Sarah Milroy

Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment offers commentary on a generation of extraordinary women painters, photographers, sculptors, architects and filmmakers from a century ago — pioneers who opened new frontiers for women artists in Canada — as well as works made by their Indigenous female contemporaries working in traditional media, for a cross-country snapshot of female creativity in this dynamic modern moment.

Hardcover | 320 pages
Publication Date: 2021

Lori Pauli

Recognized as one of Canada's most eloquent interpreters of landscape, Geoffrey James has been making photographs since the early 1970s. His first photographs, images of gardens, express classical notions of beauty as they reveal the geometry and underlying structures of the formal garden. These small panoramic photographs evoke a quiet passion for the great landscape schemes and natural sanctuaries of the past. In his most recent work, James pays particular attention to the way in which nature and culture intersect. While not concerned with "Romantic" notions of "the ruin," his photographs do suggest a fall from grace.

Hardcover | 176 pages
Publication Date: 2008

Lori Pauli

Recognized as one of Canada's most eloquent interpreters of landscape, Geoffrey James has been making photographs since the early 1970s. His first photographs, images of gardens, express classical notions of beauty as they reveal the geometry and underlying structures of the formal garden. These small panoramic photographs evoke a quiet passion for the great landscape schemes and natural sanctuaries of the past. In his most recent work, James pays particular attention to the way in which nature and culture intersect. While not concerned with "Romantic" notions of "the ruin," his photographs do suggest a fall from grace.

Hardcover | 176 pages
Publication Date: 2008

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

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

Phyllis Webstad

"Every child matters, including you and me. With our orange hearts, we walk in harmony." As a young child, your little world can be full of big emotions. In this book, I, Phyllis Webstad, founder of Orange Shirt Day, show that sharing my story with the world helped me to process my feelings. My true orange shirt story encourages young children to open their hearts and listen as others share their feelings, and to be more comfortable sharing their own feelings too. Listening is a first step towards reconciliation. It's never too early to start.

Softcover | 24 pages
19.7 x 19.7 cm (7.7 x 7.7 in.) 
Publication Date: 2022

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.