Biography & Autobiography : Artists, Architects, Photographers

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

American Brad Washburn had an impact on his protégés and imitators as profound as that of any other adventurer in the twentieth century. Unquestionably regarded as the greatest mountaineer in Alaskan history and as one of the finest mountain photographers of all time, Washburn transformed American attitudes toward wilderness and revolutionized the art of mountaineering and exploration in the great ranges. In The Last of His Kind, National Geographic Adventure contributing editor David Roberts goes beyond conventional biography to reveal the essence of this man through the prism of his extraordinary exploits from New England to Chamonix, the Himalaya to the Yukon. Washburn's remarkable achievements—including nine first ascents of North American peaks—would stamp him not only as one of a kind, but as one of a kind they don't make anymore. Born June 7, 1910, to a Boston Brahmin family whose roots trace back to the Mayflower, this highly intelligent, impatient, and stubborn iconoclast published books, made a monumental first ascent in the French Alps that would become a touchstone in mountaineering history, and lectured on his adventures—including an address to the National Geographic Society—while still in his teens. In 1935, at the age of twenty-four, while others were turning their attention to the Himalaya, the Harvard-educated Washburn led a three-month journey across what was then the largest remaining unexplored territory in North America—the 6,400 square miles of glaciers and mountains in the frozen heart of Alaska's Saint Elias Range. In addition to his prowess as a mountaineer and photographer, Washburn was also a renowned surveyor and cartographer, producing maps of little-known terrain—the Grand Canyon, Mt. McKinley, and Mt. Everest—that surpassed those that came before, and several of which remain the standard. He was also a scientist who would take a regional natural-history museum and transform it i more...

Price: $19.99

National Book Award winner Nuland "distills one of the greatest minds ever into its pure essence . . . truly awe-inspiring" ("Time"). Illustrations. more...

Price: $14.00

Novelist and critic Jonathan Wilson clears away the sentimental mists surrounding an artist whose career spanned two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, and the birth of the State of Israel. Marc Chagall’s work addresses these transforming events, but his ambivalence about his role as a Jewish artist adds an intriguing wrinkle to common assumptions about his life. more...

Price: $19.95

Most of us know him as one member of the band Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, but what you may not know is that at the same time Graham Nash was rocking the world, he was also pursuing a parallel career in photography and digital imaging. Nash Editions—the world’s premier fine-art digital printmaking studio, which Graham co-founded with R. more...

Price: $40.00