Art & Architecture

This ultra-stylish travel diary chronicles a year-long face-hunting expedition to more than thirty of pioneering street fashion photographer Yvan Rodic's favorite cities. An extension of Rodic's wildly popular Face Hunter blog (1.5 million page views per month), Travels with Face Hunter is a visual feast for a wide audience of fashionistas.

For Yvan Rodic (better known to his fans as "Face Hunter"), style is about so much more than clothes -- it's an attitude, a form of self-expression, a way of interacting with the world that is at once expansively global and distinctively local. Travels with Face Hunter captures the global phenomenon that is street fashion, and proves the best outfits and most beautiful faces of fashion aren't necessarily on runways or in magazines. Along with more than three hundred stylish photos, Rodic offers commentary on the atmosphere and style trends of each city he visits, taking readers with him on the journey.

Throughout the pages of this book, readers will discover a young child in Tokyo wearing fantastic striped sunglasses; trainers paired with cowrie shells in Cape Town; a woman posing in a fake leopard-skin coat outside of a Milan Cathedral; and blue suede shoes in Beirut. You never know what will catch Face Hunter's eye -- but you can bet it won't be a professional model or celebrity wearing this season's must-have outfit from a leading fashion house.

Peter Fraser revisits stories told onscreen that in different ways all convey clear and ringing truths and touch the deepest human chords. Spanning different time periods and cultures, Twelve Films about Love and Heaven speaks to the hearts of those who cry at old movies and the old abiding Faith, and who believe a well-written book is always worth the time. It is a reminder to both artists and spectators that the pursuit of virtue, and above all in our family roles, is the greatest of adventures and the most glorious of victories.

"I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. . . . Be ready to share with me a bit of the mood--it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation--which these books arouse in a genuine collector. . . . What I am really concerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship of a book collector to his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection." --Walter Benjamin, 1931

What does a library say about the mind of its owner? How do books map the intellectual interests, curiosities, tastes, and personalities of their readers? What does the collecting of books have in common with the practice of architecture? Unpacking My Library provides an intimate look at the personal libraries of twelve of the world's leading architects, alongside conversations about the significance of books to their careers and lives.

Photographs of bookshelves--displaying well-loved and rare volumes, eclectic organizational schemes, and the individual touches that make a bookshelf one's own--provide an evocative glimpse of their owner's personal life. Each architect also presents a reading list of top ten influential titles, from architectural history to theory to fiction and nonfiction, that serves as a personal philosophy of literature and history, and advice on what every young architect, scholar, and lover of architecture should read.

An inspiring cross-section of notable libraries, this beautiful book celebrates the arts of reading and collecting.

Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books features the libraries of:

Stan Allen

Henry Cobb

Liz Diller & Ric Scofidio

Peter Eisenman

Michael Graves

Steven Holl

Toshiko Mori

Michael Sorkin

Bernard Tschumi

Todd Williams & Billie Tsien

Peter Eisenman's Recommended Titles:

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

Andrea Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

William Faulkner, Light in August

Published in association with Urban Center Books, The Architecture Bookstore of the Municipal Art Society of New York

Piazza virtuale by the group of artists known as Van Gogh TV was not only the biggest art project ever to appear on television, but from a contemporary point of view the project was also a forerunner of today's social media. The ground-breaking event that took place during the 100 days of documenta IX in 1992 was an early experiment with entirely user-created content. This is the first book-length study of this largely forgotten experiment: It documents the radicality of Piazza virtuale's approach, the novel programme ideas and the technical innovations. It also allows, via QR codes, direct access to videos from the show, which until now have been inaccessible.

How a once-forgotten Dutch painter inspired generations of artists, writers, and filmmakers

Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) is one of the most beloved painters in the world. But when an enterprising French journalist and art critic set out to recover his work in the mid-nineteenth century, both his name and achievement were virtually forgotten. Vermeer's Afterlives tells the remarkable story of how one of the great masters of the Dutch Golden Age was lost to obscurity until the rise of art history as a new discipline introduced his work to modern audiences and asks why his art compels so many other artists to respond with works of their own.

Ruth Bernard Yeazell traces the cultural ascendency of this extraordinary painter, whose enigmatic subjects and quiet, introspective interiors, transfigured by light and color, continue to captivate viewers far removed from his native Delft. We meet the critics who first welcomed Vermeer into the canon along with the painters who sought to imitate him, the forgers who tried to pass off their work as his own, and the contemporary artists who openly repurpose it. The enquiry concludes by looking at Vermeer's paintings through the eyes of the poets and novelists who have attempted to translate his silence into words and give voice to the stories he left untold. Along the way, Yeazell interrogates the changing assumptions that govern art history, while demonstrating how paintings live on not only in later paintings but in poetry, fiction, photography, and film.

Marking the 350th anniversary of Vermeer's death, this beautifully illustrated book explores the variety of ways in which Vermeer's art has been interpreted through the centuries and shows how his paintings take on afterlives of their own in the imaginations of those who view them.

