A tour of America's most notable museums is also a history of the nation's art that highlights each location's top works while discussing the backgrounds of each building and featured piece of art.

Celebrating the reopening of the newly restored Smithsonian American Art Museum, a premier collection of American art features more than 250 reproductions of great works of American painting, sculpture, folk art, and photography, by such artists as Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Nam June Paik, and other luminaries.

American art museums share a mission and format that differ from those of their European counterparts, which often have origins in aristocratic collections. This groundbreaking work recounts the fascinating story of the invention of the modern American art museum, starting with its roots in the 1870s in the craft museum type, which was based on London’s South Kensington (now the Victoria and Albert) Museum. At the turn of the twentieth century, American planners grew enthusiastic about a new type of museum and presentation that was developed in Northern Europe, particularly in Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia. Called Kulturgeschichte (cultural history) museums, they were evocative displays of regional history. American trustees, museum directors, and curators found that the Kulturgeschichte approach offered a variety of transformational options in planning museums, classifying and displaying objects, and broadening collecting categories, including American art and the decorative arts. Leading institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, adopted and developed crucial aspects of the Kulturgeschichte model. By the 1930s, such museum plans and exhibition techniques had become standard practice at museums across the country.

Since the late nineteenth century, art museums have played crucial social, political, and economic roles throughout Latin America because of the ways that they structure representation. By means of their architecture, collections, exhibitions, and curatorial practices, Latin American art museums have crafted representations of communities, including nation states, and promoted particular group ideologies. This collection of essays, arranged in thematic sections, will examine the varying and complex functions of art museums in Latin America: as nation-building institutions and instruments of state cultural politics; as foci for the promotion of Latin American modernities and modernisms; as sites of mediation between local and international, private and public interests; as organizations that negotiate cultural construction within the Latin American diaspora and shape constructs of Latin America and its nations; and as venues for the contestation of elitist and Eurocentric notions of culture and the realization of cultural diversity rooted in multiethnic environments.

This handsome tribute to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. traces the history of the museum from conception to construction on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. Opened with great fanfare, the National Gallery was "the richest single gift from any individual to any nation ever." That individual was financier Andrew Mellon. Kopper's succinct biography covers Mellon's personal and political life as well as his passion for collecting the paintings of old masters. Mellon's bequest stipulated the museum's name, location, and details of governance, ensuring continued high standards and a vital future. Kopper includes profiles of the architect and various museum directors, including Mellon's son Paul, as well as illustrations that document some of the collection's highlights. ISBN 0-8109-3658-5: $60.00 (For use only in the library)

In this expansive volume devoted to one of the premier art collections in the U.S., the rich and full picture of Maine's central role in American art from the early nineteenth century to the present is chronicled. Published on the occasion of Maine's bicentennial, the book considers more than 200 major works of American art from the Farnsworth Art Museum's impressive holdings and details how the state has figured prominently in the development of American art. The volume includes artists as diverse as Andrew Wyeth, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Francesco Clemente, Robert Rauschenberg, and Alex Katz, among others. Through their work, a fascinating depiction of the state--and indeed of the development of American art--emerges. The volume will feature two historic sites: the Farnsworth Homestead (the National Register of Historic Places home of founder Lucy Copeland Farnsworth) and the National Historic Landmark Olson House, inspiration for some 300 works by Andrew Wyeth, including Christina's World. The book also considers Lucy Copeland Farnsworth's distinctive vision to create a museum, library, and historic house, placing her among the few and still under-recognized women who created museums throughout the United States in the early twentieth century.

"The first comprehensive book to focus on the history of African art in American art museums. ... Thirteen essays present the institutional biographies of African art collections in the Cincinnati Museum of Art, the Hampton University Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Barnes Foundation, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Primitive Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Indiana University of Art Museum, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the University of Iowa Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Menil Collection, and the National Museum of African Art."--back cover.