Before the clocks fall back and steal an hour of sun, I’m snatching every moment of outdoor reading time I can get. Our editors and contributors have a book list to sweeten your mid-autumn reading, too. For documentary lovers, Pooja G. Rangan’s book turns the medium inside out. For those in search of guidance, Susan Gubar chronicles the work made by beloved women artists toward the end of their lives, proving that creative discovery has no timeline. For Studio Museum devotees, a collection book harmonizes the artwork and the people who make the Harlem institution such a force. Find your next read below. —Lakshmi Rivera Amin, Associate Editor
Recently Reviewed
Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Women Artists by Susan Gubar
“Gubar, herself 80 years old, doesn’t romanticize the experience of aging: She knows firsthand that with it comes a parade of losses, from our strength and mobility to our loved ones. But she takes heart in the dynamism and adaptability of her subjects, many of whom produced their most ambitious and original art as they approached the end of their lives. The book’s in-depth analyses of some of these works can slip into a rather academic register, and may seem dauntingly dense to readers seeking straightforward inspiration, but for the lit crit lovers among us, they prove wonderfully enlightening. Among Gubar’s most interesting findings is how the constraints of getting older can present opportunities to explore new artistic modes. Bourgeois’s late-life sculptures, for example, ‘grew humongous until, toward the very end of her life, they shrank into small proportions that could be handled at a table in a wheelchair.’ Meanwhile, the elder O’Keeffe ‘often found watercolor, pastel, and graphite easier to use than oils’ after losing her central vision at 84.” —Sophia Stewart
Read the Review | Buy on Bookshop | W. W. Norton & Company, June 10, 2025
Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image by Jack Hartnell
“The Wound Man might strike contemporary viewers as a gruesome spectacle, an archaic precursor to the Saw movies, or the revenge fantasy of some jilted ex. The violence is so over the top that it might even seem ridiculous — the punch line to a macabre joke. But the figure is something else altogether, writes art historian Jack Hartnell in his new book, Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image. The Wound Man, he argues, was not ‘originally designed to inspire fear or to menace.’ Instead, early versions of the Wound Man accompanied by summaries of medical treatments likely offered reassurance to patients coping with ailments of their own. ‘Although at first appearing to be a pained and pitiless figure, one whose injuries threatened to overwhelm both their victim and the viewer,’ Hartnell writes, ‘the Wound Man was in fact one of the period’s most sophisticated repositories of medical hope, at once enunciating and embodying the many cures he marshaled for the fifteenth-century reader.’” —Zoë Lescaze
Read the Review | Buy on Bookshop | Princeton University Press, August 19, 2025
On Our List
The War of Art: A History of Artists’ Protest in America by Lauren O’Neill-Butler
There is no dearth of books about art and activism — in fact, I dare say there have been more titles on this subject in recent years than any of us has the patience to read. But Lauren O’Neill-Butler’s The War of Art stands apart for a simple reason: It is engaging, propulsive writing that not only looks back at history, but also reveals timely lessons for the art-as-resistance of today. Nearly four decades since artist David Wojnarowicz attended an AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power protest wearing a jacket emblazoned with the words “IF I DIE OF AIDS — FORGET BURIAL — JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE FDA,” the book’s opening chapter examines the immortal epigram’s memeification, variously repurposed to call out governments guilty of inaction fueled by prejudice. Another plumbs the legacy of the Black Emergency Artists Coalition led by artist Faith Ringgold (“perhaps this book’s patron saint,” O’Neill-Butler writes), arguably best known for protesting the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s egregious exclusion of Black artists in its 1969 show Harlem on My Mind. The artists and collectives discussed in this book have unmasked the Sackler family’s artwashing of the opioid crisis (Nan Goldin’s PAIN), advocated for Indigenous land rights (Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds), and planted a massive wheatfield in Manhattan’s Battery Park Landfill (Agnes Denes). Their efforts are bound together not by a shared poeticism or political sentimentality, but by effective tactics and actionable impact that may very well be blueprints for confronting the new wave of authoritarianism. —Valentina Di Liscia
Buy on Bookshop | Verso, June 17, 2025
The Documentary Audit: Listening and the Limits of Accountability by Pooja G. Rangan
“Giving voice to the voiceless” is a common refrain in the art world, dotting personal statements and curatorial essays, but it can all too often result in artists speaking over the very people they intended to amplify. I was swept up by scholar Pooja G. Rangan’s new book sprouting from this exact point of tension, which has preoccupied documentarians since the form’s inception but remains less examined from the vantage point of the viewer. Closely analyzing the conditions of production and development on documentaries around the world, Rangan maps the ways that we form “habits” of listening that can flatten and harm the very voices we strain to hear. What does it really mean to listen without projecting, compressing, or silencing in the process? What might we learn from the echoes left in its wake? —LA
Buy on Bookshop | Columbia University Press, July 8, 2025
Family Amnesia: Chinese American Resilience by Betty Yu
We are all patchworks of history, family, and memory, recalled and recombined and come back to haunt. What I love about Betty Yu’s book is that she makes that truth tangible. Family Amnesia’s exciting design combines, annotates, and overlays family photos, her own past work, and historical ephemera and documentation.
