PUBLICATIONS

Nobody's Property; Art, Land, Space, 2000-2010, by Kelly Baum, is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum from October 2010-February 2011.

This generously illustrated volume surveys a new chapter in the history of environmental art, one in which space, geopolitics, human relations, urbanism, and utopian dreamwork play as important a role as, if not more than, raw earth. Discussed are case studies by seven artists and two artist teams—Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Francis Alÿs, Yael Bartana, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Emre Hüner, Andrea Geyer, Matthew Day Jackson, Lucy Raven, and Santiago Sierra. While some of these artists explore historical and symbolic configurations of space, others parse the social, legal, and economic conditions of specific land-sites, including the Navajo Nation, the island of Vieques, the border town of Juarez, and the cities of Tongling, Jerusalem, and Beirut. Not confined to the displacement of matter, these artists employ a wide range of media, such as performance, animation, assemblage, and photography.

• Hardcover

A rich exploration of American artworks that reframes them within current debates on race, gender, the environment, and more

Object Lessons in American Art explores a diverse gathering of Euro-American, Native American, and African American art from a range of contemporary perspectives, illustrating how innovative analysis of historical art can inform, enhance, and afford new relevance to artifacts of the American past. The book is grounded in the understanding that the meanings of objects change over time, in different contexts, and as a consequence of the ways in which they are considered. 

Inspired by the concept of the object lesson, the study of a material thing or group of things in juxtaposition to convey embodied and underlying ideas, Object Lessons in American Art examines a broad range of art from Princeton University’s venerable collections as well as contemporary works that imaginatively appropriate and reframe their subjects and style, situating them within current social, cultural, and artistic debates on race, gender, the environment, and more.

Edited by Karl Kusserow, John Wilmerding Curator of American Art, Princeton University

Contributions by 

• Horace D. Ballard
• Kirsten Pai Buick
• Ellery E. Foutch
• Karl Kusserow
• Jeffrey Richmond-Moll
• Rebecca Zorach

Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum

Published (US): Mar 28, 2023

Edited & Designed by Ian Sternthal

Sternthal Books is proud to present ‘Odili Donald Odita’ – a visually enticing survey that spans over twenty years of Odili Donald Odita’s exciting career. Odili’s vibrant abstract paintings blur the borderlines of American, African, and Western European traditions of abstract paintings, which according to Rob Storr, has led him to “rejuvenate abstract painting 100 years after its invention – and in the process create a culturally syncretic idiom that is all his own.” The book will emphasize the political and aesthetic importance of Odili’s visually astounding paintings and installations by presenting them alongside a trove of accompanying visual materials – including images from photographic archives he has collected, drawings, installations, and geometric studies.

Odili Donald Odita is a hard cover comprehensive monograph of the artist’s work – spanning from his early mixed media collages from the early 1990’s – to his latest three dimensional painting installations and more. Odili’s vibrant abstract paintings blur the borderlines of American, African, and Western European traditions, which according to Rob Storr, has led him to “rejuvenate abstract painting 100 years after its invention – and in the process create a culturally syncretic idiom that is all his own.”

The book’s discreet black and white cover betrays a striking panoply of colors, papers, and formats that make up the book’s 400+ pages. Mixing and layering drawings, geometric studies, paintings, installations, and texts creates momentary connections between different images – echoing Odita’s thirty year artistic pursuit of fusing disparate and separate colors into spiritually unified spaces.

Inspired both by African and American Design, the book mixes his paintings with a trove of materials from the ‘Black Album’, a collection of ads, photographs, and media clippings related to race and Black American culture that he has been collecting for years. This intermixing contextualizes Odita’s abstract expressionism within a political context of struggle, race, and diaspora, resulting in a timely meditation on race in America.

The curatorial essays were laid out on spreads from Ebony Magazine, and while the images and captions were preserved,  the original texts were erased and replaced with new ones, with Odili’s work appearing on smaller shiny papers reminiscent of the detachable mail in subscription advertisements in magazines from the 80’s and 90’s.

Texts by Stamatina Gregory, Gregory Volk, and Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, and a conversation between Odili and Ian Sternthal.

