The Best Art Books of 2024
Here’s a list of the Rail’s top art books from 2024 (plus a few others from years past we couldn’t resist adding).
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Marjane Satrapi’s Woman, Life, Freedom
Translated from the French by Una Dimitrijevic (Seven Stories Press, 2024)
The fatal beating of Mahsa Amini by Iranian morality police in 2022 was a political inflection point that prompted global protest and pulled Iranian graphic novelist and cartoonist Marjane Satrapi—who won international acclaim for her graphic memoir Persepolis—out of quasi–comic retirement. She adopted the movement’s slogan, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” as the title of a graphic anthology that brings together twenty artists, journalists, activists, and academics from Iran, Europe, and North America to realize two goals: explaining to those outside Iran what’s going on in the country, and reminding those within its borders that they’re not alone. Alongside general information on who the morality police are and how state media uses propaganda to stymie solidarity, contributors share the realities of living under artistic censorship; missives from Tehran’s Evin Prison, a detention facility housing many Iranian intellectuals; and the story of Shakiba, a young woman who crossdresses as a man to watch a men’s soccer match—an activity women had been banned from since the 1979 Islamic revolution. The book features a variety of animation styles, from political cartoons (satirical caricatures in black and white given emotive texture through cross-hatching), to designs inspired by German expressionism and illustrated infographics, to cursive lettering beside drawings which give the pages the appearance of a note passed between friends in class. The anthology is an adroit gloss of Iran’s long history that overflows with hope for its future.
Niu Jinmei’s 晋美 jm
Edited and designed by Chang Yuchen (How Many Books, 2024)
Niu Jinmei (who prefers to go by Jinmei) started drawing in 2015, almost thirty years after attending art school—years in which she left the culture industry to open a flower shop and start a family, an act that she poetically describes as a leap “into the sea.” Since then, drawing has become an ongoing practice as requisite and constant as the chores that it interrupts and intersperses. Edited by Jinmei’s daughter, artist Chang Yuchen, 晋美 jm compiles a selection of the artist’s abstract sketches made between 2015 and 2023. Roughly chronological, the book is organized to highlight Jinmei’s serial and studiously technical experimentation with formal devices and compositions iterated across an array of colors and paper substrates. Jinmei’s early drawings are suggestive of applied design, characterized by repeating geometric and linear motifs; Xs, dots, circles, and squares float and condense cloud-like on the page. As time passes, the artist turns to colored sheets imbued with rich fields of interacting colors, drawings as vigorous and complex as a water surface. Designed with care by Chang Yuchen, this edition riffs on Jinmei’s own procedural approach to drawing in a variety of layouts that produce a dialogue among gestures, colors, and processes. Produced in six different covers drawn by Jinmei, the book opens flat with the dark green binding stitches entering the drawings as additional marks. 晋美 jm presents an artist in vital aesthetic dialogue, learning from and through the work itself.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s Dark Room A–Z
Photographs and text by Paul Mpagi Sepuya, with text by Gökcan Demirkazik (Aperture, 2024)
Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s Dark Room A–Z is more an interconnected web of relations or document of networks, relationships, themes, and technical strategies than a traditional monograph. This comes as no surprise considering that many years ago Sepuya got his start in arts administration, including building databases. I first met Sepuya in Brooklyn while I was working for another artist database he built—but I knew his photographs from his residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. At Arcana Books for the launch of this monograph in Los Angeles, Sepuya noted the connection between this book’s design and format and his past work in digital archiving. Dark Room A–Z catalogues several groups of works made between 2016 and 2021. In lieu of a traditional table of contents, the book opens with “A Reader’s Guide” an alphabetical index, featuring names of sitters, exhibition locations, series titles, and even themes such as desire and recognition. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book, besides the unusual structure, is that the sitter entries list plate numbers for all the other images in which these figures appear, revealing one of the previously fundamental aspects of Sepuya’s work: the anonymity of his subjects, who, in his images, also become co-authors. Thus, Dark Room A–Z unveils Sepuya’s process on many levels, from his research methods and internal database-like thinking process to the identities (some only initials or first names) of his collaborators.
