Amid the devastation, delight, and general sense of cognitive dissonance that suffused this year, the best way for many of us to digest and make sense of the present is to sink deeply into books probing art’s past and future. Catalogues on artists from Nan Goldin to Gwen John, feminist writings on artist-parents and the many meanings of the monstrous, modern art’s overlooked religious and spiritual influences, and a host of other excellent publications provided us moments of revelation, comfort, and rousing awakening. In no particular order, our editors and writers offer you the top 20 art books from the past year. —Lakshmi Rivera Amin, editorial coordinator
Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe
We all know Christina Sharpe is one of those rare academics who tackles her subjects with true literary skill, so I was curious about her newest book that compiles short reflections, thoughts, and insights into a collection of 249 “notes.” Sometimes these passages read like social media posts, other times like very short stories. This is the kind of book that pokes and prods you into considering thoughts that are often floating in our minds and bodies and need to be given form — one of Sharpe’s talents. I do find the way the images are laid out a little awkward, but regardless, this is the type of book I’ll place by a reading chair, knowing it could inspire new thoughts by exploring the honest musings of someone who thinks deeply about the world around them. As she explains in note 242, “I write these ordinary things to detail the sonic and haptic vocabularies of living life under these brutal regimes.” I had to pause for a few minutes after reading that. —Hrag Vartanian, “10 Art Books We’re Reading This November“
Buy on Bookshop | Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 2023
Marina Abramović: A Visual Biography by Marina Abramović and Katya Tylevich
The queen of contemporary performance art has produced an impressive visual biography harnessing that strange and galvanizing energy between the personal and systemic that her best art captures and distills. Archival images are accompanied by quotes, phrases, and diaristic entries to tell the story of an unapologetically individualistic artist.
Co-created with Katya Tylevich, this volume is probably one of the easiest-to-read coffee table books I’ve ever held, while the weight and size of the book itself echo the artist’s desire to take up space. Sure, there are parts of the tale that made me think, “maybe you should talk to someone about that,” but then again, she’s typical of many artists of her generation who used art as a way to figure out how to exist in a world that hadn’t yet figured out how to financialize the crap out of contemporary art. The one major downside? It’s such a visual biography that I suspect there won’t be an audiobook version coming out any time soon. —HV
Buy on Bookshop | Laurence King, November 2023
Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island
Cuban-American artist, writer, and activist Coco Fusco is an inveterate truth-teller and a longtime fighter for the rights of the marginalized, persecuted, and dispossessed. She is the enemy of the dictatorial state and the morally rotten art establishment. This beautiful book, released in conjunction with the opening of Fusco’s namesake exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin earlier this year, looks back at her influential work, including many of her memorable performances, in the three decades since she emerged on the scene in the 1990s. It’s an unfinished story as Fusco is still making work and publishing words that bring deep discomfort to the powers to be. —Hakim Bishara, “10 Art Books to Add to Your Shelf This December“
Buy on Bookshop | Thames & Hudson, October 2023
Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well
In an art world full of feckless, two-faced opportunists, Nan Goldin stands out as an artist who doesn’t hesitate to put herself on the line for a just cause. Look at how she weaned major museums off the Sackler family’s dirty money with her opioid advocacy group PAIN. That’s just one of the struggles she waged throughout her life. She’s taken many hits along the way — her youth and early life marked by sexual and emotional cruelty — but she also gained myriad golden memories, many of which she captured with her camera and organized into slideshows and films. Accompanying a namesake traveling show organized by Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, this book gives you a glimpse into the work and life of this once-in-a-generation artist. Here’s the best part of Goldin’s story: She survived. —HB, “10 Art Books We’re Reading This November“
Buy on Bookshop | Steidl and Moderna Museet, February 2023
An Indigenous Present
A project conceived by Jeffrey Gibson, nearly 20 years in the making, An Indigenous Present celebrates the work of artists working across photography, weaving, fashion design, choreography, performance, writing, and more, each of whom has creatively impacted Gibson in one way or another. The book prioritizes artists’ works and voices, especially when compared to other publications that rely heavily on academic essays to establish credibility, and the nonlinear format highlights the fluid, enduring nature of creative practice. Especially compelling is its exploration of artists working with music and sound, including Laura Ortman and Raven Chacon, and those forging ahead in the realm of technology and digital tools including AI, such as Kite and Dylan McLaughlin. The book defied my expectations. It’s truly a gift, showing how these Indigenous artists are setting the standards for creative realms that are yet to be defined, while also carrying their traditions and communities forward. —Nancy Zastudil
