7 Books We’re Looking Forward to in May

Edited by Antonia Carrara with a Forward by McKenzie Wark

Across writing, painting, and her “trend forecasting” collective K-HOLE, Yago has become a go-to armchair theorist of those aesthetic sensibilities so banal and pernicious—so normal and boring—that they could easily go unnoticed. But once someone—often, Yago and her ilk—puts language to the phenomenon—whether its the aesthetics of irony, cringe, or “normcore,” the now ubiquitous term K-HOLE coined—you start to see it everywhere. In her paintings, she trains an artist’s 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.

By Victoria Johnson

Johnson, 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—putting the country’s art on the world map and helping to found the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This was hardly without consequence: Church’s paintings of unpeopled vistas propagated Manifest Destiny. Still, it’s never not interesting to consider the real roles art plays in politics, for better and for worse.

By Trevor Paglen

This 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’s: what do images do? Paglen confronts, with clear prose and a level head, everything from UFOs to psyops, offering a revealing look behind the curtain that you can’t unsee.

By Nicholas Fox Weber

The 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.

By Massimiliano Gioni

If you’ve ever wanted to know how—and why—one assembles so strange a creature as the Venice Biennale, here’s 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’s posthumous 2026 edition.

By Rennie McDougall

Yvonne Rainer dances her iconic Trio A on the cover of this New York history, and aptly so: McDougall’s 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’s a book to make you wiggle while you read.

By Paul Elie

Elie’s Last Supper 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’s The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars, as well as Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art by Daisy Dixon. Why now? The similarities between our times and theirs can’t 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’s triumphs and mistakes.