The Best Art Books of 2020
Books became portals into other worlds more than usual in 2020, with seemingly endless times of confinement and less in the way of IRL experience than most of us had ever imagined before. Whether through reading or looking at pictures that proved a lot more interesting than the composition of our walls, we at ARTnews found much to be grateful for between the covers of books this year. Here are some of our favorites.
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Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation edited by Liz Munsell and Greg Tate (Museum of Fine Arts Boston)
Image Credit: Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts Boston The Boston Globe declared that “Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation,” a show this year at the city’s Museum of Fine Arts, “feels like the most important exhibition on Basquiat you’ll ever see, and he’s just one artist among the show’s dozen.” It’s the first exhibition to really put Basquiat in the context of hip-hop and among his peers in post-graffiti art. And given that many of us won’t get to see the show in the midst of the pandemic (though it runs through May 16, so there is still hope!), this catalogue serves as a good substitute. You learn that Basquiat’s friend Rammellzee called him a “sponge artist,” for the way he absorbed his many influences, and come to appreciate the New York city subway system—where many of Basquiat’s contemporaries did their best work—as “the biggest gallery for distribution.” The catalogue has killer essays by the show’s co-curators, Greg Tate and Liz Munsell, and also an excellent take on Basquiat’s social conscience by J. Faith Almiron. —Sarah Douglas
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Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics by Arlene Dávila (Duke University Press)
Image Credit: Courtesy Duke University Press With deep research and details about the ways in which the market continues to overlook and undervalue the work of Latinx artists, Arlene Dávila’s Latinx Art is one of this year’s most important contributions to the art world as a whole. As Dávila told ARTnews earlier this year, “For me, this book is to ensure that people know about these artists.” And she crafts a well-told story that begins by defining Latinx art (useful for the uninformed), how it differs from Latin American art, and the many ways in which Latinx artists continue to be invisible with the mainstream art world. Dávila also provides two appendices that provide an important list of living Latinx artists and a resource guide to institutions and scholars who are already doing the work of supporting them. That this book exists is itself an important milestone in the struggle for equity in the art world. —Maximilíano Durón
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Cover to Cover by Michael Snow (Light Industry and Primary Information)
Image Credit: Primary Information To even begin to try to explain what transpires in Michael Snow’s Cover to Cover is to feel like you’ve missed the point entirely. The storied artist book from 1975 was released in a facsimile edition by Primary Information (the redoubtable publisher behind other great 2020 titles including Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 and Yvonne Rainer’s Work 1961-73), and flipping through it made for some of the most simultaneously disorienting and locked-in experiences of my year. Without a word, a sort of story presents itself through a quasi-cinematic sequence of black-and-white photographs whose subject matter becomes the making of those same photographs and then, also, the book itself. It makes sense up until the point when you pause and try to articulate what makes sense about it. In that, Cover to Cover felt right for our times. —Andy Battaglia
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Video/Art: The First Fifty Years by Barbara London (Phaidon)
Image Credit: Courtesy Phaidon There may be no one better equipped to write a history of video art than former Museum of Modern Art curator Barbara London, who has been one of the medium’s top defenders since the 1970s. Having followed video’s rise as an artform, she traces its history in this compact, accessible volume. Nam June Paik, Joan Jonas, Bill Viola, Bruce Nauman, and other usual suspects are all represented, but London’s book excites because it brings new artists into a lineage worthy of greater stuff. Her passion for lesser-known figures like Shigeko Kubota, Ericka Beckman, Paul Wong, Anna Bella Geiger, and Shu Lea Cheang is contagious, and given London’s track record, it seems like we’ll be seeing more from them in the future. —Alex Greenberger
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Kusama: The Graphic Novel by Elisa Macellari (Laurence King Publishing)
Image Credit: Courtesy Laurence King Yayoi Kusama’s rise to international renown has long been fodder for books and films, and this publication—released in a year that saw the postponement of Kusama exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and Gropius Bau in Berlin—helped followers around the world connect with Kusama in the midst of social distancing. Written and illustrated by Elisa Macellari, Kusama: The Graphic Novel traces events from the artist’s early days in New York during the 1960s to her recent blockbuster exhibitions. Macellari proves that illustration is an auspicious medium for representing Kusama’s buoyant artworks, and she tells a detailed, thoughtful account of the artist’s formative childhood experiences and later triumphs and struggles in the art world. —Claire Selvin
