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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 of a prescription pad with a physician’s signature at the bottom. 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.

“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.

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.

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.

British author and critic Hettie Judah’s Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood is an essential art history. With 150 color illustrations and a scope that encompasses prehistory to the present moment, this exceptional book reframes motherhood as an important position from which to make and understand art. Judah’s tight prose moves gracefully from poetic to intense to straightforward. From her first sentence, this gifted writer tackles her subject with intellectual and artistic vigor: “A monstrous child is blocking my view and has carved a nest in the soft darkness of my head,” she writes in the book’s introduction. It’s inspiring to read along as she tackles the long overlooked cultural figure of the artist-mother with gravitas. A chapter titled “Creation” investigates the analogy of creativity and childbearing, noting the irony of the artist-mother’s place throughout the ages: “For much of art’s history, this literal process of baby-making and nurture invalidated a woman’s status as an artist.” Contemporary art enthusiasts will be especially taken with Acts of Creation, which includes insight into heavyweights like Judy Chicago, Louise Bourgeois, Carrie Mae Weems and more. But like any good curator, Judah has filled these pages with more obscure and under-the-radar artists, so there’s plenty to discover no matter your familiarity with art, feminism or motherhood. In a chapter called “Mothering,” Judah, with a hat-tip to the writer and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs, speaks to “the radical potential of mothering as a form of expanded care,” regardless of gender or social privilege.

Hettie Judah’s insightful Acts of Creation gives motherhood its due, honoring it as an important position from which to make and understand art.
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I dare you to page through Force of Nature: A Celebration of Girls and Women Raising Their Voices and not feel moved. The triumphant (and so affordably priced!) book from Strong Is the New Pretty creator Kate T. Parker overflows with photographs of girls and women speaking and living their truths, cultivating their voices and using them to effect change, whether in one-on-one friendships, school settings, the corporate world or broader social contexts. An 8-year-old in fairy wings uses her voice “to be silly and make [people] laugh to try to cheer them up”; a 49-year-old heart attack survivor raises awareness about a type of heart disease common in women under 40. Athletes, activists, advocates and those who have overcome terrific obstacles are well accounted for in the compelling profiles. But equally arresting are the images, both in color and black-and-white, of ordinary girls and women. I can almost hear Tina Turner singing, “We don’t need another hero.” What we do need are girls and women who wholeheartedly believe in their own worth and power, however they decide to be in the world. 

The triumphant Force of Nature overflows with photos and profiles of girls and women who wholeheartedly believe in their own worth and power.
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The human mind possesses the ability to leave reality and travel to marvelous realms, and some of us seek to capture those impossible dreams upon a physical canvas. In The Art of Fantasy: A Visual Sourcebook of All That is Unreal, Florida-based writer and blogger S. Elizabeth explores the “sweeping though loosely defined art genre” of fantastic art and its “visual flights of fancy and imagination.” Through full-color reproductions of artwork across a variety of mediums—physical and digital—The Art of Fantasy investigates how artists capture their personal ideas of fantasy, which are just as often grounded in unfamiliar visions as recognizable lore. S. Elizabeth’s curation spans not only the well-known classics such as Hieronymus Bosch and Salvador Dali, but also fresh, contemporary artists such as Yuko Shimizu or Paul Lewin.

Readers will be entranced by colorful assortments of peculiar figures: Ed Binkley’s colored pencil “Corvid Priestess” gazes out regally, while an anthropomorphic rabbit wears traveling clothes in Carisa Swenson’s epoxy clay sculpture “Shining Apples.” S. Elizabeth’s exploration of fantasy landscapes in the book’s last section is particularly compelling and stylistically diverse. Foreboding alien invasions, apocalyptic castles and whimsical aircraft remind us just how unlimited our imaginations can be.