Klaus Pichler’s Fear Guards the Lemon Grove
(Fw:Books, 2024)
Making a connection between lemons and modern-day resources such as diamonds and coltan, Pichler’s visually striking book allows the reader to accompany him down a rabbit hole bursting with ominous and memorable primary sources. This book tells a surprising story: according to a theory recently advanced by several economic historians, the Sicilian mafia arose in relation to the surging demand for lemons in the 1800s. After the Scottish physician James Lind popularized the idea that citrus cured scurvy, Sicilian lemons became valuable commodities, and the mafia developed as protectors of the groves and middlemen between farmers and buyers. Pichler conveys this research through archival documents, botanical illustrations, and excerpts from historical texts, juxtaposed with his haunting photographs of Sicilian sites associated with the Cosa Nostra.
Stephanie Syjuco’s The Unruly Archive
(Radius Books, 2024)
Most of us who work in and around the archive have come to know that it is organized by an imperial eye, however objective it may feign to be. In her monograph, The Unruly Archive, Stephanie Syjuco simulates this learning and re-learning of the archive as a colonial tool. She depicts a fractured image of the Philippines as told through the American record. Pulling fragments, photographs, and documents from national collections using variations (and even misspellings) of keywords “Filipino” and “the Philippines,” the Manila-born, Oakland-based artist searches for visions of a whole people within the confines of an institution never built to hold them. Physically, the book mirrors her research process: collages of low-resolution, overly cropped photographs unfold across layers of unevenly sized pages, evoking the material overwhelm of looking for these histories in the margins. Syjuco’s monograph beams brightly against a landscape generally overwrought with archival jargon, sharply modeling how we might “talk back” to the historical record. “I do not make work about Filipino identity,” writes Syjuco in her introduction, “I make work about the white gaze, and those are two totally different things.”
Carmen Winant’s The Last Safe Abortion
(SPBH Editions, 2024)
“Abortion care is work.” Carmen Winant concludes her book, The Last Safe Abortion, with these words, and the 2,700 images that she gathered to construct its sequence leave us with little doubt as to the fundamental importance of the women who pick up the phone, time and time again. Though the book’s title might suggest an interest in the graphic or politically dramatic, what the images actually show us is the labor that institutional abortion care has always depended upon (clerical, educational, managerial, for example), which have typically been underemphasized, though, as Winant shows us, not undocumented. Winant sourced these images from abortion clinic archives across the country, interspersing them at times with her own photographs, often self-portraits, made during trips to and from these clinics and archives. The book, spiral-bound and printed on multi-colored paper, evokes a scrapbook or some other form of collective memory rather than a typical art monograph or photobook. In other words, it is as much a tool as anything else (an admittedly beautiful one at that), and in its construction it offers a potent reminder that abortion care, like all healthcare, must be defended, fought for, and maintained through organizing and collective action.
The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience
Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times Magazine (Clarkson Potter, 2024)
The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience combines an art and photography exhibition catalogue with text chronicling more than four hundred years of Black people in the United States who were brought in chains and enslaved. Told through a mix of powerful media and accessibly written texts, and woven together by elegantly explosive design, the book is already a classic. American journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones begins the preface with a photograph of her family, establishing seeing as essential for understanding. Aspects of cherished family albums chronicling events and achievements appear throughout, along with photographs and documents providing scholarly or legal evidence. Arranged by topic rather than chronology, recent and distant history share space. For example, on the topic of “Race,” historical photographs and documents reveal how defining race and controlling racial interactions remain a constant force in American life. For a subtopic, “Resistance,” six contemporary artists, including Carrie Mae Weems and Fahamu Pecou, responded to this historically omitted “defining trait of Black life.” Other commissioned Black visual artists also share their intentions through artist statements. This book is a gift of hidden knowledge that was just out of the frame of a conventional American historical lens. By shifting the point of view, these images and stories are now visible and cannot be unseen.
Simon Wu’s Dancing on My Own: Essays on Art, Collectivity, and Joy
(Harper, 2024)
Lyrics from Robyn’s 2010 pop anthem “Dancing on My Own” punctuate Simon Wu’s eponymous essay collection, serving as a refrain for a way of being—one that embraces joy and resilience without the burden of relentless opposition. Chronicling Wu’s post-college years in New York, the seven essays weave personal anecdotes, ranging from swaying in clubs with strangers to sorting through a decade of accumulated belongings in his mother’s suburban garage, with well-researched meditations on artists like Ken Okiishi, Telfar Clemens, and Tseng Kwong Chi. Together, they unspool a web of ambition, self-doubt, joy, admiration, and yearning, capturing his experience of participating in, around, and amid the cracks of New York’s arts scene—DIY, institutional, and everything in between. In one particularly emotive essay, “A Terrible Sense of When He Was Wanted and When He Was Not,” Wu recounts a charged conversation with a friend following a wild night of clubbing, grappling with the unruliness of queer longing and their shared habit of “bullying their desires with [their] politics.” While this tension may press Wu, his writings resist collapsing under its weight. Instead, they stage a collision where his desires remain undeniably tied to his political obligations, yet continue to persist as wonderfully rebellious.
