We’ve started to think about finding the perfect gifts for our loved ones and bet you have, too, which is why we’re sharing the first part of our Colossal Year in Review series a little bit early. Below, you’ll find our staff’s favorite art books published this year, from artist monographs, surveys, and historical reflections to prove that art really does make the world a better place.
The titles below are on our shortlist, so head to Bookshop to check out what else made the cut.
Heidi Gustafson of the Early Futures Ochre Archive takes us on a journey through rare pigments and their landscapes in a celebration of the unique qualities of earthen materials. Each chapter is dedicated to an aspect of her massive collection, which contains more than 600 samples. Captivating and insightful, the volume elucidates the world of natural color, challenging our perceptions of terrain and the inanimate world, and includes practical advice and techniques for creating your own pigments.
The first monograph of the pioneering artist’s work, Simone Leigh encompasses two decades of Leigh’s sculptures, videos, and installations, all of which center on Black women and the aesthetics of Africa and the African diaspora. The book also coincides with the artists’s first major museum survey, which is currently on tour across the U.S., and contains writings by some of today’s most brilliant thinkers.
Works by more than 60 artists comprise this monumental survey, which renders solid a new paradigm of representation and visibility of Native North American art. The nearly 450-page book is filled with bold full-color images that explore myriad practices focused on contemporary art, music, filmmaking, choreography, architecture, writing, photography, design, and more.
This groundbreaking volume is corrective and celebratory as it highlights the women artists who changed the genre. Spanning 256 pages, Groundswell encompasses works by renowned artists like Ana Mendieta, Nancy Holt, and Agnes Dean, who used untraditional and organic materials in their practices and gravitated toward the earth itself as a site for their works.
French artist Julien Malland, a.k.a. Seth Globepainter, takes us on a journey through a decade of his resilient and youthful subjects, many of which are enveloped by color and playful optical illusions. The monograph features many of the artist’s most impactful murals and emphasizes how imagination could be the key to solving many of the world’s ills.
Opened in 1987, Luna Luna was the first-ever art amusement park, and it was brimming with rides and kiosks designed by some of the most recognizable names in 20th-century art history like David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, and Salvador Dalí. This re-issue contains information about and photos of the public spectacle, along with cover drawings commissioned by the artists.
Elizabeth Gould is known for her vibrant illustrations of birds that paired with her husband’s ornithological studies and was overlooked for her contributions during her lifetime. A corrective book that recognizes Gould for her immense talent, Birds of the World is a celebration of the artist’s legacy and contains 220 vivid renderings depicting myriad species, from a speckled vulturine guineafowl and chromatic crimson rosella to a slender-beaked glossy ibis.
We intuitively know that art affects us, but how exactly? Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross dive into the connection between art and health in this illuminating book that details a range of positive outcomes, from museum visits aiding people suffering from dementia to playing music to build cognitive skills. It’s an essential read for anyone interested in the real-world impact of art.
Shop all of the Best Art Books of 2023 on Bookshop.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
