New Books in Art

With The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris: Ethics and Self-Making in Dada, Simultanism, and Surrealism (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Rachel Silveri takes a fresh look at the desire to unify art and life, an ambition long regarded as foundational to the European historical avant-gardes. She reveals how many early twentieth-century artists saw their own everyday lives—their bodies, identities, and relationships—as a type of creative material and a central component to their avant-garde practice. These artists abandoned traditional forms of artmaking and venues of art viewing, instead aspiring to integrate art with everyday life, creating an “art of living.”...

John Kapusta's Self-Realization Nation: How Artists of the Creative Counterculture Made a New America (U California Press, 2026) is the story of an unexpected group of performing artists who led one of the most influential artistic movements in contemporary American history. After World War II, personal fulfillment emerged as a defining American cultural ideal. Self-realization--the quest to become our authentic selves--remains a powerful part of American culture and arts today. In Self-Realization Nation, John Kapusta provides a lively cultural history of how an overlooked movement of musicians, dancers, and actors championed the ideal of self-realization. These performers, who spanned many bac...

Between the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries, European painting underwent a profound transformation as artists increasingly painted on canvas instead of wood or walls. Nowhere was more important to this shift than Venice, where painters experimented with canvas with remarkable creativity and innovation. In Venetian Canvas and the Transformation of Painting (Princeton University Press, 2026), Dr. Cleo Nisse investigates why Venetian artists adopted canvas and how it revolutionized their art between 1400 and 1600.

Intertwining approaches from art history and art conservation, and featuring stunning new photographs that show details as never before, the book presents groundbreaking research based on...

Can publishing change the world? In Dispatches from the Avant-Garage: The Alternative Press Rebecca Kosick (Wayne State UP, 2026), an Associate Professor in Comparative Poetry and Poetics at the University of Bristol, tells the story of The Alternative Press. Beginning in Detroit in the late 1960s, initially based in the house of Ann and Ken Mikolowski, the press created a rich and eclectic set of artworks. The story of The Alternative Press is also the story of US art and radical politics from the 1970s into the 1990s, with lessons for art and politics today. Drawing on a huge amount of archiva...

Wayfaring: Photography in Taiwan, 1950s–1980s (Australian Centre on China in the World, 2025) explores four transformative decades of photography in Taiwan, tracing its evolution amid the island’s emergence from Japanese colonialism and integration into Nationalist China, largely under martial law (1949–87). Through a dozen richly illustrated essays and interviews, the book bridges the gap between vigorous Chinese-language scholarship on photography in Taiwan and its limited representation in English. Essays on photographers in the 1950s–60s, including Long Chin-San (Lang Jingshan) (1892-1995), Deng Nan-Guang (1907-1971), Chang Chao-Tang (1943-2024), Liu An-Ming (1928-2022), Hwang Pai-Chi (b. 1931), Hsu Yuan-Fu (1932-2018) and Tsai Hui-Feng (1928-2005), reveal...

This is a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities’ Vault podcast. On May 13, 2026, Princeton’s Center for Human Values hosted a day-long conference titled Audio & Ideas: Exploring the Possibilities for Scholarly Podcasting. It was co-sponsored by Princeton’s Journalism program, and the NYU Podcast Initiative. Over the course of four panels, scholars, podcasters, and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their research.

In the second panel, Chenjerai Kumanyika led a discussion about the aesthetics of podcasting. Professor Kumanyika is an assistant professor at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter...

Black Freedom: A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2026) is the first fully illustrated history of Juneteenth and other Emancipation Day celebrations, told through photographs, art, and an engrossing narrative.

For more than 150 years, Black communities have gathered to honor freedom, resilience, and the ongoing struggle for true liberation. While Juneteenth has recently gained wider recognition, it was one of many Emancipation Day traditions celebrated across the United States.

These observances were spaces of joy, remembrance, and resistance—even as the fight for full freedom was unfinished. This volume brings together stirri...

