Staff Picks

 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.

 

Comyns' writing is utterly unique and so good, and fortunately, much of her work has recently been rediscovered and republished. Our Spoons Came from Woolworths is quirky, sharp-witted, and darkly funny, all with a fairytale ending. I want to read everything she has written.

 

Publisher's description: I told Helen my story and she went home and cried" begins Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. But Barbara Comyns's beguiling novel is far from maudlin, despite the ostensibly harrowing ordeals its heroine endures. Sophia is twenty-one when she marries fellow artist Charles, and she seems to have nearly as much affection for her pet newt as she does for her husband. Her housekeeping knowledge is lacking (everything she cooks tastes of soap) and she attributes her morning sickness to a bad batch of strawberries. England is in the middle of the Great Depression, and in any case, the money Sophia earns at her occasional modeling gigs are not enough to make up for her husband's lack of interest in keeping the heat on. Predictably, the marriage begins to falter; not so predictably, Sophia's optimistic guilelessness is the very thing responsible for turning her life around

 

Companion Piece is so incredible. The book takes place during COVID time, and thus during the current ecological ruination of the world. It weaves in the power of imagination and the power of words (and pronoun changes) to change/make history. It is humble, powerful, and deeply caring. The main character is a free-thinking lesbian. Despite taking place in contemporary society, there is a fair amount of history presented too. I wish that my art could do what this text does, and as skillfully.

 

Publisher's description:

Here we are in extraordinary times. Is this history? What happens when we cease to trust governments, the media, each other? What have we lost? What stays with us? What does it take to unlock our future? Following her astonishing Seasonal Quartet, Ali Smith again lights a way for us through the nightmarish now, in a vital celebration of companionship in all its timeless and contemporary, legendary and unpindownable, spellbinding and shapeshifting forms. Companion Piece stands apart from the Quartet, which remains discrete unto itself. But like Smith's groundbreaking series, this new novel boldly captures the spirit of the times. 'Every hello, like every voice, holds its story ready, waiting.

 

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. 

 

 

In her memoir, Janice figured out how to quit her tiresome job and make a life for herself in Paris. Sweet and relatable, with the ordinary magic of life's adventures! She covers everything from cleaning out her underwear drawer to finding love.

 

Publisher description: 

How much money does it take to quit a job? Exhausted and on the verge of burnout, Janice poses this questions to herself as she doodles on a notepad at her desk. Surprisingly, the answer isn't as daunting as she expected. With a little math and a lot of determination, Janice cuts back, saves up, and buys herself two years of freedom in Europe. A few days into her stop in Paris, Janice meets Christophe, the cute butcher down the street who doesn't speak English.

 

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