The 30 Best Art Books of 2024

Africa and Byzantium, edited by Andrea Myers Achi

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 “Byzantine Empire,” 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 “Bright as the Sun: Africa After Byzantium,” which looks at how Orthodox Christian communities in Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia thrived in their regions. Another section, “Legacies: Black Byzantium,” 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’s current exhibition on Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now, which continues through February 17, 2025. —Sarah E. Bond

Buy on Bookshop | Metropolitan Museum of Art, November 2023

Had to Be There: A Visual History of the Explosive Pittsburgh Underground, 1979-1994 by Erik Bauer

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’s vibrant music scene hasn’t 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. 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’s 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’s 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. —Ed Simon

Buy the Book | Mind Cure Records, January 2024

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

This 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’re 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’s worth the wait. —Hrag Vartanian, Editor-in-Chief

Buy on Bookshop | Knopf, January 2024

Raven Chacon: A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak, edited by Alison Coplan, Katya Garcia-Anton, and Stefanie Hessler

Sometimes a book about an artist and their work strikes a chord. So it was for me with Raven Chacon: A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak. Considering Chacon’s 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’Souza, Sámi filmmaker and reindeer herder Marja Bål Nango, poet Sigbjørn Skåden, curator Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation), and others — plus a lexicon of Chacon’s musical notations — this book resonates with an energy similar to that of the Diné artist’s 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/Sápmi, the monograph guides readers through the sites and sounds of Chacon’s career, from 1990 to 2023, and draws connections between the survivance of Navajo and Sámi peoples who share Indigenous histories that colonialism has attempted to annihilate. The book acts much like one of Chacon’s scores, offering a structure for improvisation. Begin anywhere. Correction: Begin where you are. —Nancy Zastudil

Buy on Bookshop | Swiss Institute and Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, February 2024

With Darkness Came Stars by Audrey Flack

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 “The Ecstacy of Saint Teresa” on view in a show featuring alums of the school. As I quickly discovered, Flack’s work is an antidote to disillusionment of any kind — personal, artistic, political — 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’s 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.

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 sings with Flack’s indefatigable creative spirit, one that pushed her to constantly learn and evolve. —LA

Buy on Bookshop | Penn State University Press, March 2024

Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Natalie Dykstra

Boston’s 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’art. Then, of course, there’s 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 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 — wealth, charm, intelligence, and style — to leave an undeniable cultural legacy. From the first pages of Chasing Beauty, 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, “In her own time and now, Isabella Stewart Gardner seems like a bright sun — we can look around her but not directly at her. She radiates but confuses.” Chasing Beauty 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 “all-consuming pursuit for beauty” that became her life’s work. —Michelle Young

Read the Review by Lauren Moya Ford | Buy on Bookshop | Mariner Books, March 2024

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie

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, 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’t appear to be liked by many in his field, and clearly beyond. But it doesn’t 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. —HV

Buy on Bookshop | Random House, April 2024

Hilary Harkness: Everything For You

The phantasmagorias represented in Hilary Harkness’s monograph Everything for You 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’s 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–12 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’s body of work. —Alexis Clements

Read the Review | Buy on Bookshop | Black Dog Press, June 2024

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbooks Got Wrong by Nate Powell and James Loewen

Nate Powell’s timely Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbooks Got Wrong adapts James Loewen’s 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’s 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, “the American Century,” the Civil Rights Era, the Vietnam War, 9/11, and the Iraq War. By 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 “who controls the present controls the past,” and that those in power shape the way history is written and taught. Lies My Teacher Told Me is a particularly essential book in this time of Trump’s reascendancy, when education — including art historical pedagogy — is threatened by the far right and Project 2025. —Jesse Lambert

Buy on Bookshop | New Press, April 2024

Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum, edited by Dare Turner and Leila Grothe

There are many reasons to celebrate this catalog, but Dare Turner’s story of her great-uncle Harry “Timm” Williams alone is worth a read — I’m 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. —HV

Buy the Book | Baltimore Museum of Art, May 2024

Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959–1968, edited by Isabelle Bonnet and Sophie Hackett

Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959–1968 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’s the hundreds of illustrations and archival photographs that form the heart of this essay collection on what the late activist Kate Cummings called “another universe” in her 1992 memoir, quoted in this book. “After 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,” she continued.

