Spring’s highlights explore gender, sexuality, activism, performance, self-expression, and the legacy of colonialism on the art world.
Top 10
Adrian Piper: Funk Lessons
Elvan Zabunyan. Afterall, Feb. 6 ($19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-84638-264-2)
Zabunyan draws on conceptual artist Adrian Piper’s interactive performances from 1982 to 1984 to trace the history of funk and soul music, from its radical beginnings as the soundtrack to the civil rights movement to its modernized form marked by performative whitewashing.
The Art of Dying: Writings, 2019–2022
Peter Schjeldahl. Abrams Press, May 14 ($30, ISBN 978-1-4197-7324-2)
New Yorker art critic Schjeldahl (1942–2022) reflects on art, life, politics, and his battle against lung cancer in this posthumous collection.
Atlas of Never Built Architecture
Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin. Phaidon, May 22 ($150, ISBN 978-1-83866-653-8)
Comprising paintings, sketches, and digital renderings of unbuilt projects by Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and others, this survey highlights architecture at its most visionary.
Giant Robot: Thirty Years of Defining Asian-American Pop Culture
Edited by Eric Nakamura. Drawn & Quarterly, May 7 ($42.95, ISBN 978-1-77046-713-2)
This compendium traces the history of Giant Robot, which began as a punk-rock zine in 1994 and expanded to galleries and retail stores on the east and west coasts in the 2000s.
The Heirloomist: 100 Treasures and the Stories They Tell
Shana Novak. Chronicle, Apr. 30 ($27.95, ISBN 978-1-7972-2440-4)
Still life photographer Novak pairs photographs of 100 objects, including an ordinary dinner fork and a Vietnam War–era fighter pilot’s helmet, with the stories of why their owners hold them dear.
Jay Matternes: Paleoartist and Wildlife Painter
Richard Milner, with Ian Tattersall. Abbeville, Apr. 23 ($45, ISBN 978-0-7892-1480-5)
This retrospective surveys the career of a pioneer in the field of natural history illustration, from his murals of extinct mammals to his drawings of birds found in America’s backyards.
The New Television: Video After Television
Edited by Rachel Churner, Rebecca Cleman, and Tyler Maxin. No Place, Apr. 23 ($45, ISBN 978-1-949484-11-3)
The impact of the groundbreaking 1974 Open Circuits conference on video art at MoMA is examined in this scholarly account.
A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonising the Museum
Françoise Vergès. Pluto, June 20 ($27, ISBN 978-0-7453-4961-9)
It is time for a complete overhaul of the Western museum tradition, which was designed to showcase work stolen from other cultures, argues French political scientist and curator Vergès.
Reframing the Black Figure: An Introduction to Contemporary Black Figuration
Ekow Eshun. National Portrait Gallery, Apr. 2 ($19.95, ISBN 978-1-85514-548-1)
Drawn from an exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery, this collection gathers representations of the Black figure from more than 20 Black artists working in the U.K. and the U.S., including Lorna Simpson and Henry Taylor.
Tears of Gold: Portraits of Yazidi, Rohingya, and Nigerian Women
Hannah Rose Thomas. Plough, Feb. 6 ($49.95, ISBN 978-1-63608-080-2)
Spotlighting marginalized women from three continents and three religions, Thomas’s photographs and her subjects’ corresponding self-portraits reflect their struggles to reclaim their femininity and personhood after the traumas of ethnic displacement and sexual violence.
Art, Architecture & Photography longlist
ABRAMS
A Great Gay Book: Stories of Growth, Belonging, and Other Queer Possibilities by Ryan Fitzgibbon (May 21, $45, ISBN 978-1-4197-6678-7). The founder of Hello Mr. gathers selections from the magazine’s archive, including art, photography, essays, poetry, and interviews with the likes of Lady Bunny, John Waters, Ocean Vuong, and Hanya Yanagihara.
Watching New York: Street Style
A to Z by Johnny Cirillo (Apr. 16, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-4197-6994-8). Instagrammer Cirillo, aka “The People’s Paparazzo,” presents a compendium of New York City street style from pandemic fashion to the latest trends seen on the sidewalks of SoHo.
Cernunnos
Mark Ryden’s Yakalina Secrets by Mark Ryden (Apr. 16, $50, ISBN 978-1-4197-7190-3) collects more of the artist’s paintings and sketches of half-animal, half-plush mythical creatures and the lands they inhabit.
