Our Favorite Art Books of 2024

At Glasstire, we’re always paying attention to art books from Texas and beyond. We’re also, occasionally, picking up old books that we haven’t quite gotten around to yet, or may have newly stumbled upon. Here’s a short list of publications that stood out to our staff in 2024.

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Jessica Fuentes

Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, published by Yale University Press.

The catalog Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage was published in 2023 to accompany the first major museum exhibition exploring the complexity of Black identity through collage. The show opened at the Frist Art Museum in the fall of 2023 and came to Texas via the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) this spring. It has since traveled to The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Though I did not make it to see any of the iterations of the exhibition, I was thrilled to pick up a copy of the book, which is often the way an exhibition lives past its limited showtime. 

With 140 color images, the book covers more than 50 artists, including Mark Bradford, Lauren Halsey, Kerry James Marshall, Lorna Simpson, Mickalene Thomas, Kara Walker, and Texas artists Tay Butler, Jamal Cyrus, Tomashi Jackson, Rick Lowe, Troy Montes Michie, Lovie Olivia, and Deborah Roberts. Kathryn E. Delmez, senior curator at the Frist and editor of the catalog, writes an introduction that provides an overview of the themes that the artworks are divided into: Fragmentation and Reconstruction, Excavating History and Memory, Cultural Hybridity, Notions of Beauty and Power, Gender Fluidity and Queer Spaces, Toward Abstraction, and Digital Stitches. 

The catalog also includes rich essays by notable arts professionals including Valerie Cassel Oliver, the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Anita N. Bateman, the Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the MFAH; and María Elena Ortiz, Curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists Since 1940, published by DelMonico Books.

The exhibition and related catalog Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists Since 1940, adds important context to the understanding of Surrealism. Released in celebration of the centennial anniversary of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, the project was spearheaded by María Elena Ortiz, Curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Surreal and Us highlights the Caribbean and African diasporic artists who have been inspired by the Surrealist movement and also speaks to the cultural history and necessity of imagining an unimaginable future. 

Beyond the introduction by Ortiz, the catalog also includes essays by Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel, the John Spencer Bassett Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University; Negarra A. Kudumu, an independent scholar whose work focuses on contemporary art from the Pacific Northwest, Africa, South Asia, and their respective diasporas; and Ashley Stull Meyers, the Chief Curator at the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts. Additionally, the book republishes historic essays by Suzanne Césaire, a French writer, scholar, and activist who was born in Martinique, an island that is part of the French West Indies.

Alice Baber: Colors of the Rainbow, published by Jody Klotz Fine Arts.

Earlier this year Abilene-based gallerist Jody Klotz organized a major exhibition of works by Alice Baber. The show debuted in Abilene and later traveled to New York City through a partnership with the Leslie Feely Gallery. The exhibition catalog includes an essay by Gail Levin, Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York and former curator of the Hopper Collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The essay covers some of Baber’s personal history and delves deeply into the artist’s practice, referencing a slew of primary sources such as artist notes and interview transcripts. This insightful essay is a prelude to a larger biography that Levin has currently in production.

Amalia Mesa-Bains: Rituals of Memory, Migration, and Cultural Space, published by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press.

Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, Professor Emeritus of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University and renowned cultural historian who coined the term “rasquachismo,” has authored a significant book on the artist Amalia Mesa-Bains. While the book covers the artist’s works on view in Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory, a retrospective exhibition currently on view at the San Antonio Museum of Art, it is much more than an exhibition catalog. Rituals of Memory, Migration, and Cultural Space covers a lot of ground in its 165 pages. Ybarra-Frausto ties together important moments from Mesa-Bains’s personal life and artistic career with larger touchstones related to Latinx culture, socio-political movements, and contemporary art.

Mestizaje: The Feminist Art of Kathy Sosa, published by Trinity University Press.

Mestizaje: The Feminist Art of Kathy Sosa, explores decades of work by the San Antonio-based artist Kathy Sosa. Since 2007, she has investigated the fusion of cultures in the Texas/Mexico border region. The 248-page book includes beautiful full-page reproductions of works across Sosa’s oeuvre, including some of her earliest works that appeared in Huipiles: a Celebration at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington, D.C., as part of the Smithsonian Latino Center, in 2007. Mestizaje is a bilingual publication and features an introduction by Sandra Cisneros and essays by Carla Stellweg, Jennifer Speed, and Sosa. 

