The Best Art Books of 2021
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.
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Afro-Atlantic Histories edited by Adriano Pedrosa and Tomás Toledo (DelMonico Books and Museu de Arte de São Paulo with D.A.P.)
Image Credit: Artbook/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
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Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network 1990–2001 edited by Howie Chen (Primary Information)
Image Credit: 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
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Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror (Whitney Museum)
Image Credit: Whitney Museum of American Art 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
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Marcel Duchamp (Hauser & Wirth)
Image Credit: Artbook/D.A.P. 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
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Shigeko Kubota: Viva Video! (Kawade Shobo Shinsha Ltd.) and Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality (Museum of Modern Art)
Image Credit: Artbook/D.A.P. 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
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Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History by Elizabeth Ferrer (University of Washington Press)
Image Credit: 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
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Deana Lawson edited by Peter Eleey and Eva Respini (Mack Books)
Image Credit: 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
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Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? A Reader edited by Adam Pendleton and Alec Mapes-Frances (Museum of Modern Art)
Image Credit: 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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Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful edited by Seth Feman and Jonathan Fredrick Walz (Columbus Museum and Chrysler Museum of Art with Yale University Press)
Image Credit: Yale University Press Riding a wave of Alma Thomas mania that kicked off when the Obamas hung a painting by her in the White House in 2015, two museums in the South—the Columbus Museum in Georgia and the Chrysler Museum in Virginia—mounted a full-dress survey for the artist, whose dazzling abstractions recreate cosmologies using what the artist referred to as “Alma’s Stripes.” The show’s magisterial catalogue is a rare volume that manages to complement its related exhibition nicely and also stand on its own. There’s been a lot of writing about Thomas in the past half-decade, some of it spurred on by an earlier Studio Museum in Harlem show in 2016, but this catalogue exposes new parts of Thomas’s oeuvre. Among its best offerings is an essay on Thomas’s carefully honed persona by curator Tiffany E. Barber, who writes, “The act of painting for Thomas was also an act of performance.” —Alex Greenberger
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Locating Sol LeWitt edited by David S. Areford (Yale University Press)
Image Credit: Yale University Press There are many ways to interpret Sol LeWitt’s famed rule-based wall drawings. As art historian David S. Areford explains in his introduction to this edited volume of essays, scholars and curators have positioned his work as both resolutely rational, anticipating the logic of computers, and essentially irrational, like a child’s babble. The texts within attempt not to sway opinion but to highlight a wider range of LeWitt’s processes. Anna Lovatt focuses on his “malfunctioning machines,” experiments that led to dead-ends or re-routings in his oeuvre. Erica DiBenedetto explores his site-specific wall drawings in a medieval tower in Spoleto, Italy, where he annotated “niches, mantlepieces, ceiling beams, lamps, electrical sockets, a fireplace.” The book offers an incisive look at a practice that is both “ironically excessive” and “absurdly rudimentary,” as James H. Miller writes—one that’s comprised of intersecting lines of thought, pointing in every direction. —Mira Dayal
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Art & Trousers: Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Asian Art by David Elliott (University of Chicago Press)
Image Credit: University of Chicago Press Over the past 50 years, British-born David Elliott has been the head of four museums in Europe and Asia; director of biennials in Sydney, Kiev, Moscow, and Belgrade; and organizer of some of the era’s most revelatory regional-focus exhibitions. In this compendium mixing new and previously published essays, he weaves an account of his own nomadic career into a wide-ranging survey of contemporary Asian art, based on the playful premise that Asia’s 20th-century adoption of Western garb heralded the assimilation of modern social and aesthetic principles across the world’s largest and most culturally diverse continent. Examining both global art stars and lesser-known artists and movements, Elliott wrangles intensely (and sometimes humorously) with colonialism’s exploitive vs. liberatory dialectic. —Richard Vine
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Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw edited by Mark Pascale, Esther Adler, and Edouard Kopp (Yale University Press)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art Self-taught artist Joseph Elmer Yoakum (1891–1972) was “discovered” by the mainstream art world in the last decade of his life, when he began hanging his drawings in the window of his storefront apartment in Chicago. Mostly stylized landscapes depicting places possibly visited in reality—he claimed to have traveled with a circus in his youth—or perhaps only in his imagination, their undulating forms and vigorous patterning offer a delirious take on the notion of the sublime in nature.Yoakum’s work was first championed by School of the Art Institute of Chicago professor Whitney Halstead and later by the Chicago Imagists, a group of artists that included Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Karl Wirsum, and Roger Brown. This elegant monograph, which includes an essay by Halstead, accompanies a traveling exhibition of Yoakum’s work currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art. —Anne Doran
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The Mayor of Leipzig by Rachel Kushner (Karma Books)
