"Zipf focuses on five gifted women in various parts of the country. In San Diego, Hazel Wood Waterman parlayed her Arts and Crafts training into a career in architecture. Cincinnati's Mary Louise McLaughlin expanded on her interest in Arts and Crafts pottery by inventing new ceramic technology. New York's Candace Wheeler established four businesses that used Arts and Crafts production to help other women earn a living. In Syracuse, both Adelaide Alsop Robineau and Irene Sargent were responsible for disseminating Arts and Crafts-related information through the movement's publications. Each woman's story is different, but each played an important part in the creation of professional opportunities for women in a male-dominated society.".

This book includes some 200 complete entries from the award-winning Dictionary of Women Artists, as well as a selection of introductory essays from the main volume.

Creating the Artful Home: the Aesthetic Movement and Its Influence on Home Decor covers the history of a movement that emphasized "art for art's sake"-and the influence it had on home decor. The Aesthetic Movement in America lasted just a few decades (1870-1900), and served mainly as a bridge between the high Victorian sensibility and the radical shift to the Arts & Crafts style. The movement germinated among artists who used opulent color, decorative patterning, and lavish materials simply for the aesthetic effects they could evoke. It was commonly held that a home that expressed an artful, harmonious soul would instill high aesthetic and moral merit in its inhabitants. The Aesthetic Movement in America helped to popularize the idea that everyone should be able to enjoy beautiful, well-made homes and furnishings-not just the very wealthy. Artful homes could be composed from brilliant antique store finds, discriminating department store purchases, and gems hand-made by the ladies of the house. It was the moment when people embraced the idea that only a beautiful home could be a happy home. Karen Zukowski delves into the movement's establishment, evolution, and main characters, and shows how today's homes can incorporate Aesthetic principles: Through suggestion rather than statement, sensuality, massive use of symbols, and synaesthetic effects-that is, correspondence between words, colors and music. How influential designers such as Clarence Cook and Charles Eastlake popularized the idea that beautiful homes with tasteful furnishings could be available to practically everyone How today's designers, manufacturers, and retailers deploy the very same stylistic markers of the Aesthetic Movement: rich color, layered pattern and texture, mixtures of historical motifs

New York Times Notable Book Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist Wall Street Journal—one of five best artist biographies Edward Hopper's canvasses are filled with stripped-down spaces and unrelenting light, evocative landscapes, and the lonely aspects of men and women seemingly isolated in their surroundings. What kind of man had this haunting vision, and what kind of life engendered this art? No one is better qualified to answer these questions than art historian Gail Levin, author and curator of the major studies and exhibitions of Hopper's work. In this intimate biography she reveals the true nature and personality of the man himself—and of the woman who shared his life, the artist Josephine Nivison.