Laura Hutson Hunter

NonfictionArtPhotographyLifestylesLGBTQ+Art

4 gift-worthy art books bound to inspire

List by Laura Hutson Hunter
STARRED REVIEW
November 27, 2024

4 gift-worthy art books bound to inspire

Get inside the mind of an artist, revisit Manet and celebrate queer life in some of 2024’s best art and photography books.
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Luncheons on the Grass

By Jeffrey Deitch

The illuminating Luncheons on the Grass asks 30 artists to create new works inspired by Manet’s eponymous masterpiece.

The illuminating Luncheons on the Grass asks 30 artists to create new works inspired by Manet’s eponymous masterpiece.

About Face

By Jonathan D. Katz

Jonathan D. Katz’s About Face celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising with deep scholarship and thrilling artworks.

Jonathan D. Katz’s About Face celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising with deep scholarship and thrilling artworks.

Casa Susanna

By Sophie Hackett, By Isabelle Bonnet

Casa Susanna is a sumptuous volume of photography that chronicles a midcentury trans enclave.

Casa Susanna is a sumptuous volume of photography that chronicles a midcentury trans enclave.

The Work of Art

By Adam Moss

The Work of Art is a visionary compendium of ephemera that makes visible the bridge between idea and artwork.

The Work of Art is a visionary compendium of ephemera that makes visible the bridge between idea and artwork.

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Get inside the mind of an artist, revisit Manet and celebrate queer life in some of 2024’s best art and photography books.
NonfictionArtLifestylesArt

The Work of Art

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

If you’ve ever been curious about how an idea turns into a piece of art, you’ll love The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing. This visionary book’s first two pages lay out its thesis in surprisingly simple terms. First, there’s a sketch that looks like little more than a physician’s signature at the bottom of a prescription pad. Turn the page and you’ll see what that doodle became: the famous Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. But how exactly did Frank Gehry’s messy sketch become the architectural masterpiece? That’s the process writer Adam Moss is concerned with; the “work” in his book’s title is a verb. Moss has been the editor of New York magazine and the New York Times Magazine, and his love for conversational, witty storytelling is clear here. The Work of Art collects conversations with some of the most lauded, interesting artists working—from Kara Walker, who takes readers through the creation of her 2014 public sculpture “A Subtlety,” to Gay Talese, who pores over the copious notes he took to write “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” in 1966. No minutia is too small to examine. In fact, it seems like the smaller the detail, the more information Moss is able to extract. Alongside each story, Moss includes images of the works in various stages of completion. You see Twyla Tharp’s massive choreographic sketches, and the first stages of a Will Shortz crossword. The images elevate the book to a compendium of precious ephemera. It’s possible that Moss has invented a new literary genre that merges self-help, art history and journalism. However it’s classified, you’ll read it cover to cover.

The Work of Art is a visionary compendium of ephemera that makes visible the bridge between idea and artwork.
NonfictionArtLifestylesArt

Luncheons on the Grass

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe, or Luncheon on the Grass, is often called the first modern painting, and the paintings compiled in Luncheons on the Grass: Reimagining Manet’s Le Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe are like a time machine connecting modern and contemporary art. The 1863 painting, which is in the collection of Musée d’Orsay in Paris, shows a nude woman sitting with two clothed gentlemen in a wooded glade. In the foreground is an overturned picnic basket. In the background, another woman bathes in a stream. In 2021, art dealer and gallerist Jeffrey Deitch asked around 30 leading contemporary artists to respond to Manet’s masterpiece, and the resulting works—as well as several pieces that weren’t commissioned specifically for the show but refer to Le Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe—are collected in this volume. Deitch’s own essay about Manet’s painting includes insight into its history, from its nude model Victorine Meurent to the inspiration the artist drew from Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Diego Velázquez. The inclusion of interviews with artists about their works and Manet’s influence is particularly illuminating. In an interview with Nina Chanel Abney, for example, the artist says, “I pulled from Manet’s beautiful landscapes, scenes, and epic compositions to make a painting that centers Black queer people, creating a new narrative in which I feel seen.” Some artists did away with Manet’s references almost entirely, focusing instead on more obscure ones. It’s here that the interviews become particularly insightful, as in one with artist Ariana Papademetropoulos: She explains that by focusing on the bather in the background of Manet’s painting, she’s able to think about what it means to have a picnic and bring domesticity to the natural world. Some other pieces discussed include work made prior to the project, most famously Robert Colescott’s 1979 painting of the same name, but also a 1965 photograph of a family of nudists by Diane Arbus, which takes on new life here.

