New Books in Art

Art and Citizenship in Conflict: British Women War Artists, 1939-45 (Manchester UP, 2026) by Dr. Lucy Curzon examines the work of women war artists in order to highlight the complexity of citizenship and gender in Britain during the Second World War. Evelyn Dunbar, Mary Kessell, Ethel Gabain, Stella Schmolle, and Laura Knight, among others, were commissioned by the War Artists' Advisory Committee (WAAC) to document the millions of women who took up sometimes unconventional roles-in agriculture, the auxiliary services, and manufacturing, among others-to support the British war effort. Indeed, their prints, drawings, and paintings were part of a broader scheme to uphold morale and promote much-needed citizen involvement on the home front. While there is growing interest, the importance of their remit in the history of the Second World War and the quality of their artistry have nonetheless not yet secured them a significant place in scholarship. Art and Citizenship in Conflict seeks to amend this gap. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In Female Art and Agency in Yugoslavia, 1971–2001 (Bloomsbury, 2024), Anja Foerschner offers a compelling exploration of the women artists, curators, scholars, and activists who shaped the cultural landscape of Yugoslavia and its successor states. Drawing on both original research and existing scholarship, she traces the emergence of the New Art Practice of the late 1960s and 1970s, highlighting the pivotal role of Belgrade's Student Cultural Centre, where women were instrumental in forging a progressive artistic and curatorial vision. Through insightful examinations of performance art, video art, and the development of feminist thought in Yugoslavia, Foerschner reveals how the region carved out a distinctive place within the international postwar avant-garde. Situating Yugoslav feminism in dialogue with Western and neighbouring contexts, she sheds new light on the complex intersections of art, politics, and social change. By exploring artistic responses to the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and the enduring political dimensions of cultural production, this book invites readers to reconsider the legacies of activist art and their resonance in our present time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

On June 10, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York returned two pieces of artwork to Cambodia: an Angkor statue and a sandstone lintel. It's the latest repatriation effort by the U.S.'s premier art museum, and the third time the Met has had to give up Cambodian artifacts specifically. Matthew Campbell's The Man Who Stole The Gods: A True Story of War, Obsession, and a Global Art Conspiracy (Penguin, 2026) dives into the story of the Cambodian antiquities trade, from looted temples in the Cambodian forests, through dealers in Bangkok like Douglas Latchford, and then into museums and billionaire homes in the West. And he also digs into how this trade fell apart: How the U.S. Department of Justice and activists in Cambodia pressured dealers and museums like the Met to give this art back. Matthew is an award-winning reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek. His previous book, Dead in the Water—co-authored with Kit Chellel—was selected as a Book of the Year by The Economist, the Financial Times, and The Times. Matt has reported from more than twenty-five countries on crime, corruption, terrorism, economics, and the environment. His work has earned some of journalism's highest honors, including awards from the Gerald Loeb Foundation, the Overseas Press Club, the National Press Club, SOPA, and SABEW for both feature and investigative reporting You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Man Who Stole the Gods. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

A creative, body-based guide to healing for queer, trans, and gender-expansive readers—somatic tools and expressive arts to feel safer in your body, rewrite your story, and sustain connection. Queer Expressions: Expressive Art and Somatic Therapy Practices for Healing Body Trauma (North Atlantic Books, 2026) is a practical, consent-centered guide to healing body trauma through embodiment and creativity. Drawing on somatic therapy—grounding, breath, orientation, gentle movement—and expressive arts—collage, drawing, clay, movement, music, voice—within a harm-reduction frame of pacing, choice, and safety plans, Wednesdae Reim Ifrach (REAT, ATR-BC, LPC) shares grounded practices, case vignettes, and simple rituals to help you move from shut down or on high alert into steadier, more connected living. The book follows a simple arc: first, feel and steady your nervous system; next, turn those sensations into art and story; and finally, build rituals and relationships that help the changes last—whether you're navigating dysphoria, ED recovery, chronic stress, or nervous system dysregulation. Inside you'll find: Body check-ins (quick prompts to name sensations and needs), short breath & movement practices (1–10 minutes), and sensory prompts (sight/sound/touch/smell/taste) Art invitations (collage, drawing, movement, sound/voice) with step-by-step guidance and safety notes Consent & harm-reduction tools (opt-in/out menus, pacing, crisis planning) to keep the work manageable Community practices & rituals (altar-making, release-writing, witness circles) to anchor change in daily lif A queer-centered lens on healing, embodiment, and creativity Warm, inclusive, and usable on your own