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Gabriel Martinez

Full Nerd Disclosure: I keep a spreadsheet of the books I read every year. It’s the only way I can keep track of them. I learned this from another book nerd and it has been very helpful, especially for something like this. In no particular order, here are some of my favorite art books I read in 2024. 

Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today by Claire Bishop, published by Verso.

Through four essays that each address a different art form, this excellent book looks at the ways the attention economy has changed our engagement with art. 

The first chapter outlines a history of how research-based art moved from a tactile engagement with information to overloading the viewer with an incomprehensible mountain of text and image to presenting an airtight, inarguable set of informative facts that allow for little interpretation. It is a good dive into a ubiquitous form of art-making that most often looks like an encyclopedia exploded in the gallery.

In the second chapter, “Black Box, White Cube, Grey Zone: Performance Exhibitions and Hybrid Spectatorship,” Bishop charts the ways choreographers have altered their pieces to meet the duration of the museum’s workday, switching from a finite start and finish time to using the loop as a compositional technique so performances can continue throughout an institution’s open hours. The attention demanded of an audience is transformed by this shift, in that audience members are not expected to see the whole piece from beginning to end. Bishop uses works like the recent opera Sun & Sea (Marina), which won the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. 

The third chapter, “Seizing the Moment: Interventions,” describes the sense of political timing artists using interventionist tactics need to employ. Bishop uses the work of Tania Bruguera to analyze different approaches artists have taken to make interventionist work. To my knowledge, there hasn’t been a formal analysis of this decades-old art form.

In the fourth chapter, “Déjà Vu: Invoking Modernist Architecture and Design,” Bishop writes about the never-ending stream of contemporary artists making work that pays homage to modernism and its architecture. A massive number of artists have engaged with modernist ideals in a manner devoid of criticality, leading to work that is stuck in a cycle of longing for the past. 

I read parts of this book twice and look forward to writers taking up where Bishop left off to build out scholarship around some of these topics. The e-book version is on sale at Verso right now for two dollars(!). 

RH Quaytman: Morning: Chapter 30, published by Prestel & MOCA.

I have wanted this book, which was published in 2017, for a long time. This year I finally bought a copy. Morning: Chapter 30 is the catalog for an exhibition by the artist at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles that consisted of 22 new silkscreen and gesso panel paintings and a previous “chapter” of work, I Modi, originally shown at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

RH Quaytman is one of my favorite living painters. She is the daughter of painter Harvey Quaytman and poet Susan Howe, and their legacies are evident in her use of the archive and her approach to abstraction. She makes a group of paintings specifically for her exhibitions and references, via research and photography, the location and history of the spaces, often through building a bank of images transferred to panels via the silkscreen process. Each exhibition is considered a “chapter,” hence the title of the MOCA LA exhibition. Her astounding book Spine (Sternberg Press) collected a decade of these chapters and explained her methodology. Morning: Chapter 30 continues to build her oeuvre/tome and has three great essays by Bennett Simpson, Yve-Alain Bois, and Juliana Rebentisch. 

Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us by Legacy Russell, published by Verso.

I was not prepared for how good this book is. With the understanding that a meme is a unit of cultural information spread by imitation, Black Meme traces the mediation of Black culture through a series of historical events and their circulation. Told chronologically in small chapters, each focusing on a specific cultural moment since 1900, it shows both the influence of Black culture and the manners in which it is controlled. Starting with 20th-century examples like lynching postcards, Emmett Till’s open casket photograph, the televisual broadcast of the March on Selma, and the Rodney King video, the book moves into the present day with a focus on more recent events like the #metoo movement and the murder of Philando Castile on Facebook Live. Legacy Russell, the Executive Director and Chief Curator of The Kitchen, an art space in New York City, delivers a smart, succinct look at the complex processes governing identity, appropriation, history, and culture. The e-book is also on sale at Verso for two dollars.

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William Sarradet

City of Independence: Views of Philadelphia Before 1800, by Martin P. Snyder published by Praeger Publishing (Out of Print).

