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By the end of the 19th century it had become possible for American women to identify themselves as serious Artists. This was a relatively new phenomenon, one that became possible only after American women writers had dismantled the conceptual frameworks that had authorized their artistic production since the early days of the Republic.

Making the “America of Art” demonstrates that beginning in the 1850s, women writers challenged the terms of the Scottish Common Sense philosophy, which had made artistic endeavors acceptable in the new Republic by subordinating aesthetic motivation to moral and educational goals. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Augusta Jane Evans drew on Ruskin to argue for the creation of a religiously based national aesthetic. In the postbellum years Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Constance Fenimore Woolson continued the process in a series of writings that revolved around three central areas of concern: the place of the popular in the realm of high art; the role of the genius; and the legacy of the Civil War.

Sofer significantly revises the history of 19th-century American women’s authorship by detailing the gradual process that produced women writers wholly identified with literary high culture at the century’s end. Sofer argues that, counter to conventional wisdom, American women writers produced a large body of theoretical writing on the central aesthetic questions of the day. Although the writers Sofer studies were finally unable to construct viable new models for women’s artistic production, their attempts to do so are an essential piece of American literary history.

Southwest Books of the Year Top Pick

In Tucson during the 1950s, nearly everyone knew, or wanted to know, the southwestern artist Mac Schweitzer. Born Mary Alice Cox in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1921, she grew up a tomboy who adored horses, cowboys, and art. After training at the Cleveland School of Art and marrying, she adopted her maiden initials (M. A. C.) as her artistic name and settled in Tucson in 1946. With a circle of influential friends that included anthropologists, designer-craftsmen, and Native American artists, she joined Tucson’s “Early Moderns,” receiving exhibits, commissions, and awards for her artwork. When she died in 1962, Mac’s artistic legacy faded from public view, but her prize-winning works attest to a thriving career.

Author Ann Lane Hedlund draws from the artist’s letters, photo albums, and published reviews to tell the story of Mac’s creative and adventuresome life. Her watercolors, oil paintings, prints, and sculptures—a diverse body of work never before seen in public—range from naturalistic studies of Sonoran Desert animals to impressionistic landscapes to moody abstractions. A sharp observer of Indigenous life, she sketched and painted scenes of Navajo (Diné), Hopi, O’odham, and Yaqui people and events. These unique portrayals of the Southwest illustrate this saga of a maverick artist rediscovered.

A collaboration between experienced Shakespeare scholar-educator Wendy Beth Hyman and her former student, emerging queer illustrator and animator Clair Wang, that seeks to visualize the literary language of Macbeth.

Macbeth: A Visual Companion offers a unique resource to readers, teachers, and performers of Shakespeare: an illustrated guide to those literary features of Shakespeare’s texts that can’t be represented on stage. How do you unravel a complex metaphor, an antiquated pun, an embedded allegory? What if allusions and images and similes could appear before the reader’s eyes? What if we could learn to read as Renaissance readers did: with fewer footnotes, but greater capacity to “see” literary language like chiasmus or equivocation? This is the aim of this creative collaboration. 

Designed to be read alongside the free online editions provided by the Folger Shakespeare Library, Macbeth: A Visual Companion illuminates the most obscure features of a very complex play, empowering readers to unpack Shakespeare without reliance on watered-down modernizations or even staged productions. Hyman and Wang present a two-part strategy. One, illustrations that, rather than counterfeiting the action of drama, provide a visual representation of the inner worlds of language. And two, scholarly commentary that, rather than inertly explain or obtusely theorize difficulty, shows how literary devices themselves generate meaning. They thus model for readers how to access metaphors, allusions, and images in real time—just like Shakespeare’s original audience did. In the process, they aim to empower students and non-specialist teachers not only to understand Macbeth or Shakespeare more generally, but also to showcase a model for more confidently grappling with challenging literary texts of all kinds.

In 1934, New York’s Museum of Modern Art staged a major exhibition of ball bearings, airplane propellers, pots and pans, cocktail tumblers, petri dishes, protractors, and other machine parts and products. The exhibition, titled Machine Art, explored these ordinary objects as works of modern art, teaching museumgoers about the nature of beauty and value in the era of mass production.

During the nineteenth century, Americans celebrated their towns and cities through printed landscapes. In Maine, lithographs were commissioned from such leading artists as Fitz Henry Lane and talented, lesser known local artists, such as Esteria Butler. This book reproduces many of these works and provides insights into how these growing centers of commerce and industry viewed themselves and wished to be viewed by others. 

It’s the perfect book for those who love Maine, both full-time residents and those who make it a beloved summer destination. 

Published in association with the Bowdoin College Museum of Art on the occasion of the bicentennial of Maine statehood.

Wearing a mask—putting on another face—embodies a fundamental human fantasy of inhabiting other bodies and experiencing other lives. In this extensively illustrated book, Thomas Morawetz explores how the creation of transformational makeup for theatre, movies, and television fulfills this fantasy of self-transformation and satisfies the human desire to become "the other."

