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Empty Plinths: Monuments, Memorials, and Public Sculpture in Mexico responds to the unfolding political debate around one of the most significant public monuments in North America, Mexico City’s monument of Christopher Columbus on Avenida Paseo de la Reforma. In convening a diverse collective of voices around the question of the monument’s future, editors José Esparza Chong Cuy and Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa probe the unstable narratives behind a selection of monuments, memorials, and public sculp...

"Americans" is an introduction to the history of the United States of America through the art of portraiture. Bringing together over 120 famous American figures, this book draws on the vibrant collections of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington to represent a selection of heroes, writers, statesmen, inventors, educators, musicians, artists and scientists. Together, these portraits comprise a unique overview of the contribution that individuals have made to American politics, society and c...

The Watts Towers, located in south-central Los Angeles, are the monumental work of one man: Simon Rodia. Born in Ribottoli, Italy c. 1879, Rodia immigrated to the U.S. when he was about fifteen. In 1921, he purchased a triangular-shaped lot at the end of a dead-end L.A. street and over the next thirty years he worked single-handedly--without machine equipment, scaffolding, bolts, rivets, welds, or drawing-board designs--to build the nine sculptures that constitute the Watts Towers. This book r...

"A true poem," Walt Whitman proclaimed in 1852, "is the daily newspaper"-and American culture was never the same again. Like a blast of cold air in a stuffy drawing room, Whitman's campaign to give artistic representation to gritty reality shocked the genteel artistic elite of the 1850s; but the brassy poet's efforts helped generate a revolution in American life and thought. Four decades later, Willa Cather could declare that the "public demands realism, and they will have it." In Facing Facts...

Art, history, and political drama all meld together in this one dramatic story about one dramatic sculpture. The nation's first federally-commissioned monument, Horatio Greenough's huge marble statue of George Washington, sits near the entrance of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Meant to be the symbolic focus of the whole continent--at the very center of the US Capitol--the monument instead seems a sadly curious relic. This book tells the tale of its demotion from stard...

Bound for Blue Water is written and complied by J Russell Jinishian, an internationally recognized authority on contemporary marine art. Informative essays on fishing, commerce, yachting, military, and coastal marine art are written for the beginning enthusiast and the experienced collector alike. Leading artists bring to life a picture of maritime America from the ports of New York and New England, to Miami, New Orleans, San Francisco and the Northwest. Portrayed here is every waterborne vesse...

The years of John F. Kennedy's rise to political power, his administration and his tragic death evoke extraordinarily vivid memories - images of the photogenic young president, his political campaigns, his dramatic oratorical style, his beautiful family and the momentous events of those times. These images, which were broadcast by the new and burgeoning medium of television, published in lushly illustrated magazines such as "Life" and "Look", and reproduced seemingly everywhere in a culture of u...