or with a therapist, Queer Expressions helps you build a more livable relationship with your body—and a story big enough to hold who you are becoming. Wednesdae Reim Ifrach is a trans/non-binary art therapist and counselor dedicated to providing gender-affirming, trauma-informed care that emphasizes healing-centered engagement, body justice, intersectional social justice, and equitable access to eating disorder treatment. They co-own and operate Rainbow Recovery, offering clinical supervision, consultations, trainings, workshops, counseling, and art therapy services to clients in Connecticut and Pennsylvania. As a full-time professor at Moravian University, Wednesdae teaches mental health counseling, social work, and expressive art courses, inspiring future professionals. Over the past decade, they have led trainings and workshops for organizations such as the American Art Therapy Association, National Alliance for Eating Disorders, and Yale University, among others. Previously, Wednesdae founded the country's first 2sLGBTQIA+ Eating Disorder Program, served on Project HEAL's Board, and presided over the Connecticut Art Therapy Association. They currently co-chair the Health Professionals in Training Program on the GLMA Board. Their expertise addresses LGBTQ+ concerns and trauma, honoring each client's identity. Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California and Associate Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies. She can be reached at contact@helenavissing.com. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

What does Blackness look like? In Forms of Blackness: Race and Visibility in the French-Speaking World (Duke University Press, 2026), Cécile Bishop argues that this seemingly simple question has no straightforward answer. Instead of treating race as something immediately visible, she explores how Blackness emerges through the interplay of perception, language, and history. A central theme of the book is that visibility is never neutral. Through examples ranging from photographs of the Liberation of Paris to works of art such as Portrait of a Black Woman, Bishop shows that Blackness cannot be reduced to what is seen. Instead, she introduces the idea of Blackness as form, emphasizing the importance of representation, opacity, and aesthetic experience. Engaging with thinkers such as Édouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon, Bishop invites readers to rethink the assumption that seeing is the same as knowing. Forms of Blackness offers a thoughtful and original account of how race is shaped not simply by appearance, but by the ways we learn to see. Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

With The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris: Ethics and Self-Making in Dada, Simultanism, and Surrealism (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Rachel Silveri takes a fresh look at the desire to unify art and life, an ambition long regarded as foundational to the European historical avant-gardes. She reveals how many early twentieth-century artists saw their own everyday lives—their bodies, identities, and relationships—as a type of creative material and a central component to their avant-garde practice. These artists abandoned traditional forms of artmaking and venues of art viewing, instead aspiring to integrate art with everyday life, creating an “art of living.”  Considering Tristan Tzara's performances of Dadaist identity, Sonia Delaunay's simultaneous fashions and self-branding, and the collective endeavor to open and operate the Surrealist Research Bureau, Silveri offers a new narrative about how the artists of interwar Paris developed experiential life practices that resisted dominant forms of “lifestyle” and normative discourses surrounding gender, ethnicity, and office work. This book argues that ethical questions of “How should I live?” and “How should I relate to others?” were as important to the avant-garde as politics, and that aspirations to change the world played out in daily practices of self-making. Hannah Freed-Thall is Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture at NYU. She is the author, most recently, of Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

John Kapusta's Self-Realization Nation: How Artists of the Creative Counterculture Made a New America (U California Press, 2026) is the story of an unexpected group of performing artists who led one of the most influential artistic movements in contemporary American history. After World War II, personal fulfillment emerged as a defining American cultural ideal. Self-realization--the quest to become our authentic selves--remains a powerful part of American culture and arts today. In Self-Realization Nation, John Kapusta provides a lively cultural history of how an overlooked movement of musicians, dancers, and actors championed the ideal of self-realization. These performers, who spanned many backgrounds, identities, genres, and artistic styles, became what he calls the creative counterculture. Artists as varied as Sonny Rollins, John Cage, Anna Halprin, Alice and John Coltrane, and Pauline Oliveros shared an approach to creativity focused on letting go of limiting beliefs and subverting oppressive social norms. Through colorful vignettes, Kapusta reveals how these artists made their art and how their approach spread beyond the performing arts to influence such fields as psychology, education, and wellness. Ultimately, these creative counterculturists came to define a new vision of an America where everyone was free to be themselves, together. