Anyone who wants to understand the origins of the modern infographic will be thrilled to discover a new compendium from Princeton Architectural Press
Encounters with Whistler, Waifs, and Kaiser Wilhelm
The painter Mary Rogers Williams, a baker’s daughter from Hartford, Connecticut, may be the only nineteenth-century woman artist whose thoughts and feelings are almost fully known.
All Fired Up
Best known for her electroplated metal sculptures embellished with richly colored enamels, June Schwarcz produced an extensive body of work in her sixty-year career that, while linked to long-standing vessel-making traditions, defied convention.
Love illustrated books? Get to know the Alice Award
A short history of the Alice Award and this year’s recipient Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South by Mark Sloan and Mark Long.
The Green Jewel
Most of New York City’s Victorian heritage has vanished so thoroughly that few of the locals have any idea that it ever existed.
On Books: Seuss and Sensibility
If Dr. Seuss did not exist, we would have a hard time inventing him, since we would have a hard time even imagining him.
Scrimshaw on Nantucket
Nantucket, in cultural memory, will always be the island of whaling. But in spite of Herman Melville’s panegyrics, it was the center of the whaling world for only a brief historical moment.
The Story of Tools
You’re not a craftsman until you think with the point of your tool,” or so says Sean Sutcliffe, cofounder of the furniture firm Benchmark.
The Statues of Central Park
New York City’s Central Park was a prescient masterstroke of urban planning in the nineteenth century. Completed in 1874, the green space created by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux flowers on, vital in every sense, as a living work of art.
Toasting a Master
Whether you know him personally or just by reputation, there’s no question that Jonathan Leo Fairbanks is a lion in the worlds of American decorative arts and craft. Recently, to toast him on his retirement as director of the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts, the museum published American History, Art, and Culture: Writings in Honor of Jonathan Leo Fairbanks.