It feels both eerie and stabilizing to read Octavia E. Butler’s books in the year 2025, when the realities she prophesized have come true. But the exhibition catalog American Artist: Shaper of God grants us a welcome opportunity to reflect on the lessons we can glean from her legacy, which critic Alexandra M. Thomas writes is a beacon for artists and activists today. Also on our bookshelf this April are an invigorating tome dedicated to the role of dreams in Latin American art, which reminded News Editor Valentina Di Liscia of beloved Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez (Gabo) and his role as “but a notary of reality,” and Celia Paul’s long-overdue monograph, recommended by Associate Editor Lisa Yin Zhang. Read on for more books for your monthly list, plus new monographs and catalogs from Kent Monkman, Saya Woolfalk, and others. We also want to shout out Primary Information’s new anthology publication on THING, a 1990s magazine centered on the queer Black creative scene of Chicago, marking the first time its 10 issues have been released in one place. As always, there’s too little time to read it all. —Lakshmi Rivera Amin, Associate Editor
Recently Reviewed
Celia Paul: Works 1975–2025
“How can a life that is made of time be rendered in art?” That inquiry, posed by Clare Carlisle, might be the animating question of a fantastic new monograph on Celia Paul. The interlinked essays interweave an incredibly generous number of reproductions of the artist’s simultaneously heavy and weightless paintings, as Karl Ove Knausgaard describes them, spanning half a century and arranged chronologically. Themes of devotion, mothers, the sea, home, and femininity set the tempo like waves crashing, each recurrence both an affirmation and a surprising permutation.
In “My Mother and the Sea,” for instance, Carlisle reads Paul through Marcel Proust, how she accompanied her mother through the slow descent into old age and death like Charon rowing across the River Styx, each of the portraits she painted like a dip of the oar. Hilton Als, meanwhile, compares her to Emily Dickinson and Jean Rhys in an essay entitled “The Sea, The Sea.” (Joyce-heads might mentally complete the line: “She is our great sweet mother.”)
These literary references are in no way out of place: Paul, who has written a memoir of her own, invokes writer Rachel Cusk in her own essay. She also meditates, understandably bitterly, on her art-historical relegation to the status of Lucien Freud’s one-time muse rather than a painter in her own right. Nevertheless, her closing line can be felt in her prolific practice of self-portraiture: “Painting myself might be like coming home.” —Lisa Yin Zhang
Read the Review by Eliza Goodpasture | Buy the Book | MACK, March 2025
Mary Cassatt between Paris and New York: The Making of a Transatlantic Legacy by Ruth E. Iskin
“In this meticulously researched and rigorously argued book, Iskin depicts her subject as an ambitious and savvy woman who, despite societal constraints, exercised remarkable agency over her trajectory. In her early 20s, she dared to leave the security of her upper-middle-class family home to pursue an artistic education in Europe. Her move to Paris was strategic: The city provided unparalleled opportunities to share her work, find patronage, and make connections. Cassatt would become the only American to exhibit with the Impressionists — which Iskin argues was the result of the artist’s ‘explicit networking’ and not her ‘chance discovery’ by Degas, as some scholars claim.” —Sophia Stewart
Read the Review | Buy on Bookshop | University of California Press, January 2025
On Our List
American Artist: Shaper of God, edited by Zainab Aliyu
Shaper of God is a mesmerizing collection of writing and images that expands on the titular exhibition about the late writer Octavia E. Butler’s legacy. American Artist’s introduction narrates their experience of re-reading Butler’s prescient 1993 novel Parable of the Sower in 2020 and beginning to develop this multimedia body of work, which mines the entanglements of Artist’s life-world alongside Butler’s. Artist maps out their deep research on their entwined family histories in Southern California and Butler’s institutional archive at the Huntington Library. The book is organized into three sections, each of which explores a different theme: the role of maternal legacies, migration and placemaking, and space exploration. Essays by Taylor Renee Aldridge, Tananarive Due, Ayana Jamieson, Lou Cornum, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Fred Moten amplify themes of legacy, place, and space by further analyzing Butler’s literature and archive, as well as Artist’s creative process. Gumbs pens an imagined conversation between Butler and astronomer Edwin Hubble in the Huntington’s archives; Moten writes a poem about an ongoing apocalypse. As a whole, the book is a record of how contemporary artists and scholars are turning to Butler’s vision when grappling with the continuous catastrophes and futuristic possibilities of today. —Alexandra M. Thomas