Exploring the work of established and emerging artists in Indonesia’s vibrant art world, Artists and the People: Ideologies of Art in Indonesia (NUS Press, 2022) examines why so many artists in the world’s largest archipelagic nation choose to work directly with people and in the studio. While the social dimension of Indonesian art makes it distinctive in the globalised world of contemporary art, Elly Kent is the first to explore this engagement in Indonesian terms. What are the historical, political and social conditions that lie beneath these polyvalent practices? How do formal and informal institutions, communities and artist-run-initiatives contrib...

Karl Whittington joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, Queer Making: On Artists and Desire in Medieval Europe (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2025). What role does desire play in the making of art objects? Art historians typically answer this question by referring to historical evidence about an artist's sexual identity or to particular kinds of imagery. But what about anonymous artists? Or works whose subject matter is mainstream? We know little about the identities and personalities of most premodern artists, but this should not hold us back from thinking about their embodied experience. In this book, Karl Whittington cont...

Connoisseurs and conmen: The contest for cultural authority in early twentieth-century Britain (Manchester University Press, 2026) by Dr. Lewis Ryder examines John Hilditch (1872-1930), a notorious collector of Chinese art who lied, hoaxed and manipulated in his struggle against museum experts to become a cultural authority. Previously overlooked as a pest with a dubious collection, this book uses Hilditch to interrogate how far the monumental social, cultural and political changes of the early twentieth century unsettled social and cultural hierarchies and how these hierarchies were remade. It shows how the cultural elites were forced to engage with the public and ...

Is food porn a vibrant and democratic new expression of modern food culture or a superficial addition to an image-saturated world? Tracing its origins from the 1970s to today, this timely book examines the evolution of food porn as a desire-inducing aesthetic practice and a visually extravagant food spectacle.

Through discussions on class, gender, sexuality and national identities, Food Porn: Food Aesthetics in a Digital Age (Bristol University Press, 2026) by Dr. Jonatan Leer & Dr. Stinne Gunder Strøm Krogager questions whether food porn reinforces social hierarchies or empowers individuals. Also exploring anti-food porn aesthetics, this book is ess...

Art-Science Undisciplined invites us into a collaborative journey grounded in mutual exploration and transformation. Moving beyond transactional exchanges of expertise, artist Janani Balasubramanian and astrophysicist Natalie Gosnell draw on their own experiences, as well as stories from other art-science collaborators, to offer an imaginative guide for developing a values-based and joyful undisciplined practice.

This playbook offers practical and conceptual tools for co-creation that foster new, powerful alliances among artists, scientists, and their supporters. While attentive to the everyday reality of busy schedules and institutional demands, Balasubramanian and Gosnell illuminate strategies to change our current ways of working a...

The Story of a Sikh Museum: Heritage, Politics, Popular Culture, published by Cambridge University Press in July 2025, is a pioneering study on Sikh museums, a unique phenomenon of contemporary India—for their sheer numbers, distinctive display, malleability and presence in multiple cultural spheres and their political significance. This case study of Bhai Mati Das Museum at Gurdwara Sisganj, Delhi, examines the process of creation of Sikh heritage through history, paintings, and museums, unearths networks of patronage, and analyses the ways in which specific versions of the Sikh past are used to make present-day claims. It is based on interviews with...

Alicia Volk’s In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2025) uncovers the largely overlooked history of Japanese art during the years of occupation (1945-1952). Volk’s diverse case studies trace the intersections of politics and art in this charged period. As it had accommodated, shaped, and resisted empire, Japanese art now accommodated, shaped, and resisted the push and pull of defeat, occupation, and the dawning Cold War. In the Shadow of Empire’s chapters present a range of practitioners and practices and their struggles in the new geopolitical order taking shape around them, taking i...

Female artists have long employed collage to reflect the ways in which identity is often constructed from conflicting, contrasting and contradictory parts. Cut Out: A Feminist History of Photo Collage, Montage and Assemblage (Thames & Hudson and V&A Publishing, 2026) by Fiona Rogers explores the relationship between photography and feminist collage, foregrounding the use of femmage—a radical reclaiming of craft traditionally associated with women—as a resilient method within feminist and political art.

Cut Out presents an expanded definition of collage and cutting techniques to encompass photomontage, assemblage and the photogram. Tracing a lineage from nineteenth-century makers to c...

Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (Oxford UP, 2024) by Sumana Roy takes an unexpected cast of writers and artists and, in studying their work as ‘plant thinkers’, looks at how their stories and songs, art and films, and, of course, the idiomatic affected Bengali life and thought. Forest and garden, grass and root, weeds and magical plants—supported by a foliage of thought that allowed them to see beyond the botanical, Rabindranath Tagore, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Jibanananda Das, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, and others derived their worldview, their poetics and politics, from the plant world. Jagadish Chandra Bose’s scientific experiments, his resea...

Starting in the 1880s, Black performers, and those invested in telling stories centering Black people, attempted to counter the dehumanizing and harmful stereotypes used to portray Black characters. Shows began touting “All Colored Revues” to indicate that a cast was made up of actual Black performers rather than white people in blackface, and that these spectacles aimed to build stories around the perception of Black experiences. Although these performances were sometimes flawed, and even overly prejudiced, they represented a significant form of Black American cultural development and expression.

Since theatrical performances were rarely recorded, and many of the...

The significance of printmaking within the history of art is often underplayed, obscured or misunderstood. The Story of Printmaking: A Global History of Art (Yale UP, 2026) by Holly EJ Black tells the story of artist prints from across the globe in a manner that is accessible and engaging. It demystifies how prints are made – from woodblock to etching – and explores how, throughout history, printmaking has defied easy categorisation, straddling ‘fine’ art practices and commercially minded production. In fact, it has been employed as much for creative experimentation as it has for disseminating information.

Beginning in ancient East Asia and t...

In this episode Pat speaks with Dr Guillermo Badia.

Dr Guillermo Badia is a philosopher working in logic. His research interests are logic in computer science, semiring-based logics and models of computation, and modal, intuitionistic and other non-classical logics.

They discuss logic, murder mysteries, and the counter revolutionary search for truth.

A transcript of this episode will be available on the Concept : Art website here.

Concept : Art is produced on muwinina Country, lutruwita Tasmania. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.

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The ravages of the Holocaust and post-World War II led to the theft and disappearance of art, archives, and personal assets. Join Jonathan Brent and Howard Spiegler for a discussion on the quest to recover and preserve these cultural treasures.

This discussion originally took place on March 23, 2021.

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Can art change the contemporary world? In Feminism, Art, Capitalism Angela Dimitrakaki, a Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the university of Edinburgh, offers a Marxist Feminist perspective on a variety of issues in both society and the cultural sector. Engaging with a huge range of examples, as well as theorising key issues such as work and labour, the long modern, communing practices and technology, the book offers a global perspective on the contradictions that feminism faces under capitalist culture. A rich examination of the book will be of interest across the humanities, as well as for anyon...

Dangerous Creations: The Inventor Novel in Fin-de-siècle France (U Toronto Press, 2025) presents a master narrative of the inventor in fin-de-siècle French literature by analyzing the works of Jules Verne, Albert Robida, Émile Zola, and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. Their writings challenge the role of science in shaping French national identity and aim to transform contemporary understandings of science and technology. The book reveals how Verne, Robida, Zola, and de l’Isle-Adam reimagine the figure of the inventor, reshaping the literary standards of their time. Universally male in these narratives, the inventor serves as a flawed exemplar of national...

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and special guest host, Melanie Kiechle (Associate Professor of History, Virginia Tech), chat with radio producers Chris Hoff and and Sam Harnett about their sound production project, The World According to Sound. Hoff and Harnett came to Virginia Tech to put on their octophonic sound show, Ways of Knowing. We recorded this special livestream edition of Peoples & Things in Virginia Tech's Athenaeum, and the conversation includes thoughts and questions from a live audience that gathered there.

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Waves Lost at Sea (Spector Books, 2026) traces the evolving practice of Cooking Sections, whose work spans visual arts, architecture, and ecology. Since 2013, they have been investigating anthropogenic infrastructures, industrial food systems, and human-made climates: from artificially colored farmed salmon and drained buffalo wetlands to ocean-filtering oysters and Sicilian tomatoes outlawed under EU regulations. Their research-based practice exposes the legal, environmental, and metabolic struggles behind what ends up on our plates, while simultaneously working to create prospects for the future. This monograph brings together six newly commissioned essays alongside an extensive series of images with detailed captions and reflective annotations. Th...

