Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums
Stories and Memorable Moments from People Who Love Museums
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A beautiful, smart, entertaining new art book from New Yorker cartoonist and author Bob Eckstein that is a love letter to museums and museum-goers, filled with lush and whimsical illustrations paired with stories and anecdotes from curators, museum workers, museum visitors, and more.
Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums is a collection of the greatest and most beloved museums of North America, illustrated and explored through fun and fascinating anecdotes. Curated by Bob Eckstein, author of the New York Times bestseller Footnotes from the World's Greatest Bookstores, this delightful twist on an art history book shows these institutes in a way not seen before, illustrated in a lush and idealized style.
The 75+ museums featured include the biggest and boldest names (MoMA, the Whitney) and the more offbeat (Museum of Bad Art, the Museum of Jurassic Technology). They span the US, Canada, and Mexico and include those specializing in art, natural history, academia and science, and more. The 155 original pieces of artwork illustrate a story about the museum or showcase a particular work of art in its collection.
Featured museums include:The Field Museum, ChicagoThe Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New YorkThe Museum of Modern Art, New YorkThe Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MAThe National Portrait Gallery, Washington DCLa Brea Tar Pits, Los AngelesIsabella Stewart Gardner Museum, BostonMuseum of Motherhood, St. Petersburg, FloridaChapultepec Castle, Mexico City, Mexico American Museum of Natural History, New YorkAnd many more
A perfect gift for artists, art lovers, students, travelers, and adventurers of all ages, this collection of funny, heartfelt, and quirky profiles is a thought-provoking, inspiring celebration of museums, why we go to them, and why we love them so much.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cartoonist Eckstein (Footnotes from the World's Greatest Bookstores) explains that the 72 institutions included in his affectionate tour of North American museums are not intended as a definitive ranking ("Otherwise I would have taken into account the three things travelers are most interested in: the museum cafe, the gift shop, and the bathrooms"). Instead, the idiosyncrasy of his "most fascinating" criteria produces a charming juxtaposition of lauded (the Met; the Smithsonian) and obscure institutions (Boston's Museum of Bad Art, which displays paintings plucked from the trash). While Eckstein's ample facts occasionally strain for significance (the Whitney contains "New York City's largest column-free exhibition spaces"), the book's true strengths are its role as a kind of communal scrapbook, with piquant anecdotes relayed from others—like poet Sharon Messmer, who, recalling a break-up with a boyfriend at the Art Institute of Chicago, blames the museum's proximity to bars—and Eckstein's illustrations. Many of those, including a depiction of a gargantuan James Turrell light installation at Mass MoCA with minuscule humans crowded before it, communicate a sense of being dwarfed and stunned, suggesting such feelings stem from both great art and great museums' showcasing of it. The result is a touching rumination on public art's potential to provoke personal epiphany.
