\n\t\t<\/aside>\nWe\u2019re proud to present our list of the best art books of 2024 for your holiday reading, and perhaps to inspire your gifting this winter. Our editors and critics read across genre, subject, and pace this year, from memoirs and graphic novels to catalogs, artist books, and everything in between. Hyperallergic<\/em> Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian muses on the poignant work of photographer Diana Markosian in Father<\/em>, while critic Alexandra M. Thomas recommends Nikki A. Greene\u2019s book reframing the study of Black visual art and musical production. Read on for Reviews Editor Natalie Haddad on Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects<\/em>, Associate Editor Lisa Yin Zhang on scholar Anne Anling Cheng\u2019s essay collection, my love of Audrey Flack\u2019s memoir, and more ordered by publication date in the list below. As always, we approach the \u201cart book\u201d category with flexibility, considering titles that seam the art world with its incalculable intersections with other fields. Let us know what your top books of 2024 are, and happy reading! \u2014Lakshmi Rivera Amin, Associate Editor<\/em><\/p>\n\n
\n
Africa and Byzantium<\/em>, edited by Andrea Myers Achi<\/h4>\n\n
This late-November 2023 tome, edited by Andrea Myers Achi, the curator of the eponymous exhibition that ran this year at The Met and the Cleveland Museum of Art, includes 40 essays to contextualize the almost 180 works and 30 lending institutions, mostly focused on the 4th to the 15th centuries in Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. Achi begins with a prologue that contextualizes how novel it is to center Africa in academic, commercial, and aesthetic conversations about the \u201cByzantine Empire,\u201d otherwise known as the Eastern Roman Empire, which lasted from 330 CE until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Of particular note are lavishly illustrated sections on \u201cBright as the Sun: Africa After Byzantium,\u201d which looks at how Orthodox Christian communities in Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia thrived in their regions. Another section, \u201cLegacies: Black Byzantium,\u201d looks at the continued influence of Byzantium in Africa through the present day. The book is an amazing textbook for the dozens of new courses now being taught on race in the premodern world and also pairs well with The Met\u2019s current exhibition on Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876\u2013Now<\/em>, which continues through February 17, 2025.\u00a0\u2014Sarah E. Bond<\/em><\/p>\nBuy on Bookshop | Metropolitan Museum of Art, November 2023<\/p>\n
\n\t\t<\/aside>\n\n
\n
Had to Be There: A Visual History of the Explosive Pittsburgh Underground, 1979-1994<\/em> by Erik Bauer<\/h4>\n\n
Like Manchester, England, or Detroit, Michigan, Pittsburgh is a gritty, post-industrial metropolis that suffered under the degradations of neoliberal economic collapse a generation ago. Unlike Manchester or Detroit, Pittsburgh\u2019s vibrant music scene hasn\u2019t been as celebrated, at least among casual listeners. Photographer Erik Bauer offers an important corrective in that regard in his path-breaking Had to Be There: A Visual History of the Explosive Pittsburgh Underground, 1979-1994. <\/em>Featuring evocative, intimate, and combustive photographs of largely forgotten (but no less important) Pittsburgh punk acts like Savage Amuse, the Beach Bunnies, the Bats, and Eviction, Bauer\u2019s work provides an archive of a particular time period, including considerations of beloved but long-gone venues such as the Electric Banana and the Syria Mosque. The period covered in Baur\u2019s book is right when Big Steel was in free fall and the population of Pittsburgh cratered out, yet ironically it was also a time of great cultural firmament, as underground musicians and artists attracted to the basement-floor cheap rent set up shop in neighborhoods like the South Side and Oakland, where true punk had its last Rust-Belt hurrah. \u2014Ed Simon<\/em><\/p>\nBuy the Book | Mind Cure Records, January 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
\n
Martyr!<\/em> by Kaveh Akbar<\/h4>\nThis novel has stayed with me since I read it in late spring. It begins haphazardly, echoing the life of the protagonist, Cyrus Shams, but after battling some of his demons, he happens upon the solo exhibition of a dying Iranian artist, Orkideh, at the Brooklyn Museum and his life slowly starts to shift. If you\u2019re in a transitional moment in your life, this book will help lubricate your mind to allow that transformation to ferment. And buckle up for the ending; it\u2019s worth the wait.\u00a0\u2014Hrag Vartanian, Editor-in-Chief<\/em><\/p>\nBuy on Bookshop\u00a0| Knopf, January 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