Don Farber's highly acclaimed photographs open a spectacular view of the beauty and diversity of Buddhist life around the world. His superb eye for composition, his attention to color and detail, and his intimate knowledge of Buddhism come together to produce outstanding, often breathtaking images. A selection of Farber's best work to date, Visions of Buddhist Life brings an important message of compassion, healing, and understanding to today's troubled world.

The photographs, together with Farber's extensive captions, take us to the temples, monasteries, and colorful streets of Los Angeles, Kyoto, and Bangkok, and travel onward to China, India, Nepal, South Korea, and Taiwan. They depict Buddhists alone and in crowds, in cities rich and poor, in meditation and in conversation. They also picture some of the great teachers of our day--the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Kalu Rinpoche. These images capture some of the last Tibetan masters to have received their training before the Chinese invasion and are a vital documentation of a tradition in danger of vanishing forever.

A study in the human face, in the art of spiritual devotion, in the evocative power of landscape, this collection of images provides an essential context for understanding Buddhism. Visions of Buddhist Life is also a visual and spiritual journey into a realm where the doctrine of nonviolence is paramount and where peace begins with the thoughts and actions of the individual.

Who was Vivian Maier? Many people know her as the reclusive Chicago nanny who wandered the city for decades, constantly snapping photographs, which were unseen until they were discovered in a seemingly abandoned storage locker. They revealed her to be an inadvertent master of twentieth-century American street photography. Not long after, the news broke that Maier had recently died and had no surviving relatives. Soon the whole world knew about her preternatural work, shooting her to stardom almost overnight.

But, as Pamela Bannos reveals in this meticulous and passionate biography, this story of the nanny savant has blinded us to Maier's true achievements, as well as her intentions. Most important, Bannos argues, Maier was not a nanny who moonlighted as a photographer; she was a photographer who supported herself as a nanny. In Vivian Maier: A Photographer's Life and Afterlife, Bannos contrasts Maier's life with the mythology that strangers--mostly the men who have profited from her work--have created around her absence. Bannos shows that Maier was extremely conscientious about how her work was developed, printed, and cropped, even though she also made a clear choice never to display it. She places Maier's fierce passion for privacy alongside the recent spread of her work around the world, and she explains Maier's careful adjustments of photographic technique, while explaining how the photographs have been misconstrued or misidentified. As well, Bannos uncovers new information about Maier's immediate family, including her difficult brother, Karl--relatives that once had been thought not to exist.

This authoritative and engrossing biography shows that the real story of Vivian Maier, a true visionary artist, is even more compelling than the myth.

The definitive biography of a fascinating and paradoxical figure, one of the most influential artists of his--or any--age

To this day, mention the name "Andy Warhol" to almost anyone and you'll hear about his famous images of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. But though Pop Art became synonymous with Warhol's name and dominated the public's image of him, his life and work are infinitely more complex and multi-faceted than that.

In Warhol, esteemed art critic Blake Gopnik takes on Andy Warhol in all his depth and dimensions. "The meanings of his art depend on the way he lived and who he was," as Gopnik writes. "That's why the details of his biography matter more than for almost any cultural figure," from his working-class Pittsburgh upbringing as the child of immigrants to his early career in commercial art to his total immersion in the "performance" of being an artist, accompanied by global fame and stardom--and his attempted assassination.

The extent and range of Warhol's success, and his deliberate attempts to thwart his biographers, means that it hasn't been easy to put together an accurate or complete image of him. But in this biography, unprecedented in its scope and detail as well as in its access to Warhol's archives, Gopnik brings to life a figure who continues to fascinate because of his contradictions--he was known as sweet and caring to his loved ones but also a coldhearted manipulator; a deep-thinking avant-gardist but also a true lover of schlock and kitsch; a faithful churchgoer but also an eager sinner, skeptic, and cynic.

Wide-ranging and immersive, Warhol gives us the most robust and intricate picture to date of a man and an artist who consistently defied easy categorization and whose life and work continue to profoundly affect our culture and society today.

The first paperback edition of this backlist classic, "The Way of the Brush" examines the technique, style, traditions, and methods of ink-painting. Illustrated with over 250 paintings and packed with instructions, "The Way of the Brush" covers every aspect of the art, from brushstrokes, composition, and the painting surface to meaning, perspective, and artistic philosophy. Part One explains the elements, techniques, and principles of Chinese and Japanese painting, while Part Two is devoted to challenges associated with the art. Also included are three appendices and a full bibliography.

A lexicon and guide for discovering the essence of landscape.

"Mr. Stilgoe does not ask that we take his book outdoors with us; he believes that reading and experiencing landscapes are activities that should be kept separate. But, as I learned in his book, the hollow storage area in a car driver's door was once a holster, the 'secure nesting place of a pistol.' I recommend you stow your copy there."

--The Wall Street Journal

Landscape, John Stilgoe tells us, is a noun. From the old Frisian language (once spoken in coastal parts of the Netherlands and Germany), it meant shoveled land: landschop. Sixteenth-century Englishmen misheard or mispronounced this as landskep, which became landskip, then landscape, designating the surface of the earth shaped for human habitation. In What Is Landscape? Stilgoe maps the discovery of landscape by putting words to things, zeroing in on landscape's essence but also leading sideways expeditions through such sources as children's picture books, folklore, deeds, antique terminology, out-of-print dictionaries, and conversations with locals. ("What is that?" "Well, it's not really a slough, not really, it's a bayou...") He offers a highly original, cogent, compact, gracefully written narrative lexicon of landscape as word, concept, and path to discoveries.

