Below is a curated selection of 10 recommended art books and works for this month, covering a broad spectrum from biographical studies to activism history, contemporary neuroscience to social fiction.
Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Women Artists (Susan Gubar)
At eighty, author Susan Gubar examines the creative dynamism and adaptability of aging women artists without romanticizing the experience. The book highlights how many artists produced their most ambitious and original works late in life. For instance, it analyzes how Louise Bourgeois’s late-career sculptures shrank to a scale she could manage from a wheelchair, and how Georgia O’Keeffe, after losing central vision at 84, shifted from oil paints to watercolor and charcoal.
Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image (Jack Hartnell)
Art historian Jack Hartnell’s new book explores the “Wound Man,” a figure riddled with injuries commonly found in medieval surgical texts. Though unsettling to modern viewers, Hartnell argues this figure was designed not to frighten but to reassure patients. The book positions the Wound Man as a sophisticated repository of 15th-century medical hope.
The War of Art: A History of Artists’ Protest in America (Lauren O’Neill-Butler)
Distinct from countless books on art and activism, this work focuses on the effective tactics of art as a tool of resistance. It examines events like artist David Wojnarowicz’s iconic AIDS protest jacket and Faith Ringgold’s leadership in the Black Emergency Artists Coalition’s anti-racism actions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The book offers actionable strategies for resisting contemporary authoritarianism.
The Documentary Audit: Listening and the Limits of Accountability (Pooja G. Rangan)
Academic Pooja G. Rangan’s book delves into the tension within the documentary art trope of “giving voice to the voiceless.” Rangan maps how audiences’ listening habits, meant to amplify voices, often flatten and harm them. The book questions what it truly means to listen without projecting, compressing, or silencing.
Family Amnesia: Chinese American Resilience (Betty Yu)
Betty Yu’s work embodies how personal history, family, and memory form a “patchwork.” Its design weaves together family photos, the author’s past works, and historical documents, annotated to materialize the past. By placing her great-grandfather’s migration story within the broader arc of Chinese-American history, the book illustrates multiple paths of resilience against generational memory loss.
Hew Locke: Passages (Martina Droth and Allie Biswas, eds.)
This significant monograph on Hew Locke, one of today’s most important artists, examines his decades-long body of work. The book illuminates Locke’s critical yet strikingly aesthetic explorations of colonialism’s consequences and afterlife. It serves as a vital resource for understanding the artist’s expansive repertoire and the emotional core driving his work.
Artepaño: Chicano Prisoner Kerchief Art (Dr. Álvaro Ibarra)
This catalog explores paños, intricate drawings on handkerchiefs by incarcerated Latinx individuals. Described as a “second skin” sent to loved ones, these personal works reflect Latinx culture and the impact of the U.S. prison-industrial complex. Featuring essays in English and Spanish, the catalog critically examines the artistic value and collectible nature of these personal keepsakes.
Meaning Matter Memory: Selections from the Studio Museum in Harlem Collection
This work chronicles the transformation of the Studio Museum in Harlem, founded in 1968 as a modest institution dedicated to living artists, into one of the most critical preservers of Black American art. Through interviews with former directors, alongside short texts, poems, and reflections by artists, the book frames the collection not as a mere assortment of objects but as a constellation of people.
Minor Black Figures (Brandon Taylor)
Brandon Taylor’s latest novel follows Wyeth, a gay Black painter navigating a challenging summer in New York. Wyeth’s insecurities about how his paintings are perceived within the politics of race, alongside his critiques of other Black artists, unfold in a warm, claustrophobic setting. Through Wyeth’s gallery work, critiqued openings, and relationship with a former Jesuit priest, the book explores his connection to Black art with profound realism.
Rabelais and His World (Mikhail Bakhtin, trans. Sergeiy Sandler)
Since its publication in 1965, Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on French Renaissance humanist François Rabelais has been essential to related studies. This new translation by Sergeiy Sandler aims to restore the book’s place within Bakhtin’s broader philosophical framework. The translator’s meticulous attention to Bakhtin’s language makes the work more illuminating for readers.
