7 Books We’re Looking Forward to in January

by Larissa Pham

In this electrifying debut novel by Art in America contributor Larissa Pham, a novelist is our protagonist, and her painting professor is our antagonist. A story about a fiction writer—and the stories we tell ourselves—Discipline memorably nests art writing within its pages, with chapters bending around artists like Agnes Martin and Helen Frankenthaler.

by Joseph Grigely

This collection of writing on art and disability spans forty years, which means it predates both the Americans with Disabilities Act and the movement now known as disability arts. Grigely, a deaf artist, is not only a trailblazer, but also someone who is intensely attentive to language; much of his work centers on communication and miscommunication while exploring what language looks like (rather than what it sounds like). He also holds a PhD from Oxford and is among today’s most articulate artists. Oh, and the book is pretty funny, too.

by Sean Canty

On the heels of Adrienne Edwards’s influential Art in America essay “Blackness in Abstraction” (2015), Sean Canty—an architect and Harvard professor—turns the question from painting toward architecture. The book focuses on David Hammons, Amanda Williams, and Theaster Gates while arguing for a new methodology.

by Nicole L. Woods

This is the first monograph on the Fluxus cofounder, who died last year, but it is also an exemplary model of feminist art history writing. Working from interviews and previously unpublished materials, Woods traces Knowles’s evolution from abstract painting to groundbreaking works in digital poetry and beyond, framing her as a central figure of the Fluxus movement of the 1960s rather than a peripheral one.

by Robert Elms

On Tuesday nights in 1980s London, you could find anyone from Boy George and Spandau Ballet to Grayson Perry and Peter Doig, Sade and Wham! to Michele Clapton and Alexander McQueen at Blitz. Founded by a group of working-class kids in the Thatcher era, the club, Elms argues, made an impact on art, literature, and fashion that is still felt today.

by Beth Derderian

Gayatri Spivak has argued that today neocolonialism carries on in the form of capitalism: colonialism proper has been somewhat dismantled, but supply chains and inequities perpetuate subalternity. What does this mean for museums, those bastions of old-school imperialism? Franchising, according to Brown anthropologist Beth Derderian, whose new book focuses on the Louvre Abu Dhabi—a move that expands the footprint of a corporation rather than a nation. Her book focuses on the ways the art world’s claims to diversifying and its expanding markets both overlap and conflict.

by Jalal Toufic

Flip open this book for an author bio and you’ll find this: “He was born in 1962, in Beirut or Baghdad, and died before dying in 1989, in Evanston, Illinois.” Enigmatic, right? Plenty of others describe him more plainly as a theorist and filmmaker whose work has greatly influenced the Beirut scene and beyond. Chief among them is Walid Raad, who once wrote, “I am not able to find my thoughts without passing through his [Toufic’s] words, books, and concepts.” January will see the first in this three-volume collection.