Art Books
Designing a New Tradition: Loïs Mailou Jones and the Aesthetics of Blackness
By Karen ChernickThis second monograph on Jones fleshes out the details of the artist’s biography using records kept at Howard University and interviews with former students such as artists David Driskell and Akili Ron Anderson. Rebecca VanDiver reinterprets Jones’s work, arguing that she nimbly laced together American, African American, African, and European artistic traditions—in order to fashion a brand new one.
Luis Camnitzer’s One Number is Worth One Word
By Leah GallantThe recent collection of the artist’s writing on art and education concerns a keen interest in conceptual art as communication, museums as places of learning, the political possibilities of creative thinking, and a constant trespassing between disciplines and forms. Camnitzer rarely discusses his own work in these texts, but it’s through the lens of his visual work that his writing feels most fully formed.
Martine Syms’s Shame Space
By Megan N. LibertyMartine Syms makes her material digital influx, trafficking in the visual and textual overload of contemporary communication. While her videos reflect the pace and flux of digital life, her publications offer a moment to slow down and move at one’s own pace.
World War 3 Illustrated’s Shameless Feminists
By Lucy LippardAutobiography has long been a powerful fertilizer for women’s art and many of the stories told in Shameless Feminists are creative nonfiction, full of tales of lonely, talented, ignored women coming into their own through community support. WW3 has lasted all this time because it is so genuinely committed to social justice and communicates with such gusto.
Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne
By David CarrierThe new edition includes just 20 pages of editorial material and a six-paragraph highly elusive introduction by Warburg himself. But most of the book is devoted to a reconstruction of his picture atlas: collected arrays of old master paintings, contemporary works, prints and also newspaper clippings and other materials from popular culture placed on large screens.