Historian Susan Stryker’s introduction perhaps best frames the value of honoring the Casa Susanna community, particularly as trans people face increasing threats to their lives and autonomy. “A 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,” Stryker writes. “I now see the people who frequented Casa Susanna as, if not exactly my sisters, then certainly my ancestors, comrades, and beloved kin.” —LA

Buy on Bookshop | Thames & Hudson, May 2024

Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects, edited by David Evans Frantz, Christina Linden, and Chris E. Vargas

Last month I attended an event that included a reading from Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects by one of the book’s 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 — as AX Mina wrote here in Hyperallergic, “It’s hard to overstate the importance of a book and exhibition series like Trans Hirstory in a time of historic attacks against trans and LGBTQ+ rights both in the United States and around the world.” 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’s reading brought the book’s contents to life, it also underscored the need for a permanent Museum of Trans Hirstory & Arts, for everyone to visit — 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. —Natalie Haddad, Reviews Editor

Buy the Book | Hirmer Publishers, June 2024

Suffrage Song: The Haunted History of Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the U.S. by Caitlin Cass

Caitlin Cass’s Suffrage Song: The Haunted History of Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the U.S. stands out as both a piece of art and a comprehensive history of the women’s 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 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-Ša (Yankton Dakota) and Mabel Ping-Hua Lee. She examines the movement’s internal struggles, highlighting tensions around race, class, and strategy, arguing that progress was neither linear nor universally agreed upon. Cass’s intersectional approach exposes the racist compromises made by White suffragist leaders and in Hamer’s words declares, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” —JL

Buy on Bookshop | Fantagraphics Books, June 2024

Heavyweight: A Family Story of the Holocaust, Empire, and Memory by Solomon J. Brager

Solomon J. Brager’s deeply moving graphic memoir Heavyweight: A Family Story of the Holocaust, Empire, and Memory intertwines themes of identity, family history, colonialism, and genocide. Through meticulous research and interviews, they piece together the harrowing experiences of their family’s survival — and loss — 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. 

The family stories are woven together with historical reflections and glimpses into Brager’s present-day life — scenes of obsessive researching, interactions with family, and tender moments with their partner. Noting that imperialism gave birth to fascism, Brager sets their family’s history against the backdrop of German colonization, resource extraction, and genocide in Africa, taking into account concurrent racist attitudes in Germany. Critically examining their family’s 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. —JL

Buy on Bookshop | William Morrow & Company, June 2024

The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin: A Study of Authenticity and the Art Market by Stephanie A. Brown

As the author myself, I know what it is like to pull at a thread. I’ve 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. When I came across The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin, 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 “Flowers and Fruit” leaves Paul Gauguin’s 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? —MY

Read the Review | Buy the Book | Rowman & Littlefield, July 2024

The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property by Eunsong Kim

Eunsong Kim’s The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property 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’t 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’s 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’re inadvertently reproducing, sometimes mindlessly, and how we can improve. Check out my podcast with the author if you need more convincing. —HV

Buy the Book | Duke University Press, August 2024

Fifteen Colonial Thefts: A Guide to Looted African Heritage in Museums by Sela K. Adjei and Yann Legall

Colonial museums are all alike; each community whose culture was stolen mourns and fights in its own way. Fifteen Colonial Thefts, 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 “belongings” (a descriptor which contributors Goodwin Gwasira and Priya Basil propose using instead of the insufficient term “objects”) before their taking and then describe the transformations possible once they’re 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’ 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 “the official and prestigious ban” from Berlin’s controversial new African art museum, the Humboldt Forum. May we all aspire to be so discomfiting. —Erin L. Thompson

Buy on Bookshop | Pluto Press, August 2024

Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue by Ginger Dunnill and Josie Lopez

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 — if not spontaneous — energy of conversations played out over time. But Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue disrupts those expectations, as does the aim of the Broken Boxes Podcast itself — 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’s creative spirit is evident throughout the book, revealed through her commitment to experimenting with a medium in service of transmitting contemporary artists’ 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). —NZ

Buy on Bookshop | University of New Mexico Press, August 2024

Antinomies of a Color in Architecture and Art by Mohsen Mostafavi and Max Raphael

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: “The light is trapped in it and struggles upward, rather like that grass pushing upward through the cement.” 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. 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’Keefe; from Derek Jarman’s 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 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. —Greta Rainbow