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Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Nicole Fleetwood (Harvard University Press)
Image Credit: Courtesy Harvard University Press The remarkable exhibition “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration” at MoMA PS1 in New York explored injustices related to the U.S. prison industrial complex through work by (formerly or currently) incarcerated artists and family members affected by their fate. In the companion book, curator Nicole R. Fleetwood expands the show’s themes of isolation and erasure while highlighting the ongoing efforts of prison abolitionists. Fleetwood spent a decade researching the visual culture of the American penal system, and the product is as illuminating as it is heartbreaking. —Tessa Solomon
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John Cage: A Mycological Foray Edited by Ananda Pellerin (Atelier Éditions)
Image Credit: Atelier Éditions John Cage’s love of mushrooms was paid fitting tribute in this gorgeous bundling of two volumes: one a collection of texts and pictures related to the avant-garde composer’s many years of foraging and the other a reproduction of Mushroom Book, first released in a limited edition in 1972 and comprising paired illustrations of vegetal specimens by artist Lois Long and handwritten notes by Cage himself (in five differently graded lithograph pencils!). In one of his own entries, Cage writes, “As a demanding gourmet sees but does not purchase the marketed mushroom, so a lively musician reads from time to time the announcement of concerts and stays quietly at home.” This book very much rewards the act of doing the same. —Andy Battaglia
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Matthew Wong: Postcards by Henri Cole and Winnie Wong (Karma)
Image Credit: Courtesy Karma Since his death in 2019, Matthew Wong’s richly colored, dreamy landscapes have continued to captivate the art world. Karma Gallery in New York staged an acclaimed exhibition of his work late last year, and the recent sale of his River at Dusk (2018) for $4.9 million at Phillips auction set a new record for the artist. Published on the occasion of an ARCH Athens exhibition of intimately scaled works by Wong in the last year of his life, Postcards also features an essay by art historian Winnie Wong and a poem by Henri Cole. The small scale presents an opportunity to acquaint with the painter’s explorations on paper, which, like his larger works, have the power to induce a deeply contemplative mood. As Winnie Wong writes in the introduction, “The postcard is a genre that seems to consciously elude a sense of stable locus, yet marks the times of our lives when we tried to grasp it.”—Claire Selvin
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The Sense of Brown by José Esteban Muñoz (Duke University Press)
Image Credit: Courtesy Duke University Press Among the most important theorists of the last quarter-century, José Esteban Muñoz helped usher in an approach to thinking about performance art that foregrounded the work and experiences of queer artists of color through important books including Disidentifications (1999) and Cruising Utopia (2009). His premature death in 2013 ended a life lost too soon, leaving behind an enormous legacy—and a hole—in the field that he helped formulate. Expertly edited after his passing by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o, The Sense of Brown is Muñoz’s final work, and it’s a true testament to an intersectional project that suggests that “queerness is in the horizon, forward dawning and not-yet-here. Brownness diverges from my definition of queerness. Brownness is already here.” Prior to his death, Muñoz had chosen which of his essays were to appear in the book, to which the editors added additional for context. The volume also includes exceptional analysis on a group of Latinx artists such as Carmelita Tropicana, Nao Bustamante, Ricardo Bracho, Tania Brugera, and Ana Mendieta, as well as Isaac Julien and Wu Tsang. —Maximilíano Durón
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Korean Art from 1953: Collision, Innovation, Interaction by Yeon Shim Chung, Sunjung Kim, Kimberly Chung, and Keith B. Wagner (Phaidon)
Image Credit: Courtesy Phaidon Korean artists Haegue Yang, Lee Bul, Lee Ufan, and Do Ho Suh are well-known in the U.S. and Europe, while others (like Lee Seung-taek, Park Seo-bo, and Lim Eung Sik) are generally not. This tome—billed as the first book ever to survey Korean contemporary art—is a good introduction for English speakers looking to learn more about latter category. With aplomb, art historians Yeon Shim Chung, Sunjung Kim, Kimberly Chung, and Keith B. Wagner assembled a thrilling history surveying Korea’s art scene as it responded to a number of political factors, from the violence wrought during the Korean War to calls for democracy that reached a fever pitch with 1980’s Gwangju Uprising. The U.S. is on the cusp of seeing major surveys of Korean art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum in the coming years, and when those shows finally do happen, this book will serve as an essential resource to have on hand. —Alex Greenberger