Raven Chacon: A Worm\u2019s Eye View from a Bird\u2019s Beak<\/em>, edited by Alison Coplan, Katya Garcia-Anton, and Stefanie Hessler<\/h4>\n\n
Sometimes a book about an artist and their work strikes a chord. So it was for me with Raven Chacon: A Worm\u2019s Eye View from a Bird\u2019s Beak<\/em>. Considering Chacon\u2019s sophisticated, multidimensional relationship with sound, whether noise music or chamber music or something altogether undefinable, this pun might feel trite. But with contributions from writer and critic Aruna D\u2019Souza, S\u00e1mi filmmaker and reindeer herder Marja B\u00e5l Nango, poet Sigbj\u00f8rn Sk\u00e5den, curator Candice Hopkins (Carcross\/Tagish First Nation), and others \u2014 plus a lexicon of Chacon\u2019s musical notations \u2014 this book resonates with an energy similar to that of the Din\u00e9 artist\u2019s deeply relational, highly collaborative practice. Published in conjunction with his traveling solo exhibition at the Swiss Institute in New York and Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum in Northern Norway\/S\u00e1pmi, the monograph guides readers through the sites and sounds of Chacon\u2019s career, from 1990 to 2023, and draws connections between the survivance of Navajo and S\u00e1mi peoples who share Indigenous histories that colonialism has attempted to annihilate. The book acts much like one of Chacon\u2019s scores, offering a structure for improvisation. Begin anywhere. Correction: Begin where you are.\u00a0\u2014Nancy Zastudil<\/em><\/p>\nBuy on Bookshop | Swiss Institute and Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, February 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
With Darkness Came Stars <\/em>by Audrey Flack<\/h4>\n\n
I first encountered an artwork by Audrey Flack in 2021 at the Yale University Art Gallery. I was a few months out of college, unsettled by the world, and battling mixed feelings about returning to New Haven when I saw her 2012 screenprint \u201cThe Ecstacy of Saint Teresa\u201d on view in a show featuring alums of the school. As I quickly discovered, Flack\u2019s work is an antidote to disillusionment of any kind \u2014 personal, artistic, political \u2014 and this memoir is no exception. She passed away at the end of June at 93, leaving behind a generous trove of wisdom, anecdotes, priceless perspectives on her decades-long career, and, of course, this book, narrated in her droll, candid voice. Flack recounts the venomous sexism and everyday abuses of New York\u2019s male-dominated Abstract Expressionism crowd, the insidious classism that kept her and other working-class artists in an uphill fight to stake a claim in the art world, and the challenges of maintaining a feminist, photorealist practice while raising two children on her own.<\/p>\n
In a Hyperallergic Podcast episode a few years ago, she spoke with Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian and artist and educator Sharon Louden. Paired with that illuminating conversation, With Darkness Came Stars<\/em> sings with Flack\u2019s indefatigable creative spirit, one that pushed her to constantly learn and evolve. \u2014LA<\/em><\/p>\nBuy on Bookshop | Penn State University Press, March 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner<\/em> by Natalie Dykstra<\/h4>\n\n
Boston\u2019s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is a landmark in its own right, renowned for its sumptuous Venetian palazzo-style courtyard and vast collection of over 7,500 paintings, sculptures, furniture, and objets d\u2019art. Then, of course, there\u2019s the infamous, unsolved 1990 heist in which 13 artworks were stolen. But less is known about the groundbreaking woman behind the collection and the building that houses it. Chasing Beauty<\/em> by author Natalie Dykstra is an impeccably researched, intimate look at the life of Isabella Stewart Gardner herself. She was a woman who lived far before her time, and who used the advantages born to her \u2014 wealth, charm, intelligence, and style \u2014 to leave an undeniable cultural legacy. From the first pages of Chasing Beauty<\/em>, you understand that you will be learning about a woman of contradiction, whose vitality was often too much for those around her, and sometimes even herself. In short, an unmistakably modern woman. As Dykstra writes, \u201cIn her own time and now, Isabella Stewart Gardner seems like a bright sun \u2014 we can look around her but not directly at her. She radiates but confuses.