Bold New Books in Art and Visual Culture from the MIT Press
From activist art and trans aesthetics to lowriders, global skateboarding culture, and Vilém Flusser’s prescient vision of the screen age.
"The books we publish at the MIT Press examine how art, architecture, and design impact our lives and influence our perception of the world. They probe visual and material culture —charting the power that runs through it — and refuse easy answers. By surfacing overlooked subjects, taking bold risks, and generating transformative knowledge, MIT Press books reveal how the environments and objects we shape, in turn, shape us."
—Victoria Hindley, Senior Acquisitions Editor, Art, Architecture, and Design
The Radical Unpresent
By Gregory Sholette
How contemporary artists and activists are navigating and resisting the collapse of historical time in our uncanny present.
"Greg has his finger on the pulse of radical art. He places this art in the context of history and is always looking at how the most challenging art of our time can be a bridge to a better future."
—Dread Scott, artist
"Greg Sholette has deepened and enlightened the dialogue around international activist art for decades. The Radical Unpresent is another intellectually passionate and original discourse on our current crises and how artists can intervene in even the most dominant contexts, jolting the way we see the world."
—Lucy R. Lippard, author of Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change
The Society of the Screen
By Martha Schwendener
How a lifelong engagement with experimental art informed the brilliant Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser’s early vision of a world dominated by glowing screens.
"Schwendener weaves together imagery, critique, and history… Society of the Screen is chockablock with many such fascinating images, all by artists who are rarely the usual suspects."
—The Village Voice
"Smartly illustrated and beautifully written, Martha Schwendener’s timely book provides a deep dive into the work of a thinker about images and visual information who has never seemed more relevant than right now.”
—Geoffrey Batchen, author of Negative/Positive: A History of Photography
Anarchitecture After Everything
By Jack Halberstam
A revolutionary way of seeing bodies and built environments that unites radical politics and trans aesthetics — from a leading author and queer theorist known for reframing many of the most pressing questions about counter-intuitive ways of being.
"A dazzling, groundbreaking series of meditations on the relationality of trans bodies and buildings.”
—Mabel O. Wilson, author of Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture
“[A] blazing manifesto”
—Claire Bishop, author of Artificial Hells and Disordered Attention
Shimmer
Edited by Mark W. Scala and Nora N. Khan
An eye-opening collection from contemporary artists and authors about how art and technology can reimagine humanity’s relationship with nature and society.
"Shimmer reveals what is possible if emergent technologies coexist with artists’ dreams and visions: a fresh, vital, and nonbinary world can foster hope and care for creatures and the planet.”
—Pamela Horn, Director of Content, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum
Tumbados
Edited by Guadalupe Rosales
A candid and timely celebration of lowrider culture that examines the politics of cruising, the Latinx experience, and the intrepid artwork of Guadalupe Rosales. Tumbados is the first book to examine Rosales’ comprehensive practice, known for fostering collective storytelling, and to surface a subject often overlooked in the public record and in official memory.
A co-publication with the Storefront for Art and Architecture
True World Skate
By Suridh Hassan and Ryo Sanada
A riveting deep dive into the wildly diverse centers of global indie skate culture in places as unexpected as Ohio and Serbia, from the bestselling authors of the Stickerbomb book series.
"A fast-moving collage of thrilling photographs, oral history, and deck art [that] captures the evolution of skate culture…there’s a beauty and a bravery and a renegade spirit to it all."
—New England Literary News
Learn more at mitpress.mit.edu.
