Staff Picks

Patrick Bringley introduces readers to art in a unique way when he becomes a museum guard in the wake of his older brother's death at 26. Needing to be surrounded by calm and beauty in that wake of that tragedy, he goes on an emotional, cultural tour of one of the great Museums of the world. Lovely!

 

Publisher's description:

Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. Caught up in his glamorous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought he’d be one of them. Then his older brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer and he found himself needing to escape the mundane clamor of daily life. So he quit The New Yorker and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew. To his surprise and the reader’s delight, this temporary refuge becomes Bringley’s home away from home for a decade. We follow him as he guards delicate treasures from Egypt to Rome, strolls the labyrinths beneath the galleries, wears out nine pairs of company shoes, and marvels at the beautiful works in his care. Bringley enters the museum as a ghost, silent and almost invisible, but soon finds his voice and his tribe: the artworks and their creators and the lively subculture of museum guards -- a gorgeous mosaic of artists, musicians, blue-collar stalwarts, immigrants, cutups, and dreamers. As his bonds with his colleagues and the art grow, he comes to understand how fortunate he is to be walled off in this little world, and how much it resembles the best aspects of the larger world to which he gradually, gratefully returns.

 

Sonia's life is a mess when she joins a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. What follows is a brilliant examination of art, personal and national identity, and the power of community. The book plays with form and trusts us to read between the lines. The ending, like the title, is haunting.

Publisher's description: 

A stage actress returns to Palestine to visit her older sister and becomes unwittingly involved with a local group who wants to put on a production of Hamlet in the West Bank using all Palestinian actors.

Find Enter Ghost in our online catalog

 Beautiful illustrations and fun message that the best color of all is a rainbow!
 

Publisher's description:
Meet Alma, she loves to paint. With each new bucket of paint she finds, brushstrokes by brushstrokes, page by page, magic appears. Welcome to Alma's World. Alma's Art is inspired by the little-known African American painter Alma Woodsey Thomas, the treasured expressionist who made her national debut in the art world at age 80. Alma kept beauty and happiness at the forefront of her painting technique, studying how light and color worked together in the shapes and patterns on her canvases. Another new book by best-selling author Roda Ahmed who continues to bring inspiring stories of unknown heroes in history to children. Alma's Art is an important book to paint young minds with broad strokes that celebrate the colors of our world.

 

Find Alma's Art in our online catalog

A powerful memoir of an artist born into Jim Crow-era Georgia. Winfred Rembert faced an attempted lynching and imprisonment in a chain gang for almost a decade for daring to march for his own civil rights. He turned to art to deal with his trauma through vibrant paintings of Black life in the south.

 

Publisher's description: A self-taught artist's odyssey from Jim Crow era Georgia to the Yale Art Gallery-a stunningly vivid, full-color memoir in prose and painted leather, with a foreword by Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson. Winfred Rembert grew up as a field hand on a Georgia plantation. He embraced the Civil Rights Movement, endured political violence, survived a lynching, and spent seven years in prison on a chain gang. Years later, seeking a fresh start at the age of 52, he discovered his gift and vision as an artist, and using leather tooling skills he learned in prison, started etching and painting scenes from his youth. Rembert's work has been exhibited at museums and galleries across the country, profiled in the New York Times and more, and honored by Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative. In this book, he relates his life in prose and paintings--vivid, confrontational, revelatory, complex scenes from the cotton fields and chain gangs of the segregated south to the churches and night clubs of the urban north. This is also the story of finding epic love, and with it the courage to revisit a past that begs to remain buried, as told to Tufts philosopher Erin I. Kelly.

 

The bestselling author of High Fidelity mines the biographies and work of two wildly different cultural icons to produce an engaging little book about creativity and genius. Fans of Chuck Klosterman's accessible yet richly detailed cultural analyses will find much to enjoy here. 

