With travel restrictions still in place, many looked to art books this year when they couldn’t visit the museums and galleries they loved most. Below is a look back at some of the year’s best books, as picked by the editors of ARTnews and Art in America, from elegant catalogues that paired nicely with the year’s finest shows to forward-thinking tomes of criticism that drew out new strands of art history.
Afro-Atlantic Histories edited by Adriano Pedrosa and Tomás Toledo (DelMonico Books and Museu de Arte de São Paulo with D.A.P.)
For the past several years, the Museu de arte de São Paulo has been mounting game-changing, expansive surveys under the name “Histórias,” with topics including Brazil, dance, women and feminism, and more. The most acclaimed one, 2018’s “Afro-Atlantic Histories,” began its U.S. tour this year at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, before heading to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Accompany this slimmed-down, more focused version of the show is this new volume: “a hybrid of sorts—it cannot be properly called an exhibition catalogue,” according to editors Adriano Pedrosa and Tomás Toledo. The almost-400-page tome presents beautiful images of the works that were in the original exhibition, along with new ones shown in the U.S. tour, as well as a bevy of new texts, including ones by Deborah Willis, Kanitra Fletcher, and Vivian A. Crockett. An Afro-Brazilian woman living in the U.S., Crockett offers these important words: “If contemporary discourses in the United States privilege the ethos of refusal, Afro-Atlantic Histories takes the opposite approach: providing so much visual evidence of these legacies of violence that their impact cannot be refuted. Art-historical mea culpa, if you will.” —Maximilíano Durón
Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network 1990–2001 edited by Howie Chen (Primary Information)
During the 1990s, the Asian American group Godzilla grew from a small New York contingent to some 2,000 participants nationwide. This volume, edited by independent curator and Art in America columnist Howie Chen, is the first anthology of writings to chronicle the collective’s art projects, curatorial activities, and critical discourse. Spurred by the activism of key members such as Ken Chu, Margo Machida, Byron Kim, Eugenie Tsai, Bing Lee, and Karin Higa, Godzilla addressed “institutional racism, Western imperialism, anti-Asian violence, the AIDS crisis, and representations of Asian sexuality and gender, among other issues.” Protests included conscience-raising campaigns against the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Chinese in America. —Richard Vine
Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror (Whitney Museum)
The catalogue for this year’s deeply intriguing and interrelated two-part Jasper Johns survey at the Whitney Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of art is as probing and prismatic as the exhibition itself. Sequences of work assembled thematically in different locations create a dialogue from page to page, as when a section on “Dreams” at the Whitney is followed by “Nightmares” at the Philadelphia Museum. Commissioned writings by a wide variety of writers—R. H. Quaytman, Ralph Lemon, and Colm Tóibín, to name just a few—go beyond what’s shown at either institution. —Andy Battaglia
Marcel Duchamp (Hauser & Wirth)
Fit snugly in an inviting orange slipcase, Marcel Duchamp dutifully reincarnates Robert Lebel’s 1959 monograph of an artist as enticing and enigmatic as any before or since. Written and designed after years of collaboration between the author and Duchamp himself, the book reproduced from Grove Press’s first English-language edition surveys the artist’s paintings and readymades as well as unclassifiable works like The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), which gets an entire deep-dive chapter of its own. And then there’s a supplemental volume—assembled in part by Lebel’s son Jean-Jacques Lebel—that tells the story of how the book came together and how its reputation has evolved over time. —Andy Battaglia
Shigeko Kubota: Viva Video! (Kawade Shobo Shinsha Ltd.) and Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality (Museum of Modern Art)
This year, the trailblazing video artist Shigeko Kubota finally got her due, with a survey at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a retrospective traveling to three cities in Japan. The shows gifted us with not one but two new definitive volumes on the Japanese American artist (1937–2015), whose poetic video sculptures consider themes of nature, death, and her art historical heroes—among them Marcel Duchamp and her husband, Nam June Paik. Both books are chock full of archival materials, fascinating photos, and scholarly essays that illuminate an intriguing body of work that has spent far too many years in the shadows. —Emily Watlington
Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History by Elizabeth Ferrer (University of Washington Press)
Curator Elizabeth Ferrer starts off this radical gathering of Latinx photography with a simple premise: “The impetus for this book is derived from a basic fact: by and large, Latinx photographers are excluded from the documented record of the history of American photography. And yet they have been highly active practitioners of the medium, nearly since its inception in 1839.” In 10 chapters, Ferrer presents a concise history of the ways in which Latinx artists have been quintessential to the development of the medium, starting with its roots going back to the 1840s, moving into the documentation of activist movements of the 1960s and ’70s, and offering specific focuses on “LA Chicanx,” “Puerto Rico, Connected and Apart,” and “Conceptual Statements.” —Maximilíano Durón
Deana Lawson edited by Peter Eleey and Eva Respini (Mack Books)
Published to accompany photographer Deana Lawson’s largest museum survey to date, at the ICA Boston, this photobook features 15 years’ worth of work by the photographer, in which studio and documentary photography blend with intergenerational references to pop culture and contemporary life. Here, retro magazine editorials and family-photo-style pictures of Lawson’s own making converge. In Lawson’s staged scenes taking place in domestic interiors and occasionally outdoors, friends, relatives, and models—most of whom are Black—are seen at times in each other’s embrace or alone, staring vacantly at the camera. These images, which the late critic Greg Tate, one of the book’s essayists, once described as “convulsively charismatic,” offer mesmerizing portraits of Black subjectivity that are both stark and sensual. They allow us to peer into their sitters’ personal histories while also drawing on the broader histories of their social worlds. “Lawson’s pictures draw attention to what the camera cannot capture—and in turn, to the many aspects of Black life that exceed forms of representation,” former MoMA PS1 chief curator Peter Eleey writes. —Angelica Villa
Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? A Reader edited by Adam Pendleton and Alec Mapes-Frances (Museum of Modern Art)
Adam Pendleton’s latest “reader” comprises an interdisciplinary selection of texts key to his current exhibition at MoMA, but Stuart Comer’s framing of the book as a “score” seems most apt. Fonts, textures, graphic elements, painted lines, and the visual fuzz of scanned documents form a rhythm across the pages while the texts invite a chorus of voices, from the demands of Occupy and Black Lives Matter protestors to the “call and response” form that late film scholar James Arthur Snead framed as being central to Black culture. Visual markings across some reproductions alternately invite and inhibit reading, suggesting a controlled glimpse into Pendleton’s library. Read this book, but also heed Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s poetic text: “close your eyes and listen.” —Mira Dayal.
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