Art

We Might Just Make It After All brings us on the rollercoaster of adventures (and misadventures) that the best friends embarked on, from transferring colleges on a whim, to falling in and out of love with suitors, cramming into roach-infested Hell’s Kitchen apartments, and eventually designing the chic, simple bag that would launch the pair to global fame. Through it all, Katy and Elyce’s friendship remained unshakeable.

Slaves to Fashion is a cultural history of the black dandy, from his emergence in Enlightenment England to his contemporary incarnations in the cosmopolitan art world. Interpreting performances and representations of black dandyism in particular cultural settings and literary and visual texts, Monica L. Miller emphasizes the importance of sartorial style to black identity formation in the Atlantic diaspora.

In How Catholics Encounter the Bible, award-winning biblical scholar and historian Michael Peppard explores the paradoxical role of the Bible for Catholics—a book central to their tradition, but not usually in the form of a book. Biblical ideas and beliefs are more often mediated through diverse modes of storytelling, artistic imagination, and ritual.

The extraordinary story of the theft of priceless Chinese antiques around the world and the connection to crimes spanning more than two centuries—with present-day implications.

What does it mean to call something "new"? Why is Western art and culture, even after postmodernism, still so obsessed with the concept? What are the consequences of relying on culture to bring about social change? In this provocative book, David Balzer argues that Western culture was never designed to produce truly new or original artifacts. Rather, we move from fixation to fixation, trend to trend—a cycle of creation and destruction with deep origins in Judeo-Christianity and the paganism that preceded it.

Threads of Empire is a spellbinding look at the history of the world through the stories of twelve carpets. Beautiful, sensuous, and enigmatic, great carpets follow power. Emperors, shahs, sultans, and samurai crave them as symbols of earthly domination. Shamans and priests desire them to evoke the spiritual realm. The world's 1% hunger after them as displays of extreme status.

In Artists, Siblings, Visionaries, acclaimed biographer Judith Mackrell turns her attention to British brother and sister artists Gwen and Augustus John. In many ways they were polar opposites. But as this vivid and insightful account of their lives shows, they were also remarkably alike, sharing a striving for escape, a commitment to their work and a profound if sometimes exasperating kinship throughout the course of their adult lives.

«Мы находим красоту не в самой вещи, а в узорах теней, света и тьмы, которые создаёт одна вещь на фоне другой… Если бы не тени, не было бы никакой красоты» - утверждает Дзюнъитиро Танидзаки в своем эссе «Похвала тени». Эта книга – настоящий поэтический гимн японской эстетике. Танидзаки учит нас слушать красоту в малом: потускневшем металле, неглазурованной керамике, напоминая о том, что слишком много яркости и цвета могут скрыть от нас главное.

Step into the extraordinary world of William Verdult—an acclaimed Dutch-American painter whose work blended royal heritage, mythological influence, and raw emotional depth. From his early life in war-torn Europe to his rise among American elites, The Life and Times of William Verdult explores the artist’s journey through fame, scandal, artistic brilliance, and ultimate legacy.

Today it's routine to take photos from an airplane window, use a camera underwater, or watch a movie or view an X-ray. But the photographic innovations more than a century ago that made such things possible were experimental, revelatory, and sometimes dangerous. In Flashes of Brilliance, New York Times photo editor Anika Burgess engagingly blends art, science, and social history to reveal the most dramatic developments in photography from its birth in the 1830s to the early twentieth century.