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Between the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries, European painting underwent a profound transformation as artists increasingly painted on canvas instead of wood or walls. Nowhere was more important to this shift than Venice, where painters experimented with canvas with remarkable creativity and innovation. In Venetian Canvas and the Transformation of Painting (Princeton University Press, 2026), Dr. Cleo Nisse investigates why Venetian artists adopted canvas and how it revolutionized their art between 1400 and 1600. Intertwining approaches from art history and art conservation, and featuring stunning new photographs that show details as never before, the book presents groundbreaking research based on close study of Venetian artworks, archival sources, art-making treatises, and early modern art criticism. It sheds new light on the materiality of early modern canvas, its production and supply, and the influence of climate on its use. The book offers fresh interpretations of iconic works and important concepts such as pittura di macchia and non finito, and demonstrates how canvas contributed to the radical new style of painters such as Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. But above all else, it shows how canvas changed the making and meaning of paintings.  This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Wayfaring: Photography in Taiwan, 1950s–1980s (Australian Centre on China in the World, 2025) explores four transformative decades of photography in Taiwan, tracing its evolution amid the island's emergence from Japanese colonialism and integration into Nationalist China, largely under martial law (1949–87). Through a dozen richly illustrated essays and interviews, the book bridges the gap between vigorous Chinese-language scholarship on photography in Taiwan and its limited representation in English. Essays on photographers in the 1950s–60s, including Long Chin-San (Lang Jingshan) (1892-1995), Deng Nan-Guang (1907-1971), Chang Chao-Tang (1943-2024), Liu An-Ming (1928-2022), Hwang Pai-Chi (b. 1931), Hsu Yuan-Fu (1932-2018) and Tsai Hui-Feng (1928-2005), reveal photography's pivotal role in documenting ‘local' culture and shaping cultural identity, while challenging ideas of ‘amateur' and ‘realist' practices and recognising the importance of transnational connections. Meanwhile, essays on Hsu Jen-Shiu (b.1946), Lin Bo-Liang (b. 1952), Kao Chung-Li (b. 1958), Lien Hui-Ling (b. 1961) and Hou Tsung-Hui (b. 1960), along with interviews sharing the firsthand experiences of Liu Chen-Hsiang (b.1963), Lulu Shur-tzy Hou (1962-2023) and Yao Jui-Chung (b.1969), highlight the experience of photography in 1970s–80s Taiwan, as both witness and agent of social transformation, addressing issues such as environmental protection, mental health and gender politics, as well as being a crucial vehicle for the transdisciplinary nature of contemporary art, theatre, cinema and performance in Taiwan at that time. Chen Shuxia is a historian and curator of Chinese art. Her research concerns art collectives, diasporic artistic practice, and reciprocal relations between people and objects. Her most recent books include Wayfaring: Photography in Taiwan, 1950s–1980s (2025), Chinese Toggles: Culture in Miniature (2024) and A Home for Photography Learning: the Friday Salon, 1977-1980 (2024). Her most recent curated exhibitions include “Merchants of Haymarket: the Making of Sydney's Chinatown” (2026), “The trace is not a presence…” (2025), “Chinese Toggles: Culture in Miniature” (2024). Chen is the inaugural curator of the Chau Chak Wing Museum's China Gallery, and a Senior lecturer in the Master's degree programme in Curating and Cultural Leadership, at the University of New South Wales School of Art & Design. Olivier Krischer is a historian and curator of art from East Asia and the Asian Australian diaspora, whose research concerns modern and contemporary transcultural art, photography and intermedia practices. His curatorial projects include “Assembly” (2023), featuring eight Hong Kong-born artists, “Wayfaring: Photography in 1970s-80s Taiwan” (2021) and “Between: Picturing 1950-1960s Taiwan” (2016). His publications include John Young: The History Projects (2025), Zhang Peili: From Painting to Video (2019) and Asia through Art and Anthropology: Cultural Translation Across Borders (with F. Nakamura and M. Perkins, 2013). Krischer is currently a lecturer and program convenor for the Master's degree programe in Curating and Cultural Leadership, at the University of New South Wales School of Art & Design. Li-Ping Chen is a visiting scholar in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Li-Ping's NBN episodes on Taiwan Studies are supported by the Chun and Jane Chiu Family Foundation Taiwan Studies Program at Oregon State University. Relevant Links: Open Access for Wayfaring: Photography in Taiwan 1950s−1980s Wayfaring 找路: Photography in 1970s–80s Taiwan Exhibition Webpage Wayfaring Exhibition Pamphlet Wayfaring Exhibition Video Tour | Part 1 — Overview “Between: Picturing 1950s-60s Taiwan / 間：臺灣五六十年代面影” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Can publishing change the world? In Dispatches from the Avant-Garage: The Alternative Press Rebecca Kosick (Wayne State UP, 2026), an Associate Professor in Comparative Poetry and Poetics at the University of Bristol, tells the story of The Alternative Press. Beginning in Detroit in the late 1960s, initially based in the house of Ann and Ken Mikolowski, the press created a rich and eclectic set of artworks. The story of The Alternative Press is also the story of US art and radical politics from the 1970s into the 1990s, with lessons for art and politics today. Drawing on a huge amount of archival work, interviews, and visual reproductions to analyse both the form and content of The Alternative Press's activity, the book will be essential reading for arts and humanities scholars, as well as for anyone interested in the history of radical art and culture in the USA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

