Cornelia Homburg, Anabelle Kienle
Joseph J. Rishel, Jennifer A. Thompson

Vincent van Gogh’s profound love of nature has often been taken for granted but has rarely been studied in detail. While he has long been admired for his dazzling use of intense colour and expressive brushwork, it is his innovative representation of nature that makes him a truly modern artist and is the focus of Van Gogh: Up Close. This exhibition, which has been organized by the National Gallery of Canada and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, concentrates on Van Gogh’s French period, from 1886 to 1890, and highlights how he conveyed his intense response to the natural world – whether this was a landscape, a still life, or the rendering of a single blade of grass – through a number of different, and often radical compositional strategies.

Softcover | 290 pages
Publication Date: 2012

Cornelia Homburg, Anabelle Kienle
Joseph J. Rishel, Jennifer A. Thompson

Vincent van Gogh’s profound love of nature has often been taken for granted but has rarely been studied in detail. While he has long been admired for his dazzling use of intense colour and expressive brushwork, it is his innovative representation of nature that makes him a truly modern artist and is the focus of Van Gogh: Up Close. This exhibition, which has been organized by the National Gallery of Canada and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, concentrates on Van Gogh’s French period, from 1886 to 1890, and highlights how he conveyed his intense response to the natural world – whether this was a landscape, a still life, or the rendering of a single blade of grass – through a number of different, and often radical compositional strategies.

Softcover | 290 pages
Publication Date: 2012

Edited by Joar Nango, Taqralik Partridge, Jocelyn Piirainen, and Rafico Ruiz

An Indigenous-led publication, Towards Home explores how Inuit, Sámi and other communities across the Arctic are creating self-determined spaces. This research project, led by Indigenous and settler coeditors, is titled after the phrases angirramut in Inuktitut, or ruovttu guvlui in Sámi, which can be translated as “towards home.” To move towards home is to reflect on where northern Indigenous people find home, on what their connections to their land means and on what these relationships could look like into the future. Framed by these three concepts—Home, Land and Future—the book contains essays, artworks, photographs and personal narratives that express Indigenous notions of home, land, kinship, design and memory. The project emphasizes caring for and living on the land as a way of being, and celebrates practices of space-making and place-making that empower Indigenous communities.

Softcover | 352 pages 
17.1 x 24.1 cm (6.75 x 9.5 in.) 
Publication Date: 2024

Robin Laurence, Mary Reid & Josée Drouin-Brisebois

For over three decades, Wanda Koop has created an overwhelming body of work. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Wanda Koop: On the Edge of Experience, organized by the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Canada, this beautifully illustrated catalogue presents a selection of paintings, as well as a number of video works.

Paper | 164 pages
27 x 23 cm (10.6 x 9.1 in.) 
Publication Date: 2011

Patrick Syme

This beautiful pocket-size facsimile is a charming artifact from the golden age of natural history and global exploration. In the pre-photographic age, almost all visual details had to be captured via the written word, and scientific observers could not afford ambiguity in their descriptions. In the late 18th century, mineralogist Abraham Gottlob Werner devised a standardized color scheme that allowed him to describe even the subtlest of chromatic differences with consistent terminology. His scheme was then adapted by an Edinburgh flower painter, Patrick Syme, who used the actual minerals described by Werner to create the color charts in the book, enhancing them with examples from flora and fauna.

Werner's handbook became an invaluable resource for naturalists and anthropologists, including Charles Darwin, who used it to identify colors in nature during his seminal voyage on the HMS Beagle. Werner's terminology lent both precision and lyricism to Darwin's pioneering writings, enabling his readers to envision a world they would never see.

Hardcover | 80 pages
14.7 x 23.1 (5.8 x 9.1 in.) 
Publication date: 2018

Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel

There have been many things written about Canada’s violent siege of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke in the summer of 1990, but When the Pine Needles Fall: Indigenous Acts of Resistance is the first book from the perspective of Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel, who was the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) spokesperson during the siege. When the Pine Needles Fall, written in a conversational style by Gabriel with historian Sean Carleton, offers an intimate look at Gabriel’s life leading up to the 1990 siege, her experiences as spokesperson for her community, and her work since then as an Indigenous land defender, human rights activist, and feminist leader.

More than just the memoir of an extraordinary individual, When the Pine Needles Fall offers insight into Indigenous language, history, and philosophy, reflections on our relationship with the land, and calls to action against both colonialism and capitalism as we face the climate crisis. Gabriel’s hopes for a decolonial future make clear why protecting Indigenous homelands is vital not only for the survival of Indigenous peoples, but for all who live on this planet.

Paperback | 304 pages
13.7 x 21.3 cm (5.4 x 8.4 in.) 
Publication date: 2024

Katerina Atanassova, Wahsontiio Cross, Anabelle Kienle Ponka, Jocelyn Piirainen

Winter Count: Embracing the Cold draws inspiration from the Plains First Nations’ practices of recording significant events each winter, a visual reminder that helps structure histories and traditions passed down to future generations. This handsome volume explores how winter has long shaped Indigenous, Canadian settler and northern European art, uniting different cultural perspectives through diverse themes of storytelling, effects of light, physical adaptation and community and isolation.

Presenting a selection of works dating from the early 19th century to the present day, including those of artists such as Kenojuak Ashevak, J.E.H. MacDonald, Claude Monet, Kent Monkman, Meagan Musseau and Jin-me Yoon, Winter Count features approximately 165 plates, along with illustrated essays by curators from the National Gallery of Canada. The result is a book that invites readers to see winter anew – not as a season to be endured, but as a source of invention, connection and mutual respect across time and place. 

Bilingual
Softcover | 304 pages 
Publication Date: 2025

Diana Nemiroff

From obstacles of bureaucracy to veiled challenges to women in powerful positions, Women at the Helm paints a rich picture of what it takes to lead a major art institution. In her latest book, author and art historian Diana Nemiroff explores a transformative thirty-year period in the history of the National Gallery of Canada through the careers of its first three women directors (Jean Sutherland Boggs, Hsio-yen Shih, and Shirley L. Thomson), detailing each of their unique triumphs and tribulations.

Paperback | 552 pages
85 photos, colour insert
19 x 24 cm (7.5 x 9.5 in)

Lynne Cooke

This transformative exhibition explores how abstract art and woven textiles have intertwined over the past hundred years.

In the 20th century, textiles were often considered lesser – as applied art, women’s work, or domestic craft. Woven Histories challenges the hierarchies that have separated textiles from fine arts. Putting into dialogue some 130 works by more than 45 creators from across generations and continents, the exhibition explores the contributions weaving and related techniques have made to abstraction, modernism’s pre-eminent art form.

See a variety of textile techniques including weaving, knitting, netting, knotting and felting. Learn about the wide-ranging reasons artists from Anni Albers to Rosemarie Trockel and Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee Nation) have engaged with this art form. Some seek to effect social change; others address political issues. Engaging with textiles as subject, material and technique, still others revitalize abstraction’s formal conventions or critique its patriarchal history and gendered identity.

Follow this hidden thread of art history to discover the work of creators who were once marginalized for their gender, race or class.

Hardcover
24 x 28 cm (9.5 x 11 in.)
Publication date: 2024

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in collaboration with the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.