Buy on Bookshop | Pioneer Works Press, March 2025
Eufrasia Burlamacchi by Loretta Vandi
The first biography of Eufrasia Burlamacchi (1478–1548) brings the prolific Italian manuscript illuminator out of the shadows. The daughter of a wealthy and cultured Tuscan family, Burlamacchi became a Dominican nun at the age of 12 and later helped to found the Observant Convent of San Dominico in Lucca, where she would remain until her death. As a woman, Burlamacchi could not complete an apprenticeship in a master’s workshop like her male peers. But even in the circumscribed world of a nun, Lucca was an especially rich artistic context, as was Tuscany at large. Sources of inspiration like contemporaneous drawings, prints, and books found their way past the convent walls and into the artist’s hands and eventual manuscripts. Art historian Loretta Vandi’s thoughtful study follows the nun, singer, and artist through the quietly dazzling works that she left behind, arguing that Burlamacchi managed to innovate and even participate in artistic currents of her time despite her strictly cloistered life. —Lauren Moya Ford
Buy on Bookshop | Getty Publications, March 2025
Sun Dreams – Art Mirages in Latin America, edited by Marina Dias Teixeira and Yasmin Abdalla
Rebutting the claim that he had invented the literary genre known as Magical Realism, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez famously said that he was “but a notary of reality.” What he meant was that in Latin America and the Caribbean, truth is often stranger than fiction — a fact perhaps never more evident than in its artists’ singular contributions to Surrealism and its many tendrils. The poetically titled Sun Dreams, a thick volume spanning more than a century of visual artistic production in the region, brings together some of the movement’s most beloved practitioners (Kahlo, do Amaral) alongside artists in a shared vein who deserve to be household names: Mexico’s Aydeé Rodríguez López, Brazil’s Marcela Cantuária, Paraguay’s Julia Isídrez, Argentina’s Leonor Fini, among dozens of others. Oh, and the exquisite illustrations … ! It may be a tired truism that we need beauty now more than ever, but this book reminds us why, ever-so-subversively: because beauty pulls us out of the darkness, invigorates and mobilizes us so that we can mount the resistance. —Valentina Di Liscia
Buy the Book | Act Editora, 2025
Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery, edited by Eric Crosby and Sarah Humphreville
In Eric Crosby’s introductory essay to this exhibition catalog, he characterizes the underappreciated painter, Gertrude Abercrombie, with a Whitman-esque docket of descriptions: She’s “the life of the party, the mischievous witch, the queen of Chicago, the jazz maven, the reclusive bohemian. Or maybe the avowed antiracist, the queer ally, the earnest entrepreneur, the inebriated ironist, the imagist forebear …” That’s quite a resume, but by the many accounts assembled in the lush, informative volume, Abercrombie lived up to each one and more. He and co-editor Sarah Humphreville along with other contributors supplement a rich array of the late artist’s work with several essays that delve into her compellingly idiosyncratic life, one at least as quixotic as the images she conjured. In an included interview, historian and fellow Chicagoan Studs Terkel asks about her role in the Depression-era Federal Arts Project: “It saved some of our lives and it started me on my career,” she says. “Your career and the work,” he confirms. But, in a tonic display of ingenuous disregard for success, one that’s all but absent from the current art scene, Abercrombie replies, “Well, whatever career it is.” This is a must-have book for anyone interested in a way of painting that is mysterious, enchanting, and revelatory, as well as the life of an artist who reminds us that the work is a calling, not just a profession. —Albert Mobilio
Buy on Bookshop | Delmonico Books, Carnegie Museum of Art, and Colby College Museum of Art, February 2025