\u201d Chasing Beauty <\/em>breaks through that cloud of mystery and presents a woman who absorbed all life could offer and forged her own path, leaving behind much more than just a collection of art. Whether visiting her museum or reading about her, you are swept into her world, one where she poured herself into an \u201call-consuming pursuit for beauty\u201d that became her life\u2019s work. \u2014Michelle Young<\/em><\/p>\nRead the Review by Lauren Moya Ford | Buy on Bookshop | Mariner Books, March 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder<\/em> by Salman Rushdie<\/h4>\n\n
This book is an incisive meditation on hate, fame, family, literature, and friendship. The gruesome assassination attempt in 2022 at the Chautauqua Institute by a person who is never named in the memoir becomes the foundation of Knife<\/em>, which refuses to play the victim but instead reflects on the human condition and the bonds that make life worth living. You discover that Rushdie, while an A-list literary figure, doesn\u2019t appear to be liked by many in his field, and clearly beyond. But it doesn\u2019t stop him from living life bravely through his words and recording his ruminations that include insights about social awkwardness (the brief Eric Fischl anecdote might interest art worlders) and even his own journey to healing. In the hands of a literary giant, even the worst tragedy can become the material that honors our common humanity. \u2014HV<\/em><\/p>\nBuy on Bookshop | Random House, April 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
Hilary Harkness: Everything For You<\/em><\/h3>\n\n
The phantasmagorias represented in Hilary Harkness\u2019s monograph Everything for You<\/em> depict so much that the far right in the United States wants to erase from existence: gloriously hot gay sex, gender-bending of all sorts, the realities of racism in the US, and the horrifying folly of war. And she does it all with a wry, dark humor. Harkness\u2019s witty painted worlds riff on artistic and literary histories, as well as American history, and feel timeless in many ways, but offer a particularly compelling commentary at this moment. In a time when K\u201312 teachers and college professors are already being forced to submit curricula for review so that legislators and school administrators can curtail conversations on race, LGBTQ+ rights, and topics like Palestine, this book would almost certainly be banned were it ever to appear on a syllabus in countless jurisdictions around the country. All the more reason to pour yourself a strong drink or a cozy mug of tea, and keep yourself warm for at least a little while during the winter we have ahead of us with this sexy and knowing compendium of Harkness\u2019s body of work. \u2014Alexis Clements<\/em><\/p>\nRead the Review | Buy on Bookshop | Black Dog Press, June 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbooks Got Wrong<\/em> by Nate Powell and James Loewen<\/h4>\n\n
Nate Powell\u2019s timely Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbooks Got Wrong<\/em> adapts James Loewen\u2019s groundbreaking critique of American history textbooks into a text-heavy, beautifully drawn, and accessible graphic novel. Powell created a companion volume that revisits the original\u2019s dissection of national myths and explores the omissions, distortions, and Eurocentric biases found in traditional educational materials. With specific examples, he illustrates how hero-making, American exceptionalism, historical inevitability, and racist perspectives are used to sanitize and obfuscate the genocide of Native peoples, slavery, and class inequality in America. Later history is analyzed with a reexamination of Reconstruction, \u201cthe American Century,\u201d the Civil Rights Era, the Vietnam War, 9\/11, and the Iraq War.\u00a0By methodically correcting misinformation and illuminating excluded facts, a counter-narrative of American history emerges; Loewen and Powell maintain that history is never neutral. Quoting George Orwell from 1984, they argue that \u201cwho controls the present controls the past,\u201d and that <\/strong>those in power shape the way history is written and taught. Lies My Teacher Told Me<\/em> is a <\/s><\/strong>particularly essential book in this time of Trump\u2019s reascendancy, when education \u2014 including art historical pedagogy \u2014 is threatened by the far right and Project 2025. \u2014Jesse Lambert<\/em><\/p>\nBuy on Bookshop | New Press, April 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum<\/em>, edited by Dare Turner and Leila Grothe<\/h4>\n\n
