American Weathervanes: The Art of the Winds, published to coincide with an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, reveals the beauty, historical significance, and technical virtuosity of American vanes fashioned between the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. This American art form has long been an enduring part of the country's skylines. Early church steeples were graced with weathercocks, following a European tradition that dates to the MiddleAges. America's first documented vane maker, metalsmith Shem Drowne of Boston, crafted a number of surviving vanes, including the iconic golden grasshopper that has topped the city's Faneuil Hall since 1742. Farmers, blacksmiths, and other craftsmen proudly fashioned roosters, cows, horses, and other forms for country barns, and as the tradition and public demand expanded over the course of the nineteenth century, so did the diversity of forms, which grew to fill the mail order catalogs of commercial manufacturers in Boston, New York, and other cities. Today, weathervanes hold a well-established place in the canon of American folk art and American Weathervanes celebrates this artistry in the most up-to-date and authoritative work on the subject. Lavishly illustrated with masterworks from prominent private and public collections, this is a book to be treasured by anyone who collects or simply admires American vernacular art and sculpture.

Collects the best artwork created before, during and following the Civil War, in the years between 1859 and 1876, along with extensive quotations from men and women alive during the war years and text by literary figures, including Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. 15,000 first printing.

From the author of the award-winning Art of Grace and Passion comes this spotlight on North American artisanship between 200 BC and the early 1900s. The masterworks featured here range from clothing, accessories, and ceremonial and hunting gear to blankets, cradles, storage vessels, and utensils. Each was crafted of such diverse materials as quills, ivory, hide, wood, fibers, stone, clay, and even glass beads imported by European traders. George Everett Shaw, Steven C. Brown, Benson L. Lanford, and Bill Mercer examine how American Indians' existence developed around the challenges and benefits of the climate, terrain, flora, and fauna of their locales. Their art objects embody the spiritual devotion--inseparable from their relationship with the natural world--that even now shapes their lives. Whether decorated with abstract patterns or with representations of humans and animals, such pieces were vehicles for passing down beliefs and customs before written languages existed. Thus we can appreciate them not only for their beauty and the skill and ingenuity of their makers but also in the context of the cultures from which they sprang.