia journeyed from enslavement to the...

Marital status was a fundamental legal and cultural feature of women's identity in the eighteenth century. Free women who were not married could own property and make wills, contracts, and court appearances,  rights that the law of coverture...

Lenape Country is a sweeping narrative history of the multiethnic society of the Delaware Valley in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. After Swanendael, the Natives, Swedes, and Finns avoided war by focusing on trade and forging strategic...

A remarkable selection of American forest trees surveyed by François-André Michaux and Thomas Nuttall from The North American Sylva,  held in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of The New York Botanical Garden,  featuring illustrations by celebrated...

An exploration of nineteenth-century American landscape painter Thomas Cole and the influential role of his studio for other artists of the Hudson River School. In December 1846, Thomas Cole excitedly began work in his new studio, but his early death...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

This volume in National Museum Series of International Communication ·Ancient Chinese Cultural Relics Collected in the Overseas Museums features the Philadelphia Museum of Art's outstanding collection of Chinese art. The goal of the program is to...

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...

Street  photography may look like luck, but you have to get out there and hone your craft if you want to shake up those luck vibes. Matt Stuart never goes out without his trusty Leica and, in a career spanning twenty years, has taken some of the...

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...

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...

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...

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...

For Marc Chagall (1887–1985), painting was an intricate tapestry of dreams, tales, and traditions. His instantly recognizable visual language carved out a unique early 20th-century niche, often identified as one of the earliest expressions of psychic...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Shimmering, pulsating color masses characterize the Abstract Expressionist masterpieces of Mark Rothko. Like no other artist in his generation, Rothko developed his own stylistic vocabulary, creating ceiling-high canvases that were to be experienced as...

Painter, and Marxist activist, Diego Rivera was not just the husband of Frida Kahlo.  He is renowned as much for his active politics as for his monumental mural paintings. This introduction explores his unique and visionary renderings of a modern...

Few artists tried as hard as Claude Monet (1840–1926) to capture light itself on canvas. The painter of whom Cézanne said “only  an eye, but my God what an eye!” he stayed true to the principle of absolute fidelity to the visual sensation, painting...

More than 300 photographs by Lewis W. Hine, whose trailblazing documentary images of early 20th-century working conditions helped to transform United States labor laws.  This book covers all eras of Hine’s work, including his pictures of  child...

It was a dappled and daubed harbor scene that gave Impressionism its  name. When Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet was exhibited in April  1874, critics seized upon the work’s title and its loose stylistic  rendering of light and motion...

Artist and prominent early American Charles Willson Peale  (1741-1827) willed his passions to his equally remarkable children, nieces, and nephew. This engaging pictorial study reveals in-depth these two generations of artists, naturalists, and...