The illuminating Luncheons on the Grass asks 30 artists to create new works inspired by Manet’s eponymous masterpiece.
NonfictionArtPhotographyLGBTQ+Art

Casa Susanna

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

“Two antique dealers discover a stash of 340 photographs at a flea market.” Thus begins Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959-1968, one of the most captivating photography books in recent memory. Casa Susanna was a secluded bit of property with a few bungalows and a barn in the Catskills. In the 1950s and ’60s, the property belonged to Marie Tornell and her wife, a trans woman who was known to friends as Susanna Valenti. Susanna was a cover girl and contributing editor to Transvestia magazine, and she and Marie opened up their home to other like-minded people—including those who were assigned male at birth but wanted to live authentically as women, if only on holiday. A textured dust jacket gives the volume a sensual quality, so that opening its pages is like admiring a silk taffeta blouse. The photograph chosen for the book’s cover—one among hundreds of candid, unaffected shots—shows four different smartly dressed women pointing their cameras at a friend mid-pose. It speaks to the number of women involved in the project, and also the importance they saw of documenting each other. Elsewhere, the well-coiffed women playing Scrabble or sitting around a dining table at Casa Susanna are charmingly ordinary. Facsimiles of letters, magazine articles and even a handful of Susanna’s own advice column clips, “Susanna Says,” open up a whole world in a few hundred pages. The sheer volume of pictures included will open eyes to the existence of trans people before the contemporary age.

Casa Susanna is a sumptuous volume of photography that chronicles a midcentury trans enclave.
NonfictionArtLifestylesArt

About Face

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

Ostensibly organized around the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in 2019, About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, and New Queer Art was an art exhibition before it became a book. Its curator, Jonathan D. Katz, is arguably the leading scholar on queer art history, and here he proves that he’s also an adept editor. About Face catalogs 350 artworks from a diverse array of artists from the past 50 years: portraits by Peter Hujar, largely recognized as one of the leading photographers of the 20th century, are positioned alongside work by Zanele Muholi, the South African photographer and activist whose art-world rise was comparatively recent. The essays in this volume skew academic, which provides a grandiosity to its subject matter. Katz cautions readers that to divide art along a line of queer and not-queer is to ignore not only nuance but the thousands of years of art history that existed before such classifications were foregrounded. Katz suggests we remove the binary and “return to a more expansive sense of sexuality.” The scholarship is deep and rewards multiple slow readings, while the artworks are sumptuous, thrilling and demand immediate appreciation. About Face is highly recommended for students of art history and queer studies, but also for anyone interested in how language transforms alongside identity.

Jonathan D. Katz’s About Face celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising with deep scholarship and thrilling artworks.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The 1619 Project: a Visual Experience

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

There have been other iterations of The 1619 Project, the groundbreaking reframing of American history that centers the Black experience. It was first a series of essays published in the New York Times Magazine in 2019, and it’s also been a podcast, an anthology, a children’s picture book and a documentary TV series. With The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience, the project’s original editor, Nikole Hannah-Jones, presents its definitive version. This new volume combines seven powerful essays from the original series with visual elements that deepen their message and, as Hannah-Jones writes in the preface, create “an experience for the reader, a wanting to reflect, to sit in both the discomfort and the joy, to contemplate what a nation owes a people who have contributed so much and yet received so little, and maybe even, to act.” 