Buy the Book | MACK, August 2024

The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America by Sarah Lewis

Though not what springs to mind as an “art book” per se — and perhaps because of this — curator and scholar Sarah Lewis’s The Unseen Truth 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 “Caucasian,” Lewis mines a web of pop culture, media and messaging, photography, visual art, and political power that reshaped whiteness and racism. From the “racial detailing” practices that bake racism into the everyday to the fiction sharpened by then-President Woodrow Wilson’s 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 — wandering through museums, commuting, reading literature. Lewis’s attention to vision as “never purely a retinal act” will change the way you see. —LA

Buy on Bookshop | Harvard University Press, September 2024

Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority by Anne Anlin Cheng

“How 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?”

That’s scholar Anne Anlin Cheng writing on the “yellow woman” in Ornamentalism (2018), basically the Bible for a specific kind of Asian-American theory nerd, like me. But as opposed to the über-confident, almost sparking kineticism of her voice in such academic works, the narration in Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority 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. “All my usual resources — my intellectual work, my personal faith in justice and self-determinism, my sense of self-mastery — crashed around me, inadequate to the forces hitting me,” she writes in the introduction. “These essays are a way back to myself, or, more accurately, to arrive at a self that I have yet to fully own.”

There’s 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’s 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’s roots in Montaigne — the French essayer: to try. —Lisa Yin Zhang, Associate Editor

Buy on Bookshop | Pantheon Books, September 2024

Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation, edited by Alexis Bard Johnson and Kelly Filreis

Wrapped in luxe maroon cloth and stamped golden cover art, Sci-fi, Magick, Queer LA: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation 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–’60s 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.

Its pages are decorated with beautifully reproduced images from the exhibition — 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 is part of Pacific Standard Time‘s Art and Science Collide 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. —Jasmine Weber

Buy on Bookshop | Inventory Press & ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, October 2024

Grime, Glitter, and Glass: The Body and the Sonic in Contemporary Black Art by Nikki A. Greene

Nikki A. Greene’s Grime, Glitter, and Glass is a captivating examination of artwork by Renée Stout, Radcliffe Bailey, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, and others. Greene introduces the concept of “visual aesthetic musicality” 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’s “soundscapes” and Campos-Pons’s live performance practice to the “feminist funk power” of Stout and late musician Betty Davis. Greene’s voice as a remarkable scholar and self-proclaimed pseudo-musician is potent: “I 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,” she writes in a prelude titled “The Cadences of Black Art.” Grime, Glitter, and Glass is a must-read that is as delightful and prismatic as its magnificent title. —Alexandra M. Thomas

Read the Review by Nereya Otieno | Buy on Bookshop | Duke University Press, October 2024

Hieronymus Bosch & the Other Renaissance by Bernard Aikema and Fernando Checa Cremades

There is a certain set of presuppositions that people bring to the idea of the “Renaissance”; 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’s 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’s argument isn’t a boring rehash of the Northern versus the Italian Renaissance debate. This alternative school isn’t 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’s lushly illustrated. —ES

Buy on Bookshop | Cernunnos, October 2024

Ballroom Marfa: The First Twenty Years, edited by Virginia Lebermann, Fairfax Dorn, and Vance Knowles

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 – 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 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. “It was like going to a cult city,” 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 “Fundred Dollar Bill Project” there in 2010, reflects, “Being from Texas, it is always a joy to see other parts of the state … it just opened up this part of Texas that I had not frequented.” 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’s 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 is the next best thing for those of us unable to jaunt through the wilds of West Texas. —Sarah Rose Sharp

Buy on Bookshop | Monacelli Press, October 2024

Korean Feminist Artists: Confront and Deconstruct by Kim Hong-Hee and Kim Hyesoon

This particular Venn diagram of Korean feminist artists produces 42 subjects, compiled by Dr. Kim Hong-hee (with a contribution from Kim Hyesoon) across 15 different themes — from “Body Art” to “Queer Politics” to “Ecofeminism” —with a further emphasis on essentialism or deconstructionism. In the first section, Kim offers the thematic guideline of “Femininity & Sexuality” and mirrors this with a pair of artists: the more established Yun Suknam, and the emerging Jang Pa. Yun’s enchanting figurative sculptures in painted wood and paper offer whimsical, representational takes on feminine identity, while Jang’s paintings are graphic, grotesque, and lush. Kim argues their differing approaches beyond the generation gap; Yun’s focus on the relationship-orientation of women, and Jang’s “gynocentric” approach show a social evolution in the “secret” life of women. Such rigorous exemplars and comparisons abound in every chapter, unpacking Korean social norms through the lens of several generations of feminist art. Korean Feminist Artists is not just a terrific primer for anyone hoping to wade into the waters of contemporary Korean art, but a fascinating form of wayfinding through waves of Korean society — feminist, artistic, and beyond. —SS