What Is Landscape? is an invitation to walk, to notice, to ask: to see a sandcastle with a pinwheel at the beach and think of Dutch windmills--icons of triumph, markers of territory won from the sea; to walk in the woods and be amused by the Elizabethans' misuse of the Latin silvaticus (people of the woods) to coin the word savages; to see in a suburban front lawn a representation of the meadow of a medieval freehold.

Discovering landscape is good exercise for body and for mind. This book is an essential guide and companion to that exercise--to understanding, literally and figuratively, what landscape is.

From the acclaimed author of Blue, a beautifully illustrated history of the color white in visual culture, from antiquity to today

As a pigment, white is often thought to represent an absence of color, but it is without doubt an important color in its own right, just like red, blue, green, or yellow--and, like them, white has its own intriguing history. In this richly illustrated book, Michel Pastoureau, a celebrated authority on the history of colors, presents a fascinating visual, social, and cultural history of the color white in European societies, from antiquity to today.

Illustrated throughout with a wealth of captivating images ranging from the ancient world to the twenty-first century, White examines the evolving place, perception, and meaning of this deceptively simple but complex hue in art, fashion, literature, religion, science, and everyday life across the millennia. Before the seventeenth century, white's status as a true color was never contested. On the contrary, from antiquity until the height of the Middle Ages, white formed with red and black a chromatic triad that played a central role in life and art. Nor has white always been thought of as the opposite of black. Through the Middle Ages, the true opposite of white was red. White also has an especially rich symbolic history, and the color has often been associated with purity, virginity, innocence, wisdom, peace, beauty, and cleanliness.

With its striking design and compelling text, White is a colorful history of a surprisingly vivid and various color.

A classic work on the joy of experiencing architecture, with a new afterword reflecting on architecture's place in the contemporary moment

"Architecture begins to matter," writes Paul Goldberger, "when it brings delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads." In Why Architecture Matters, he shows us how that works in examples ranging from a small Cape Cod cottage to the vast, flowing Prairie houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, from the Lincoln Memorial to the Guggenheim Bilbao. He eloquently describes the Church of Sant'Ivo in Rome as a work that "embraces the deepest complexities of human imagination."

In his afterword to this new edition, Goldberger addresses the current climate in architectural history and takes a more nuanced look at projects such as Thomas Jefferson's academical village at the University of Virginia and figures including Philip Johnson, whose controversial status has been the topic of much recent discourse. He argues that the emotional impact of great architecture remains vital, even as he welcomes the shift in the field to an increased emphasis on social justice and sustainability.

A fascinating examination of a formative time in the iconic artist's career

In 1948, Willem de Kooning held his first solo exhibition, at age forty-four, at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York City. Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years explores how the painter developed his distinctive style in the period leading up to the show, blending figuration with abstraction and experimenting with materials such as enamel paint, cardboard, and Masonite.

This beautifully illustrated book features illuminating essays by John Elderfield and Mitra Abbaspour, who closely consider de Kooning's work during this time, the environment and influences that surrounded him, and the impact of the 1948 exhibition on both his career and the New York School. Lee Colón's detailed chronology provides invaluable context for the exhibition while Jim Coddington and Bart Devolder's material study of Black Friday--a painting included in the 1948 exhibition--offers vital perspective on the painter's working methods.

Featuring paintings and drawings made by the artist between 1945 and 1950 as well as important primary source material, this book sheds critical light on a prolific and formative period in the life and career of an incomparable artist.

Exhibition Schedule
Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton
March 14-July 26, 2026

Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum

Intimate photo essays of thirty-eight important writers, including Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, Zadie Smith, and Colm Tóibín

"We've all seen writers on the dust jackets of their books. These portraits, it seemed to me, generally failed to convey either character or personality. Writers deserve better. I wanted to make compelling pictures that would stick in the mind's eye."--Laura Wilson

Inspired by the classic photo essays that once appeared in Life magazine, renowned photographer Laura Wilson presents dynamic portraits of thirty-eight internationally acclaimed writers. Through her photos and accompanying texts, she gives us vivid, revealing glimpses into the everyday lives of such luminaries as Rachel Cusk, Edwidge Danticat, David McCullough, Haruki Murakami, and the late Carlos Fuentes and Seamus Heaney, among others. Margaret Atwood works in her garden. Tim O'Brien performs magic tricks for his family. And Louise Erdrich, who contributes an introduction, speaks with customers in her Minneapolis bookstore. At once inviting and poignant, the book reflects on writing and photography's shared concerns with invention, transformation, memory, and preservation. With 220 duotone images, The Writers: Portraits will appeal to fans of literature and photography alike.

Published in association with the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin

Exhibition Schedule:

Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin
August 26, 2022-January 1, 2023