It’s one thing to read about the slave trade, for example, but another to see a high-resolution photograph labeled “A child’s iron shackles” with this stark explainer: “Because governments determined by the ton how many people could be fitted onto a slave ship, enslavers considered children especially advantageous: they could fill the boat’s small spaces, allowing more human capital in the cargo hold.” A chapter titled “Fear” includes an essay co-written by historian Leslie Alexander and her sister, The New Jim Crow author Michelle Alexander, that reframes police brutality as a result of the same white fear that can be traced back to the very beginnings of American history. The essay is intercut with various photographs from demonstrations, including photojournalist Robert Cohen’s shot of a Black man in a stars-and-stripes shirt throwing a container of tear gas back at the police in Ferguson, Missouri. Woven throughout the book’s 288 pages are 13 original artworks from celebrated visual artists like Carrie Mae Weems, multiple archival photographs of happy Black families and a vibrant spread of a Beyoncé concert. This visual history is an invaluable addition to a revelatory project and an essential selection for any American classroom or family library.

The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience complements the storied New York Times series with visual art and photography that deepens our understanding of how slavery has profoundly shaped American life.
NonfictionCrafts, Hobbies & Home

The Story of Perfume

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

The Story of Perfume: A Lavishly Illustrated Guide successfully pulls off one of my favorite literary tricks: It takes something extremely specific—in this case, perfume—and gets so immersed in it that all manner of connections among seemingly disparate worlds begin to take shape. From ancient Greek mythology to traditional Indian medicine, from the French Revolution to the sexual revolution, from Salvador Dali to Christian Dior, perfume was there through it all. And although fragrance is an area of study that is traditionally skipped by scholarly treatment, historian Élisabeth de Feydeau takes her subject seriously. The Story of Perfume is much more scholastic than you might expect. For example, the chapter “The First Iconic Perfumes” includes an entry about the 16th-century French king Francis I, whose edict to treat gunshot wounds with an elixir made from aromatic plants became so popular among the general public that it helped forge a path for legendary perfume house Guerlain. The stories Feydeau tells are fascinating, and they’re matched with a slew of equally compelling visual elements, like an ancient Roman fresco that depicts a seated woman decanting perfume, photographs of fragrant herbs and more elaborately detailed glass bottles than I was able to count. This is a great reference for fragrance lovers, but might also be an unexpected supplement for students of history—from ancient times through the Industrial Revolution, in particular.

The Story of Perfume is a sumptuous reference for fragrance lovers and an unexpected supplement for students of history.
NonfictionFood & DrinkCookbooks

The Contemporary African Kitchen

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

James Beard Award-winning author Alexander Smalls includes 120 recipes from 33 chefs, restaurateurs, caterers, cooks and writers in The Contemporary African Kitchen: Home Cooking Recipes From the Leading Chefs of Africa. It’s a massive undertaking that spans an entire continent filled with innumerable culinary styles. But that breadth is important to Smalls, who writes in the book’s foreword that “our culture has been kept alive in great part through our culinary currency and traditions.” The book is organized into broad geographic segments: Northern, Eastern, Central, Southern and Western Africa are all represented. The Northern African section includes a particularly interesting recipe for Egyptian okra stew, which is loaded with garlic, basil, cilantro and mint and looks at once lush and hearty. In his description of the stew, chef Mostafa Seif writes, “Some foods are as much for nourishment as they are a tool for showing off.” He goes on to describe how people would hang okra from their balconies on the days that it was on the menu as a kind of demonstration of abundance. This book is great for adventurous eaters from all backgrounds, but that’s not to say an experimental palette is a prerequisite; if you’re more comfortable with traditionally American fare, you may be surprised by how familiar some of these dishes are: from Ethiopian deviled eggs and a chocolate cake recipe from Uganda to a buttery, garlicky recipe for South African mashed potatoes with spinach.