Flowering currant, ivy, Portuguese laurel, and woad might all have grown in a medieval garden, but it would have taken special expertise to extract and create rich blue and purple pigments from them. Humans have been extracting dyes and inks from natural materials for millennia, and the practice was firmly established during the medieval era, recorded in manuscripts that survive today. Gold from Newton's Apple Tree: Historical Recipes for Natural Inks, Paints, and Dyes (Princeton UP, 2026) by Nabil Ali brings together recipes for making natural colors according to season, method, and ingredients.
This unique book takes its title fr...

In this episode of High Theory, Zac Zimmer talks to Kim about Decolonizing the Novum. The novum is a concept developed by Darko Suvin that names the new element of a science fiction or speculative fiction narrative. SF narratives from the Americas that rewrite archival material about colonization and first contact have begun an imaginative project of decolonizing that novum.

In Zac’s words, the "novum" has been part of our definition of science fiction since Darko Suvin first offered up the concept of part of his critical assessment of SF. This idea of "novelty" is linked to...

Most people hate and fear uncertainty. It causes such stress and anxiety that we often choose certain surrender over doubt, becoming passive, dependent, addicted―and more anxious than ever. Doubling down on the certainties promised by technology and micro-management only makes things worse, leaving no opportunity for innovation, adaptation or invention. Artists live with uncertainty constantly―but instead of waiting for the future, they run towards making it, with agency and freedom. What can we learn from them, about facing into a future that grows more uncertain daily?

At a time when organizations of all kinds crave inno...

Karen L. Bowen and Dirk Imhof join Jana Byars to talk about their new book, The Burgeoning European Print Trade: The Distribution of Prints Via the Plantin-Moretus Press of Antwerp (Harvey Miller, 2025). The European print trade is an evocative topic. Not only art historians, but social, cultural, and economic historians all agree that it was of vital importance in the Early Modern Period, as the conveyer of established icons, as well as the most recent imagery and news. Yet, thus far it is often discussed solely on the basis of tantalizing, isolated case studies. Bowen and Imhof's ground-breaking publication will a...

In Transatlantic Disbelonging: Unruliness, Pleasure and Play in Nigerian Diasporic Women's Art (Duke University Press, 2025), Bimbola Akinbola redirects the focus in diaspora studies from questions of loss and longing to acts of unapologetic self-definition through the study of Nigerian diasporic women artists navigating disparate geographies, allegiances, and identities. Drawing on the work of contemporary visual and performance artists, experimental filmmakers, and writers—including Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Zina Saro-Wiwa, ruby onyinyechi amanze, and Nnedi Okorafor—Akinbola articulates how these artists use their experiences as cultural outsiders to redefine home and national belonging on their own terms. Taking a capaci...

The first in-depth exploration of the work of artist Cory Arcangel, a pioneer of DIY-new media art whose influential “hacks” subvert the confines of Big Tech.

Cory Arcangel (b. 1978)—perhaps best known for Super Mario Clouds, the most referenced artistic game hack in art history—became one of the first artists from a new generation of punk DIY–new media geeks to capture the attention of the art world.
Combining the hands-on skills from the 1990s net art scene and the 2010s post-internet art’s fondness for memes and the generic image, Arcangel demonstrated the way cultural expr...

Museums often served nationalist and imperialist interests in the past, but the primary force in the 21st century is the market. Museum franchising—exemplified by the Louvre Abu Dhabi—is one of the most visible cases of the increasing entanglement of art and museums with capital interests. Such projects are often touted as global enterprises diversifying the art world. Frequently, critics of these controversial projects question these claims and market influence.

The intersection of these two forces—increasing capitalization and moving toward inclusivity—creates a fundamental tension, and that is the subject of Beth Derderian's Art Capital: Museum Poli...

In Belle Époque Paris, the Eiffel Tower was newly built, France was experiencing remarkable political stability, and American women were painting the town and gathering at a female-only Residence known as The American Girls' Club in Paris. Opened in 1893, The Club was the center of expatriate living and of dedication to a calling in the fine arts, and singularly harbored a generation of independent, talented, and driven American women.
Now in The Club: Where American Artists Found Refuge in Belle Epoque Paris (Bloomsbury, 2025), curator, art historian, and podcast host Jennifer Dasal presents the untold story of the Club, the p...

