July’s Art Books Range From Black Feminist Thought to Art Heists
A summer reading list can reveal as much about the art world as a museum season. This month’s crop of books moves from Black masculinity and feminist theory to fictional thefts, forensic investigation, and the written record of one of avant-garde dance’s most exacting thinkers.
Huey Copeland’s Touched by the Mother: Black Men, American Art, Feminist Horizons, published by the University of Chicago Press, gathers 20 years of essays and interviews. Across the book, Copeland returns to a central concern: the relationship between Black mothers and masculinity. He considers how maternal figures and feminist thought shaped the work of artists including David Hammons, Barkley L. Hendricks, Arthur Jafa, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, and Sun Ra, and he speaks with figures such as Hilton Als, Thelma Golden, and Frank B. Wilderson, III.
Roshan Sethi’s The Simp, from Simon & Schuster, takes its cue from a viral job posting that asked someone to “make life easier for the couple in every way possible,” including help with “dog systems” and “closet systems.” The result is a satire rooted in the strange social theater of contemporary wealth, with Tom Sachs and Sarah Hoover at the center of the original episode.
Jo Piazza’s The Parisian Heist, set in Paris, uses the irresistible structure of an art theft to drive its plot. The novel arrives in the wake of the daytime theft at the Louvre that drew wide attention earlier this year, and it stars Jo van Gogh, the young widow who inherited the paintings of her brother-in-law, Vincent. Piazza’s book also lands alongside another forthcoming title, The Widow Van Gogh by Joan Martelli.
Eyal Weizman’s Ungrounding: the Architecture of Genocide, published by Penguin Press, is his first book with a trade press. The Israeli architect and founder of Forensic Architecture revisits the group’s origins in research on urban planning in Israel and its role in displacing Palestinians by restricting access to water and roads. Since 2023, the group has focused on producing evidence for the International Court of Justice’s case against Israel, material Weizman details here.
Rounding out the list is Yvonne Rainer: A Reader from JRP Editions. The volume collects a lifetime of writing by Yvonne Rainer, including artist statements, lectures, reviews, essays, letters to the editor, and interviews with Lynne TIillman, Gregg Bordowitz, and Simone Forti. Together, the books sketch a summer reading list that is less escapist than clarifying, mapping the pressures and arguments shaping contemporary art now.