This is a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities' Vault podcast. On May 13, 2026, Princeton's Center for Human Values hosted a day-long conference titled Audio & Ideas: Exploring the Possibilities for Scholarly Podcasting. It was co-sponsored by Princeton's Journalism program, and the NYU Podcast Initiative. Over the course of four panels, scholars, podcasters, and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their research. In the second panel, Chenjerai Kumanyika led a discussion about the aesthetics of podcasting. Professor Kumanyika is an assistant professor at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, who specializes in using narrative non-fiction audio journalism to critique the ideology of American historical myths about issues such as race, the Civil War, and policing. His podcast Empire City, was chosen by the New York Times as one of the best podcasts of 2024. He was the co-creator, co-executive producer and co-host of Uncivil, a podcast on the Civil War, and he is the collaborator for Scene on Radio's Season 2 “Seeing White,” and Season 4 on the history of American democracy. His current podcast is Unruly Subjects. The panel included Vinson Cunningham, a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he has written about theatre and television. He is a Spring 2026 McGraw Professor of Writing in the Program in Journalism at Princeton University. He is the author of the novel, Great Expectations; Julia Barton is an award-winning podcast, audiobook, and radio editor. She was the executive editor of Pushkin Industries, where she helped develop Revisionist History and Against the Rules. She's the editor of Malcolm Gladwell's The Bomber Mafia, Michael Specter's Fauci, and Michael Lewis's unabridged Liar's Poker and companion podcast. Her 2019 series, Spacebridge, was called “dazzling” by The New Yorker. She writes the audio history newsletter, Continuous Wave. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Black Freedom: A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2026) is the first fully illustrated history of Juneteenth and other Emancipation Day celebrations, told through photographs, art, and an engrossing narrative. For more than 150 years, Black communities have gathered to honor freedom, resilience, and the ongoing struggle for true liberation. While Juneteenth has recently gained wider recognition, it was one of many Emancipation Day traditions celebrated across the United States. These observances were spaces of joy, remembrance, and resistance—even as the fight for full freedom was unfinished. This volume brings together stirring essays and striking images from Juneteenth and beyond, offering a sweeping portrait of how Black people have created and sustained rituals of remembrance, a testament to the generations who, through celebration and storytelling, demanded that their contributions to the making of America be fully recognized. Blair LM Kelley is an award-winning author, historian, and scholar of  the African American experience. She is also the president and director of the National Humanities Center, the only independent center for advanced study in the world dedicated exclusively to the humanities. Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Exploring the work of established and emerging artists in Indonesia's vibrant art world, Artists and the People: Ideologies of Art in Indonesia (NUS Press, 2022) examines why so many artists in the world's largest archipelagic nation choose to work directly with people and in the studio. While the social dimension of Indonesian art makes it distinctive in the globalised world of contemporary art, Elly Kent is the first to explore this engagement in Indonesian terms. What are the historical, political and social conditions that lie beneath these polyvalent practices? How do formal and informal institutions, communities and artist-run-initiatives contribute to the practices and discourses behind socially-engaged art in Indonesia? What do artists do when they locate their practice in a broader social milieu, and what tensions arise when artists integrate communities, governments, politics, history and people into their practice? Drawing on interviews with artists, translations of archival material, visual analyses and participation in artists' projects, this book presents a unique, interdisciplinary examination of ideologies of art in Indonesia. It portrays the ways art practice and theory are understood within Indonesia and inside Indonesian-language discourse. Indonesia's artists have continued to explore, resist and draw on the methodologies and discourses of social responsibility and artistic autonomy generated by Indonesian arts practitioners through their early 20th-century encounters with modernity and the founding of the nation state. This book brings contemporary practice into conversation with art