University of Pittsburgh Press
Knowing and Seeing
Hardcover $35.00

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Knowing and Seeing

Reflections on Fifty Years of Drawing Cities

By Douglas Cooper
“Douglas Cooper’s mesmerizing new book . . . catalogs every stage of his career and also every laborious stage of his most famous works. It’s as though a seven-floor Cooper museum has been artfully crammed into one big gorgeous book.
Pittsburgh Quarterly
Hardcover $35.00

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In Knowing and Seeing, muralist Douglas Cooper reflects on his long career as a muralist in various cities around the world. Part memoir and part an examination of his art, Cooper looks back on his half-century career from two points of view. First, through personal anecdotes on site sketches and finished works, and secondly, on the intellectual roots of the works. Though the core ideas of his work began in Pittsburgh, Cooper has exhibited work and produced murals, up to 200 feet long, in Cologne, Rome, San Francisco, Seattle, Qatar, Frankfurt, Philadelphia, New York, and Washington DC.
Memory has been a recurring theme in his art. All of Cooper’s works are driven by a desire to combine his conception of place with his perception of it—knowing and seeing. Knowing and Seeing features personal essays and more than 240 color images, including early Christian and Renaissance paintings as well as contemporary murals and other illustrations of Cooper’s unique work.

More Praise

An acutely gifted draftsman, Doug Cooper employs his panoptical vision not only to record and rearrange the lay of the land, but also to infuse it with a distinct psychological flavor. His many representations of Pittsburgh mirror the city’s intensely built, verdantly wrinkled face, memorializing it with affection.

Richard Armstrong, Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation

244 Pages, 11 x 9 in.

November, 2019

isbn : 9780822945703

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about the author

Douglas Cooper

Douglas Cooper is a Pittsburgh-based muralist who combines topography, story, history and memory into panoramic civic murals, some up to 200 feet-long. Typically, he works with local residents to incorporate their lives into these works, often with drawings in their own hands. Over the years he has collaborated with photographers animators and fabric artists in creating murals in Frankfurt, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Qatar, Rome, San Francisco, and Seattle. His drawings have been exhibited in individual gallery shows in Cologne, New York, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Washington D.C. Cooper teaches hand drawing at the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon and he is the author of two books: Drawing and Perceiving and Steel Shadows.

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Douglas Cooper