Figure 1
Bertram Brooker: When We Awake! by Michael Parke-Taylor (Mar. 5, $50, ISBN 978-1-77327-243-6) profiles a prominent figure in the Canadian modernist scene and curator of one of the first abstract painting exhibitions in Canada.
Fordham Univ.
Aeffect: The Affect and Effect of Artistic Activism by Stephen Duncombe (May 7, $29.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-5315-0651-3) examines what the trend of combining art and activism means for the future of socially impactful yet creative expression.
Breaking the Bronze Ceiling: Women, Memory, and Public Space by Valentina Rozas-Krause, edited by Andrew M. Shanken (May 7, $29.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-5315-0639-1), reassesses the role of women in public art, with a particular focus on the lack of female memorials around the world.
David R. GODINE
In the Company of Art: A Museum Director’s Private Journals by Perry T. Rathbone (May 21, $28.95, ISBN 978-1-56792-803-7) recounts the author’s career, from the 1950s through the ’70s, at the St. Louis Art Museum and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, including his encounters with such artists as Willem de Kooning and Andrew Wyeth.
Frances Lincoln
The Elements of Art: Ten Ways to Decode the Masterpieces by Susie Hodge (Apr. 30, $19.99, ISBN 978-0-7112-8665-8) shares insights into the techniques used to create 30 classic artworks to teach readers how to dissect art.
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
The Art of the Literary Poster by Allison Rudnick (Mar. 26, $50, ISBN 978-1-58839-774-4) surveys the history of late 19th–century posters promoting books and magazines and the influence they had on U.S. visual culture and advertising.
The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, edited by Denise Murrell (Feb. 27, $65, ISBN 978-1-58839-773-7), examines how the movement expanded beyond its New York City origins to help shape 20th-century modernism and foster a global shift in Black creativity and artistic influence.
MIT
Art as Demonstration: A Revolutionary Recasting of Knowledge by Sven Spieker (Feb. 6, $35, ISBN 978-0-262-04871-2) analyzes how the perception of art as a mode of protest, activism, and resistance has shifted with post–WWII and Cold War politics.
Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual by Kimberly Juanita Brown (Feb. 6, $18.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-262-54764-2) studies images from the first Black republic in early 19th-century Haiti to the 1994 Rwandan genocide to probe the colonial roots of global photography and the ethics of sensationalizing Black suffering.
Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzsky as Architect by Richard Anderson (Apr. 9, $65, ISBN 978-0-262-04878-1) spotlights Russian painter and designer El Lissitzsky (1890–1941) and his proposal for a series of eight “horizontal skyscrapers” to stand at the intersections of Moscow’s Boulevard Ring.
Monacelli
STILL: The Art of Noticing by Mary Jo Hoffman (May 1, $60, ISBN 978-1-58093-633-0) selects 275 of the best images from Hoffman’s project of taking a photograph every day for more than a decade.
Museyon
Kominka: The Beauty and Wisdom of the Japanese Traditional House by Kazuo Hasegawa (Feb. 1, $28.95, ISBN 978-1-940842-70-7). Drawing inspiration from the legacy of premodern Japanese architecture, craftsmanship, and determination, Hasegawa offers a guide to Japan’s 101 most attractive kominka.
Penguin Press
The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing by Adam Moss (Apr. 16, $45, ISBN 978-0-593-29758-2). A former editor of New York magazine interviews artists, writers, and musicians, including Rostam Batmanglij, Sofia Coppola, and Marc Jacobs, to shed light on how their notable works got made.
Phaidon
Tattoo You: A New Generation of Artists (Apr. 3, $59.95, ISBN 978-1-83866-756-6) gathers 700 images featuring the work of 75 tattoo artists to highlight the artistry of tattooing and the innovations being made with this ancient form of self-expression.
Princeton Univ.
Contact: Art and the Pull of Print by Jennifer L. Roberts (May 14, $39.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-691-25585-9) highlights the physical aspects of engraving, lithography, and other forms of printmaking to show what it takes to create an often one-of-a-kind artwork, and surveys pieces by David Hammons, Edgar Heap of Birds, Jasper Johns, and other artists.
Reaktion
Symbolism, Dada, Surrealisms: Selected Writing of Mary Ann Caws by Mary Ann Caws (May 13, $40, ISBN 978-1-78914-857-2) gathers the literary critic and art historian’s writings on such artistic movements as symbolism, dadaism, and surrealism, including insights into works by Emily Dickinson, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Marcel Duchamp.
