Reading List
Books I recommend
Art history, collecting, curating, and a few stories that stayed with me. Every purchase through these links supports independent bookstores.
Museums & the Art World
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Gathering of Strangers: Why Museums Matter
Based on her Slade Lectures at Cambridge, a look at what museums are for and how they might change.
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Everything You Know About Art Is Wrong
A short, playful tour of art-history myths and blunders.
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Thunderclap
A memoir and art-historical detective story about the painter Carel Fabritius and a deadly explosion in Delft in 1654.
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Collecting & the Market
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Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America
How modern art found its way to American collectors and museums.
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Art History & Ideas
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Primitive Art in Civilized Places
A classic critique of how Western collectors and museums see non-Western art.
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The “Black Art” Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism across Continents
How African sculpture shaped modernism in Europe, America and Africa.
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Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art
A critic's exploration of women artists who broke the rules.
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Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World
The women history left out, and what they built.
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Stories & the World
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War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
The history behind the war in Ukraine, from an exiled Russian journalist.
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