There are many reasons to celebrate this catalog, but Dare Turner\u2019s story of her great-uncle Harry \u201cTimm\u201d Williams alone is worth a read \u2014 I\u2019m not going to spoil it. How rare it is to find such honest, complicated writing about art, and in this essay, like much of the book, you feel the winds of new energy that will continue to lift Native and Indigenous art to the fore of conversations around contemporary art, particularly in North America. Beautifully designed and illustrated, this is what I hope all museum exhibition catalogs can be. \u2014HV<\/em><\/p>\nBuy the Book | Baltimore Museum of Art, May 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959\u20131968<\/em>, edited by Isabelle Bonnet and Sophie Hackett<\/h4>\n\n
Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959\u20131968<\/em> traces the history of an unsung haven run by Susanna Valenti and her wife, Maria, in upstate New York, where guests were free to live their lives as women, if only for a weekend. The story is a necessarily painful one: The years in which Casa Susanna was most active were dangerous ones for trans people, who faced the constant risk of violence, incarceration, and institutionalization. But it\u2019s the hundreds of illustrations and archival photographs that form the heart of this essay collection on what the late activist Kate Cummings called \u201canother universe\u201d in her 1992 memoir, quoted in this book. \u201cAfter years of hiding behind closed doors, venturing out only after dark, not daring to speak in case my voice betrayed me I was suddenly liberated into a society where I was not only tolerated but understood and welcomed,\u201d she continued.<\/p>\nHistorian Susan Stryker\u2019s introduction perhaps best frames the value of honoring the Casa Susanna community, particularly as trans people face increasing threats to their lives and autonomy. \u201cA transphobic world tries to sweep all of the gender-trash into the same waste bin, regardless of how we might distinguish ourselves from one another,\u201d Stryker writes. \u201cI now see the people who frequented Casa Susanna as, if not exactly my sisters, then certainly my ancestors, comrades, and beloved kin.\u201d \u2014LA<\/em><\/p>\nBuy on Bookshop | Thames & Hudson, May 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects<\/em>, edited by David Evans Frantz, Christina Linden, and Chris E. Vargas<\/h4>\n\n
Last month I attended an event that included a reading from Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects<\/em> by one of the book\u2019s editors, artist Chris E. Vargas. The book, which has also been presented in exhibition form, is co-published by the Museum of Trans Hirstory & Arts, a conceptual art project by Vargas. The book deserves to be on this list for its breadth and importance alone \u2014 as AX Mina wrote here in Hyperallergic<\/em>, \u201cIt\u2019s hard to overstate the importance of a book and exhibition series like Trans Hirstory<\/em> in a time of historic attacks against trans and LGBTQ+ rights both in the United States and around the world.\u201d It includes a kaleidoscopic array of ancient to modern objects, from icons like the first transgender pride flag to esoteric historical ephemera to contemporary artworks, with accompanying texts, attesting to the multitudes that compose trans identities. But as Vargas\u2019s reading brought the book\u2019s contents to life, it also underscored the need for a permanent Museum of Trans Hirstory & Arts, for everyone to visit \u2014 not just to shed light on unrecorded visual histories by trans creators but also because gender is lived by all of us one way or another. \u2014Natalie Haddad, Reviews Editor<\/em><\/p>\nBuy the Book | Hirmer Publishers, June 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
Suffrage Song: The Haunted History of Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the U.S.<\/em> by Caitlin Cass<\/h4>\n\n