Buy on Bookshop | DelMonico Books and Big NDN Press, August 2023
Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex by Sophia Giovannitti
Artist Sophia Giovannitti’s perspicacious book wends its way through her personal experiences, art history, and legal frameworks to trace the parallels between art and sex work. Both, she writes, can be understood in the context of the market, yet must not be solely examined as such. Particularly against the backdrop of sex workers’ criminalization due to legislation such as SESTA and FOSTA, Giovannitti’s candid writing and limpid examination of the two fields challenge the way we think about them, inspiring new understandings in the process. —LA
Buy on Bookshop | Verso Books, May 2023
Wendy Red Star: Bíilukaa
In a new tome titled after a word meaning “our side,” referring to how Apsáalooke people speak of themselves, artist Wendy Red Star highlights the links between her vast body of work and familial history. The book includes interviews she conducted with her parents, her sister, and Indigenous art curators Annika Johnson and Adriana Greci Green. The layered transcripts and full-page spreads of her artwork — from childhood drawings to works based on Apsáalooke cultural objects held in collections — bring each other to life, rendering her already personal work all the more powerful. —LA, “14 Art Books and Catalogues We’re Reading This Month“
Buy on Bookshop | Radius Books, April 2023
How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers by Hettie Judah
As some spheres of the art world catch up on the fact that motherhood and artmaking are not mutually exclusive, this slender but informative text on the failure of institutions, residencies, and galleries to provide proper support to artists who choose to become parents lays bare the progress we have yet to make. As Debra Brehmer writes, critic Hettie Judah “provides context on the history of sexism in the art world and examples of possible solutions to abide this dilemma.” Her interviews with artists and discussion of new programs creating sustainable ways for them to both make work and parent serve as a crucial record for the future that artist-parents are working to build. —LA
Read the Review | Buy on Bookshop | Lund Humphries, January 2023
When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting
When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting is a must-read catalogue that accompanies the landmark, internationally touring exhibition curated by Koyo Kouoh and Tandazani Dhlakama at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art in Cape Town, South Africa. The sections of the book are arranged as powerful meditations on themes from the exhibition — the everyday, joy and revelry, repose, sensuality, spirituality, and triumph and emancipation. Each contribution from the curators and invited authors historicizes and poetically interprets the aesthetics and politics of Black figural paintings in Africa and its global diaspora. As opposed to solely offering a didactic overview of the exhibition, the book provides rich theoretical engagement with Blackness and figural representation from transnational and transhistorical perspectives. Such a text is necessary to unpack our current moment, a time when African and African diasporic portraiture is prolific and Black artists are consistently expanding the medium. —Alexandra M. Thomas, “11 Art Books to Add to Your Reading List This Summer“
Buy on Bookshop | Thames & Hudson, March 2023
Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris by Alicia Foster
Gwen John is one of the most important British painters of the early 20th century. Yet, until recently, she was largely relegated to the margins of canonical art history. She was overshadowed by the men in her orbit — brother Augustus John and lover Auguste Rodin — and dismissed as an unambitious recluse during her lifetime, but since her death in 1939, her significance has slowly come to light. CuratorAlicia Foster’s illustrated biography of John (published alongside an exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery) frames the artist as an intrepid, bohemian figure who defied the norms of her time, with a vibrant social sphere and complex interior life that both found their way into her work. After moving to Paris in 1904 with the goal of becoming a great artist, John found her signature focus: painting anonymous, solitary women in muted interiors. She went on to create dozens of indelible portraits, always of women (and occasionally of cats), many of them featured in this biography. Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris honors its subject’s life and secures her legacy — a truly remarkable book. —Sophia Stewart
Buy on Bookshop | Thames & Hudson, July 2023
Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin
Associating monsters and women, thanks to myths aplenty and sexism in general, is as old as patriarchy itself. But when Jenny Offill released her 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation, her use of the term “art monster,” specifically as it relates to women artists, struck a new chord, spawning a rich exploration and reclamation of its layered meanings. In Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, Elkin takes a poetic approach as she considers this concept in the context of feminist art and literature. She grounds her study in the symbolic duality of the forward-slash (/), which she uses to both link and distinguish her musings. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Virginia Woolf, Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann, Sutapa Biswas, and a host of other artists with feminist perspectives on the monstrous and disobedient are threaded together and put under Elkin’s magnifying glass. Straddling poetry and creative nonfiction, she invites us as readers to grapple with, and even nurture, the monsters within. —LA, “10 Art Books We’re Reading This November“
