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.
Art Deco in the Toddlin’ Town
Art Deco Chicago: Designing Modern America, distributed for the Chicago Art Deco Society by Yale University Press, provides an occasion for examining the city’s art deco history. Through five scholarly essays and 101 notable objects and buildings, Art Deco Chicago reevaluates art deco’s and Chicago’s cultural and economic contributions to the United States during the Machine Age.
A new book on the art and life of sculptor Daniel Chester French
The most in-depth biography of the pre-eminent American sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850-1931) is now out. French—whose works include the statues of the Minute Man in Concord, Massachusetts, and Alma Mater at Columbia University in New York—has long deserved a comprehensive exploration, and historian Harold Holzer’s Monument Man: The Life and Art of Daniel Chester French (Princeton Architectural Press, $35) has been eagerly anticipated.