Buy on Bookshop | Phaidon Press, October 2024

Giant Robot: Thirty Years of Defining Asian American Pop Culture by Eric Nakamura

Founded as a magazine by publisher Eric Nakamura in 1994 in Southern California and co-edited by the late painter Martin Wong, Giant Robot was both disruptive to and representational of a diverse Asian diasporic experience. From humble beginnings, the magazine found a voracious audience and developed into a multifold entity including art galleries and exhibitions, as well as brick-and-mortar toy stores in New York, LA, and San Francisco. This new publication presents dozens of the most significant articles within the deeply influential magazine’s 68-issue run from its founding through 2011 — with topics ranging from manga and toys to the history of Japanese incarceration in the US, from skateboarder Peggy Oki to Cibo Matto, Slumdog Millionaire, and so much more — and features an updated addendum and commentary from an entire generation of culture-makers who cite Giant Robot’s influence in the formation of their own identity as Asian Americans. It’s a comprehensive tribute to a vanguard undertaking that moved the needle on Asian-American culture, comprising a boundless blender of food, art, music, travel, fashion, politics, and beyond. —SS

Buy on Bookshop | Drawn & Quarterly, October 2024

Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies, edited by Dalila Scruggs

Accompanying the exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum curated by Dalila Scruggs, this catalog surveys the life and work of the radical Black feminist artist and activist Elizabeth Catlett. Moving chronologically from her birth in Washington, DC, in 1915 to her Howard undergraduate years and early career in Chicago and New York City through to her ultimate exile in Mexico in the 1960s, the book underscores the inextricability of Catlett’s creative output from her leftist politics, and in particular her advocacy for Black and Mexican women. In these pages, you’ll find over 150 works spanning her nearly seven-decade career, including linocut prints, lithographs, terracotta sculptures, and murals, as well as insightful essays by editor Scruggs (recently named the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s inaugural African American art curator) and an assemblage of art historians and curators. To call Catlett a “trailblazer” feels cliched and insufficient, yet that’s precisely what she was: She melded art and activism, enacting her politics as an educator and organizer while establishing an iconography of justice as a sculptor and printmaker. At last, a visionary gets her due. —Sophia Stewart

Read the Review by Alexandra M. Thomas | Buy on Bookshop | University of Chicago Press

Seeing Baya: Portrait of an Algerian Artist in Paris by Alice Kaplan

Baya Mahieddine, the self-taught Algerian artist who enthralled the Paris art world in the 1940s, is often reduced to the men whom she inspired, among them Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. (The former, in fact, envied her seemingly boundless creativity.) But Alice Kaplan’s biography of painter and sculptor doesn’t let her backstory overshadow the merit of her work. Orphaned as a child and adopted by a French intellectual in Algiers who recognized the young girl’s creative gifts, Mahieddine was discovered at just 16 years old, making her debut at a 1947 art show in Paris whose catalog included a preface from none other than André Breton. Once Mahieddine returned to Algeria, her wunderkind status quickly faded, and with it her place in the annals of art history, but her work endures: her vital, vibrant gouache paintings — which featured bright colors and bold patterns and often took female figures and Algerian folk tales as their subjects — remain a marvel of outsider art, ripe for rediscovery. —SS

Buy on Bookshop | University of Chicago Press, October 2024

Diana Markosian: Father by Diana Markosian and Coline Aguettaz

In a small photo book, an artist goes searching for her father, a man whom she, her mother, and her brother left when she was only seven years old and without saying a proper goodbye. This intimate exploration includes photographs that mostly render the absences out of frame in a way that is as emotional as it is visual. While her father would also search for her and her sibling, she would eventually track him down. The heartbreaking story of loss, searching, and finding that which you might not understand is lovely. It reminds us that sometimes we cannot grasp something even when it’s right in front of us. —HV

Buy on Bookshop | Aperture, November 2024