history in Indonesia. Dr Elly Kent is a visual artist, translator, researcher and educator with 20 years of experience working in academia and the arts in Indonesia and Australia. Elly is Deputy Director of the ANU Indonesia Institute and Sub-dean of Languages in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. She convenes the Year in Asia program and is Treasurer of the Indonesia Council, Australia's peak body for Indonesian studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Karl Whittington joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, Queer Making: On Artists and Desire in Medieval Europe (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2025). What role does desire play in the making of art objects? Art historians typically answer this question by referring to historical evidence about an artist's sexual identity or to particular kinds of imagery. But what about anonymous artists? Or works whose subject matter is mainstream? We know little about the identities and personalities of most premodern artists, but this should not hold us back from thinking about their embodied experience. In this book, Karl Whittington contends that we can "queer" the works of anonymous makers by thinking about their embodied experiences creating art. Considering issues of touch, pressure, and gesture across substances such as wood, stone, ivory, wax, cloth, paint, and metal, Whittington argues for an erotics of artisanal labor, in which the actions of hand, body, and breath interact in intimate ways with materials. Whittington takes seriously the agency of materials and technical processes, arguing that they necessarily placed the bodies of artists and artisans into physical situations and psychological states that can be read through the lens of desire. Combining historical evidence with speculative description, this evocative set of essays broadens our understanding of the motivations and experiences of premodern artists. It will appeal to scholars and students of art history, medieval studies, gender studies, queer studies, and anthropology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Connoisseurs and conmen: The contest for cultural authority in early twentieth-century Britain (Manchester University Press, 2026) by Dr. Lewis Ryder examines John Hilditch (1872-1930), a notorious collector of Chinese art who lied, hoaxed and manipulated in his struggle against museum experts to become a cultural authority. Previously overlooked as a pest with a dubious collection, this book uses Hilditch to interrogate how far the monumental social, cultural and political changes of the early twentieth century unsettled social and cultural hierarchies and how these hierarchies were remade. It shows how the cultural elites were forced to engage with the public and re-draw the boundaries of citizenship, expertise and high and low culture in response to unprecedented social mobility, the democratisation of culture and politics, as well as the effects of British imperialism which brought ordinary Britons access to antiquities as well as confidence to claim expertise over foreign cultures. The book will interest social and cultural historians of Modern Britain, museum scholars and art historians. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Is food porn a vibrant and democratic new expression of modern food culture or a superficial addition to an image-saturated world? Tracing its origins from the 1970s to today, this timely book examines the evolution of food porn as a desire-inducing aesthetic practice and a visually extravagant food spectacle. Through discussions on class, gender, sexuality and national identities, Food Porn: Food Aesthetics in a Digital Age (Bristol University Press, 2026) by Dr. Jonatan Leer & Dr. Stinne Gunder Strøm Krogager questions whether food porn reinforces social hierarchies or empowers individuals. Also exploring anti-food porn aesthetics, this book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the deeper social implications of food's digital allure. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Art-Science Undisciplined invites us into a collaborative journey grounded in mutual exploration and transformation. Moving beyond transactional exchanges of expertise, artist Janani Balasubramanian and astrophysicist Natalie Gosnell draw on their own experiences, as well as stories from other art-science collaborators, to offer an imaginative guide for developing a values-based and joyful undisciplined practice. This playbook offers practical and conceptual tools for co-creation that foster new, powerful alliances among artists, scientists, and their supporters. While attentive to the everyday reality of busy schedules and institutional demands, Balasubramanian and Gosnell illuminate strategies to change our current ways of working and dare us to imagine a more expansive future. The projects, potentials, and possibilities resulting from undisciplined creation will reshape not only the practitioners but their worlds altogether. Janani Balasubramanian is an artist, director, and founder based at Stanford University. Natalie Gosnell is an astrophysicist, artist, and Associate Professor of Physics at Colorado College. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The Story of a Sikh Museum: Heritage, Politics, Popular Culture, published by Cambridge University Press in July 2025, is a pioneering study on Sikh museums, a unique phenomenon of contemporary India—for their sheer numbers, distinctive display, malleability and presence in multiple cultural spheres and their political significance. This case study of Bhai Mati Das Museum at Gurdwara Sisganj, Delhi, examines the process of creation of Sikh heritage through history, paintings, and museums, unearths networks of patronage, and analyses the ways in which specific versions of the Sikh past are used to make present-day claims. It is based on interviews with artists and patrons, material from personal and institutional archives, a visual analysis of Sikh popular art and a critical examination of the museum's narrative. This book brings together Sikh history, popular art, politics and museums to discuss some of the most important current debates (of nation, identity and heritage) and reveals new ways in which we may understand museums, especially in a non-Western context. Kanika Singh is a historian, founder of Delhi Heritage Walks and Director at Centre for Writing & Communication at Ashoka University. Harleen Kaur is a historian and urban studies scholar who recently completed her Joint PhD from National University of Singapore and King's College London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Alicia Volk's In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2025) uncovers the largely overlooked history of Japanese art during the years of occupation (1945-1952). Volk's diverse case studies trace the intersections of politics and art in this charged period. As it had accommodated, shaped, and resisted empire, Japanese art now accommodated, shaped, and resisted the push and pull of defeat, occupation, and the dawning Cold War. In the Shadow of Empire's chapters present a range of practitioners and practices and their struggles in the new geopolitical order taking shape around them, taking into account not just the domestic context of Japan's relationship with the American-led occupation, but with Japan's erstwhile Asian empire, the socialist bloc, and audiences in “the West.” Spoiler alert! At the conclusion of the podcast, we talk about this image. Alicia Volk is professor of Japanese art at the University of Maryland; she is the author of Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement and In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorō and Japanese Modern Art, recipient of the Phillips Book Prize. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the Department of Foreign Languages, University of Bergen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Female artists have long employed collage to reflect the ways in which identity is often constructed from conflicting, contrasting and contradictory parts. Cut Out: A Feminist History of Photo Collage, Montage and Assemblage (Thames & Hudson and V&A Publishing, 2026) by Fiona Rogers explores the relationship between photography and feminist collage, foregrounding the use of femmage—a radical reclaiming of craft traditionally associated with women—as a resilient method within feminist and political art. Cut Out presents an expanded definition of collage and cutting techniques to encompass photomontage, assemblage and the photogram. Tracing a lineage from nineteenth-century makers to contemporary practitioners, we encounter Victorian album makers; Modernist, Surrealist and Dadaist innovators; and radical, second-wave feminist artists. Thematic sections include profiles written by expert contributors on key individuals, including Hannah Höch, Dora Maar and Lorna Simpson. Looking to the future as much as the past, Cut Out also reveals how the pioneering work of contemporary and digital artists continues to subvert dominant narratives and foster ever-expanding forms of photographic collage.  At a moment when photography and its history are being actively contested and reappraised, Cut Out is a reminder of its political power.  This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (Oxford UP, 2024) by Sumana Roy takes an unexpected cast of writers and artists and, in studying their work as ‘plant thinkers', looks at how their stories and songs, art and films, and, of course, the idiomatic affected Bengali life and thought. Forest and garden, grass and root, weeds and magical plants—supported by a foliage of thought that allowed them to see beyond the botanical, Rabindranath Tagore, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Jibanananda Das, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, and others derived their worldview, their poetics and politics, from the plant world. Jagadish Chandra Bose's scientific experiments, his research and the philosophy that propelled it, religions and rituals that involved an affective relationship with the natural world, a subterranean invocation of plant philosophy in actions and words, in living and in creative practice, and the political possibilities beyond the nation state that such thinking generated give this book its sap and flow. What might we take from these plant thinkers to rehabilitate our consciousness today? Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Starting in the 1880s, Black performers, and those invested in telling stories centering Black people, attempted to counter the dehumanizing and harmful stereotypes used to portray Black characters. Shows began touting “All Colored Revues” to indicate that a cast was made up of actual Black performers rather than white people in blackface, and that these spectacles aimed to build stories around the perception of Black experiences. Although these performances were sometimes flawed, and even overly prejudiced, they represented a significant form of Black American cultural development and expression. Since theatrical performances were rarely recorded, and many of the movies that featured all Black casts are now considered “lost films,” films for which no copy is known to survive, advertising posters often provide the only remaining evidence of the most important productions featuring Black performers between the 1870s and 1940s. These posters, and the historic innovations of playwrights, composers, directors, producers, and the Black performers behind them, are the subjects of the exhibition, Act Black: Posters From Black American Stage and Screen, curated by our guest for this episode, Assistant Curator of Collections at New York City's Poster House museum, Es-pranza Humphrey. Act Black: Posters from Black American Stage & Screen is on view at Poster House through September 6, 2026. Exhibition resources are also available via the Bloomberg Connects app until September 6, and at the Poster House online exhibition archive thereafter. Es-pranza's recommended reading list is available at the Additions to the Archive Substack. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In this episode Pat speaks with Dr Guillermo Badia. Dr Guillermo Badia is a philosopher working in logic. His research interests are logic in computer science, semiring-based logics and models of computation, and modal, intuitionistic and other non-classical logics. They discuss logic, murder mysteries, and the counter revolutionary search for truth. A transcript of this episode will be available on the Concept : Art website here. Concept : Art is produced on muwinina Country, lutruwita Tasmania. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The significance of printmaking within the history of art is often underplayed, obscured or misunderstood. The Story of Printmaking: A Global History of Art (Yale UP, 2026) by Holly EJ Black tells the story of artist prints from across the globe in a manner that is accessible and engaging. It demystifies how prints are made – from woodblock to etching – and explores how, throughout history, printmaking has defied easy categorisation, straddling ‘fine' art practices and commercially minded production. In fact, it has been employed as much for creative experimentation as it has for disseminating information. Beginning in ancient East Asia and travelling through Renaissance Europe, revolutionary Mexico, and post-Apartheid South Africa, these ten chapters celebrate the interconnected nature of the printed image and its multiple histories, while illuminating the lesser-known players who have been deliberately or erroneously overlooked. Whether formed by slicing linoleum or plunging plates into acid, then distributed via bound books or pasted posters, the print has not just replicated the world, it has shaped it. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The ravages of the Holocaust and post-World War II led to the theft and disappearance of art, archives, and personal assets. Join Jonathan Brent and Howard Spiegler for a discussion on the quest to recover and preserve these cultural treasures. This discussion originally took place on March 23, 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Dangerous Creations: The Inventor Novel in Fin-de-siècle France (U Toronto Press, 2025) presents a master narrative of the inventor in fin-de-siècle French literature by analyzing the works of Jules Verne, Albert Robida, Émile Zola, and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Their writings challenge the role of science in shaping French national identity and aim to transform contemporary understandings of science and technology. The book reveals how Verne, Robida, Zola, and de l'Isle-Adam reimagine the figure of the inventor, reshaping the literary standards of their time. Universally male in these narratives, the inventor serves as a flawed exemplar of national heroism during the Age of Empire – a period marked by significant external threats and internal strife – while also embodying unrestrained creativity. Ultimately, the inventor novel reflects broader French anxieties surrounding scientific progress, empire, and gender. Ana Oancea explores the transmedia and transnational legacy of the fin-de-siècle inventor novel through vignettes that highlight similarly themed narratives in contemporary popular culture. These sections engage with films, television series, graphic narratives, and video games that reinterpret key aspects of the inventor narrative, shedding light on its power structures, racial and gender politics, and colonial aspirations. Guest Ana Oancea is Associate Professor of French at the University of Delaware. Her research interests include the intersections of science and literature, adaptation studies, and visual culture. She has recently published articles in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Science Fiction Film and Television, and French Screen Studies. