Art Books
A Joe Brainard Show in a Book
By Megan N. LibertyThis collection of zines and book jacket designs celebrates Brainard’s generosity, but also his skill as a designer, highlighting the material aspects of the artist’s hand, his graphic design sensibility, and use of the space of the page.
Alex Majoli’s Opera Aperta
By Sarah MorozThis composite project incorporates ideas about performance and the pandemic in a narrative that cannily straddles realism and symbolic exaggeration. The project highlights that reportages still contain subjectivity, making storytelling tricky to differentiate from non-fiction.
Nour Bishouty’s 1—130: Selected Works Ghassan Bishouty b. 1941 Safad, Palestine — d. 2004 Amman, Jordan
By Daniella SanaderEmerging from the artist’s ongoing research into the extensive archive of her father’s art practice, this artist book allows for a different portrait to materialize. It’s a portrait that uses the physicality of the bookwork itself to explore the complicated rhythms of remembering, forgetting, and storytelling that exist between generations of a family.
Wei Weng’s Eat A Chili/吃辣椒
By Claire VoonA self-published work that uses its namesake plant as the linchpin of a sensorial saga. The half-inch-thick publication is part photobook, part sci-fi story, with photographs interspersed with short texts that stitch together a chili-centric and action-packed narrative.
Alex Katz
By Tom McGlynnIn this recent, 416-page volume devoted to the artist’s life as seen through his portraiture, one gets the picture that Katz’s people constitute a distinct ecosystem of social relations. While the artist himself values gestural simplicity, his portraits, taken as a whole, make up quite a complex of civil manners.
Motor City Underground: Leni Sinclair Photographs 1963–1978
By Nolan KellyUnlike so many other exhibition monographs—which are often treated as something between a program guide and show souvenir—Motor City Underground presents detailed reproductions of Sinclair’s photographs, often blown up to full-page, alongside a wide variety of testimony. The range of dates and sources across which these statements are culled suggests years of research combing through a decade’s worth of underground missives—the type of ephemera that does not often make it into digital archives.