• HardBound sewn signatures
• Silkscreen on cloth
• 22,9 x 30.5 mm, 408 Pages

Princeton University Art Museum from March 5–June 7, 2009.

The art world is currently enthralled with contemporary Chinese art. This thoughtful book argues, however, that American audiences have been exposed only to a narrow range of what is available—with the majority of attention having been given to “avant-garde,” “experimental,” or politically charged art. Outside In discusses contemporary Chinese art in a far wider range of styles and subject matter and substantially expands on our understanding of this work.

The book features six artists—Arnold Chang, Michael Cherney, Zhi Lin, Liu Dan, Vannessa Tran, and Zhang Hongtu—all of whom are American citizens yet are widely diverse in age and experience as well as geographical and ethnic origins. In addition to extensive personal interviews and artists’ statements, there are essays that challenge the categorization of art into such focused genres as “Chinese,” “contemporary,” and “American,” and reexamine the factors that shape the development of “Chinese art” in America.

Jerome Silbergeld with contributions by Dora C. Y. Ching, Michellle Y. Lim, Cary Y. Liu, Gregory Seiffert, and Kimberly Wishart 

• Hardcover

WINNER of the Guild of Food Writers Award under the First Book category

This unique cookbook pairs artistic masterpieces with effortless recipes that will turn your dining room table into a feast for the eyes and the palate.

Filled with gorgeous photography, high quality reproductions and fascinating anecdotes, this one-of-a-kind cookbook connects great art with the world of food. To create the recipes in this book Felicity Souter delved into the lives of artists past and present, uncovering fascinating stories, eating habits, and cultural traditions.

Each entry consists of an appetizer, main, side, dessert, or drink that visually echoes the artwork and reflects the culinary connection to its artist. More than fifty masterpieces from an enormous array of genres and periods include works by Marina Abramović, Jean Michel Basquiat, Georgette Chen, Salvador Dalí, Jacob Lawrence, Man Ray, Henri Matisse, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock.

Sumptuous illustrations reveal a striking resemblance between recipe and artwork. An abstract Lee Krasner painting is transformed into a colorful mixed vegetable salad; an oval-shaped Barbara Hepworth sculpture into a crusty loaf of bread; a snowy Monet haystack into a sugar-dusted breakfast muffin; an Yves Klein sponge into an electric blue martini.

Easy enough for every day, and aimed at cooks of all abilities, these recipes are themselves works of art, and will whet the creative appetites of readers and chefs alike.

• Publisher: Prestel
• Publication Date: October 3, 2023
• Hardcover
• Pages: 240 pages
• Dimensions: 8.56 x 0.88 x 10.88 inches

Photography at Princeton: Celebrating Twenty-Five Years of Collecting and Teaching the History of Photography, by Peter C. Bunnell, complements the photography exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum  held  October 1998 - January 1999. 

• Softcover

A diverse set of contributions to the expanding field of ecocritical studies 

Offering a broad reexamination of visual culture through the lenses of ecocriticism, environmental justice, and animal studies, Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective presents a diverse array of art historical criticism formulated within an ecological context. This timely compendium brings together contributors whose scholarship extends chronologically and geographically from 11th-century Chinese painting to contemporary photography of California wildfires, emphasizing the environmental dimensions inherent in the content and materials of aesthetic, sacred, and didactic images and objects. The book’s introduction and fifteen interdisciplinary essays provide a dynamic, cross-cultural approach to an increasingly vital area of study, advancing valuable new strategies for considering works of art in ways that are innovative, intellectually stimulating, and universally significant.

With contributions by Alan C. Braddock, Maura Coughlin, Rachael Z. DeLue, T. J. Demos, Mónica Domínguez Torres, Finis Dunaway, Stephen F. Eisenman, Emily Gephart, Karl Kusserow, De-nin D. Lee, Gregory Levine, Anne McClintock, James Nisbet, Andrew Patrizio, Sugata Ray, and Greg M. Thomas. 

Karl Kusserow is the John Wilmerding Curator of American Art at the Princeton University Art Museum. Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum 

Publication date: October 2021

Paperback:  304 pages. 150 color illustrations

by Karl Kusserow, the curator of American Art at the Princeton University Art Museum.

