He claimed to be “the plainest kind of fellow you can find. There isn’t a single thing I’ve done, or experienced,” said Grant Wood, “that’s been even the least bit exciting.”Wood was one of America’s most famous regionalist painters; to love his work was the equivalent of loving America itself. In his time, he was an “almost mythical figure,” recognized most supremely for his hard-boiled farm scene, American Gothic, a painting that has come to reflect the essence of Americ...

Enter the private world of four New England bachelors, men who transformed their homes - now all public museums - into personal artistic statements.Exploring the lives of four bachelor designers, The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home invites readers into the private worlds they created. Spanning the Gilded to the Jazz Age, these fascinating interiors not only reflect the intimate lives of their owners – men whose personal stories have, u...

During Mexico's first century of independence, European and American explorers rediscovered its pre-Hispanic past. Finding the jungle-covered ruins of lost cities and artifacts inscribed with unintelligible hieroglyphs—and having no idea of the age, authorship, or purpose of these antiquities—amateur archaeologists, artists, photographers, and religious writers set about claiming Mexico's pre-Hispanic patrimony as a rightful part of the United States' cultural heritage.In this insi...