Buy on Bookshop | Farrar, Straus and Giroux, November 2023
Sophie Calle (Photofile)
In art as in life, our true heroes are those who devote themselves entirely to an idea, risky as it might be. Sophie Calle belongs to that category of people. She will go wherever a project takes her, often forfeiting autonomy and control in the process. She famously shadowed a man from Paris and all the way to Venice, asked her mother to hire a private detective to follow her, worked as a hotel maid to snoop through guests’ belongings, and opened her bed to strangers. She tells us the stories behind these works and others in this precious little book, combined with photographs, personal reflections, and anecdotes. However, I could’ve gone without art historian Clément Chéroux’s overly psychoanalytical introduction to the book, which imposes too much theory on an artist who has mastered the skill of letting go. —HB, “11 Art Books to Add to Your Reading List This Summer“
Buy on Bookshop | Thames & Hudson, February 2023
Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth-Century American Artists and Religion by Erika Doss
What caused Jackson Pollock’s breakthrough moment that led to his iconic drip paintings? In her new book Spiritual Moderns, Erika Doss offers an answer that may come as a surprise. For Pollock, it wasn’t just putting down the bottle and picking up a stick dripping with paint, as Hollywood and mainstream narratives suggest. It was instead the close observation of queer mystical painter Mark Tobey’s “white writing” paintings that were inspired by Baháʼí calligraphy. The long-standing anti-religious bias in modern art glosses over how the frenetic calligraphy of the Baháʼí faith spread from Tobey to Pollock. Doss’s book demonstrates that religion and mysticism have influenced modern art far more than the presentation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City or college art history courses let on. With additional case studies on Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell, and Agnes Pelton, Doss unearths the spiritual and religious influences that earlier generations buried. —Daniel Larkin
Read the Review | Buy on Bookshop | University of Chicago Press, May 2023
Pacita Abad
Born in 1946 in Basco, Filipina artist Pacita Abad charted an unusual course through life from the beginning. Raised in a political family that was threatened by the rise of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Abad began studying law but was diverted into the arts during a move to San Francisco in 1971, where she witnessed the predominant counter-culture movement of the times. Abad then hitchhiked with her life partner Jack Garrity across Asia in 1973, traveling overland from Turkey to the Philippines through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. It was during this yearlong journey that Abad began to collect and wear traditional fabrics and jewelry and absorb the techniques and aesthetics that would ultimately shape her work for decades to come. Abad is perhaps best known for her trapunto technique, inspired by the Italian embroidery method, but this career-spanning publication, which accompanies the Pacita Abad exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, brings every aspect of the artist’s colorful and multifaceted life and art into view. Cataloguing more than 100 works and featuring oral histories from Abad’s closest interlocutors, the book extensively details the beautiful visual practice of an artist who was remarkably unbounded in lifestyle, medium, vision, and process. —Sarah Rose Sharp
Read the Review | Buy on Bookshop | Walker Art Center, June 2023
This Is Not a Gun
Printed in conjunction with artist Cara Levine’s exhibition To Survive I Need You to Survive at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, This Is Not a Gun uses form and content to powerfully address police violence and gun control in the United States. Levine writes that the book, along with the eponymous long-term multidisciplinary project, “seeks to move beyond the realms of mere empathy or sympathy and into deeply embodied self-aware conversations and actions about how race, gender, ability, and class shape our relationships to our bodies and the objects we interface with.” What follows is over 50 entries from artists, writers, activists, and healers in creative response to 44 objects, each of which police officers say they misidentified as a gun when they shot an unarmed civilian, often fatally. Levine encouraged contributors to choose an object that resonated with them. As a reader, I approached the content in the same manner, beginning with tinfoil, cane, sub sandwich, underwear, and hands — each inherently harmless yet circumstantially interpreted as a threat. Designed as a narrow, elongated rectangular object, the book has done more to shape my awareness of policing and bias — whether toward race, gender, ability, class, or an intersection of these identities — than any statistical report or DEIA training. —NZ
Buy the Book | For the Birds Trapped in Airports and Sming Sming Books, February 2023
Trailblazing Women Printmakers: Virginia Lee Burton Demetrios and the Folly Cove Designers by Elena M. Sarni