This book is a bit of a niche area of study: engraved maps of Philadelphia from the inception of the city through 1800. The amount of research here is astounding, and the trail of history unsurprisingly has many idiosyncrasies. This is an excellent deep dive into American (and European) printmaking on the subject of one of America’s oldest cities. I purchased this book at the Galveston Bookshop, which is a treasure trove of many varieties of books.

Analysing Architecture, by Simon Unwin Published by Routledge.

During all of my work and travels, architecture is a consistent marvel. Frustratingly, architecture is a separate field of study from studio art, and so I never encountered any edification in that field. This book is a primer on the concepts of architecture, with illustrated examples both in the hypothetical and from across the world. I have been searching for visual dictionaries specifically in the field of architecture, and though this textbook does not fit that definition perfectly, it has been a pleasure to read. This book was purchased at Brave Books in El Paso, which contains many historic and scholastic materials for anyone curious.

Short War, by Lily Meyer, published by Deep Vellum Publishing.

This episodic book of historical fiction is illustrative of the political underpinnings of South America, as well as a riveting read that skips characters every time the store moves forward in time. Meyer has included a bibliography of literary references in the back of the book, which the reader will be primed to engage with by the time they have reached the list. As a function of criticism, I often read historical or reference materials which leaves little time for fiction. This book accomplishes both of those aspects of writing and finishes with an interesting twist. I greatly recommend it. This book was published at Deep Vellum in Dallas, which was a mainstay of my book shopping this year, and hopefully many years to come.

The Hipsters, by Terry Southern, Edited by Nile Southern published by antibookclub.

This book will fit in any bag and compiles previously unpublished journal entries alongside short stories and scripts written by Terry Southern, a close associate of Stanley Kubrick. Southern was born in the small North Texas town of Alvarado, although readers of Texana may be disappointed that there are no real Texas connections contained within his writings. One can determine from reading this collection of short works that Southern departed for Manhattan as a young man and never looked back. The value here comes from the comparative reading of cryptic journals, pithy short stories, and, finally, scripts that are influential in American cinema. It’s a window into American society that is nearly forgotten. I purchased this book at Interrobang Books in Dallas, which has a lovely section of Texas-based writings.

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Brandon Zech

What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with art critics by Jarrett Earnest, published by David Zwirner Books.

Art criticism is a hard thing to pin down. There’s no real pedagogical basis for it; most art critics only find out they are art critics once they begin being art critics. Honing a critical eye and way of thinking comes from on-the-ground training, looking, and dialoguing with artists, other writers, editors, and friends. Having that eye in the first place is congenital. 

Though it is now six years old, What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with art critics is a sort of Rosetta Stone for what makes up critics and how they think. Getting these 30 writers in the same place would be both the best and the worst dinner party you could imagine — insightful, energetic, exhaustive, meticulously detailed, and intensely technical. The book includes nuggets of practical writing advice I will hold with me for the rest of my career. It also features mind-expanding ideas on how a person may approach art, culture, and the world.

Executing a good interview is infinitely more difficult than it would seem, and Jarrett Earnest has mastered the art form, asking questions that are well-researched and hard hitting, and also open-ended and obvious. The tactic makes for wide-ranging conversations that touch on specific topics to draw out pointed answers. Through this book and his other projects (like his editing of Feint of Heart: Art Writings: 1982–2002, a collection of the late Dave Hickey’s writings, published this year by David Zwirner Books), Earnest has turned himself into the millennial historian of art criticism: a valuable, thankless position in an industry whose major players are starting to age out or die.

This book is worth reading for anyone that is annoyed or bewildered by criticism, wants more criticism, wants to learn about criticism, or wants to demystify why art critics think the way they do. The big-picture, take-home lesson? Art critics are weirdly unique and their processes contradict that of their peers and sometimes themselves. What they are driven by, however, is a deep, genuine combination of love, appreciation, confusion by, and desire to understand art. They write because they want to make sense of art, which itself is making sense of the world and one’s place in it. 

Pierre Huyghe: Liminal, published by Marsilio Arte.

This book is not a straightforward catalog for Pierre Huyghe’s exhibition, also titled Liminal, which ran for eight months this year at the Punta della Dogana in Venice. It also, however, is not not a catalog for the show. Confusing? Yes. Appropriate for Huyghe’s multifaceted, disparate, and sometimes cabalistic practice? Double yes. 

