Help us raise $200,000 to keep the Rail independent, relevant, and free!
Art Books
Meeka Walsh’s Malleable Forms: Selected Essays
By Mary Ann CawsThese writings grasp the most seemingly insignificant detail and weave an entire text around it. We might direct our attention to just plain objects, knitting texts about them, concentrating our focus upon them, or simply collecting them for no particular reason.
Accra Shepp’s Radical Justice: Lifting Every Voice
By Lee Ann NormanThe book brings together photographic portraits of people protesting in Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street movement in Lower Manhattan in 2011 and the racial justice protests across New York City throughout the summer of 2020, filling critical gaps in the narrative around the haves and have-nots.
Celia Paul’s Letters to Gwen John
By Cynthia PayneThis encounter between two women artists takes the unusual form of a one-sided correspondence. Separated by decades, the letters imagine them as companions able to scale the heights they deserve.
Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore’s Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination: An Artist’s Reckoning with the South
By TK SmithAs a historian of the American South, Gilmore is positioned to offer a historical analysis of Bearden’s life within a larger American context, expanding upon the work previously done by art historians, curators, and Bearden himself. A promising transdisciplinary endeavor, it fails to complicate what is widely known of the artist’s life.
Lisa Slominski’s Nonconformers: A New History of Self-Taught Artists
By Jo Lawson-TancredBuilding on the history of “Outsider art” dating back to the 1970s, this book dives into the implications, limits, and paradoxes of the popular and problematic label. Placing the emphasis on the artists themselves and the formal properties of their work, the book foregrounds their practices over excessive biographic detail.
ADVERTISEMENTS