Janelle Rebel’s Bibliographic Performances & Surrogate Readings
(The Everyday Press, 2024)
With an evocative cover design and title, Janelle Rebel’s Bibliographic Performances & Surrogate Readings brings the art of bibliography to life. Rebel traces her own journey to a love of reading lists from her childhood desire to know more, to read more: “There was more to discover beyond the bounds of my geography, beyond any limitations of my present circumstances.” What follows is a catalogue of what she calls “visual bibliography” in the forms of exhibitions, books, and works of art. As someone who closely follows artist’s projects that I deem “Books About Books,” Rebel’s selection was a pleasurable mix of familiar and foreign selections including: Jamal Cyrus’s wearable book jacket Africanismus_12469 (2006); a collected sampling of the Bulletins of The Serving Library; Mindy Seu’s digital database Cyberfeminism Index (which was also published as a book and exhibited); several projects by artist Cauleen Smith, who often makes reading and books her art material; and Glenn Ligon’s memoir in book covers A People on the Cover (2015). For the artists’ book enthusiasts, Rebel includes a forthcoming digital autobiography in “All: The Books I Never Wrote or Wrote and Never Published” by Johanna Drucker; Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle’s artists’ book designed with Sming Sming Books, Kentifrications (2018); and a call out to Printed Matter’s thematic book tables on their website. For anyone interested in the history of reading and how books enter and reflect our lives and culture, this book is not to be missed.
Svetlana Alpers’s Is Art History?
(Hunters Point Press, 2024)
Good writing can have the effect of a well-cooked meal; you may find yourself carrying on for the sheer pleasure of consumption. This is a question of style for the writer, and often a measure of taste for the reader. When it comes to subject matter, the analogy extends to one’s dining companions—engaging table-talk is the hallmark of rich content. Svetlana Alpers’s newest book, Is Art History?, succeeds on both counts; to be served so generously by this august historian is a most gratifying experience. Her writing is so forceful, so confident—but also so funny.
Alpers’s book is a collection of writing that stretches across the decades of her distinguished career. Though, as is often the case with books such as this, chronology gives form to the body of work without constraining the reader to a particular order. Though I started with the opening essay, because I wanted to read young Alpers against her more mature self—the pleasure of comparison one only gets in a book of such magnitude—I quickly found myself hopscotching from one topic to another. “Bruegel’s Festive Peasants,” an article from the early seventies, is a highlight for me. In supremely persuasive prose, Alpers undresses the moralizing, puritanical, bloodlessly academic arguments of earlier art historians to show that beneath their rigid understanding of Bruegel’s efforts there is room for pleasure without penitence, joy without judgement.
Barbara Debeuckelaere’s ’Om (Mother)
(The Eriskay Connection, 2024)
The photobook ’Om (Mother) unfolds as a collective visual narrative of nearly fifty women from eight families living in Tel Rumeida—a residential site in Hebron, a city divided by illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine’s West Bank. Initiated in 2023, journalist Barbara Debeuckelaere’s project began with a series of trips to Tel Rumeida, where she was accompanied by artist Adam Broomberg, who also contributed an essay to the book. Upon meeting the women and their families, Debeuckelaere supplied them with analog cameras to capture their immediate surroundings, where just outside their doors, armed soldiers fortified the settlements. Debeuckelaere’s book assembles the women’s photographs of one another and their children, houses and gardens, and barricades, checkpoints, and the apartheid wall that cuts through Hebron. The analog photographs reveal mistakes in the film, overexposures, light refractions, and abstracted vignettes that counteract the extractive precision of digital technology employed by the press and surveillant state actors who document the region. The women’s images are blurry and soft, intercut with texts on the Old City, poetic quotes, captions, and maps. The small, thread-bound volume includes a dustjacket featuring the family names of the photographers overlaying a photograph of a large settlement. ’Om (Mother) speaks to matrilineal knowledge-keeping and a particular form of resistance, a way of orienting oneself within imposed, contested boundaries. The photographs evoke the blur of a political strategy and point of refusal. The opacity of the subjects is in no way undermined by the intimacy of the images. Instead, Debeuckelaere’s book speaks to forms of daily resistance at poetic thresholds of visibility.