What is that rock you’ve just picked up? Which minerals is it made of, what’s unique about it and what can it reveal about Earth’s deeper story?
Rocks: A Guide to the Stones Around Us and the Stories They Tell (Frances Lincoln, 2026) gives you the tools to answer these questions. Geologist and science illustrator Vojta Hybl guides you through more than 100 rock types, explaining how they form, what they look like and the geological processes they represent.
This authoritative yet accessible guide includes clear explanations of igneous, volcaniclastic, sedimentary, metamorphic and anthropic rocks. It also di...

Caryn Rose's Three Chords and Blessed Noise (2026) is an ode to the lost art of the tour diary. In November of 2025, Patti Smith and her band embarked on a short tour in the United States and Europe to commemorate this auspicious occasion and to allow us, the children of this particular revolution, to celebrate this achievement, these songs and these people.

Rose headed off for a week of shows: Chicago, New York City, and Boston. One more time. Maybe one last time. As someone whose writing career has focused on rock and roll in its live form, and...

In the Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France (Northwestern University Press 2025) explores the relationship between sensory experience, state ideology, and artistic form, examining literature and art inspired by comets that unsettled the heliocentric order to which French politics and culture aspired.

Guest Claire Goldstein Professor of French and Director of the Humanities Program at UC Davis. Her research in ancien régime French-language literature and culture has explored subjects such as garden design, art and architecture; theater, ballet, and fête performances; astronomy; early modern fashion accessories; and early journalism. Claire’s current pro...

Contemporary Art in the Post-Yugoslav Space explores the production, discussion, and consumption of contemporary art across the post-Yugoslav region. Bringing together 16 original contributions, the work explores how and why contemporary art discourses have continued to navigate the chronic difficulties facing local cultural economies since the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia's common federal space. Framed by the concept of hauntology, the contributors foreground various "ghosts" of the Yugoslav past — from its anti-fascist and non-alignment legacies, to histories of queer and feminist movements and artistic activism — as a lens for examining the present state of affairs both regionally and globally.

...

Marc Chagall is widely recognized as the preeminent Jewish artist of the 20th century, but little is known of his work to preserve Jewish culture. In this program, his granddaughter Bella Meyer interweaves images of Chagall’s artwork and personal letters to reflect on his life, passion for Yiddish and dedication to perpetuating Jewish heritage and culture.

This program originally took place on February 17, 2016.

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On the Edge: Endbands in the Bookbinding Traditions of the Eastern Mediterranean by Dr Giorgios Boudalis (Legacy Press, 2022). The term endbands designates the two bands worked with thread(s) at the head and tail edges of the spine of a book. The techniques with which they are worked and the ways with which they are connected to a bound codex vary greatly over time and geography. The purpose of this book is to identify, classify and describe several of these different techniques used in manuscript books bound within different cultures in the Eastern Mediterranean from Late Antiquity until the 20th...

In the heyday of Islamic art collecting around the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of premodern ceramic objects circulated on the international antiquities market. Invisible Hands: Fabrication, Forgery, and the Art of Islamic Ceramics (Princeton University Press, 2026) tells the story of how traditional craft skills of the Islamic world, often thought to have died out with the advent of industrialization, were redirected toward a thriving new market in the colonial era: the fabrication and fictionalizing of antiquities, especially ceramics.
In this stunning work of art history, Dr. Margaret Graves shakes the foundations of the discipline, challenging us to...

In the 1950s, American glamour swept into a war-torn Britain as part of a broader transatlantic exchange of culture and commodities. But in this process, the American ideal of the blonde became uniquely British—Marilyn Monroe transformed into Diana Dors.

British Blonde: Women, Desire and the Image in Post-War Britain (Yale UP, 2025) by Professor Lynda Nead examines postwar Britain through the changing ideals of femininity that reflected the nation’s evolving concerns in the twenty-five years following the Second World War. At its heart are four iconic women whose stories serve as prompts for broader accounts of socia...