Caitlin Cass\u2019s Suffrage Song: The Haunted History of Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the U.S.<\/em> stands out as both a piece of art and a comprehensive history of the women\u2019s suffrage movement. The book contains a range of illustration styles, fold-out pages, a subtle color-coding system, newspaper clippings, and elaborate hand-drawn typography. Using ghosts and haunting as a metaphor for the unrealized and ongoing quest for justice, Cass delves into the different eras of the movement. She explores the individual lives and stories of both well-known and lesser-known figures, including <\/strong>Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Ella Baker. Touching on the struggle for Native and Asian-American rights, Cass also features less celebrated activists such as Zitkala-\u0160a (Yankton Dakota) and Mabel Ping-Hua Lee. She examines the movement\u2019s internal struggles, highlighting tensions around race, class, and strategy, arguing that progress was neither linear nor universally agreed upon. Cass\u2019s intersectional approach exposes the racist compromises made by White suffragist leaders and in Hamer\u2019s words declares, \u201cNobody\u2019s free until everybody\u2019s free.\u201d \u2014JL<\/em><\/p>\nBuy on Bookshop | Fantagraphics Books, June 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
Heavyweight: A Family Story of the Holocaust, Empire, and Memory<\/em> by Solomon J. Brager<\/h4>\n\n
Solomon J. Brager\u2019s deeply moving graphic memoir Heavyweight: A Family Story of the Holocaust, Empire, and Memory<\/em> intertwines themes of identity, family history, colonialism, and genocide. Through meticulous research and interviews, they piece together the harrowing experiences of their family\u2019s survival \u2014 and loss \u2014 during the Holocaust. Acknowledging gaps and uncertainties, family legends are investigated, like the story that their great-grandfather, a boxing champion who fought Nazis in the streets, clobbered Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels and was summoned to court for it. Another recounts how their great-grandmother disguised as a nurse broke family members out of an internment camp in occupied France.\u00a0<\/p>\nThe family stories are woven together with historical reflections and glimpses into Brager\u2019s present-day life \u2014 scenes of obsessive researching, interactions with family, and tender moments with their partner. Noting that <\/strong>imperialism gave birth to fascism, Brager sets their family\u2019s history against the backdrop of German colonization, resource extraction, and genocide in Africa, taking into account concurrent racist attitudes in Germany. Critically examining <\/strong>their family\u2019s pre-Nazi wealth and later White privilege in the US, Brager wrestles with ideas of being both victimized and complicit in violence. The book poignantly opens and closes with Brager, also a boxer, sparring with the ghost of their great-grandfather.\u00a0\u2014JL<\/em><\/p>\nBuy on Bookshop | William Morrow & Company, June 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin: A Study of Authenticity and the Art Market<\/em> by Stephanie A. Brown<\/h4>\n\n
As the author myself, I know what it is like to pull at a thread. I\u2019ve spent almost four years looking at a sliver of the life of spy and art historian Rose Valland for my forthcoming book, The Art Spy<\/em>. When I came across The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin<\/em>, a book about a single painting, I knew what it took for author Stephanie Brown, an assistant program director in museum studies at Johns Hopkins University, to unravel its fascinating story. In the book, the reader is taken on an adventure that begins the moment the painting \u201cFlowers and Fruit\u201d leaves Paul Gauguin\u2019s hands in 1889. We learn how a well-known work of art, by an artist who never knew fame in his lifetime, can slide in and out of authenticity, and even be deemed lost when it never was. By diving deep into one painting, Brown reveals the contradictions and idiosyncrasies of the art world, and asks a fundamental question: What does authenticity mean in art, and who gets to define it? \u2014MY<\/em><\/p>\nRead the Review | Buy the Book | Rowman & Littlefield, July 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property<\/em> by Eunsong Kim<\/h4>\n\n
Eunsong Kim\u2019s The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property<\/em> is sure to upset the academic priesthood of conceptual art, among whom the holy saint of Marcel Duchamp is the pinnacle of any canon. But her book goes far beyond that to explain how it isn\u2019t only historical museums that are problematic. Modern and contemporary museums and various art institutions have their own issues as they parrot managerial concepts and reproduce their patron class for a public that might not understand the subtext. After reading this book, you might wonder if artists and curators deserve better in the venues that showcase their work. Perhaps Kim\u2019s text will ignite some of the much-needed change, but only if art people are ready to really look in the mirror and figure out what toxic systems we\u2019re inadvertently reproducing, sometimes mindlessly, and how we can improve. Check out my podcast with the author if you need more convincing. \u2014HV<\/em><\/p>\nBuy the Book | Duke University Press, August 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