The almost three hundred portraits that once composed the New York Chamber of Commerce's renowned collection capture the giants of American business with aesthetic and symbolic power. The images of civic leaders and entrepreneurs, carefully assembled over two hundred years, tell the story of American industry as shaped and reflected in the life of a major institution. Interpreting these images as historical documents, Picturing Power traces the establishment, growth, and eventual decline of the nation's most powerful business organization. Lavishly illustrated, this book also charts the social and aesthetic course of institutional portraiture in the United States.

This book accompanied the exhibition Picturing Power: Capitalism, Democracy, and American Portraiture, held exclusively at the Princeton University Art Museum from March 9 through June 30, 2013.

• Hardcover

by John Wilmerding (Preface), Hal Foster (Introduction)

Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann, Robert Indiana, and Alex Katz have all come to define the Pop art movement that emerged in America in the 1960s. This handsomely illustrated book focuses on 40 understudied and rarely seen late paintings, works on paper, and sculptures by these influential artists in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum.

Pop Art offers fresh insights into the ways in which artists radically transformed the mediums of painting and sculpture. For example, Lichtenstein is repositioned as a classical “studio artist”; Wesselmann is shown to be playfully preoccupied with academic genres; and Indiana is interpreted less as a Pop artist than as a folk artist in a mass-cultural context. This important book also features an engaging introduction by Hal Foster that places these new interpretations in the context of the history of Pop art and its critical literature.

• Hardcover

Princeton and the Gothic Revival investigates America's changing attitudes toward medieval art around the turn of the twentieth century through the lens of Princeton University and its role as a major patron of Gothic Revival art and architecture. Johanna Seasonwein charts a shift from eclecticism to a more unified, "authentic" approach to medieval art, and examines how the language of medieval forms was used to articulate a new model of American higher education in campus design and the classroom.

The catalog for an exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton and the Gothic Revival breaks new ground by addressing why universities, and Princeton in particular, were so effective at bringing together what had been disparate interests in the Middle Ages. Revivalists and Medievalists were often at odds, yet at Princeton they used the language of the Middle Ages to create a new identity for the American university, one that was steeped in the traditions of Oxford and Cambridge but also embraced the model of the German research university.

Princeton and the Gothic Revival provides an overview of Princeton's Romanesque and Gothic Revival architecture and examines the changing approach to the idea of the "Gothic" by looking at three Princeton buildings and their stained glass windows: the Marquand Chapel, Procter Hall at the Graduate College, and the University Chapel.

• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.4 x 0.9 x 10.2 inches
• Hardcover

By Marilyn Menago

Experience the layers of history and diverse architecture of Princeton, New Jersey, in this narrated photographic tour of more than 200 locations where history was made and greatness launched. Founded before the American Revolutionary War, this quintessential small town has lured scholars, scientists, statesmen, and writers from around the world. Many of them, including two US presidents, have made Princeton their home. James Madison, Woodrow Wilson, Grover Cleveland, Albert Einstein, Aaron Burr, T. S. Eliot, and F. Scott Fitzgerald are a few of the notable figures the town claims. 

This second edition includes landmarks such as the Princeton train station, the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment (designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects), and the Arts Council of Princeton, by architect Michael Graves. A readable historical survey, it is a keepsake for all who have fallen in love with Princeton.

• Size: 8.5in x 11.0in
• Pages: 128
• 278 color images
• Binding: Hardback

The first title in Aperture’s Vision & Justice Book Series—featuring a collection of award-winning short essays by Maurice Berger that explore the intersections of photography, race, and visual culture. Created and coedited by Drs. Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis, the series reexamines and redresses historical narratives of photography, race, and justice.

Edited by Marvin Heiferman, Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images examines the transformational role photography plays in shaping ideas and attitudes about race and how photographic images have been instrumental in both perpetuating and combating racial stereotypes. Written between 2012 and 2019 and first presented as a monthly feature on the New York Times Lens blog, Berger’s incisive essays help readers see a bigger picture about race through storytelling. By directing attention to the most revealing aspects of images, Berger makes complex issues comprehensible, vivid, and engaging. The essays illuminate a range of images, issues, and events: the modern civil rights movement; African American–, Latinx–, Asian American–, and Native American photography; and pivotal moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when race, photography, and visual culture intersected. They also examine the full spectrum of photographic imaging: from amateur to professional pictures, from snapshots to fine art, from mugshots to celebrated icons of photojournalism.