Morawetz begins by discussing the cultural role of fantasies of transformation and what these fantasies reveal about questions of personal identity. He next turns to professional makeup artists and describes their background, training, careers, and especially the techniques they use to create their art. Then, with numerous before-during-and-after photos of transformational makeups from popular and little-known shows and movies, ads, and artist's demos and portfolios, he reveals the art and imagination that go into six kinds of mask-making—representing demons, depicting aliens, inventing disguises, transforming actors into different (older, heavier, disfigured) versions of themselves, and creating historical or mythological characters.

Mali’s history is defined by crossroads—geographic, cultural, and intellectual—linking to the Sahara and to long-standing trade routes. Francophone Malian women’s writing reflects this convergence, positioning literature as a site where diverse artistic and cultural traditions meet and evolve. In Malian Women at the Crossroads: Blending Literature and Art, writers such as Aoua Kéita, Aïcha Fofana, Adame Ba Konaré, Fatoumata Sidibé, Zakiyatou oualett Halatine, and Fadimata walett Oumar blur the boundaries between text and artistic practice, incorporating storytelling, visual arts, music, textile design, and other creative forms into their work. These interdisciplinary expressions both honor and reinterpret tradition, illuminating Mali’s cultural diversity while challenging divisions rooted in gender and ethnicity.

The voices of these writers denounce the conflict that has plagued Mali for over a decade and opt instead for showcasing creativity that preserves the memory of more promising times.

The only known Indigenous-authored rendering of Mexico City from the sixteenth century.

Rediscovered in a Swedish library in the 1800s, the Uppsala Map of colonial Mexico City is a crucial Indigenous-authored document. Nearly a square meter, it was created by Nahua artists in 1540 shortly after the Spanish invasion. The Franciscan-trained artists have long been characterized as having passively adopted European aesthetics in their representation.

Jennifer Saracino challenges this view, arguing that the artists purposefully blended both Nahua and European visual strategies to legitimize and improve their position in colonial society. Building upon archival, ethnohistorical, and archaeological research, Saracino reinterprets the map’s network of roads and waterways, agricultural and urban features, glyphs, and depictions of Nahua people. Saracino argues that, amid dispossession and exploitation, the artists made a visual case for Nahuas to steward the local population and land in collaboration with colonial officials as privileged intermediaries. Challenging the assumption that the map was made merely in service to the crown, Mapping an Indigenous Future contends that these Nahua mapmakers capitalized on their proximity to viceregal elites to appeal for their rightful role as custodians of New Spain.

The project examines the influx and significance of imported plants, materializing at port cities across several continents: Marseille, Reposaari, Liverpool, Exeter and Topsham, Dunkerque, Bristol, Antwerp, and most recently New York, where it was awarded the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. In each city, Seeds of Change has revealed the entangled relationship between “alien” plant species and the colonial maritime trade of goods and enslaved peoples, contrasting their seemingly innocuous beauty with the violent history associated with their arrival. By focusing on ballast flora, Alves invites us to de-border postcolonial historical narratives and consider a “borderless history.”

The first monograph of Alves’s historic project, Seeds of Change is edited by Carin Kuoni and Wilma Lukatsch and features essays by the artist as well as Katayoun Chamany, Seth Denizen, Jean Fisher, Yrjö Haila, Richard William Hill, Heli M. Jutila, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Lara Khaldi, Tomaž Mastnak, Marisa Prefer, and Radhika Subramaniam.

This new biography reveals Marion Greenwood's central place in the pantheon of history’s remarkable women artists.

Marion Greenwood: Portrait and Self-Portrait—A Biography brings to life a woman who blazed through the twentieth-century art world. Born in Brooklyn in 1909, Greenwood thrived at storied institutions and arts centers such as the Art Students League, the studio of German modernist Winold Reiss, the Woodstock Colony, and Yaddo. In 1933, she catapulted to international fame as the first woman to paint a public mural in Mexico. Diego Rivera celebrated Greenwood as one of “the world’s greatest living women mural painters.” She traveled the globe to create award-winning portraits of people from diverse backgrounds, crossing racial, cultural, and class lines to reflect her vision for a more just world.

This biography, the first about Greenwood, is based on a decade of research and interviews. Author Joanne B. Mulcahy integrates the artist’s adventuresome personal life with her journey to artistic glory. Greenwood comes alive as a notable and spirited part of the heady art scenes of 1920s and 1930s Mexico, New York City, and Paris, and as one of two women artist-correspondents during World War II. After social realism and portraiture fell from favor, Greenwood doggedly stuck with what she called “the human thing” in art. Her freewheeling romantic life and independent spirit defied expectations for women, and she dismissed sexist critics who mixed acclaim for her work with commentary on her stunning beauty.

A feminist pioneer, Greenwood made a living as an artist in a time when few women could. In following Greenwood’s maverick path and artistic achievements, this book reveals her central place in the pantheon of history’s remarkable women artists.