Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums

January 1, 2024

This title written and illustrated by award-winning cartoonist Eckstein (The Complete Book of Cat Names) is a mix of modern firsthand accounts from museum curators and visitors, mixed with the histories of individual museums in North America (mostly in the United States). It features Eckstein's illustrations of the museums' architecture, collections, and galleries. The institutions will be instantly recognizable (the Museum of Modern Art; the National Portrait Gallery) even as the images are in the artist's signature style. This is not an encyclopedia of museums or even a list of the best. Instead, it is a small sampling of wonderful museums that readers of this book will be compelled to visit; those who have already perused these sites might feel nostalgic. For browsers, the book organizes the museums by type ("Academia & Science"; "Culture"; "Historic Homes"). Each institution is covered in a page or two, delivering a quick, light, but informative read alongside the book's calming artwork. VERDICT A serene collection of some of North America's most famous museums. Suitable for all ages and great for finding new places to visit.--Elizabeth Chandler

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 6, 2024
Cartoonist Eckstein (Footnotes from the World’s Greatest Bookstores) explains that the 72 institutions included in his affectionate tour of North American museums are not intended as a definitive ranking (“Otherwise I would have taken into account the three things travelers are most interested in: the museum cafe, the gift shop, and the bathrooms”). Instead, the idiosyncrasy of his “most fascinating” criteria produces a charming juxtaposition of lauded (the Met; the Smithsonian) and obscure institutions (Boston’s Museum of Bad Art, which displays paintings plucked from the trash). While Eckstein’s ample facts occasionally strain for significance (the Whitney contains “New York City’s largest column-free exhibition spaces”), the book’s true strengths are its role as a kind of communal scrapbook, with piquant anecdotes relayed from others—like poet Sharon Messmer, who, recalling a break-up with a boyfriend at the Art Institute of Chicago, blames the museum’s proximity to bars—and Eckstein’s illustrations. Many of those, including a depiction of a gargantuan James Turrell light installation at Mass MoCA with minuscule humans crowded before it, communicate a sense of being dwarfed and stunned, suggesting such feelings stem from both great art and great museums’ showcasing of it. The result is a touching rumination on public art’s potential to provoke personal epiphany.