Rizzoli
Housing the Nation: Affordability and Social Equity, edited by Alexander Gorlin and Victoria Newhouse (Mar. 26, $35, ISBN 978-0-8478-7398-2), reframes America’s housing crisis as more than just a failure of the market but an ongoing and ever-growing byproduct of climate change, multigenerational poverty, and racial injustice.
Ride: Antoine Predock: 65 Years of Architecture by Antoine Predock (Apr. 23, $125, ISBN 978-0-8478-9951-7) brings together 3,500 photographs surveying the career of trailblazer Predock, from the La Luz townhouse development in 1960s Albuquerque, N.Mex., to the 2009 construction of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.
Running Press
This Is a Book for People Who Love Tattoos by Verena Hutter, illus. by Eric Hinkley (May 7, $17, ISBN 978-0-7624-8595-6), traces the history of the American traditional style and delves into the meaning and origins of designs from across the world.
Scribner
Cities in the Sky: The Quest to Build the World’s Tallest Skyscrapers by Jason Barr (May 14, $32.50, ISBN 978-1-9821-7421-7) details the economics, controversial designs, and histories of the world’s skyscrapers, including Dubai’s 2,717-
feet-tall Burj Khalifa.
Sternberg
Burn & Gloom! Glow & Moon! Thousand Years of Troubled Genders by Katrina Daschner (Feb. 6, $24, ISBN 978-1-915609-31-1) presents the Vienna-based artist and filmmaker’s work from the 1990s to today.
The Complex Answer: On Art as a Non-binary Intelligence by Chus Martinez (Feb. 13, $25.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-915609-17-5) probes how contemporary art has helped break down the barriers between culture and nature.
Martine Syms: She Mad by Martine Syms (Apr. 2, $35 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-915609-33-5) discusses the five episodes filmed by installation artist Syms between 2015 and 2020 for her TV series She Mad, and how their references to sitcoms, silent films, and other narrative forms comment on representations of Black
identity in mass media.
Tate
A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography, edited by Osei Bonsu (Mar. 26, $45 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-84976-851-1), gathers images from Africa’s leading photographers and corresponding essays touching on such subjects as spirituality, urbanism, and climate change to challenge Western perceptions of the continent.
Thames & Hudson
Claude Cahun by François Leperlier (Feb. 13, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-500-29749-0). Born Lucy Schwob, French surrealist Cahun (1894–1954) pushed against the boundaries of gender and identity in her art and writing. The latest entry in the publisher’s Photofile series gathers her striking self-portraits and other photographs.
Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay et al. (Feb. 6, $85, ISBN 978-0-500-54533-1), challenges the notion of photographers as the sole creators of their work by surveying Susan Meiseaes’s photos of her neighbors, Endia Beales’s images of Black women about to enter the workforce, and other collaborative projects.
Project UrbEx by Ikumi Nakamura (Mar. 5, $50, ISBN 978-0-500-02694-6). The video game creator presents her photographs of abandoned and secret locations, from a derelict high school in New Jersey to the Petrova Gora monument in Croatia.
The Art of Ukraine by Alisa Lozhkina (Apr. 16, $24.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-500-29778-0). The latest entry in the World of Art series chronicles Ukrainian art from the 19th century to the beginning of the 2022 Russian invasion.
Univ. of Minnesota
Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon: Laura Gilpin, Queerness, and Navajo Sovereignty by Louise Siddons (July 30, $34.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-5179-1073-0) analyzes 20th-century lesbian photographer Gilpin’s depictions of the Navajo community, the problematic legacy of white photographers depicting Native cultures, and the limits of allyship.
Viking
Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See by Bianca Bosker (Feb. 6, $29, ISBN 978-0-525-56220-7). The author of Cork Dork returns with a report on how obsession drives the art community and what it means to see the world as artists and collectors do.
Yale Univ.
How to Enjoy Architecture: A Guide for Everyone by Charles Holland (Apr. 23, $25, ISBN 978-0-300-26393-0) invites readers to examine buildings through the eyes of an architect and contends that doing so can bring joy.
The Performer: Art, Life, Politics by Richard Sennett (Apr. 23, $30, ISBN 978-0-300-27290-1) dissects artists’ uncanny abilities to perform, not just on the stage or canvas but in life and politics.
