
‘LINA BO BARDI’ By Zeuler RM de A. Lima (Yale University Press). One of the problems with being a die-hard starchitecture fan is that sometimes you have to travel far to see the work of a designer you love – all the way to São Paulo, Brazil, in the case of revolutionary Lina Bo. Bardi. But it’s worth exploring his 1950 Glass House on top of a hill; its Pompéia factory which has become a public leisure center; and its monumental São Paulo Art Museum with its “crystal easel” installation. Alternatively, you can now stay home and get a wide-angle view of Bo Bardi herself in a beautiful 2013 critical biography published in paperback this winter. It’s a slippery subject; but his impulse to drill holes in containment walls of all kinds was emphatic and deep, and is more than welcome at this time.
“CURATORIAL ACTIVISM: TOWARDS AN ETHICS OF CURATION” By Maura Reilly (Thames & Hudson). Tough political times call for original museum thinking, something Ms. Reilly documents and calls for in both this how-to manual for aligning art and real life. To this end, Ms. Reilly, founding curator of the Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, revisits key exhibitions of contemporary art, from 1976 to the present day, that have addressed questions of race, class, sexuality and gender. , and intrigues. a path to a future of institutional truth.
‘BRUCE NAUMAN: DISAPPEARING ACTS’ By Kathy Halbreich, et al. (The Museum of Modern Art). One of the year’s outstanding museum exhibits is accompanied by a superb book. The lead curator of the exhibition, Ms. Halbreich, as usual, brings an involved, in-depth and personal tone to the catalog anchor essay. Other contributions from artists (Ralph Lemon, Glenn Ligon, Rachel Harrison) and art historians (Suzanne Hudson, Liz Kotz, Catherine Lord) demonstrate the breadth and depth of Mr. Nauman’s continuing reach. and reveal a moral subtlety and tenderness in his art, which has not always been recognized in previous evaluations. (Read the review of the exhibition.)
‘DEANA LAWSON: AN OPENING MONOGRAPH’ With an essay by Zadie Smith (Aperture). Photographer Deana Lawson is one of a growing number of contemporary artists keen to position the black body where it has rarely been welcome before, namely in the mainstream of contemporary art. In a visual version of creative non-fiction, she places people she barely knows in home settings that she has organized as stage sets. Her babysitters appear to be home, but something is wrong. You sense hidden dramas waiting to unfold; the tensions subside. This brilliant book of 40 photographs is a group portrait of a new version of the difference that she discovers and invents. (Read an article on the artist.)
“WE WILL OVERCOME: NEWS PHOTOGRAPHS OF NASHVILLE DURING THE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA” Edited by Kathryn E. Delmez, with a preface by representative John Lewis (Frist Art Museum in association with Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville). In the 1960s, Birmingham, Alabama and Memphis became iconic sites in the struggle for civil rights. Nashville, some 200 miles from the two cities and home to the historically black Fisk University, has also had its struggles, less widely publicized but scrupulously recorded by the local press. This book, the catalog for an exhibition at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, captures a decade of everyday bravery and trauma as recorded in photographs, taken from the city’s archives, by Nashville photojournalists. (Read an opinion piece on the exhibit.)
‘TIBET’S MURALS’ By Thomas Laird, et al. (Taschen). The great madness. In the 1970s, as a teenager, American photographer and writer Thomas C. Laird first traveled to the Himalayas. He settled in Kathmandu, Nepal, and eventually traveled to Tibet, where he made life-size digital photographs of century-old wall cycles in Buddhist monasteries. The photographs have been reproduced in a collector’s edition of 998 copies, each of which includes six leaflets of complete murals and is accompanied by a 528-page guidebook and kiosk designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Shigeru Ban. Price for a total and stunning set: $ 12,000. I can’t imagine what the Buddha might say about such an extravagance, but His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama blessed him, personally signing each copy of the Collector’s Edition.