Image Credit: Karma With her remarkable 2013 novel The Flamethrowers, whose protagonist is recent art school grad from Nevada newly arrived in 1970s SoHo, Rachel Kushner established herself as one of the very few writers capable of portraying the art world in fiction without falling back on satirical cliché. Her latest work of fiction, The Mayor of Leipzig, a very slim novella published as a very attractive hardcover by Karma Books, is once again set in the art world, this time following a present-day midcareer artist who has traveled to Germany to prepare for an upcoming museum show in Leipzig. There’s little in the way of plot, but plenty of hilarious, sharply observed vignettes about artists’ social and professional obligations. —Rachel Wetzler
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African Artists from 1882 to Now (Phaidon)
Image Credit: Phaidon Among numerous misconceptions about African art is the idea that artists from the continent are “curiosities or latecomers,” as art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu writes in the introduction to African Artists from 1882 to Now. Proof abounds in the lavishly illustrated tome, which for the uninitiated can serve as a bracing intro to the past 130 years of African art. Famous figures like El Anatsui, John Akomfrah, and Chéri Samba come under consideration, but it is the lesser-known and under-recognized artists who shine—like Manuel Figueira, a Cape Verdean artist who paints abstractions based on his country’s landscapes, or Lerato Shadi, a South African based in Berlin who meditates on the Black female body in her performances. —Alex Greenberger
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Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South by Winfred Rembert with Erin I. Kelly (Bloomsbury Publishing)
Image Credit: Bloomsbury In this fascinating remembrance of his life story and the art he has made, Winfred Rembert recalls his encounters with racism, the American prison system, and the innovative means by which he spun lived experiences into art by expressively painting them onto leather. In addition to being unusually clear-eyed, Rembert’s memoir is notable for its openness. “I feel like I am putting my audience in another world when I get them interested in Black life,” he writes. —Alex Greenberger
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Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition (Museum of Modern Art)
Image Credit: Artbook/D.A.P. The Berlin-born Surrealist Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985)—best known for her iconic furry teacup sculpture—is the currently subject of overdue traveling retrospective. Titled “Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition,” it includes some 200 objects highlighting the wide-ranging output of the artist, who some have inaccurately labeled a one-hit wonder. Her wide-ranging oeuvre, which spans geometric abstract paintings to jewelry designs, is illustrated in this new catalogue. The standouts remain the Surrealist objects that showcase Oppenheim’s signature wit and humor, but essays by the show’s three curators also draw out other aspects of her work. —Emily Watlington
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Alice Neel: People Come First edited by Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
After a 2020 filled with online viewing rooms, Alice Neel’s career-spanning show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was a respite—something that definitely needed to be seen in person. It comprised more than 100 painted portraits, drawings, and watercolors featuring an astounding array of New Yorkers: immigrants, activists, celebrities, and expecting mothers in a style that melded abstraction and figuration. The exhibition catalogue is a vital supplement, containing essays on Neel’s aesthetics and her personal engagement with feminism and the civil and gay rights movements. Neel always focused on the people in her paintings; the show was faithful to the spirit of her work in this way. But this book is valuable in that it brings the artist forward, too. —Tessa Solomon
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Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time by Teju Cole (University of Chicago Press)
Image Credit: University of Chicago Press These are dark times, with an ongoing global pandemic, an urgent climate crisis, and escalating race-related violence. Aptly, Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole takes up the concept of darkness for his latest book of essays. Merging art criticism, travelogues, political discourse, and diaristic forms of writing, he foregrounds the diversity of Blackness and its shifting cultural meaning. In one essay, for example, he addresses the colonial history of Africa, which he refers to as the “Dark Continent,” and offers alternative narratives on Blackness. Other essays focus on art critic John Berger, photographer Lorna Simpson, painter Kerry James Marshall, and the 2018 film Black Panther. Perhaps most important, in this divisive year especially, is Cole’s attempt to find greater purpose and a sense of belonging. After all, as Cole writes, “Darkness is not empty.” —Francesca Aton
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We Are Here: Visionaries of Color Transforming the Art World by Jasmin Hernandez (Abrams)
Image Credit: Abrams This visually stunning coffee book is an important visual record of artists and curators of color who are making a profound impact on the art world. Written by Jasmin Hernandez, who started the closely followed art blog Gallery Gurls in 2012, We Are Here offers beautiful original photography that are accompanied with accessible Q&A-style interviews with the likes of Firelei Báez, Tourmaline, Derek Fordjour, Genevieve Gaignard, Renee Cox, Naima J. Keith, and Jasmine Wahi. For any person of color considering a career in the art world, the inspiring messages and wisdom on offer make this book a must-read. —Maximilíano Durón
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Hello Future by Farah Al Qasimi (Capricious)
Image Credit: Capricious Foundation It’s difficult to choose the most memorable image from Hello Future, Farah Al Qasimi’s photobook exploring the intersection of gender, politics, and aesthetics in the Persian Gulf. The Emirati artist has a keen eye for the glorious riots of pigments, pattern, and texture found in mundane spaces, like the glowing calligraphy of a storefront or the fluorescent floral print of an abaya. Al Qasimi is part of generation of young Gulf artists experiencing immense change to their home in the form of migration, globalization, and cultural investment. Her sumptuous images chronicle a people and place grappling with how to meet their future. —Tessa Solomon