Art Books
Ray Johnson and William S. Wilson: Frog Pond Splash
By Mark BlochThis beautiful and well-researched book joins a selection of the artist’s collages with texts by his friend, the late critic William S. Wilson. But the star of this show is Johnson, whose magnificent, uncanny, and sublime collages require little explanation that he himself did not provide in abundance during his self-truncated lifetime.
Renee Gladman’s One Long Black Sentence
By Megan N. LibertyThe white lined drawings glow against the full-bleed black pages, encased in a black hardcover with embroidered white lines that are physically raised off the surface. These cityscapes, celestial scenes, and cartographic “paragraph drawings” conjure a vision of a different world, reconsidering the form of a sentence.
Karlheinz Weinberger’s Photographs: Together & Alone
By Sarah MorozNever-before-published intimate portraits of nude men the Zurich-based photographer invited into his makeshift studio, located within the apartment he shared with his mother, show the studio as a refuge for homoerotic desire away from relentless Swiss normativity.
Son Ni’s The Well-Tempered Us
By Jordan SpencerThe latest book from Taiwanese artist and publisher, assembles and disassembles graphite lines into all manner of new forms that quickly shift and warp as the numbered pages turn, continuing her study of structuralism and serial drawing.
In Conversation
HANNAH WHITAKER with Naomi Elias
Hannah Whitaker speaks with Naomi Elias on the occasion of her new photobook Ursula, out in 2021 from Image Text Ithaca Press.
20 Best Art Books of 2020
To celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Brooklyn Rail, our editors and writers have selected our favorite art books from the past year. Many of the titles reflect a year spent mostly at home, often in isolation. What follows is a selection of what kept us company during this difficult year, kept us thinking and dreaming about art and language, and kept us rethinking what looking and reading can and should be.
