Biography & Autobiography : Artists, Architects, Photographers

From the way we build to the way we live, Frank Lloyd Wright’s influence on American architecture is visible all around us. Now, Ada Louise Huxtable, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture writer for The Wall Street Journal—and chief architecture critic for The New York Times for nearly twenty years—offers an outstanding look at the architect and the man. She explores the sources of his tumultuous and troubled life and his long career as master builder as well as his search for lasting, more...

Price: $14.00

In His Invention So Fertile, Adrian Tinniswood offers the first biography of Christopher Wren in a generation. It is a book that reveals the full depth of Wren's multifaceted genius, not only as one of the greatest architects who ever lived--the designer of St. Paul's Cathedral--but as an influential seventeenth-century scientist. Tinniswood writes with insight and flair as he follows Wren from Wadham College, Oxford, through the turmoil of the English Civil War, to his role in helping to found the Royal Society--the intellectual and scientific heart of seventeenth-century England. The reader discovers that the great architect was initially an astronomer who was also deeply interested in medicine, physics, and mathematics. Family connections pulled him into architecture, with a commission to restore the chapel at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Tinniswood deftly follows Wren's rise as architect, capturing the atmosphere of Restoration London, as old Royalists scrambled for sinecures from Charles II and Wren learned the art of political infighting at court, finally becoming Surveyor of the Royal Works-the King's engineer. Most important, the author recounts the intriguing story of the building of St. Paul's. The Great Fire of 1666--vividly recreated in Tinniswood's narrative--left London a smoldering husk. Wren played a central role in reshaping the city, culminating with St. Paul's, his masterpiece--though he had to steer between King and cathedral authorities to get his radical, domed design built. As the Enlightenment dawned in England, Wren's magnificent dome rose above London, soon to become an icon of London and world architecture. One of the most influential architects in history, Christopher Wren comes vividly to life in this fittingly grand biography.  more...

Price: $36.00

Gordon Parks, acclaimed photographer, filmmaker, composer, and author of fiction and nonfiction, has participated in, been witness to, and documented many of the major events in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. He is first and foremost a celebrated photojournalist and fine art photographer whose work, collected and exhibited worldwide, is emblematic of American culture. In A Hungry Heart, he reaches into the corridors of his memory and recounts the people and events that shaped him: from growing up poor on the Kansas prairie to withstanding the unbearably cold winters of Minnesota to living on the edge of starvation in Harlem during the Depression. He more than survived the challenges and crises of his life; he thrived and has become one of the most celebrated and diversely talented figures in American culture. more...

Price: $15.00

Joyce Wieland triumphed over what she called "obscene poverty" to achieve international celebrity as a painter, collagist, quiltmaker, and filmmaker, celebrated as Canada's most important woman artist next to Emily Carr. Her art portrays strikingly Canadian themes of environmental issues, historical passages, and aboriginal rights in buoyant, satirical images. To make her distinctive, highly personal art, Wieland uses toys, paper cut-outs, wood, glass, and pieces of her panties and dresses just as boldly and felicitously as she uses oils, watercolors, and pencils. Some of her most famous works are quilts, such as "Reason Over Passion" and "Confedspread," She made underground films long before Andy Warhol did, producing a total of 16. Joyce Wieland achieved acclaim through unstinting courage, vivacity, and her off-the-wall humor. She was known for tucking away her secrets in her work. Author Iris Nowell has uncovered some of these secrets through primary sources, such as Joyce's friends and family, and through her own perspective of having known Joyce for many years. This intimate, rollicking, poignant biography uncovers Joyce Wieland's life as she lived it, intimately and fully--through the 1950s "Dark Ages of Art" in Toronto, for much of the 1960s in New York's grungy artist's loft community and the underground film scene, and back to Toronto for the most productive, stunning years of her life. more...

Price: $11.95

From acclaimed biographer and cultural historian, author of Balthus and Patron Saints —the first full-scale life of le Corbusier, one of the most influential, admired, and maligned architects of the twentieth century, heralded is a prophet in his lifetime, revered as a god after his death. more...

Price: $45.00