 

James Beard Award-winning author Alexander Smalls’ The Contemporary African Kitchen collects recipes that span an entire continent filled with innumerable culinary styles and traditions.
NonfictionArtPhotographyArt

The African Gaze

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

Amy Sall’s The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema and Power began as a university course Sall developed at New York City’s The New School. An undercurrent of academic rigor flows throughout the volume, which functions as an introduction to African photography and film as well as a collective biography of some of its most influential players. In her preface, writer and archivist Sall distills her thoughts on the subjects she spent so many years studying, and each sentence is packed with authoritative insight. The photography section begins with self-portraits by Ghanaian Felicia Abban, who also happens to be one of the few “named and known” women photographers in Africa. Many of the book’s other highlights involve female subjects: a striking studio portrait of three women by Augustt Azaglo Cornélius Yawo; a candid shot of four young women seated around a table at a party by Jean Depara; and a woman posing seated with a single high-heeled sandal that’s been placed atop her oversized skirt by Seydou Keita. Cinema is more difficult to capture in still images, and so the Filmmakers section relies on the breadth of its subjects, which includes artists working in documentary and animation in addition to scripted dramas. Particularly evocative are images of the two protagonists of Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki, or the stunning close-up of the main character in Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl. The African Gaze is an essential, encyclopedic study of African image-makers, and reading through it in its entirety made me feel like I’d actually enrolled in Sall’s course.

Amy Sall’s The African Gaze is an essential, encyclopedic study of African photographers and filmmakers that’s packed with insight and images.
NonfictionSocial ScienceEssays

Want

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

As Gillian Anderson prepared for her role as a sex therapist in the British TV show Sex Education (which this writer quickly added to her Netflix queue), she read the 1973 cult classic My Secret Garden, a compendium of fantasies collected by novelist Nancy Friday. In Friday’s book, Anderson writes, it was revealed that “. . . for some of us, the sex we have in our head may be more stimulating than the physical nuts and bolts of any coupling, no matter how hot. Unconstrained by assumed social conventions, self-consciousness, or perhaps the fear of making our partner uncomfortable, in our imagination we can indulge in our deepest, most transgressive desires.”

Inspired by Friday, Anderson put out an invitation for women and genderqueer people to write down their own fantasies and send them to her. She soon began amassing a “torrent of unbridled passion from around the world.” The result is Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous, an extensive series of writings—some less than a page long, but most a page or two—detailing a multitude of diverse fantasies. What began as a platform for women to anonymously share fantasies has turned into something like a calling.

The polyvocality of Want means there’s something for everyone, but it also means that you’ll probably come across a fantasy you’ve never considered, as with Anderson, who writes that she was fascinated by the number of women with dreams of being milked like a cow. “The human imagination has few limits and our sexual desires and fantasies are no different, yet are still treated as taboo,” she writes in the book’s introduction. “Is everyone ashamed and pretending not to be?”

Anderson herself is among the anonymous writers here. There’s no hint at which of the many fantasies is hers; the only identity markers at the end of every essay are nationality, income, religion, sexual orientation, relationship status and whether the writer has children. “I was terrified of putting my fantasy down on paper,” she writes, “lest someone was able to discern which was mine.” But after reading more than 1,000 others, she finds that “sexual liberation must mean freedom to enjoy sex on our terms, to say what we want, not what we are pressured or believe we are expected to want.”

With luck, this provocative, original volume will help women and genderqueer people feel more empowered and less ashamed.

