Forthcoming

National Gallery of Art Selected Works
Within this book you’ll discover over 50 paintings, sculptures, works on paper, photographs, and much more from the National Gallery of Art. Selected from more than 150,000 works in the museum’s vast collection, these remarkable examples of European and American art span centuries of human creativity.

Here you’ll learn about the National Gallery, its history, and the three parts of our 29-acre campus: the West Building (opened 1941), East Building (1978), and Sculpture Garden (1999). You’ll encounter Ginevra de’ Benci, the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas, as well as exceptional works by Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, and Alexander Calder. Contemporary artists featured include Faith Ringgold, Carrie Mae Weems, Daniel Lind-Ramos, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.

From scenes painted in the Middle Ages to mixed-media works created this century, you’ll find art in all its forms at the National Gallery of Art.

96 pages | 85 illustrations | 7 × 7 inches

Coming spring 2024

Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies
Edited by Dalila Scruggs

Accomplished printmaker and sculptor, avowed feminist, and lifelong activist Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012) built a remarkable career around intersecting passions for formal rigor and social justice. This book, accompanying a major traveling retrospective, offers a revelatory look at the artist and her nearly century-long life, highlighting overlooked works alongside iconic masterpieces.

Catlett’s activism and artistic expression were deeply connected, and she protested the injustices of her time throughout her life. Her work in printmaking and sculpture draws on organic abstraction, the modernism of the United States and Mexico, and African art to center the experiences of Black and Mexican women. Catlett attended Howard University, studied with the painter Grant Wood, joined the Harlem artistic community, and worked with a leftist graphics workshop in Mexico, where she lived in exile after the US accused her of communism and barred her re-entry into her home country.

The book’s essays address a range of topics, including Catlett’s early development as an artist-activist, the impact of political exile on her work, her pedagogical legacy, her achievement as a social realist printmaker, her work with the arts community of Chicago’s South Side, and the diverse influences that shaped her practice.

304 pages | 240 illustrations | 9 × 11 inches

Coming fall 2024

Little Beasts: Joris Hoefnagel, Jan van Kessel, and the Dawn of Natural History, 1570–1700
Alexandra Libby, Brooks Rich, and Stacey Sell

The painters of the lively and extraordinarily delicate beestjes, “little beasts,” in this richly illustrated book were two of the most successful Flemish artists of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Joris Hoefnagel, Jan van Kessel, and their contemporaries flourished during a period of colonial expansion shaped by trade and expeditions around the globe. They built their careers on the growing intellectual, scientific, and artistic interest in natural history at that time. Possessing a remarkable curiosity about animals, all manner of insects, and other little beasts, they each created images of such precision that individual species are still easily identified today.

Illustrated with 150 full-color images, this intriguing volume delves into connections between artists, collectors, and naturalists. Little Beasts invites readers to look carefully and with wonder at creatures small and even smaller.

Coming spring 2025