Books
28 Years of Miranda July, Master of Self-Fashioning
Titled simply Miranda July, Prestel’s excellent new “mid-career retrospective” of the artist highlights July’s enduring interest in the very darkest aspects of human existence.
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Books
An Unconventional Art Critic of La Belle Epoque
Lacking formal training in art, Joris-Karl Huysmans had a knack for seizing on the unanticipated, the gritty, and the revelatory in painting.
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No Touching: Discovering the Art of Books Online
This exhibition provides an exciting starting point for exploring artists' personal sites, statements, and YouTube videos.
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What Are Exhibition Catalogues for?
No exhibition of any pretension is complete without lasting proof of its existence, preferably in print on coated paper.
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An Ebay Purchase That Revealed the Everyday Lives of French Surrealists
Reading between the lines of contact information for friends, graphologists, psychoanalysts, and plumbers, Brigitte Benkemoun’s Finding Dora Maar reveals a map of a bygone France.
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Olivia Laing’s Essays Make a Case for Why Art Matters in Turbulent Times
As exterior life shuts temporarily down, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency is a useful reminder that connection can be intellectual as well as physical.
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Susan Howe's Feminist Poetics
Throughout her work and in her latest volume, Concordance, Howe confronts the plight of the female writer in a masculine literary culture.
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Questioning the Very Form of the Book
Madeline Gins uses the form to dislodge our notion of individual subjectivity, the narrator commonly known as “I.”
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The Media’s Brave New World
Two new books focusing on journalism and news, and on how they are delivered, offer expansive visions of what “the media” have become.
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Lifestyle Over Life: Stephen Wright’s Vision of America
Wright’s darkly comic novel burrows into our hollow cravings, and finds more hollowness.
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The Central, Yet Invisible, Labor of Motherhood in Art
Curators, scholars, artists, and designers reflect on the labor and experience of motherhood in the new essay collection Inappropriate Bodies.
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Ruth Asawa’s Life and Legacy, in Both Art and Education
Marilyn Chase’s new biography sheds light on Asawa’s contributions to San Francisco’s public schools and its artistic community at large.