Race Stories collects together Berger’s reader-friendly essays in their breadth and brilliance to encourage a broad range of readers to look at and think about photographs in order to better understand themselves and the diverse world around them.

Co-published by Aperture and the New York Times

• Format: Hardback
• Number of pages: 312
• Number of images: 189
• Publication date: 2024-12-17
• Measurements: 6.7 x 9.5 x 1 inches

The Sande Society of the Mende people of Sierra Leone is a secret female regulatory society that both guards and transmits the ideals of feminine beauty so fundamental to the aesthetic criteria in Mende culture. 

In this eloquent and moving book, Sylvia Ardyn Boone describes the Society, its rituals and organization, and the mask worn by its members. Her book is an evocative account of Mende life and philosophy as well as a unique contribution to the study of African art, one based on African conceptions about the person and the human body.

Recarving China's Past: Art, Archaeology, and Architecture of the "Wu Family Shrines," by curator Cary Y. Liu, et. al, is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2005.

The “Wu Family Shrines,” one of the most important cultural monuments of early China, comprise approximately 50 stone slabs from the so-called Wu cemetery in Shandong province. Depicting emperors and kings, heroic women, filial sons, and mythological subjects, these famous carved and engraved reliefs may have been intended to reflect such basic themes as loyalty to the emperor, filial piety, and wifely devotion; centuries later, they vividly bring to life the art, social conditions, and Confucian ideology of the Eastern Han.

This generously illustrated book examines the stone slabs and their rubbings as artifacts with a complex cultural history from the second century to the present, and addresses questions about the traditional identification of the structures as Han dynasty shrines of the Wu family. Written by a team of distinguished scholars in the fields of Chinese art and history, the book includes a novel examination of Han burial items in relation to burial belief, pictorial carvings, and funerary architecture.

• Hardcover

Recarving China's Past: Art, Archaeology, and Architecture of the "Wu Family Shrines," by curator Cary Y. Liu, et. al, is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2005.

The “Wu Family Shrines,” one of the most important cultural monuments of early China, comprise approximately 50 stone slabs from the so-called Wu cemetery in Shandong province. Depicting emperors and kings, heroic women, filial sons, and mythological subjects, these famous carved and engraved reliefs may have been intended to reflect such basic themes as loyalty to the emperor, filial piety, and wifely devotion; centuries later, they vividly bring to life the art, social conditions, and Confucian ideology of the Eastern Han.

This generously illustrated book examines the stone slabs and their rubbings as artifacts with a complex cultural history from the second century to the present, and addresses questions about the traditional identification of the structures as Han dynasty shrines of the Wu family. Written by a team of distinguished scholars in the fields of Chinese art and history, the book includes a novel examination of Han burial items in relation to burial belief, pictorial carvings, and funerary architecture.

• Hardcover

Now in its seventy-ninth year, the Record of the Princeton University Art Museum is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal that publishes research based on the Museum’s collections. 

This issue, devoted to European Renaissance and Baroque art, features essays on works by Gianlorenzo Bernini written by the late Irving Lavin, Professor Emeritus in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, and by Charles Scribner III, Princeton Class of 1973 and Graduate School Class of 1977, a specialist in Baroque art. These essays are joined by six explorations of Northern Renaissance painting, the genesis for which was a seminar based on technical examination taught by Maryan Ainsworth, Alvaro Saieh Curator Emerita in the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, during her term as Robert Janson-La Palme, Graduate School Class of 1976, Visiting Professor. Ainsworth and five of her students—J. S. Hermán, Yifu Liu, Erene Rafik Morcos, Aleksander Musiał, and Sarah Rapoport—have written essays that provide new insights into several works in the Museum’s collections, including issues of attribution and dating as well as the meaning and context of inscriptions. These essays are joined by lists of the Museum’s acquisitions in 2017 and 2018.

