Published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 14 - June 1, 1999.

During the economic boom of the 1990s, art museums expanded dramatically in size, scope, and ambition. They came to be seen as new civic centers: on the one hand as places of entertainment, leisure, and commerce, on the other as socially therapeutic institutions. But museums were also criticized for everything from elitism to looting or illegally exporting works from other countries, to exhibiting works offensive to the public taste. Whose Muse? brings together five directors of leading American and British art museums who together offer a forward-looking alternative to such prevailing views. While their approaches differ, certain themes recur: As museums have become increasingly complex and costly to manage, and as government support has waned, the temptation is great to follow policies driven not by a mission but by the market. However, the directors concur that public trust can be upheld only if museums continue to see their core mission as building collections that reflect a nation's artistic legacy and providing informed and unfettered access to them. The book, based on a lecture series of the same title held in 2000-2001 by the Harvard Program for Art Museum Directors, also includes an introduction by Cuno and a fascinating--and surprisingly frank--roundtable discussion among the participating directors. A rare collection of sustained reflections by prominent museum directors on the current state of affairs in their profession, this book is without equal. It will be read widely not only by museum professionals, trustees, critics, and scholars, but also by the art-loving public itself.

"[Book] examines the relationship between high fashion and the evolving ideals of beauty through the careers and personifications of iconic models who posed in the salons, walked the runways, and exploded onto the pages of Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and even Life and Time. High-profile models enlivened the designs of the world's most celebrated couturiers and, on occasion, even inspired them." --Book jacket.

Catalogue published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Feb. 10-June 5, 2011.

A beautifully designed introduction to art history by way of artworks that feature the mouse—from the ancient world to drawings by Picasso, Disney, and Art Spiegelman. Across centuries and civilizations, artists have used the mouse—the planet’s most common mammal after us—to illustrate our myths and beliefs. Mice have appeared as Japanese symbols of good luck or medieval emblems of evil, in Arab fables, Russian political satire and Nazi propaganda, as scientific tools and to help us challenge the way we see nature. With more than 80 rarely reproduced works—including paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and Gustav Klimt, a silkscreen by Andy Warhol, a print by Hokusai, a photograph by André Kertész, a sculpture by Claes Oldenburg, a video installation by Bruce Nauman, a performance by Joseph Beuys, and many more—Lorna Owen has created an engaging presentation of an extraordinary range. The pieces, which represent every period of visual art, are accompanied by Owen’s intriguing text about the story behind each work. She has combined her passion for art and her empathy for the unsung archetype of the animal kingdom to explain not only how or why the artist came to use the mouse as a subject, but how the art, in the end, reveals more about us than it could ever reveal about this humble creature.

A new perspective on woman’s role in the world of art jewelry at the turn of the twentieth century—from Art Nouveau in France and the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain, to Jugendstil in Germany and Austria, Louis Comfort Tiffany in New York, and American Arts and Crafts in Chicago—and the most extensive survey to date of the sheer diversity and beauty of art jewelry during this period. Accompanying a groundbreaking exhibition at The Richard H. Driehaus Museum in Chicago, this lavishly illustrated catalog showcases nearly two hundred stunning pieces from the Driehaus Collection and prominent national collections, many of which have never been seen by the public. Women were not only the intended wearers of art jewelry during the early twentieth century, but also an essential part of its creation. Their work—boldly artistic, exquisitely detailed, hand wrought, and inspired by nature—is now widely sought after by collectors and museums alike. From the world’s first independent female jewelry makers, to the woman as artistic motif, this jewelry reflected rapid changes in definitions of femininity and social norms. Essays by noted scholars explore five different areas of jewelry design and fabrication, and discuss the important female figures and historic social milieu associated with these movements—from the suffragists and the Rational Dress Society in England; to the Wiener Werkstätte and Gustav Klimt; and the Art Nouveau masters René Lalique and Alphonse Mucha, who depicted otherworldly women in jewelry for equally fascinating patrons like Sarah Bernhardt. The essays are illustrated by historic photographs and decorative arts of the period as well as the extraordinary pieces themselves: hair combs, bracelets, brooches, and tiaras executed in moonstones, translucent horn, enamel, opals, aquamarines, and much more. As Driehaus writes in his introduction to Maker & Muse, “Essential as these elements are, the metal and gemstones of a necklace—or a brooch or a bracelet—are like a canvas. It is the designer who evokes true greatness, beauty, and value from them. Neither monumental nor mass-produced, the object contains a memory of a particular artist’s skilled hand.”

Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age explores the nature of digital objects in museums, asking us to question our assumptions about the material, social and political foundations of digital practices. Through four wide-ranging chapters, each focused on a single object – a box, pen, effigy and cloak – this short, accessible book explores the legacies of earlier museum practices of collection, older forms of media (from dioramas to photography), and theories of how knowledge is produced in museums on a wide range of digital projects. Swooping from Ethnographic to Decorative Arts Collections, from the Google Art Project to bespoke digital experiments, Haidy Geismar explores the object lessons contained in digital form and asks what they can tell us about both the past and the future. Drawing on the author’s extensive experience working with collections across the world, Geismar argues for an understanding of digital media as material, rather than immaterial, and advocates for a more nuanced, ethnographic and historicised view of museum digitisation projects than those usually adopted in the celebratory accounts of new media in museums. By locating the digital as part of a longer history of material engagements, transformations and processes of translation, this book broadens our understanding of the reality effects that digital technologies create, and of how digital media can be mobilised in different parts of the world to very different effects.