Art Books
Art Books is generously sponsored by the Dedalus Foundation.
This is a unique blend of artist monograph, art-historical account, confessional biography, and casual conversation, which ultimately provides an emotionally wrought and intellectually engaging portrait of the artist.
These photographs showcase human behavior mostly in absentia of frontal bodies—but not without evidence of a uniquely American vision. This is predicated on cultural mythmaking compounded by overpromising advertisements, aspirational magazines, and Hollywood films.
Notwithstanding her best efforts, eighteenth-century French painter Vallayer-Coster was somewhat forgotten and overlooked in the years following her successful five-decade career in Paris. Now a new English publication, part of Lund Humphries’s Illuminating Women Artists book series dedicated to highlighting historic European female artists, offers a new look at her life and work.
Published in commemoration of the artist’s career retrospective in 2019, the catalogue’s meticulous design and detailed history of Blake’s multifaceted practice render it well worth the wait. The material variety of the design smartly complements the multifaceted nature of Blake’s art, comprising glossy color plates and matte pages with half-tone reproductions presenting essays.
The photographer’s writing reveals she lived entirely in the immediate realm of action, not pausing until the very end. Her words function as an alternative way of seeing, so the need for describing her photography process only comes when she’s tackling it head-first: finding a lab, finding subjects, pulling out a camera, getting some press.
In the face of post-WWII PTSD, conformity, and materialism, the practices and ideology of self-realization provided these artists with a new sense of freedom. It was out with rules and structure, in with tuning in and letting go.
This is a densely theoretical rereading of the artist through the lens of Marxist social art history. (Be warned: if you are not versed in the vast Beuys literature nor particularly comfortable with critical theory, your entrée lies elsewhere.) Spaulding’s book is, above all, an attempt to take Beuys seriously.
While the design of this collection may make the reader looking for subject-oriented criticism feel frustrated, it provides a broader view of the critic herself. The best moments are when Tillman steps gently away from her subject to comment on criticism (and by extension on herself).
This book is implicitly about the craft of making comics and explicitly about the practice of telling stories. What makes a good story, Kim Deitch’s book asks? A good story is one that feels solid and alive, something that resembles and reflects the human experience.
For Katayama, the studio becomes a place not just of performativity and speculation, but a lived-in exhibitionism, because the world has opened up all around her.
The black-and-white photographs present fragments from a minimalist home. Images taken through doorways into empty rooms, plates and bowls stacked on shelves, a rattan chair at a wooden table deal with loss, grief, and the absence of loved ones.
In 1997, Gianni Versace is shot dead; his sister Donatella now has to run the summer collection show. Sante D’Orazio, now a seasoned fashion photographer, is there to capture it. In his introduction, Max Blagg describes Sante’s life as a circus tent where the beautiful and damned dance around his heat-seeking lens. The summer collection is no different, nor are the countless other stories chronicled in A Shot in the Dark, Sante’s frank memoir about the glamour and chaos he’s put to film.
This monograph distills a multifaceted career spanning more than thirty photographic series. As with any retrospective catalogue, this one faces the challenge of presenting diverse bodies of work in an engaging way, a matter further complicated by Cartagena’s voluminous photobook production.
Woods marshals Knowles’s use of commonplace materials as a proto-feminist technique for eroding the divisions between public and private, platforming an otherwise invisible home-based and feminine world. But the compulsion to transmute the open-endedness of Knowles’s work into an explicit economy of care speaks to present-day insecurities about practices whose politics are subtle rather than overt.
Relatively faithful to the original zines in scale, texture, and color, this facsimile collection has the same intimate yet throw-away feel to it. The collection creates an interplay between Sepuya’s sitters that may not have been present at the original time of the zine release.
The book presents her black-and-white portraits of the predominantly teenage squatters who inhabited an abandoned Lower East Side glass factory, alongside her writing on the neighborhood’s gentrification and interviews with former residents. Departing from spectacle, Morton offers a stiller portrait of daily life at Glass House, rendering the squat not only viable but almost utopic in its offerings of space and community.