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Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell (Verso Books)
Image Credit: Courtesy Verso Books Glitch Feminism, the literary debut of curator Legacy Russell, explores the experiences of queer, nonbinary, and trans BIPOC in digital and internet spaces (a terminally capitalist, patriarchal realm) through a record of boundary-pushing contemporary artists who require “new frameworks and new visions of fantastic futures.” The book is part-manifesto and part-memoir, and Russell presents the notion of “glitch feminism” as part-successor and part-homage to ’90s-era cyberfeminism. I only wish the book could be longer—some of the sharpest prose and most provocative ideas appear near the end—but it gets the reader on the way to imagining more equitable alternatives to today’s cyberspace. —Tessa Solomon
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Nothing But the Music by Thulani Davis (Blank Forms Editions)
Image Credit: Blank Forms Editions Bearing the subtitle “Documentaries from Nightclubs, Dancehalls, and a Tailor’s Shop in Dakar,” this collection of poems captures Thulani Davis’s experiences out and about in the world of music and the experiences it elicits. Dating through decades going back the 1970s, the poems compiled for Blank Forms—a performance-minded curatorial and publishing enterprise whose offerings this year also included the valuable Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews—include tributes to jazz greats like Cecil Taylor and Roscoe Mitchell as well as rock and R&B groups like Bad Brains and the Commodores. Threaded through them all are appreciations for—as Tobi Haslett writes in the book’s introduction—”the dynamism at the heart of Black expression, and its centrality to the culture it’s been forced to resist.” —Andy Battaglia
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Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop edited by Sarah L. Eckhardt (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts)
Image Credit: Courtesy Virginia Museum of Fine Arts The Kamoinge Workshop has been and continues to be one of the most important collectives for African-American photographers, and its immense contributions have long been underknown. Thankfully that began to change with curator Sarah L. Eckhardt’s exhibition “Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop,” which opened at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts earlier this year before traveling to the Whitney Museum in New York, the Getty in Los Angeles, and Cincinnati Art Museum over the next few years. Eckhardt’s catalogue for the show charts the history of the Kamoinge Workshop from its founding in 1963 through well-researched essays accompanied by powerful images by the group’s early core members, including Louis Draper, Roy DeCarava, Ming Smith, and Anthony Barboza. This essential volume puts their varied artistic visions on full view. —Maximilíano Durón
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Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (Aperture)
Image Credit: Courtesy Aperture Few photographers are more in need of a big museum survey than Ming Smith, and though her work is currently in the Whitney Museum’s Kamoinge Workshop exhibition, no major solo shows on the horizon make Aperture’s excellent monograph all the more important. Smith’s works are often dark, smudgy pictures that tend toward indefinability, and this lavish tome offers them up with perceptive texts that shed light on her pictures, many of which were shot in lush black and white. To contextualize them, Aperture assembled a mix of contributors including critic Yxta Maya Murray, who muses on Smith‘s background as a model, as well as Greg Tate and Arthur Jafa, who have been instrumental in bringing historians’ attention to Smith’s overlooked photographs. —Alex Greenberger
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Medieval Monster Hunter by Daniel Kempf (Witty Books)
Image Credit: Courtesy Witty Books Damien Kempf, a manuscript expert and senior lecturer in medieval history at the University of Liverpool in England, has made a name for himself on Instagram in recent years, with more than 100,000 followers of his posts devoted to the madcap creatures and figures featured in medieval manuscripts and paintings. He often pairs images with droll captions about Monday mornings, holiday festivities, dating, office life, and, lately, quarantine. And this year, Kempf published this delightful compilation of strange details from manuscripts accompanied by his own captions. An image of fantastical aquatic creatures, for instance, is coupled with the description, “Welcome to the Sea Monsters Symposium.” Kempf writes that his vocation as a “medieval monster hunter” is a “weird job,” and here’s hoping he keeps doing it. —Claire Selvin