Art Book List ·

Barn Quilts and the American Quilt Trail Movement

By Suzi Parron and Donna Sue Groves

The story of the American Quilt Trail, featuring the colorful patterns of quilt squares painted large on barns throughout North America, is the story of one of the fastest-growing grassroots public arts movements in the United States and Canada.…

Irish People, Irish Linen

By Kathleen Curtis Wilson

The story of Irish linen is a story of the Irish people. Many thousands of men and women made Irish linen a global product and an international brand. It is also a story of innovation and opportunity. Irish linen has served its makers as sail cloth of incredible strength and durability for world exploration and trade; it has functioned as watertight containers for farmers and firemen; it has soothed the brows of royalty and absorbed the sweat of the working class.…

A Photographer’s Guide to Ohio

By Ian Adams

In A Photographer’s Guide to Ohio Ian Adams, Ohio’s foremost landscape photographer, guides you to some of the most photogenic sites in the Buckeye State. With 3,600 buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, more than 120 state parks and nature preserves, and the world’s largest Amish community, Ohio’s photographic subjects are nearly endless.…

Midwest Modern

The Color Woodcuts of Mabel Hewit

Edited by Jane Glaubinger

Midwest Modern: The Color Woodcuts of Mabel Hewit is the first book showcasing the work of an important modernist printmaker.An Ohio artist, Hewit (1903-1984), who came of age in the 1920s, was well aware of European modernism and other contemporary trends and worked in both representational and abstract styles.…

The World of a Wayward Comic Book Artist

The Private Sketchbooks of S. Plunkett

By Sandy Plunkett

The World of a Wayward Comic Book Artist: The Private Sketchbooks of S. Plunkett is a fascinating look at the creative processes of Sandy Plunkett. A self-taught illustrator and comic book artist, Plunkett came of age in New York City during the ‘60s and ‘70s and began drawing for Marvel Comics at eighteen.…

Philena’s Friendship Quilt

A Quaker Farewell to Ohio

By Lynda Salter Chenoweth

Chenoweth’s research to discover the story behind a Quaker signature quilt made in Columbiana County, Ohio, in 1853 revealed not only the identity of the quilt recipient and details of her life and community, but also a striking feature of the quilt itself—a “hidden” design element created by the deliberate placement of names on the quilt’s surface. In Philena’s Friendship Quilt, Lynda Salter Chenoweth reveals the value of signature quilts as historic and social documents waiting to be read.

Outside the Ordinary

Contemporary Art in Glass, Wood, and Ceramics from the Wolf Collection

Edited by Amy Miller Dehan

One of the premier private collections of contemporary craft, the Nancy and David Wolf Collection features outstanding creations by the foremost artists working in craft media today, including Howard Ben Tré, Dale Chihuly, William Morris, Wendell Castle, David Ellsworth, Virginia Dotson, Michael Lucero, Michelle Holzapfel, Theman Statom, Ginny Ruffner, Akio Takamori, and Betty Woodman.…

Unconquerable Spirit

George Stow’s History Painting of the San

By Pippa Skotnes

George Stow was a Victorian man of many parts—poet, historian, ethnographer, artist, cartographer, and prolific writer. A geologist by profession, he became acquainted, through his work in the field, with the extraordinary wealth of rock paintings in the caves and shelters of the South African interior.…

The Demon and the Damozel

Dynamics of Desire in the Works of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti

By Suzanne Waldman

Developing a perspective on Victorian culture as the breeding ground for early theories of the unconscious and the divided psyche, The Demon and the Damozel: Dynamics of Desire in the Works of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti offers a new reading of these eminent Victorian siblings’ literature and visual arts.…

Bead International 2008 & Beyond Basketry

Edited by Andrea R. Lewis

This unique book combines two catalogs in one. Bead International 2008 & Beyond Basketry represents the best of two juried exhibitions held at the Dairy Barn Arts Center in Athens, Ohio. Beads have long been worn as jewelry, but in Bead International 2008 contemporary bead artists are shaking things up.…

Edna Boies Hopkins

Strong in Character, Colorful in Expression

By Dominique H. Vasseur

Edna Boies Hopkins (1872–1937) is best known for her floral woodblock prints that range from delicate Japanese-inspired stylizations to boldly colored and progressively modernist works. In her brief twenty-year career, Hopkins produced seventy-four known woodblock prints, including figurative work and landscapes as well as floral compositions.…

Rookwood and the American Indian

Masterpieces of American Art Pottery from the James J. Gardner Collection

By Anita J. Ellis and Susan Labry Meyn

The nation’s premier private collection of Rookwood art pottery featuring American Indian portraiture is on display at the Cincinnati Art Museum from October 2007 to January 2008.…

Claim to the Country

The Archive of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd

By Pippa Skotnes

In the 1870s, facing cultural extinction and the death of their language, several San men and women told their stories to two pioneering colonial scholars in Cape Town, Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. The narratives of these San—or Bushmen—were of the land, the rain, the history of the first people, and the origin of the moon and stars.…

Quilts of the Ohio Western Reserve

By Ricky Clark

Quilts of the Ohio Western Reserve includes early quilts brought from Connecticut to the Western Reserve in northeastern Ohio and contemporary quilts, including one by a conservative Amish woman and another inspired by Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Ricky Clark, one of Ohio’s foremost quilt historians, has assembled exquisite examples of calamanco, T-shaped, and borderless pieced quilts to show the influence of Connecticut aesthetics and history on the making of early quilts in this region. Rich in color, detail, and inventiveness, the quilts of this region commemorate community history.

Bringing Modernism Home

Ohio Decorative Arts, 1890–1960

By Carol Boram-Hays

Ohio enjoys a rich artistic heritage: its inhabitants have made significant contributions in the arts; its schools have produced artists of international acclaim; and its companies have employed progressive manufacturing techniques and pioneering materials in the production of their wares.…

Pictorial Victorians

The Inscription of Values in Word and Image

By Julia Thomas

The Victorians were image obsessed. The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw an unprecedented growth in the picture industry. Technological advances enabled the Victorians to adorn with images the pages of their books and the walls of their homes.…

American Pantheon

Sculptural and Artistic Decoration of the United States Capitol

Edited by Donald R. Kennon and Thomas P. Somma

Like the ancient Roman Pantheon, the U.S. Capitol was designed by its political and aesthetic arbiters to memorialize the virtues, events, and persons most representative of the nation's ideals—an attempt to raise a particular version of the nation's founding to the level of myth.…

Cincinnati Art-Carved Furniture and Interiors

Edited by Jennifer L. Howe

In the early 1850s three British expatriates—Henry Lindley Fry, his son William Henry Fry, and Benn Pitman—settled in Cincinnati and launched one of the most important manifestations of Aesthetic movement furniture in the United States, the Cincinnati art-carved furniture movement.…

Wyeth People

By Gene Logsdon

Wyeth People is the story of one writer's search for the meaning of artistic creativity, approached from personal contact with the work of one of the world's great artists, Andrew Wyeth. In the 1960s, just beginning his career as a writer, Gene Logsdon read a magazine article about Andrew Wyeth in which the artist commented at length on his own creative impulse.…

The Virgin and the Dynamo

Public Murals in American Architecture, 1893-1917

By Bailey Van Hook

The beaux-arts mural movement in America was fueled by energetic young artists and architects returning from training abroad. They were determined to transform American art and architecture to make them more thematically cosmopolitan and technically fluid and accomplished.…