Essay The Humboldt connection between nature and American art May 21, 2020 An exhibition titled Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture will be shown at the Smithsonian American Art Museum located at 8th & F Streets NW in Washington, DC, opening in 2020. Read More
Interview By Design | The making of The Obama Portraits February 12, 2020 Every book’s backstory includes the intricacies of its production. That fact was brought home to me in my recent discussion with Steve Sears, Production Manager for art books at Princeton University Press, about the design and manufacture of one of the Press’s most important books of 2020, The Obama Portraits. Read More
Essay Michelangelo gave me a new perspective on aging November 15, 2019 I needed to pass age sixty before I could write a book about the artist Michelangelo Buonarroti in his seventies and eighties. Read More
Essay A look inside Protest!: A History of Social and Political Protest Graphics November 12, 2019 Throughout history, artists and citizens have turned to protest art as a means of demonstrating social and political discontent. Read More
Essay A look inside The Nevada Test Site November 11, 2019 More nuclear bombs have been detonated in America than in any other country in the world. Between 1951 and 1992, the Nevada National Security Test Site was the primary location for these activities, withstanding more than a thousand nuclear tests that left swaths of the American Southwest resembling the moon. Read More
Essay Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence March 27, 2019 The Nineteenth Amendment, which allowed women to vote in the United States, was ratified 99 years ago. Read More
Interview Rebecca Bedell on Moved to Tears October 05, 2018 In her new book Moved to Tears, Rebecca Bedell overturns received ideas about sentimental art, arguing that major American artists—from John Trumbull and Charles Willson Peale in the eighteenth century and Asher Durand and Winslow Homer in the nineteenth to Henry Ossawa Tanner and Frank Lloyd Wright in the early twentieth—produced what was understood in their time as sentimental art. Read More