• Paperback
• 192 pages

The "Wu Family Shrines" pictorial carvings from Han dynasty China (206 BCE–220 CE) are among the earliest works of Chinese art examined in an international arena. Since the eleventh century, the carvings have been identified by scholars as one of the most valuable and authentic materials for the study of antiquity. This important book presents essays by archaeologists, art and architectural historians, curators, and historians that reexamine the carvings, adding to our understanding of the long cultural history behind them and to our knowledge of Han practices.

The authors offer a thorough analysis of surviving physical and visual sources, invoking fresh perspectives from new disciplines.  Essays address the ideals, practices, and problems of the "Wu Family Shrines" and Han China; Han funerary art and architecture in Shandong and other regions; architectural functions and carved meanings; Qing Dynasty Reception of the Wu Family Shrines; and more.

• Softcover

Fully illustrated, with over four hundred specially commissioned photographs, including twelve color plates, this book joins its companion volume, Greek Sculpture in The Art Museum, Princeton University, to offer one of the most comprehensive scholarly publications of any collection of classical sculpture in the United States. 

Edited by J. Michael Padgett, Associate Curator of Ancient Art, the catalogue is a collaborative project with entries on 163 sculptures by sixteen authors, including Hugo Meyer, Michaela Fuchs, Michal Gawlikowski, Robert Wenning, Christopher Moss, and John Pollini.

Each entry features a full description and analysis, with updated bibliography, accompanied by multiple views of the object. Among the works catalogued are some of the finest Roman sculptures in America: marble portraits of the emperors Augustus and Marcus Aurelius; two rare bronze heads of women from the reigns of the emperors Trajan and Hadrian; a statue of the wine god Dionysos draped with a panther skin; a relief of the god Silvanus holding the viscera of a sacrificial animal; and sarcophagi with reliefs of the infancy of Dionysos and Herakles battling the centaurs. Never exhibited and seldom seen by scholars, eighty-five pieces from the Princeton excavations at Antioch are here fully catalogued for the first time. Useful concordances and a comprehensive index complete a catalogue that will be a valuable addition to the collection of every university library and the bookshelf of every student of ancient Rome.

• Hardcover

Rothko to Richter: Mark-Making in Abstract Painting from the Collection of Preston H. Haskell, by Kelly Baum, is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2014. 

 Featuring 27 paintings created between 1950 and 1990 by some  of the most important artists of the mid- to late 20th century,  including Karel Appel, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Jack Goldstein, Hans Hofmann, Morris Louis, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, and Frank Stella, this book provides a window onto a moment of remarkable  creative ferment, when the nature of abstract painting was being hotly  contested. For the artists featured here, the debate around abstraction occurred largely at the level of technique, and to this end, they developed radically new ways to make marks that alternately emphasized  or suppressed traces of the artist’s touch. Beautiful reproductions are  accompanied by insightful essays that examine how the works communicate the changing priorities of abstract art after World War II.   

• Hardcover

Edited with text and interview by Okwui Enwezor. Foreword by Artur Walther, Jean-Marc Patras. Text by Quentin Bajac, Yves Chatap, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Terry Smith, Claire Staebler, James Thomas.

Autoportrait is the first comprehensive survey of the multifaceted oeuvre of Nigerian photographer Samuel Fosso (born 1962). Since the mid-1970s, Fosso has focused on self-portraiture and performance, envisioning variations of identity in the postcolonial era. From Fosso’s early black-and-white self-portraits from the 1970s to his recent exercises in self-presentation, highlights include the vibrant series Tati (1997), in which he playfully inhabits African and African American characters and archetypes; and the magisterial portraits of African Spirits (2008), where he poses as icons of the pan-African liberation and Civil Rights movements, such as Angela Davis, Martin Luther King, Jr., Patrice Lumumba and Nelson Mandela.

This landmark monograph demonstrates Fosso’s unique departure from the traditions of West African studio photography, established in the 1950s and ’60s by modern masters Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé. By charting his conceptual practice of self-portraiture, and sustained engagement with notions of sexuality, gender and self-representation, this book reveals an unprecedented photographic project.

BOOK FORMAT:
Cloth, 9.5 x 11 in. / 188 pgs / 32 color / 47 bw.