Fifteen Colonial Thefts: A Guide to Looted African Heritage in Museums<\/em> by Sela K. Adjei and Yann Legall<\/h4>\n\n
Colonial museums are all alike; each community whose culture was stolen mourns and fights in its own way. Fifteen Colonial Thefts<\/em>, a collection of simultaneously heartbreaking and fiercely inspiring narratives, proves that repatriation of heritage in Africa goes far beyond the Benin Bronzes and other headline cases. The point of the book is not to multiply miseries, but to celebrate agency. The contributors explain the social roles once played by these stolen \u201cbelongings\u201d (a descriptor which contributors Goodwin Gwasira and Priya Basil propose using instead of the insufficient term \u201cobjects\u201d) before their taking and then describe the transformations possible once they\u2019re sprung from their display case or, more often, storeroom imprisonment. The book becomes a joyful conspiracy between African, European, and American provenance researchers, historians, artists, performers, and community members, all plotting together for the future. Even the contributors\u2019 bios fizz with possibilities, like that of the artist and scholar Fogha Mc Cornilius Refem (aka Wan wo Layir), who says he was the first-ever recipient of \u201cthe official and prestigious ban\u201d from Berlin\u2019s controversial new African art museum, the Humboldt Forum. May we all aspire to be so discomfiting. \u2014Erin L. Thompson<\/em><\/p>\nBuy on Bookshop | Pluto Press, August 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue<\/em> by Ginger Dunnill and Josie Lopez<\/h4>\n\n
A book about 10 years of a podcast that uses a long-form interview format might bring to mind lengthy transcripts, show notes, or other semi-boring documentary-style attempts to capture the original \u2014 if not spontaneous \u2014 energy of conversations played out over time. But Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue <\/em>disrupts those expectations, as does the aim of the Broken Boxes Podcast itself \u2014 and, arguably, any significant artwork. This standalone publication accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Albuquerque Museum in New Mexico, curated by Ginger Dunnill and Josie Lopez, and offers readers a generous selection of images and personal accounts from artists who have participated in the podcast, which Dunnill launched in 2014. Dunnill\u2019s creative spirit is evident throughout the book, revealed through her commitment to experimenting with a medium in service of transmitting contemporary artists\u2019 ideas and voices on topics such as decolonization, Indigenous sovereignty, the commercial art market, friendship, mental health, academia, and more (side note: For readers who prefer conventional, homogenous graphic design, this book will be a disruption in that realm as well). \u2014NZ<\/em><\/p>\nBuy on Bookshop | University of New Mexico Press, August 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
Antinomies of a Color in Architecture and Art <\/em>by Mohsen Mostafavi and Max Raphael<\/h4>\n\n
Black is not really a color, the righteous physicist says. It is simply the absence of light. But for James Baldwin, this never made sense; he once described black in an essay: \u201cThe light is trapped in it and struggles upward, rather like that grass pushing upward through the cement.\u201d The most basic yet perplexing of artistic elements receives a dedicated dissection this year with The Color Black: Antinomies of a Color in Architecture and Art<\/em>. Mohsen Mostafavi, a Harvard design professor, maps a history of theory and visual narrative through an impressive inventory of examples, from the work of Theaster Gates to Kara Walker and Georgia O\u2019Keefe; from Derek Jarman\u2019s Prospect Cottage in the English countryside to the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Abetted by a rich philosophy courtesy of German Marxist art historian Max Raphael, translated here into English for the first time, The Color Black <\/em>shifts our perception of that which we take for granted. All instances of blackness start to seem, as Baldwin suggested, like miraculous feats of nature. \u2014Greta Rainbow<\/em><\/p>\nBuy the Book | MACK, August 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America<\/em> by Sarah Lewis<\/h4>\n\n
