8 Art Books To Explore This Fall

(MENAFN- USA Art News) A new selection of eight art-focused books offers a deep dive into art history, photography, sculpture, and archaeology, providing substantial reading for the fall season.

Featured Publications and Their Insights

One notable release is John Berger: From Life by Tom Overton, a biography that took over a decade to research. Overton drew from interviews within Berger's circle and his archive at the British Library to create a complex portrait of the writer and art critic. The book explores Berger's career highlights, including his 1972 series Ways of Seeing and his novel G., alongside his political activism and his views on the interplay between politics and art. As Berger once stated,“We never look at just one thing.”

Studio Museum in Harlem: A History, edited by Romi Crawford, chronicles the institution's journey since its 1968 founding as a hub for artists of African descent. The museum has launched careers for artists like Kara Walker and Kevin Beasley, amassed a collection of over 10,000 works, and expanded into a $300 million building. The volume includes firsthand accounts and essays from figures such as director Thelma Golden, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Dawoud Bey, Naomi Beckwith, and Franklin Sirmans, enriched by the museum's visual archive.

Women Photographers Are Dangerous by Laure Adler and Clara Bouveresse re-evaluates art history to highlight overlooked women in photography. The book profiles 60 artists, from well-known figures such as Dorothea Lange, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, and Zanele Muholi to lesser-known talents. The authors also recognize women instrumental in photography's technical advancements, including English botanist Anna Atkins, who is widely credited with publishing the first photographic book, featuring her cyanotypes.

Neil Levine's The Sculpture of Donald Judd challenges established interpretations of Judd's work by explicitly using the term“sculpture.” While Judd himself characterized his assemblages of wood, steel, and Plexiglas as“three-dimensional works” and denied being a Minimalist, Levine positions Judd's practice within the broader history of the medium. The book chronologically traces Judd's artistic output from his early 1960s found-object pieces to his polychrome formations three decades later.

The Space Behind the Face, a memoir by Robert Wilson with Keith McDermott, takes its title from Wilson's theatrical directive to actors about where their power resides. The book explores Wilson's life through vignettes structured around three artistic approaches to space: portrait, still life, and landscape, tracing his journey from a conservative upbringing in Texas to his influence on New York's avant-garde theater scene.

Zanele Muholi's acclaimed series Faces and Phases, 2006–2026 receives a new volume, coinciding with solo exhibitions at Foto Arsenal Wien in Vienna and the Hasselblad Center in Sweden. For 20 years, Muholi has photographed queer Black women across locations including South Africa, Los Angeles, London, and São Paolo, exploring themes of gender and sexuality. This publication features new and previously unseen portraits, alongside essays by Lola Olufemi and Briona Simone Jones. A conversation between Renée Mussai and Muholi highlights the artist's intent:“I am creating a living archive that I did not have access to when I was growing up, and one I wish queer and trans people in the future will be able to reference easily,” Muholi said.

Louis Shadwick's Edward Hopper: A Life is the first biography to utilize the Sanborn Hopper Archive, acquired by the Whitney Museum in 2017. Shadwick examines Hopper's paintings, which portray the“hollow promise of modern America,” considering their historical contexts despite Hopper's own reluctance to interpret his work as sociopolitical. The biography also draws on the records of Hopper's wife, secretary, and model, Jo Nivison.

Finally, Uncovering Antioch: The Ancient City and Its Lost Treasures of Mosaic Art by Robert Kanigel details a 1932 expedition by Princeton University archaeologists in Antioch, Syria. The team, seeking palace walls and sculptures, instead discovered over 300 mosaic artworks from ancient Roman villas. Kanigel chronicles the eight-year excavation, which resulted in these treasures being dispersed to institutions globally, including the Louvre in Paris and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The book argues that this expedition was a landmark in archaeology but also raised enduring questions about the ownership of cultural heritage.

Source: Artnet News

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