{"id":1910264,"date":"2026-04-29T17:13:34","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T14:13:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1910264"},"modified":"2026-04-29T17:13:34","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T14:13:34","slug":"7-books-were-looking-forward-to-in-may","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1910264","title":{"rendered":"7 Books We\u2019re Looking Forward to in May"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\tHappy park-reading (or porch-reading) season to those who celebrate! Whether you\u2019re grabbing a book for you flight to the Venice Biennale or to bask on a picnic blanket in the glorious sun elsewhere in the world, we\u2019ve got the latest and greatest art books for you below.<\/p>\n
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That Figures: Selected Writings by Dena Yago<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/figure>\n
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Edited by Antonia Carrara with a Forward by McKenzie Wark<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tAcross writing, painting, and her \u201ctrend forecasting\u201d collective K-HOLE, Yago has become a go-to armchair theorist of those aesthetic sensibilities so banal and pernicious\u2014so normal and boring\u2014that they could easily go unnoticed. But once someone\u2014often, Yago and her ilk\u2014puts language to the phenomenon\u2014whether its the aesthetics of irony, cringe, or \u201cnormcore,\u201d the now ubiquitous term K-HOLE coined\u2014you start to see it everywhere. In her paintings, she trains an artist\u2019s keen eye on the visual culture of late capitalism. The result is an update on the Pop art approach meant to evade the cynicism and complicity now synonymous with Andy Warhol.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Glorious Country: How the Artist Frederic Church Brought the World to America and America to the World<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/figure>\n
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By Victoria Johnson<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tJohnson, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, offers new biography of this Ur-American artist. The 19th-century landscape painter, Johnson argues, played a pivotal role in crafting a majestic American imaginary, both at home and abroad\u2014putting the country\u2019s art on the world map and helping to found the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This was hardly without consequence: Church\u2019s paintings of unpeopled vistas propagated Manifest Destiny. Still, it\u2019s never not interesting to consider the real roles art plays in politics, for better and for worse.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/figure>\n
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By Trevor Paglen<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tThis book repackages essays from across a career spent turning the tools of surveillance and control back in on themselves. Across it all, an argument emerges. The question of our era, Paglen says, is perhaps no longer: what do images mean? Rather, he posits, it\u2019s: what do images do<\/em>? Paglen confronts, with clear prose and a level head, everything from UFOs to psyops, offering a revealing look behind the curtain that you can\u2019t unsee.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Anni Albers: A Life <\/em><\/h2>\n<\/figure>\n
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By Nicholas Fox Weber<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tThe recent, overdue rediscovery of Anni Albers ushered in an art world reckoning: her sophisticated weavings dialogued significantly with the work of her male peers at the Bauhaus and at Black Mountain College. But her medium and her gender kept her in the shadows for far too long. Cracking open her story made the world alert to the many works in fiber that had been overlooked. This new biography tells the story of her life as a bridge between worlds.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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High Waters: An Oral History of the Venice Biennale<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/figure>\n
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By Massimiliano Gioni<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tIf you\u2019ve ever wanted to know how\u2014and why\u2014one assembles so strange a creature as the Venice Biennale, here\u2019s one heck of a chance. Massimiliano Gioni, who curated the 2013 edition, has interviewed 11 of its curators, including the late Okwui Enwezor; his wife, Cecilia Alemani; and the team executing Koyo Kouoh\u2019s posthumous 2026 edition.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Nonstop Bodies: How Dance Shaped New York City<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/figure>\n
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By Rennie McDougall<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tYvonne Rainer dances her iconic Trio A <\/em>on the cover of this New York history, and aptly so: McDougall\u2019s telling traverses everything from the avant-garde to ordinary movements in the streets, a gulf Rainer herself has memorably bridged. Covering everything from South Bronx hip-hop to Broadway musicals to the ballroom scene, here\u2019s a book to make you wiggle while you read.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex and Controversy in the 1980s<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/figure>\n
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By<\/strong>Paul Elie<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tElie\u2019s Last Supper <\/em>is the first in spate of books coming out this season to address the culture wars of the 1980s. Controversy junkies can keep their eyes peeled for Isaac Butler\u2019s The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America\u2019s Culture Wars<\/em>, as well as Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art <\/em>by Daisy Dixon. Why now? The similarities between our times and theirs can\u2019t be overstated: the Right is once again bent on making an enemy out of art it barely understands. One way to prepare for the fight is to bone up on history and learn all the moves in the book, taking note from another generation\u2019s triumphs and mistakes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/aia_book-collage.jpg?w=1024″] Happy park-reading (or porch-reading) season to those who celebrate! Whether you\u2019re grabbing a book for you flight to the Venice Biennale or to bask on a picnic blanket in the glorious sun elsewhere in the world, we\u2019ve got the latest and greatest art books for you below. That Figures: Selected Writings by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1910264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1910264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1910264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1910264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1910264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1910264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1910264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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