The art museum has become a prestige commission for contemporary architects, and for several decades reference has been made to a "museum building boom." Among these new museums, those of Louis Kahn are especially admired. This significant American architect, who ranks in this century with Frank Lloyd Wright both as a creator and as an influence, has made a special contribution to the architecture of museums and has helped create a subtle but telling change in the concept of what a late twentieth-century museum building should be.
After a brief look at the development of a tradition in...

Lavishly illustrated with nearly 400 color images, "Painting the Maya Universe" is the most thorough study and brilliant display of Classic Maya ceramic painting yet published. Building on twenty years of research and debate, Dorie Reents-Budet and her collaborators Joseph W. Ball, Ronald L. Bishop, Virginia M. Fields, and Barbara MacLeod bring together many perspectives, including the art historical, archaeological, epigraphical, and ethnohistorical, to examine one of the world's great but overlooked painting traditions. With an emphasis on sixth- to eighth-century pottery featuring both...

Baltimore Portraits is a unique presentation of photographs by Amos Badertscher. These portraits--many accompanied by poignantly revealing, hand-written narratives about their subjects--represent a sector of Baltimore that has gone largely unnoticed and rarely has been documented. In this volume, the assemblage of images of bar and street people--transvestites, strippers, drug addicts, drag queens, and hustlers--spans a twenty-year period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. Badertscher's arresting and melancholy photographs document a culture that has virtually disappeared due to...