It’s that time of year again, when we share artists’, and our, recommendations for a good read. For those of us who have sworn off televised news, magazines, and blogs, an inspirational, aspirational, transporting title for a good curl-up may be just what the season needs!
Dawn MacNutt, in Canada, gets first place with Timeless Forms, the art book and autobiography that she has been working on for a few years. Timeless Forms intersperses over 100 images of MacNutt’s sculptures and textiles, with stories of her life: from growing up in rural Nova Scotia during the Second World War; through her studies at Mount Allison University under the guidance of Alex Colville; to marriages, motherhood and finding, in her 40s, the courage to throw herself into art full time. “Writing about her unique artistic journey with humor and empathy,” the publisher writes, “MacNutt finds joy in the face of loss and resilience in the face of adversity.” The book is officially published by Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery where MacNutt will have a retrospective show in January 2025. Timeless Forms (MSVU Art Gallery and Owens Art Gallery, Halifax, Canada, 2025) is available for preorder on our website.
The lives of other artists were of interest for Polly Barton in New Mexico. She had two favorite books this year: The Slip: The New York Street the Changed Art Forever by Prudence Peiffer (Harper, New York, 2023) was one. “I wanted more about Lenore Tawney,” she writes, “but I loved the descriptions of the artists, their connections, the slip and the whole sense of period in NYC artistically and politically when I was born (1956) and living there.” The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velazquez by Laura Cumming (Chatto & Windus, London, 2016) was the second. “It is beautifully written and a deep dive into the life of Velazquez, a painter I really did not know. Just reading good writing about art was a treat.”
In Germany, Heidrun Schimmel read Parade by Rachel Cusk (Farrar,Straus and Giroux, New York, 2024). Chosen a “Best Book of the Year” by The New Yorker and Vulture, Schimmel says,“it’s a novel for artists!” She also recommends the two-volume catalog for the 60th Biennial of Arts, Venice, Italy, Biennale Arte 2024: Foreigners Everywhere. The editor, Adriano Pedrosa, says it’s “a celebration of the foreign, the distant, the outsider, the queer as well as the Indigenous” that focuses “on artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, emigres, exiled and refugees―especially those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North.”
“Quite amazing – wonderful escape!” Blair Tate in New York, said of Hugo Award Winner, The Three Body Problem trilogy by Cixin Liu (Tor Books, New York, 2019). Tate is now reading Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom, Russia, Europe, America, (Crown Reprint, New York, 2019),”checking back in to this insane world we’re about to experience…..”
Polly Sutton in Washington also had a timely suggestion. She had just finished National Book Critics Circle Award Winner, All the Frequent Trouble of Our Days, by Rebecca Donner (Back Bay Books, 2022), a “disturbing” book, “so close to what we are going through.” It’s the true story of the American Woman at the heart of the German resistance to Hitler. One of her favorites books of the year was Where the Language Lives: Vi Hilbert and the Gift of Lushootseed by Janet Yoder (Girl Friday Books, 2022). Vi Hilbert revitalized her Salish language in the Pacific Northwest, where Sutton lives, written by one of her students at the University of Washington.
In April, Jim Bassler, who lives in California, went to visit friends in Oaxaca, Mexico. At the airport he bought, James, the US National Book Award Winner, by Percival Everett. “Loved it,” he writes, “and now want to get Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.” (Dover Revd. ed. 1998).
In Korea, Young-ok Shin had a full complement of books this year to recommend: Thinking through Craft, by Glenn Adamson (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2007). which dispenses with clichéd arguments that craft is art, and persuasively makes a case for defining craft in a more nuanced fashion; The Living Reed: A novel of Korea (The John Day Company, Inc. New York, 1963) by Pearl S. Buck (who is the most translated American author); What a Plant Knows: Field Guide to the Senses, Expanded Edition by Daniel Chamovitz (Darun, 2012); Le Zubial Alexandre Jardin, (Alexandre Jardin et Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1997) about Jardin’s father who was a lover of women and life.
Marianne Kemp in the Netherlands is reading The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed the World by Kasia St. Clair (John Murray, 2020). In 13 episodes, the book tells a story of human ingenuity — from 30,000-year-old threads found in a Georgian cave to the Indian calicoes that sparked the Industrial Revolution.
On browngrotta arts’ list was The Secret Lives of Color (Penguin Books, 2017) also by Kasia St. Clair, which tells the story of 75 shades — from a brown that changed the way battles were fought to Picasso’s blue. And always, we recommend our catalogs for 2024, Discourse: art across generations and continents, 176 pages of art by 50 artists from 20 countries, with an essay by Erika Diamond, and Ways of Seeing: Exploring ways individuals envision and curate art collections, 150 works of art in 188 pages.
Enjoy!!