Leo Amino: The Visible and the Invisible
Edited by Genji Amino (Radius Books, 2023)
The sculptures of Leo Amino remind me of the recurring scene in Pulp Fiction (1994) when characters open the mysterious briefcase and find their faces illuminated. Amino’s works emanate, and are, pure light, and the glorious images in Leo Amino: The Visible and the Invisible portray these modestly sized sculptures for what they are: glistening reliquaries of supernal energy. Amino was one of the first, if not the first, artist in America to use cast resin as a medium, and the monograph, produced for his exhibition at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center traces his practice from carved wooden sculptures á la Henry Moore, languorously toying with the hazy borders between positive and negative space, and literally conjuring his own alternative jelly-like space. In these brief interludes of slow space and time, the artist injected strokes of color, at first using the floating bodies of pigment to highlight the abstract forms he was casting. As Amino’s career progressed, the forms became prisms and the splays of color seemingly literal vectors of energy—he was zeroing in on some grand unified ideal of sculptural space along the same trajectory as a particle physicist. The sculptures are presented in full form and detail, so we can see the floating fields of color, specks and the very occasional bubble, allowing us to bliss out anew on the work of this sculptor very worthy of a second look.
Paul Galvez’s Courbet’s Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting
(Yale University Press, 2022)
As we no longer take it for granted, landscape has rarely been painted by those who live closest to the land. It was primarily the inquisitive urbanites who in confronting nature created some forms of sophisticated coding systems by which mountains, trees, rivers, and streams found their equivalence on the painted surfaces. Many of us may recall what Paul Cézanne once said to a friend, “In order to paint a landscape well, I first need to discover its geological foundations,” which testified to the painter’s intense desire to restore sub-surface elements of nature that had been deteriorated by the Impressionists. For Cézanne’s most famous “little sensations” meant direct perception of sensory objects, with special consideration for weight, solidity, texture, tactility, spatial volume, and giving local color to things appearing in his field of vision. This would radicalize a new pictorial coherence which carries a perpetual tension that lies between a complete three-dimensional world and its depiction on a two-dimensional surface of the canvas.
Just as his sense of detachment in the making process relates to the psychological roots of his personality, Cézanne’s evolution would not have occurred without Courbet’s “materialism,” at least by the 1860s. At which time, according to Paul Galvez, “[it] took on a completely different character. The landscapes are less concerned with the effect of changing systems of production on the subject matter of art than on the basic process at the heart of painterly labor itself: the transformation of the raw materials into an image.” In this essential book, Galvez provides a lucent, original analysis adding to previous scholarships, elevating our better comprehension of Courbet’s painted landscapes of mostly grottoes, riverbeds, and seascapes. All were perceived experiences in painting a particular site that are at once temporal and physical, as Galvez again wrote, “virtually moving forward in space but conceptually backward in time.”
Giving Courbet’s love of the physical substance of nature, from the up-close, hidden places to the vast open spaces, Galvez, perhaps, more than any previous writer, has single-handedly focused on the painter’s most celebrated palette-knife technique and how the various paint applications relate to the four chapters: “Bags of Paint in Glassy Skins”; “When Landscape Became Language”; “Milk of the Sea”; and “Cut with a Palette Knife.” All of which, I should add, correlate with the author’s own summary of the five arguments on Courbet’s previous literature: “The landscapes have no subject”; “The landscapes embody an ideal”; “The landscapes are about paint itself”; “The landscapes are naturalized myth”; “The landscapes are bodies”. In conclusion “Coda: Anti-Impressionism”, Galvez reminds us, Courbet, for having engaged in the sciences of linguistics, archeology, and geology, came to have discovered a new pictorial invention from which oil pigments, brush, and palette knife were his technical wonderment in re-creating material substances as profound responses to nature. Courbet was a materialist par excellence to whom without the dexterity of his palette knife the eloquent networks of paint applications with spatulas, palette knives of wide varieties of the likes from Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Nicolas de Staël to Pierre Soulages, Cecily Brown, among others, would not be possible. This is a book, written with respectful scholarship, deep meditation on the subject that resulted in accumulative power of new insights for all readers, especially for painters, and those who are admirers of Courbet and lovers of painting culture.