Gillian Anderson asked women to send her their sexual fantasies. The result is a provocative, original volume that will help women and genderqueer people feel more empowered and less ashamed.
NonfictionLifestylesArt

Great Women Sculptors

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

In her introduction to Great Women Sculptors, curator and scholar Lisa Le Feuvre doesn’t use the term “woman” until well into the essay. Even then, it is included only to highlight a historical lack of institutional support, rather than anything inherently female about a particular artwork, subject matter or medium. Instead, the sole commonality of the artists collected in Great Women Sculptors is that they made art while being marginalized by structural misogyny. “Rather than expanding the canon, this book is an index that ruptures the received account of sculpture,” Le Feuvre explains. That distinction is important, because even as Great Women Sculptors brings together more than 300 artists throughout 500 years of art history, women artists are still marginalized; the patriarchy didn’t just shrivel up, much as we’d wanted it to, after Linda Nochlin published the seminal essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in 1971. This encyclopedic volume includes entries on established artists like Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois alongside a younger generation of stars like Lauren Halsey. Even the most well-read art scholars will find something new—or old, as in Baroque-era Spanish sculptor Luisa Roldán. The breadth of the book’s coverage is tempered by its focus on a single work per artist, an image of which is printed beautifully on heavy-duty paper and fully contextualized by a slate of 46 art experts. 

The beautifully printed, encyclopedic Great Women Sculptors brings together more than 300 artists who have been excluded from institutions and canons on the basis of gender.
NonfictionPhotographyLifestylesAnimals

Faithful Unto Death

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

A pet cemetery can be much more than fodder for horror stories and Ramones songs. It can also be a way to dig deep (pardon the pun) into the ways that people live and grieve. Paul Koudounaris’ thoroughly researched book, Faithful Unto Death: Pet Cemeteries, Animal Graves & Eternal Devotion, is an investigation into the bonds between pets and their owners. It begins by explaining that, although people have kept animals close since ancient times, the modern conception of a pet is fairly contemporary. As people left rural areas in the wake of 19th-century industrialization, they brought their animals with them. In these new, smaller quarters, they grew ever more intimate. Faithful Unto Death is as much about how people love their pets as it is about how they mourn them. For a book that’s ostensibly about death, it’s not overly macabre: Passages about grief and Edna Clyne’s famous “Rainbow Bridge” poem are interspersed with images of a dog named Ah Fuk and a tomb for a beagle named Tippy, “the Elvis dog,” who was sung to by The King himself in her puppyhood. With archival photos and illustrations featured alongside Koudounaris’ portraits of headstones and informal altars, Faithful Unto Death will appeal to those interested in cultural rituals and the human-animal bond; what’s more, readers who have lost their own pets will feel acknowledged in their grief. 

 

Faithful Unto Death is a thoughtful investigation into the bonds of pets and their owners that chronicles the ways in which we grieve and remember the animals we love.
NonfictionSocial ScienceLifestyles

Eerie Legends

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

Eerie Legends: An Illustrated Exploration of Creepy Creatures, the Paranormal, and Folklore From Around the World arrives like Halloween candy, just in time for the spookiest season of the year. Austin, Texas-based artist Ricardo Diseño’s bold, offbeat illustrations don’t simply complement these spine-tingling stories, they lead the way. Each chapter blends elements of fiction and nonfiction, and includes a corresponding full-page illustration that stands on its own as a fully realized piece of art. The horror elements here are plenty scary, but skew toward the creature-feature end of the spectrum—think Universal Studio monsters, or even Troma’s The Toxic Avenger. The chapter on Krampus details the yuletide terror’s appearance with frightening specificity: “Part man, part goat, and part devil. . . . His tongue is red, forked, creepy, and always whipping around.” Diseño’s hoofed monster, straight out of the Blumhouse cinematic universe, is shown in the midst of abducting a child. Each chapter ends with a campfire-style tale about the designated monster, written with Lovecraftian zeal by Steve Mockus. As an added incentive, the cover glows in the dark—a feature I hadn’t noticed until after I fell asleep with it on my bedside table. Talk about eerie.

 

Bold, offbeat illustrations by Ricardo Diseño lead the way in the spooky-fun Eerie Legends.

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