In Knowing and Seeing, Douglas Cooper reflects on his long career as a muralist in various cities around the world, including in Pittsburgh. The essays are also personal discussing family, memories from his childhood, mentoring from his Carnegie Mellon University professors, and his collaborations. They are also instructive. Murals are not walls but provide the appearance as such and require the artist to have a different skill set that is part architect, part painter, and part builder.

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.

“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