Wilmington, DE - The Delaware Art Museum presents Building Books: The Art of David Macaulay, an exhibition of the world-famous author and illustrator’s original drawings, paintings, and studies on view from October 14, 2006, through January 7, 2007.  Macaulay uses art to communicate complex concepts in a fun and accessible manner.  His imaginative and often humorous illustrations are sure to inspire and delight the whole family.  Macaulay’s most popular book to date, The Way Things Work, is an entertaining and whimsical illustrated guide to the inner workings of machines.  In more than a dozen additional books, he has displayed the construction of intricate architectural structures, examined a centuries-old sailing vessel from past and present perspectives, and taken readers on journeys into his unique imagination.  Building Books explores both Macaulay’s work and his artistic process.

“With every illustration he produces, David Macaulay inspires us to understand the workings of our world,” said Joyce K. Schiller, Curator at the Delaware Art Museum.  “Macaulay has called himself a ‘victim of curiosity,’ and we are certainly richer for his need to examine and explain.”

The Way Things Work, published in 1988, spent 50 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and was updated in 1998 as The New Way Things Work to include digital technology.  Macaulay’s illustrations not only help explain how things do what they do, but they also show links between the concepts behind various types of machines.  His books on architecture, including Cathedral, City, Pyramid, Underground, Castle, Unbuilding, Mill, and Mosque, range from the construction of monuments for pharaohs to the dismantling of the Empire State Building. Building Books features dramatic, original drawings from these titles.

Macaulay’s artistic process is on display as the creation of his book Ship is examined from concept, research, and preliminary layouts to finished art and text.  In Ship, modern-day underwater archaeologists discover pieces of a 500-year-old vessel called a caravel in the Caribbean Sea, and the ship-owner’s 1504 diary recounts its construction.  Building Books offers insight into how Macaulay works through ship models, artifacts, studies, drawings, photographs, and finished art. Building Books: The Art of David Macaulay has been organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

David Macaulay was born on December 2, 1946. As a young boy in Lancashire, England, he was fascinated by the way objects are made and how they operate.  He was 11 years old when his parents moved to Bloomfield, New Jersey.  He earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design and spent a year in the European Honors Program, studying in Rome, Herculaneum, and Pompeii.  His first book, Cathedral, was published in 1973.  After the events of September 11, 2001, he began working on Mosque, published in 2003.  His books have sold more than 2 million copies in the United States alone, and his work has been translated into a dozen languages.  Macaulay is the recipient of many prestigious awards, including the Caldecott Medal and Honor Awards.

Founded in 1912, the Delaware Art Museum holds a world-renowned collection that focuses on American art and illustration from the 19th to the 21st century as well as the British Pre-Raphaelite movement of the mid-19th century.  The Museum offers an outdoor Sculpture Park, the Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives, studio art classes, the interactive Kids’ Corner learning area, the delART Café featuring free Wi-Fi access, and the Museum Store with distinctive books and gifts.

Visit : http://www.delart.org/