In addition to chronicling the works on view in the exhibition, Liminal the book takes a long view, surveying Huyghe’s major works from 1993 to 2024. Being a member of the Relational Aesthetics movement, much of the artist’s works are prone to a you-had-to-be-there-to-get-it sentiment. To cut through this, the catalog eliminates the fluff by explaining, in plain language, core visual and conceptual tenets of the individual works — their materials, what they look like, what happened during their runs, etc. By organizing the pieces in a mostly chronological order, patterns start to develop; if you’re less familiar with Huyghe’s history (as was I), you travel through time with him, watching how one project snowballs into the next, and seeing the echoes and reverberations of ideas as they’re revisited and tweaked over decades. 

Self-context is everything for artists with disparate practices such as Huyghe’s, which is why this publication is warrantably beefy. Full-color photos fill the book’s 456 pages, which are matte and thin — almost a slightly thicker stock newsprint. The images are dulled by the paper in a way that makes the book feel less like a slick exhibition catalog and more like some sort of scientific text. Aesthetically, the book mirrors Huyghe’s practice: shiny on the outside (literally — the cover is holographic), but complicated, informative, and a little humble on the inside.  

Huyghe is someone you may never have heard of, but his thoughtful, smart works are well-poised to win you over. In the same way Luc Tuymans is a painters’ painter, Huyghe is an artists’ artist. But, since Huyghe is dealing with the meat of the world and what it means to be human (including how we relate to each other and to nature, how we change and evolve based on our preconceived notions and our environments, etc.), it is more accurate to call him a people’s person. Confused again? Picking up this book will help you understand. 

Lee Lozano: Strike, published by Marsilio Arte, and other Lee Lozano catalogs.

It was only upon sitting down to write these “best of” reviews that I realized two of my selections — that above Pierre Huyghe catalog and this Lee Lozano book — both chronicle shows presented by the Pinault Collection. Major solo presentations, the kinds that produce new criticism and scholarship in a well-manicured book, are both difficult and expensive to organize, so it is logical that some of the best catalogs for any given year would result from exhibitions presented by funded foundations. 

That said, Strike and the artist’s other recent publications pack an appropriately Lozano-sized punch. I’ve been enraptured with the artist’s work ever since I saw her painting of a reamer at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin. In the years since, I’ve delved into every publication of her work I could get my hands on. 

Drawings 1958–64, a doorstopper published by Karma Books in 2021, gives deep, far-reaching insight into seven years of the artist’s career. Some pieces are proto-concepts of ideas, while others are full-fledged masterpieces. Her subjects range from portraits to cigarettes to machines to genitalia to tools and beyond. In the years of this book, Lozano’s style cannibalizes itself by metamorphosing from classical charcoal drawings to her signature crude cartoons. The publication is a guidebook for how an artist learns, piece by piece, to develop a signature voice.

Lee Lozano: Not Working (Yale University Press), a thoroughly written but visually spare survey of her oeuvre, and Strike work together to tell the whole story of the artist’s career. Both publications are scholarly in different ways: Not Working is more narrative based, while the Pinault publication is organized into thematic sections, much as an exhibition would be. Both do their part, in equally successful and divergent ways, to elucidate the trajectory of this mysterious artist. 

After surveying the context of Lozano’s career, there is no substitute for the primary source of the artist’s writing. This is where her Private Book project comes in. There are currently nine available facsimile pocket-sized memo books from this series, also published by Karma Books. Spiral-bound and featuring pages covered in meticulous handwritten notes, sometimes with paper fold outs, the books are unfiltered lines into the artist’s mind. In them are platitudes, references to drug consumption and the New York City art world, calendars, addresses, diaristic writings, and so much more. They’re chronicles of the life of an artist in the 1960s and 70s; they’re almost indecipherable, decontextualized documents from a world that no longer exists. And yet, they help round out a picture of Lozano, an artist that anyone would be foolish to say they wholly understand. 

 

Honorable mentions that are currently sitting on my shelf and I can’t wait to read: Sebastian Smee’s Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism (W. W. Norton & Company); Brendan Greaves’ comprehensive biography of Terry Allen, Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen—An Authorized Biography (Da Capo); Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso); Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad’s Poor Artists: A Quest Into the Art World (Prestel); and Ellen Levy’s A Book about Ray (MIT Press), which chronicles the life and work of mail art pioneer Ray Johnson.