7 Books We're Looking Forward To In May

A season of art publishing is arriving with unusual range: theory, biography, oral history, and cultural criticism all land in the same reading pile. The latest recommendations span Dena Yago's writing, a new life of Frederic Church, Trevor Paglen's essays on AI and surveillance, and books on Anni Albers, the Venice Biennale, New York dance, and the culture wars of the 1980s.

Dena Yago's“That Figures: Selected Writings,” published by After 8 Books and edited by Antonia Carrara with a foreword by McKenzie Wark, gathers the artist's essays and reflections on the visual habits of late capitalism. Yago, who has worked across writing, painting, and the trend-forecasting collective K-HOLE, has long been attentive to the aesthetics that slip into everyday life so quietly they can seem invisible until named.

Victoria Johnson's“Glorious Country: How the Artist Frederic Church Brought the World to America and America to the World,” from Simon & Schuster, revisits the 19th-century landscape painter as a figure central to the making of an American artistic identity. Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, argues that Church helped place U.S. art on the international map and played a role in the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, even as his unpeopled vistas also served the logic of Manifest Destiny.

Trevor Paglen's“How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI” turns from the history of images to their present function. Drawing on essays from across his career, Paglen asks a sharper question for the AI era: not what images mean, but what they do. His subject is surveillance, control, UFOs, psyops, and the machinery that shapes what can be seen.

Several other titles widen the frame. Nicholas Fox Weber's“Anni Albers: A Life,” published by Yale University Press, follows the overdue reassessment of an artist whose weaving was long sidelined by medium and gender. Massimiliano Gioni's“High Waters: An Oral History of the Venice Biennale,” from Les Presses du Réel, is built from interviews with 11 curators, including Okwui Enwezor, Cecilia Alemani, and the team behind Koyo Kouoh's posthumous 2026 edition.

Rennie McDougall's“Nonstop Bodies: How Dance Shaped New York City,” from Abrams Books, moves from avant-garde performance to South Bronx hip-hop, Broadway, and the ballroom scene. Paul Elie's“Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex and Controversy in the 1980s,” published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, joins a new wave of books revisiting the decade's culture wars.

Taken together, these books suggest a season less interested in easy categories than in the systems that shape art's public life: how images circulate, how histories are written, and how artists alter the terms of what a culture notices.

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