Through full-color reproductions of artwork across a variety of mediums—both physical and digital—The Art of Fantasy investigates how artists capture their personal ideas of fantasy, drawing on both unfamiliar visions and recognizable lore.
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What comes to mind upon hearing the phrase “beneath the surface”? Stephen Ellcock’s Underworlds: A Compelling Journey Through Subterranean Realms, Real and Imagined (Thames & Hudson, $35, 9780500026311) rouses our minds from “a world of surfaces, of gloss and illusion and first impressions, a global empire of signs, sensory saturation and instant gratification” to remember the dark, labyrinthine world of the subterranean that has, since time immemorial, served as a wellspring of awe and fear for humankind. Known for curating online art galleries on social media, Ellcock presents an eclectic yet coherent collection of images ranging from dizzying ossuaries, to nightmarish animals of the deep sea, to the soothing colors of agates, to the sophisticated structures of mycorrhizal fungi.

Underworlds is split into five sections encompassing both the real and the imaginary. Ellcock pulls off an impressive feat in gathering material from sources as diverse and multifaceted as an underground ecosystem: In his quest to inspire, he moves not only between continents and time periods, but also disciplines such as philosophy, biology, art history and literature. Surreal, intricate artworks and photographs are accompanied by an even pacing of Ellcock’s own prose and factual explanations, as well as excerpts from others’ musings. The result is a dreamlike atmosphere and a trove of information that will leave readers with a newfound connection to the realms below us, which we have too often mindlessly ransacked for profit. As Ellcock writes, if we “heed the echoes of eternity calling from the lower depths,” we might just “claw our way back out of darkness.”

In the dreamlike Underworlds, Stephen Ellcock pulls off an impressive feat in gathering material from sources as diverse and multifaceted as an underground ecosystem.
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Throughout the 1970s, science fiction paperbacks were graced with attention-grabbing cover art that often possessed shockingly complex detail. Even in the 21st century, these ornate compositions and vivid color palettes still percolate into major franchises such as James Cameron’s Avatar series or the 2016 video game No Man’s Sky. Adam Rowe chronicles the development of this instantly recognizable style in Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s. This thorough collection traces a connection between ’70s cover art and influences that include 1920s iconography by Frank R. Paul (“underwater explorers, human-eating plants, future ice-age apocalypses, dinosaurs fighting laser rays”), surrealism, psychedelia and even the competing genre of fantasy.

Rowe writes, “In my unvarnished opinion, ’70s sci-fi is the peak of artistic achievement, though I’ve heard good things about the Renaissance.” It’s a bold statement, but one that is difficult to refute as one traverses the vibrant pages of Worlds Beyond Time, which does a superb job of cataloging the nuances of artists and their unique styles, from Angus McKie’s hazy cities and space stations, to the elegant dreamscapes of Bruce Pennington. In addition to spotlighting an exemplary art style, Worlds Beyond Time demonstrates the stunning vastness of science fiction as a literary genre.

In addition to spotlighting an exemplary art style, Worlds Beyond Time demonstrates the stunning vastness of science fiction as a literary genre.
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STARRED REVIEW

September 29, 2021

A garden of unearthly delights

These fantastic volumes will send the art lovers in your life on a journey through mystical worlds.

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Book jacket image for The Magicians by Blexbolex

The Magicians

Elevated word choice and spirited phrasing give a timeless quality to Blexbolex’s fantastic graphic novel, which muses upon mercy, change and possibility.
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Book jacket image for Worlds Beyond Time by Adam Rowe

Worlds Beyond Time

In addition to spotlighting an exemplary art style, Worlds Beyond Time demonstrates the stunning vastness of science fiction as a literary genre.
Read more
Book jacket image for Underworlds by Stephen Ellcock

Underworlds

In the dreamlike Underworlds, Stephen Ellcock pulls off an impressive feat in gathering material from sources as diverse and multifaceted as an underground ecosystem.
Read more
Book jacket image for The Art of Fantasy by S. Elizabeth

The Art of Fantasy

Through full-color reproductions of artwork across a variety of mediums—both physical and digital—The Art of Fantasy investigates how artists capture their personal ideas of fantasy, ...
Read more

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