This book not only introduces the breadth of her production but of the thinking and methodology behind it. How Taeuber-Arp executed this creative approach reflects a meticulous, curious mind.
Timed to coincide with the MoMA presentation, this slim but trenchant publication begins with an illuminating essay by Cara Manes and Dominika Tylcz, both of MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture. They convincingly position the Tamarind residency as connected to Asawa’s interdisciplinary ethos, formal interest in figure-ground relationships, and advocacy for arts education.
In this book, varying definitions of “spoiled function as means to critique the dominant culture in the US that expects immigrants to assimilate, which reduces Asian American identity into a category, or worse, a stereotype. Through aggravation and deformation, Kim Lee pushes away from modes of being incomprehensible, to create openings for legibility.
Even where I wanted more sustained attention to underlying conditions, Photo Obscura: The Photographic in Post-Photography succeeds as a generous, artist-forward, and intellectually agile guide that encourages the reader to keep looking, ever more carefully.
Sichel explores the intertwined lives of critics Gene Swenson and Jill Johnston, two figures who chronicled the early days of, respectively, Pop art and Judson dance. Both were writers that refuted a distinctly modernist authoritative voice, merging personal experience with political idealism, confessional immediacy with performative incoherence.
This book allows images and text to inform each other through proximity, providing the reader with a key to the ideas explored onscreen. These juxtapositions reveal the continuity of certain frictions throughout Ahwesh’s filmography, particularly the relationship between death, sexuality, and the mediation of our perception of reality by both social and technological apparatuses.
Play, desire, and possibility underpin the images. But perhaps most delightfully, Peter Tomka equates gestures in the images themselves with the analogue process of making a photo.
The series acts as a sui generis study of commercial signs and advertisements before Germany’s reunification, which is also the moment before global brands conquered the urban landscape.
The volume Surrealism and Anti-fascism: Anthology, edited by Karin Althaus, Adrian Djukić, Ara H. Merjian, Matthias Mühling, and Stephanie Weber, was conceived as the exhibition catalogue, but it stands alone as a monument of surrealism’s battle against fascism.
This book calls for a rethinking of some of the well-worn narratives about art and work in 1970s New York. In six captivating essays, sequenced chronologically according to the order of events, this collection charts the young aspirational poet’s shifting queer social and artistic milieu.
Techniques of distortion, collage, and multiple exposure describe the changes taking place across Makharda, where evidence of industrial blight and environmental decay is increasingly more visible. Sikka’s eye for the sculptural quality of form is ever-present, and there is a sense that each picture is as much a concept as it is a directive to look.
The monograph collects over one hundred photographs by the artist of her dolls, carefully posed and artfully staged. Lankton rejected the smooth crotches of Barbie and G.I. Joe: her dolls have genitalia, innards, viscera.
This is a compendium of the most private parts of the artist’s practice—the unfinished and abandoned projects that have languished in notebooks, memories, and email drafts—presented with unsentimental retrospection. It forms a portrait of Calle’s practice by looking at that which she could not, or did not, accomplish.
Our writers have reflected on their favorite art books of 2025, featuring work by Barbara T. Smith, Amanda Ross-Ho, Jeff Mermelstein, and others.
Over 179 images spanning her studio photography, street and fashion photography, and mixed-media collages illuminate Simpson’s gaze. The monograph reveals a signature visual language that uses the manifold articulations of Black style—across sports, youth, street, and fashion culture—to showcase the radiance and infinite textures of Black life.
There is much about Cahun’s life—their gender-nonconforming presentation, their sustained work (with Marcel Moore) of anti-fascist resistance in Nazi-occupied France—that will feel familiar today. It’s another striking moment of doubling, perhaps, an uncanny (and possibly affirming) look in the mirror as history repeats itself.