Though not what springs to mind as an \u201cart book\u201d per se \u2014 and perhaps because of this \u2014 curator and scholar Sarah Lewis\u2019s The Unseen Truth<\/em> captures a cross-section of issues that are central to art history and criticism: race, sight, and narrative. Homing in on the 19th-century Caucasus War as a turning point in how Americans have come to understand the term \u201cCaucasian,\u201d Lewis mines a web of pop culture, media and messaging, photography, visual art, and political power that reshaped whiteness and racism. From the \u201cracial detailing\u201d practices that bake racism into the everyday to the fiction sharpened by then-President Woodrow Wilson\u2019s administration, this thorough study is one you should consume in pieces. I recommend absorbing a chunk, putting the book down, and keeping it in your mind as you move about your daily life \u2014 wandering through museums, commuting, reading literature. Lewis\u2019s attention to vision as \u201cnever purely a retinal act\u201d will change the way you see. \u2014LA<\/em><\/p>\nBuy on Bookshop | Harvard University Press, September 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority<\/em> by Anne Anlin Cheng<\/h4>\n\n
\u201cHow is it that a figure so encrusted with racist and sexist meaning, so ubiquitously deployed to this day and so readily recognized as a symptom, should at the same time be a theoretical black hole, a residue of critical fatigue?\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s scholar Anne Anlin Cheng writing on the \u201cyellow woman\u201d in Ornamentalism<\/em> <\/em>(2018), basically the Bible for a specific kind of Asian-American theory nerd, like me. But as opposed to the \u00fcber-confident, almost sparking kineticism of her voice in such academic works, the narration in Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority<\/em> is uncertain and wobbly. For fair reason: As Cheng wrote the book, she was coping with cancer, COVID-19 had just made landfall, and her mother was losing her mind. \u201cAll my usual resources \u2014 my intellectual work, my personal faith in justice and self-determinism, my sense of self-mastery \u2014 crashed around me, inadequate to the forces hitting me,\u201d she writes in the introduction. \u201cThese essays are a way back to myself, or, more accurately, to arrive at a self that I have yet to fully own.\u201d<\/p>\nThere\u2019s a certain sense of whatever the intellectual equivalent of body horror is to watching a mind you admire so greatly scramble, suffer, and sometimes, fall short in that attempt to claw back into herself. But it\u2019s affecting and charming for that quality, too. We all know artists who seem to have found the winning formula in their work and subsequently forgot what it meant to keep up the effort. Not Cheng. This essay collection returns to the form\u2019s roots in Montaigne \u2014 the French essayer<\/em>: to try. \u2014Lisa Yin Zhang, Associate Editor<\/em><\/p>\nBuy on Bookshop | Pantheon Books, September 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation<\/em>, edited by Alexis Bard Johnson and Kelly Filreis<\/h4>\n\n
Wrapped in luxe maroon cloth and stamped golden cover art, Sci-fi, Magick, Queer LA: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation <\/em>as an object is as sumptuous and sensual as its contents. The catalog compiles essays and images spanning the development of a remarkable social milieu in 1930s\u2013\u201960s Los Angeles. From avante-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger to historian Jim Kepner to writer Edythe D. Eyde (also known as Lisa Ben and Tigrina The Devil Doll), the book documents a burgeoning community centered around a love for science fiction and occultism. Its contributors elucidate a special moment in LA history when these movements offered means of escapism for midcentury queer people dreaming of other realities. Whereas gay bars were subject to police raids, sci-fi and occult collectives operated mostly under the radar, often gestating an unexpected space for queer connectivity.<\/p>\nIts pages are decorated with beautifully reproduced images from the exhibition \u2014 erotic and fantastical drawings, images of early cosplay, film stills, ephemera from the foundational ONE Archives, and more. The exhibition at the USC Fisher Museum of Art <\/strong>is part of Pacific Standard Time\u2018s Art and Science Collide <\/em>initiative and continues through March 15 of next year, but the book proves a beautiful standalone resource, replete with luxe two-page spreads and essays decorated with jewel-tone inks. \u2014Jasmine Weber<\/em><\/p>\nBuy on Bookshop | Inventory Press & ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, October 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
