Explores the place of rock and stone in human culture and history.

Museum of Stones reveals a possessive/obsessive world of a love that must be released. An exceptional child collects too many rocks, invents a garbage recycler that runs amok, does not “play well.” His mother takes their relationship to extremes, threatening her sanity and health, a wrenching yet often funny account.

Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster--war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb--Forche's ambitious and compelling third collection of poems is a meditation of memory, specifically how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems reflect the effects of such experience: the lines, and often the images within them, are fragmented discordant. But read together, these lines become a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations human beings make to survive what is unsurvivable. As poets have always done, Forche attempts to give voice to the unutterable, using language to keep memory alive, relive history, and link the past with the future.

Museum Matters tells the story of Mexico's national collections through the trajectories of its objects. The essays in this book show the many ways in which things matter and affect how Mexico imagines its past, present, and future.

Paintings on Stone examines a fascinating tradition long overlooked by art historians-stone surfaces used to create stunning portraits, mythological scenes, and sacred images. Written by an international team of scholars, the catalogue reveals the significance of these paintings, their complex meanings, and their technical virtuosity. Using a technique perfected by Sebastiano del Piombo (1485-1547), 16th-century Italian artists created compositions using stone surfaces in place of panel or canvas. The practice of using stone supports continued to engage European artists and patrons well into the 18th century. This volume reveals the beauty of these works and examines the complexity of using materials such as slate, marble, alabaster, lapis lazuli, and amethyst. Illustrated with more than one hundred examples with essays on topics ranging from importing stone to its relationship to alchemy, Paintings on Stone will become the essential reference on this little-studied practice.Accompanies a major exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum from October 25, 2020 to January 17, 2021