He feels both strange and stabilizing to read the books of Octavia E. Butler in 2025, when the realities she prophesied were made. But the exhibition catalog American artist: Shaper of God We grant an opportunity to think about the lessons we can glean from his inheritance, which Alexandra M. Thomas Writing criticism is a beacon for artists and activists today. Also on our library in April is a invigorating volume dedicated to the role of dreams in Latin American art, who recalled the editor of New Valentina di Liscia of the Bien-Aimée Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez (Gabo) and her role as “but a notary of reality” and the long-standing Zhang of Celia Paul. Read the rest for more books for your monthly list, as well as new Kent Monkman, Saya Woolfalk and others. We also want to shout the new publication of the new anthology of primary information on THINGA magazine from the 1990s focused on the creative black queer scene from Chicago, marking the first time that its 10 numbers are published in one place. As always, there is too much time to read everything. –Lakshmi Rivera Amin, deputy editor -in -chief
Recently examined
Celia Paul: 1975-2025 works
“How is a life that is made of time being returned in art?” This investigation, posed by Clare Carlisle, could be the animated question of a new fantastic monograph on Celia Paul. The interconnected tests intertwine an incredibly generous number of reproductions of the paintings that are both heavy and in weightlessness of the artist, as Karl Ove Knausgaard describes them, covering half a century and chronologically arranged. The themes of devotion, mothers, the sea, the house and femininity have put the rhythm like waves crashing, each recurrence both an assertion and a surprising permutation.
In “My Mother and the Sea”, for example, Carlisle reads Paul through Marcel Proust, how she accompanied her mother through the slow descent into old age and death like Charon Rowing through the Styx river, each of the portraits she painted like a dive of rowing. Hilton Als, meanwhile, compares her to Emily Dickinson and Jean Rhys in a test entitled “The Sea, the Sea”. (Joyce-Heads could mentally end the line: “She is our great sweet mother. “)
These literary references are in no way out of place: Paul, who wrote a memoryinvokes the writer Rachel Cusk in his own essay. It also meditates, of course, on its historical relegation of art to the status of the single muse of Lucien Freud rather than a full -fledged painter. Nevertheless, its fence line can be felt in its prolific practice of the self -portrait: “Paint me can be home.” –Lisa Yin Zhang
Read the criticism of Eliza Goodpasture | Buy the book | Mack, March 2025
Mary Cassatt between Paris and New York: the manufacture of a transatlantic heritage By Ruth E. Iskin
“In this meticulously studied and rigorously argued book, Iskin portrays his subject as an ambitious and wise woman who, despite the societal constraints, has worked a remarkable agency on her trajectory. At the start of the twenty connections. –Sophia Stewart
Read the review | Buy on the bookstore | University of California Press, January 2025
On our list
American artist: Shaper of GodPublished by Zainab Aliyu
Shaper of God is a fascinating collection of writing and images that develops on the Holder exhibition About the late writer Octavia E. Butler. The introduction of the American artist recounts their experience of rereading the premonitory novel of Butler in 1993 Sower parable In 2020 and start developing this multimedia work, which exploited the tangles of the artist's world of life alongside Butler. The artist diverts their in -depth research on their family history intertwined in southern California and the institutional archives of Butler at the Huntington Library. The book is organized in three sections, each explores a different theme: the role of maternal heritage, migration and creation of places and space exploration. Essays by Taylor Renee Aldridge, Tananarive Due, Ayana Jamieson, Lou Cornum, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Fred Moten Amplify themes of heritage, place and space by analyzing the literature and butler's archives more, as well as the artist's creative process. Gumbs does not cover an imaginary conversation between Butler and astronomer Edwin Hubble in the Huntington archives; Moten writes a poem on an ongoing apocalypse. Overall, the book is a recording of how artists and contemporary scholars turn to Butler's vision when they are struggling with continuous disasters and the futuristic possibilities of today. –Alexandra Mr. Thomas
Buy on the bookstore | Pioneer Works Press, March 2025
Eufriacasi burlahshia By Loretta Vandi
The first biography of Eufrasia Burlamacchi (1478–1548) brought out the illuminator of the prolific Italian manuscript. Daughter of a rich and cultivated Tuscan family, Burlamacchi became a Dominican nun at the age of 12 and then helped to find the attentive convent of San Dominico in Lucca, where she would remain until her death. As a woman, Burlamacchi could not complete a learning in a master workshop like her male peers. But even in the circumscribed world of a nun, Lucca was a particularly rich artistic context, just like Tuscany as a whole. Sources of inspiration such as drawings, prints and contemporary books have found their way in front of the convent walls and in the artist's hands and possible manuscripts. The thoughtful study of the art historian Loretta Vandi follows the nun, a singer and artist through the quietly dazzling works she left behind, arguing that Burlamacchi managed to innovate and even participate in artistic currents of her time despite her strictly cloistered life. –Lauren Moya Ford
Buy on the bookstore | Getty Publications, March 2025
Sun Dreams – Art Mirages in Latin AmericaPublished by Marina Dias Teixeira and Yasmin Abdalla
Refuting the assertion that he had invented the literary genre known as the magic realism, the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez said that he was “but a notary of reality”. What he meant is that in Latin America and in the Caribbean, the truth is often stranger than fiction – a fact may never be more obvious than in the singular contributions of his artists to surrealism and his many vrilles. The poetically titled Sun dreamsA Thick Volume Spanning More Than a Century of Visual Artistic Production in the REGION, BRINGS TOGETHER SOME OF THE MOVEMENT's Most Beloved Practitioners (Kahlo, Do Amaral) AlongSide Artists in a shared vein who deerve to be household names: Mexico's Aydeé Rodríguez Brazil's Marcela Cantuária, Paraguay's Julia Isídrez, Argentina's Leonor Fin, Among dozens of others. Oh, and the exquisite illustrations…! It can be a tired truism that we need beauty more than ever, but this book reminds us why, always so subversively: because beauty derives us from darkness, invigorates and mobilizes us so that we can mount the resistance. –Valentina di Liscia
Buy the book | Act Editora, 2025
Gertrude Abercrombie: The whole world is a mysteryPublished by Eric Crosby and Sarah Humphreville
In Eric Crosby's introduction test to that exposure Catalog, he characterizes the underestimated painter, Gertrude Abercrombie, with a file of descriptions of Whitman: she is “The life of the party, the playful witch, the Queen of Chicago, the Jazz Maven, the Bohemian attack. It is a whole curriculum vitae, but by the many accounts assembled in the Lush and informative volume, Abercrombie was up to everyone. He and the co-publisher Sarah Humphreville as well as other contributors complete a rich range of late artist's work with several essays that plunge into his convincing idiosyncratic life, at least as improbable as the images it has evoked. In an included interview, the historian and colleague of Chicagoan Studs, Terkel, asks questions about his role in the federal artistic project of the era of depression: “It saved some of our lives and it threw me in my career,” she said. “Your career and work,” he confirms. But, in a demonstration tonic of contempt ingenuous of success, which is practically absent from the current artistic scene, Abercrombie replies: “Well, whatever his career.” It is an essential book for anyone interested in a mysterious, enchanting and revealing way of painting, as well as the life of an artist who reminds us that the work is a call, not just a profession. –Albert furniture
Buy on the bookstore | Books by Delmonico, Carnegie Museum of Art et Colby Colby Museum of Art, February 2025