 

Publisher's description:

Every so often, a pairing comes along that seems completely unlikely--until it's not. Peanut butter and jelly, Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong Un, ducks and puppies, and now: Dickens and Prince. Equipped with a fan's admiration and his trademark humor and wit, Nick Hornby invites us into his latest obsession: the cosmic link between two unlikely artists, geniuses in their own rights, spanning race, class, and centuries--each of whom electrified their different disciplines and whose legacy resounded far beyond their own time. When Prince's 1987 record Sign o' the Times was rereleased in 2020, the iconic album now came with dozens of songs that weren't on the original--Prince was endlessly prolific, recording 102 songs in 1986 alone. In awe, Hornby began to wonder, Who else ever produced this much? Who else ever worked that way? He soon found his answer in Victorian novelist and social critic Charles Dickens, who died more than a hundred years before Prince began making music. Examining the two artists' personal tragedies, social statuses, boundless productivity, and other parallels, both humorous and haunting, Hornby shows how these two unlikely men from different centuries "lit up the world." In the process, he creates a lively, stimulating rumination on the creativity, flamboyance, discipline, and soul it takes to produce great art.

 

Whether you are a longtime knitter or have just learnt to cast on, The Nordic Knitting Primer is an amazing resource. Kristin Drysdale connects the knitter with patterns from her Scandinavian roots and shares technique tips, how-to, and design inspiration. She also has a website called "Scandiwork." This book really makes colorwork accessible. Drysdale shares that " I believe the most important thing in knitting, whether you're a beginner or a seasoned expert, is to knit what you love."

 

Publisher's description:

Gorgeous Scandinavian knitwear is within reach for knitters of all levels with this collection of timeless patterns and essential techniques... Inspired by Kristin's Scandinavian heritage, these designs combine traditional patterns and motifs with stylish, easy-to-wear shapes. Knitting with multiple yarns creates a warmer knit fabric for high-quality garments and accessories to gift or wear all year long

 

Find The Nordic Knitting Primer in our online catalog.

The Moon and Sixpence was written in such an interesting way that it captivated me throughout. As I was introduced to the lives of different characters, the only thing that connected them was that they had once been acquainted with the enigmatic and despicable Charles Strickland, a stockbroker who had abandoned his mediocre life and family in England to live in absolute poverty so long as he could paint. I found myself enthralled by all the questions asked about his life, even those that were never answered. 

- Natasha, 8th-grade teen volunteer

Publisher's description:

The Moon and Sixpence (1919) is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. Inspired by the life of French painter Paul Gauguin, Maugham set out to capture the disconnect between an artist's desire to create and their obligations to their loved ones and society. Praised for its multifaceted portrayal of tortured genius and wasted talent, The Moon and Sixpence explores the distance between expectation and desire in a man whose decisions, however, hastily made, are done with the loftiest of intentions...The Moon and Sixpence is a tale of creativity, disappointment, and struggle by a master stylist with a keen sense of the complications inherent to human nature. 

 

Ninth Street Women is written in a way that makes you feel like you are there, spending time with your dear friends. Gabriel retells the story of Abstract Expressionism with women at the center. Art history, and history generally, skews white and male, giving the impression that white men are responsible for all aspects of society and culture. Reexamining this assumption, one finds that history is a lot more like everyday life, where many people of varying identities contribute to its production, (though still only a few are credited, well remunerated, and named). Reading about the spit-fire personalities of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler, along with their incredible art is inspiring as well as a good time.

 

Publisher's description:

Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, Ninth Street Women is the impassioned, wild, sometimes tragic, always exhilarating chronicle of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstract painting–not as muses but as artists. From their cold-water lofts, where they worked, drank, fought, and loved, these pioneers burst open the door to the art world for themselves and countless others to come

 

This psychological novel is brimming with questions about cultural bias, philosophical arguments, and is itself a study in perception. Presented as an edited book about the artist Harriet Burden, uniquely composed through interviews, journals, newspaper articles, and written statements, this book is both plot-driven and character-driven. Burden claims to have made a series of artworks, which were presented to the public through three separate "masks". The third "mask" is a famous artist who takes credit for creating the work presented in their name. Neither the third "mask" nor Burden are living, so the reader is left to decide for themselves who actually created the art. (Side note, although the catalog description genders the editor Professor Hess, the novel purposely does not, a lesson in cultural assumptions, which this novel explores.)

 

Publisher description:

When Professor Hess stumbles across an unusual letter to the editor in an art journal, he is surprised to have known so little about the brilliant and mysterious artist it describes, the late Harriet Burden. Intrigued by her story, and by the explosive scandal surrounding her legacy, he begins to interview those who knew her, hoping to separate fact from fiction, only to find himself tumbling down a rabbit's hole of personal and psychological intrigue.