Grime, Glitter, and Glass: The Body and the Sonic in Contemporary Black Art<\/em> by Nikki A. Greene<\/h4>\n\n
Nikki A. Greene\u2019s Grime, Glitter, and Glass <\/em>is a captivating examination of artwork by Ren\u00e9e Stout, Radcliffe Bailey, Mar\u00eda Magdalena Campos-Pons, and others. Greene introduces the concept of \u201cvisual aesthetic musicality\u201d to reckon with the powerful interplay between Black art and Black music. Her analysis encourages further exploration of the sonic elements of contemporary Black art, from Bailey\u2019s \u201csoundscapes\u201d and Campos-Pons\u2019s live performance practice to the \u201cfeminist funk power\u201d of Stout and late musician Betty Davis. Greene\u2019s voice as a remarkable scholar and self-proclaimed pseudo-musician is potent: \u201cI invite readers to follow my remix of the history of art since I play new chords within a discipline that has traditionally not included poor Black girls like me,\u201d she writes in a prelude titled \u201cThe Cadences of Black Art.\u201d Grime, Glitter, and Glass <\/em>is a must-read that is as delightful and prismatic as its magnificent title.\u00a0\u2014Alexandra M. Thomas<\/em><\/p>\nRead the Review by Nereya Otieno | Buy on Bookshop | Duke University Press, October 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
Hieronymus Bosch & the Other Renaissance<\/em> by Bernard Aikema and Fernando Checa Cremades<\/h4>\n\n
There is a certain set of presuppositions that people bring to the idea of the \u201cRenaissance\u201d; that this was a period marked by learning and light, illumination and renewal. That which is strange, eccentric, or disturbing is thus relegated to a Medieval past, but the weird can often be the most illuminating creative force. University of Verona art history professor Bernard Aikema and Fernando Checa Cremades, the former director of Madrid\u2019s storied Prado Museum, reevaluate how we define Renaissance art in this ingenious collection from Cernunnos which focuses on the Flemish fabulist Hieronymus Bosch, but then expands outward. By recontextualizing the Renaissance in downright gothic terms, Bosch becomes the primogeniture of an alternative school of the period that is marked by the monstrous as much as the humanistic. Aikema and Cremades\u2019s argument isn\u2019t a boring rehash of the Northern versus the Italian Renaissance debate. This alternative school isn\u2019t marked by geography as much as it is by perspective, so that Giuseppe Arcimboldo joins Netherlandish counterparts like Pieter Brueghel in their turn towards the bizarre. An illuminating and essential collaborative study that\u2019s lushly illustrated. \u2014ES<\/em><\/p>\nBuy on Bookshop | Cernunnos, October 2024<\/p>\n
\n
\n
Ballroom Marfa: The First Twenty Years<\/em>, edited by Virginia Lebermann, Fairfax Dorn, and Vance Knowles<\/h4>\n\n
In the 1970s, Minimalist artist Donald Judd drew an isolated and tiny town in West Texas into conversation with the wider art world. Since then, Marfa has become an art mecca \u2013 and Ballroom Marfa, a free, contemporary art space founded in 2003 by Virginia Lebermann and Fairfax Dorn, has been one of its standard-bearers. Ballroom Marfa: The First Twenty Years<\/em> takes us into the Chihuahuan Desert for a multifold view of one of the most remote international art destinations, collecting images, writing, and other ephemera from two decades of art and performance facilitated by the center. \u201cIt was like going to a cult city,\u201d writes John Waters, who executed one of the first activations at the art center, with a performance in 2004. Artist Mel Chin, who held his \u201cFundred Dollar Bill Project\u201d there in 2010, reflects, \u201cBeing from Texas, it is always a joy to see other parts of the state \u2026 it just opened up this part of Texas that I had not frequented.\u201d One of the best parts of the book is the mass of personal recollections by participating artists and performers, all of whom convey the deep effects of the land, Judd\u2019s legacy, and the opportunities the unlikely space afforded them in their own words. A thorough and fascinating survey of an unusual relationship between art, place, and people, Ballroom Marfa<\/em> is the next best thing for those of us unable to jaunt through the wilds of West Texas. \u2014