The best of Art and Design 2021

Some beautiful art, design and architecture books were published in 2021. Below are 10 of our favourites and make sure you browse the collection for the full round-up of outstanding titles.


1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir by Ai Wei Wei

In his widely anticipated memoir, Ai Weiwei - one of the world’s most famous artists and activists - tells a century-long epic tale of China through the story of his own extraordinary life and the legacy of his father, Ai Qing, the nation’s most celebrated poet.

Here, for the first time, Ai Weiwei explores the origins of his exceptional creativity and passionate political beliefs through his own life story and that of his father, whose own creativity was stifled. At once ambitious and intimate, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows offers a deep understanding of the myriad forces that have shaped modern China, and serves as a timely reminder of the urgent need to protect freedom of expression.


Design: Building on Country by Alison Page and Paul Memmott

Aboriginal design is of a distinctly cultural nature, based in the Dreaming and in ancient practices grounded in Country. It is visible in the aerodynamic boomerang, the ingenious design of fish traps and the precise layouts of community settlements that strengthen social cohesion.

Alison Page and Paul Memmott show how these design principles of sophisticated function, sustainability and storytelling, refined over many millennia, are now being applied to contemporary practices. Design: Building on Country issues a challenge for a new Australian design ethos, one that truly responds to the essence of Country and its people.


Small Business by David Waldeton

Small Business looks at the small but enduring family-run businesses that are fading away, often tucked away on suburban streets. David Wadelton has gathered a considerable photographic archive of these interiors from all over Melbourne and regional Victoria over the last ten years with a couple of side excursions to iconic interstate locations.

Many of the businesses have traded for decades, and continue to do so even as multi-storey developments and multi-nationals overshadow or consume them. One third of the shops featured in the book have already closed since they were photographed. Many of the interiors depicted are family businesses started by post-war migrants who came to Australia to start a new life and in so doing enriched and transformed our culture.


The King’s Painter: The Life and Times of Hans Holbeins by Franny Moyle

Hans Holbein the Younger is chiefly celebrated for his beautiful and precisely realised portraiture, which includes representations of Henry VIII, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, Anne of Cleves, Jane Seymour and an array of Tudor lords and ladies. But beyond these familiar images, Holbein was a protean and multi-faceted genius: a humanist, satirist, political propagandist, and contributor to the history of book design as well as a religious artist and court painter. The rich layers of symbolism and allusion that characterise his work have proved especially fascinating to scholars.

Franny Moyle traces and analyses the life and work of an extraordinary artist against the backdrop of an era of political turbulence and cultural transformation, to which his art offers a subtle and endlessly refracting mirror.


Doing Feminism by Anne Marsh

Doing Feminism represents over 220 artists and groups with 370 colour illustrations punctuated by extracts from artists’ statements, curatorial writing and critique. Tracking networks of art practice, exhibitions, protest and critical thought over several generations, Marsh demonstrates the innovation and power of women’s art and the ways in which it has influenced and changed the contemporary art landscape in Australia and internationally. The images and texts are curated by decade and contextualised to provide a broad analysis of art and feminist criticism since the late 1960s.

This extraordinary work presents one of the most comprehensive collections of material ever compiled on women and the arts in Australia. It will become essential reading for years to come.


Patented: 1000 Design Patents by Thomas Rinaldi

An unprecedented, essential field guide to more than a century of fascinating product and industrial design.

From legendary classics to anonymous objects that are indispensable in homes and offices, this one-of-a-kind collection of original patent documents celebrates the creative genius of designers, inventors, creators, innovators, and dreamers the world over.

The range is phenomenal: patents by Eero Saarinen, Charles Eames, Isamu Noguchi, Ettore Sottsass, Raymond Loewy, and George Nelson sit alongside everyday designs for tape dispensers, pencil sharpeners, food processors, desk fans, and drink bottles to create a valuable reference that’s also an irresistible browse.


Evergreen Architecture: Overgrown Buildings and Greener Living by Gestalten

Nature and architecture have never been more intertwined. As more of the earth’s surface is swallowed up by the built environment, architects are increasingly up to the task of integrating flora and greenery into their creations.

There are many ways to express this: green roofs, living walls, indoor courtyards and entire facades filled with plants. But where these are posed as solutions there are yet more questions. How does a skyscraper uphold the weight of hundreds of trees? How do residents keep moss-covered walls alive? Evergreen Architecture explores this, and much more.


Frances Burke: Designer of Modern Textiles by Nanette Carter, Robyn Oswald-Jacobs

Frances Burke was Australia’s most influential and celebrated textile designer of the 20th century. Displaying imagery and colours from native flora, marine objects, Indigenous artefacts and designs of pure abstraction, Burke’s innovative fabrics remain fresh and appealing, distinctive and evocative of Australia.

In this long-awaited, richly illustrated work, the authors have located and unpacked the different components of a body of work never presented as art, but which contributed so much to the felt experience of Australian life in the middle decades of the twentieth century.


Still Life: Contemporary Australian Artists by Amber Creswell Bell

Still Life explores the diverse practices of more than forty contemporary Australian artists and documents a repertoire of styles, subjects, visions and philosophies. Alongside flowers and food - mainstays of the genre - the works within these pages also incorporate objects such as books and beer cans, birds and balloons, adding energy and intrigue to both the composition and the story revealed.

This book captures the inanimate beauty of the everyday in a distinctly Australian context, and offers a meditation on human experience and the brevity of life.


A Room of her Own by Robyn Lea

A Room of Her Own features the dazzling homes of twenty extraordinary women around the globe. Across sitting rooms and studios, salon-style hangs and table settings, this is a book of daring inspiration. Artists, designers, makers and curators invite us into their domestic and professional domains to reveal a world of meaning and purpose beyond status and consumerism.

These pages are filled with beautiful rooms, but Robyn Lea’s gorgeous photography and evocative texts look beyond the aesthetics to explore the ideals and practices of these women and guide us all on a new and exciting path forward.