Its content, too, is a pastiche. The book is dedicated to past and future — her late family, her young son. The titular introduction is adapted from a 2021 essay originally published in e-flux, and the final pages see her fit herself into the larger trajectory of Chinese-American history via nodes on a timeline. After “Central Pacific recruits Chinese workers to build a transcontinental railroad” in 1865, for example, is a note about her own great-grandfather’s immigration to Reno, Nevada, where he worked on the railroad.
Sharon Mizota once meditated in these pages on an Asian-American tendency toward generational amnesia. This book shows that there are many ways to remember. —Lisa Yin Zhang
Buy on Bookshop | Daylight Books, July 15, 2025
Hew Locke: Passages, edited by Martina Droth and Allie Biswas
Hew Locke is one of the best artists of our time. His multi-leaved work probes, dissects, stings, aches, and forgives. And out of all of his decades-long excavation and deconstruction of the aftermaths and afterlives of colonialism, and the forces of good and evil, truth and beauty emerge. Long in the planning, this significant publication will enlighten you about Locke’s massive repertoire and the beating heart that guides it. —Hakim Bishara
Buy on Bookshop | Yale Center for British Art, September 30, 2025
Artepaño: Chicano Prisoner Kerchief Art
During his Hyperallergic fellowship last year, curator Dr. Álvaro Ibarra described paños as a “second skin” — an apt label for these intricate drawings on handkerchiefs made by incarcerated Latinx people. Mailed to loved ones on the outside, these tokens visualize a web of cultural and personal symbols and reflect the impact of the American prison-industrial complex, yet remain on the fringes of art history. Ibarra’s research into these intimate works of art grapples responsibly not just with their visual and context, but also with what it means to remove them from their circulation as deeply personal keepsakes and place them behind glass in a museum. The result of his research was an exhibition at Utah State University, whose excellent accompanying catalog includes detailed images of 71 richly illustrated paños, along with essays and interviews in both Spanish and English. This must-read book offers a comprehensive, critical look into the universe of layered meanings in artepaño, prodding the foundational assumptions that shape popular notions of art, display, and collection. —LA
Buy the Book | Ginko Press, October 2025
Meaning Matter Memory: Selections from the Studio Museum in Harlem Collection
“Keepsake” is a perfect word for this little gem of a book. Through interviews with former directors, it tells the story of how a humble non-collecting institution dedicated to living artists, begun in 1968, has evolved to become one of the most critical institutions safeguarding Black American art.
The biggest delight, though, is the guide to the collection. Crucially and movingly, it’s arranged not as a mass of objects, but rather as a constellation of people. With blurb-length, eminently readable texts, it feels like a community project, with contemporary curators, art administrations, and artists like Horace D. Ballard, TK Smith, and Daonne Huff contributing scholarship, reflections, and even poems.
Mark your calendars for the Studio Museum’s reopening on November 15. I can’t wait for this new epoch. —LYZ
Buy on Bookshop | Phaidon Press, October 8, 2025
Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor
Wyeth is a gay Black painter navigating New York City through the thick heat of a steaming summer. Most of his studiomates have abandoned Manhattan for Fire Island or upstate New York, while Wyeth’s insecurities about how his paintings are perceived vis-à-vis racial politics, and his criticisms of other artists of color as grifters, are left to fester in the heat. We enter his life fully, joining him at jobs in a gallery and art restoration studio, glitzy openings he sardonically judges, and a chance meeting with a defrocked Jesuit priest with whom he quickly becomes enamored. His world is hyperreal and hyperfamiliar. Author Brandon Taylor writes about our most bleak but consequential contemporary circumstances, drawing in references to the COVID-19 pandemic, monkeypox, the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Minor Black Figures follows the tradition of literary realism; we know every detail of Wyeth’s day, down to the paper sizes of the notebooks he browses. It results in an exhaustively immersive slow burn as Wyeth navigates and is challenged by his relationships, as he reasons his relationship to Black art. —Jasmine Weber
Buy on Bookshop | Riverhead Books, October 14, 2025
Rabelais and His World by Mikhail Bakhtin, translated from the Russian by Sergeiy Sandler
Since it was published in 1965 and translated into English three years later, Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World has become so integral to the study of its subject, French Renaissance humanist François Rabelais, that the two are hard to disentangle from one another. What’s generally lost in discussions of Rabelais, though, is its place in the larger context of Bakhtin’s thought and work. This new edition aims to restore some of that background — how it fits into his oeuvre (or doesn’t), reflects the limitations of scholarship in 1930s Russia, and serves as a vehicle for Bakhtin to develop his own philosophical voice. And for those of us who have spent years poring over Hélène Iswolsky’s canonical English translation, the new edition’s exacting attention to the author’s language is illuminating. Rabelais and His World is a gift of a book that keeps on giving, and this edition gives even more to its readers. —Natalie Haddad
Pre-order the Book | MIT Press, October 28, 2025