Who would’ve guessed that one of America’s longest-running artist guilds was a group of women printmakers in a small cove along the Massachusetts shoreline? Working upstream against the growing, male-dominated Abstract Expressionist movement, the Folly Cove Designers collective was encouraged to draw from the world around them — meaning that their designs reflect a distinct moment of their seaside hamlet in mid-century Gloucester. Scholar and curator Elena M. Sarni’s book is the masterful culmination of 13 years of archival work, during which she unearthed many Folly Cove designs that haven’t been seen for decades. This first-ever history of these brilliant women will be critical for lovers of ornament, printmaking, mid-century modern design, women’s art history, WPA-era craft, and art pedagogy alike. —Isabella Segalovich
Buy on Bookshop | Princeton Architectural Press, August 2023
Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding
I hadn’t yet made it down to see Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding at the New Mexico State University Museum by the end of this year, but the publication that accompanies the traveling retrospective (originating at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego) proved worth revisiting over and over. Part career survey and part visual examination of Álvarez Muñoz’s Enlightenment series, the publication’s design mirrors the artist’s conceptual and narrative practice of engaging text and images. Here, two books are connected by a shared cover, eschewing distinct borders and enabling a slippage of one form into the other, and a generous selection of images provides for an intimate reading. Co-curator Kate Green bookends, as it were, her essay “Un Puro Cuento” with recountings of Álvarez Muñoz’s 1981 and 1992 performative lectures titled Petrocuatl. The essay also traces the artist’s experiences in fashion illustration and advertising to her conceptual art and institutional critique, all the while foregrounding her interest in personal narrative. An exchange between Álvarez Muñoz and Roberto Tejada and essays by Josh T. Franco and Isabel Casso each delve further into the artist’s experiences, influences, and collaborations. —NZ
Buy on Bookshop or shopmcasd.com | Radius Books and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, November 2023
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer
How do you feel when you discover that an artist or author you love has done or said things you abhor? Does creative genius permit, even demand, a certain selfishness on the part of artists and audiences alike? What do we owe the people whom predators victimize in creating masterpieces that shape our lives, and do we partake in their monstrosity when we admire their work or embark on creative careers of our own? If you’ve wrestled with any of these questions, then Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma is for you. While Dederer does not break new ethical ground or offer general prescriptions, she delivers a brutally honest, compulsively readable biographical account of her struggle with these questions as they’ve informed her life and career — of interest to any if not all of us invested in the arts. —Nandini Pandey
Read the Review | Buy on Bookshop | Knopf, April 2023
The Tarot of Leonora Carrington
This second edition of The Tarot of Leonora Carrington, edited by Susan Aberth and Tere Arcq, comes courtesy of the Spanish publisher Editorial RM, with a gold cover of The Magician and The High Priestess, two cards from the surrealist artist’s gorgeous tarot deck. The authors’ scholarship gets more breadth in this new iteration, including a close review of each card and a deep look into how tarotic symbols and imagery appeared throughout Carrington’s oeuvre. We also learn more about the artist’s explorations of feminist spirituality and the alchemical possibilities of blending gender expressions — what we might today call nonbinary or genderqueer identity. It’s essential reading for surrealists and tarot practitioners alike. —AX Mina
Read the Review | Buy on Bookshop | Rm, December 2022
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein
Definitely in the running as the book of the year, Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger might not be a volume you were expecting to see on this list, but I think it is an important read for anyone into art and culture. The double, or doppelganger, is a prevalent theme in contemporary art. Klein explores the theme beautifully and poignantly, while also grappling with the practical reality that she keeps getting mixed up with Naomi Wolf, whom she describes as another White Jewish “big idea books” author with long brown hair. While other, weaker authors may have shunned the case of mistaken identity, Klein leans into it and uses this real-life experience as a way to examine the use of doppelgangers in everything from tech to literature, notably Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock (1993) — a favorite section of the book.
Wolf’s own trajectory is part of the appeal of this story, notably because the former liberal intellectual darling who helped Al Gore during his 2000 Presidential bid quickly became a fixture of right-wing conspiracy podcasts in recent years, after a public fall from grace (she is a regular on a podcast hosted by former Trump advisor Steve Bannon.) Klein takes a deep dive into this alternative mediascape into which Wolf has immersed herself, offering a clear perspective on this skewed world. The book truly shines when the author steps back to make unexpected connections: her section on the doubling related to Israel, Zionism, and Palestine is a timely must-read. What you walk away with is the sense that we’re all being doubled in many ways, and while we all may have our own personal experiences (I’ll never forget the time someone with my same name unfriended me on Facebook,) we may have to come to terms with the fact that our online lives already function as doubles. —HV
Buy on Bookshop | Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2023