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progresson posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Can art change the contemporary world? In Feminism, Art, Capitalism Angela Dimitrakaki, a Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the university of Edinburgh, offers a Marxist Feminist perspective on a variety of issues in both society and the cultural sector. Engaging with a huge range of examples, as well as theorising key issues such as work and labour, the long modern, communing practices and technology, the book offers a global perspective on the contradictions that feminism faces under capitalist culture. A rich examination of the book will be of interest across the humanities, as well as for anyone interested in the importance of art today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and special guest host, Melanie Kiechle (Associate Professor of History, Virginia Tech), chat with radio producers Chris Hoff and and Sam Harnett about their sound production project, The World According to Sound. Hoff and Harnett came to Virginia Tech to put on their octophonic sound show, Ways of Knowing. We recorded this special livestream edition of Peoples & Things in Virginia Tech's Athenaeum, and the conversation includes thoughts and questions from a live audience that gathered there. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Waves Lost at Sea (Spector Books, 2026) traces the evolving practice of Cooking Sections, whose work spans visual arts, architecture, and ecology. Since 2013, they have been investigating anthropogenic infrastructures, industrial food systems, and human-made climates: from artificially colored farmed salmon and drained buffalo wetlands to ocean-filtering oysters and Sicilian tomatoes outlawed under EU regulations. Their research-based practice exposes the legal, environmental, and metabolic struggles behind what ends up on our plates, while simultaneously working to create prospects for the future. This monograph brings together six newly commissioned essays alongside an extensive series of images with detailed captions and reflective annotations. The book traverses legal fictions, queer ecologies, disappearing landscapes, multispecies entanglements, and speculative tastes. Through these layered investigations, Waves Lost at Sea invites readers to rethink food cultures and agricultural imaginaries, decentering humans at both microscopic and planetary scales. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Flowering currant, ivy, Portuguese laurel, and woad might all have grown in a medieval garden, but it would have taken special expertise to extract and create rich blue and purple pigments from them. Humans have been extracting dyes and inks from natural materials for millennia, and the practice was firmly established during the medieval era, recorded in manuscripts that survive today. Gold from Newton's Apple Tree: Historical Recipes for Natural Inks, Paints, and Dyes (Princeton UP, 2026) by Nabil Ali brings together recipes for making natural colors according to season, method, and ingredients.This unique book takes its title from an ink recipe derived from a descendant of Sir Isaac Newton's apple tree, in which ingredients extracted from the bark are transformed, seemingly by magic, from brown to a yellow gold. But gold pigments can also be extracted from cornflower, crocus, greater celandine, myrrh, and turmeric. Ali shares his own accessible adaptations for preparing these and other recipes rooted in medieval craft traditions. Along the way, he provides an engaging and informative natural history of the plants used, alongside the broad spectrum of marvelous colors they produce.Presenting original translations of medieval recipes taken from painters' and illuminators' technical manuscripts from the third century BCE through to the twenty-first century, alongside stunning botanical illustrations, Gold from Newton's Apple Tree is a captivating celebration of colors derived from nature. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In this episode of High Theory, Zac Zimmer talks to Kim about Decolonizing the Novum. The novum is a concept developed by Darko Suvin that names the new element of a science fiction or speculative fiction narrative. SF narratives from the Americas that rewrite archival material about colonization and first contact have begun an imaginative project of decolonizing that novum. In Zac's words, the "novum" has been part of our definition of science fiction since Darko Suvin first offered up the concept of part of his critical assessment of SF. This idea of "novelty" is linked to conquest and colonialism through the figure of the New World, i.e. the post-1492 Americas. Thus untangling the relationship between colonialism, novelty, and science fiction must pass through the historical record of the conquest. One way to do this is to focus on SF that deeply engages the archival record of the XVIth century in the Americas: texts and artworks that use speculation to depart from the knowledge that things didn't quite occur the way the dominant paradigms would lead us to believe, and to imagine other futures linked to past moments of historical contingency. In the episode, Zac references an incredible list of writers and theorists, including Edmundo O'Gorman and Walter Benjamin, Saidiya Hartman's “Venus in Two Acts,” You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, Destrucción de todas las cosas by Hugo Hiriart, and “Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. The transcript lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Zac's book, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas (Northwestern University Press 2025), is a comparative study of Latin American science fiction and narratives of the sixteenth century conquest of the Americas. It moves through a corpus of Mexican novels, Andean visual arts practices, and other cultural artifacts that have dramatized counterfactual narratives. Reimagining the early colonial period's historiography from a south-to-north directionality while inventing parallel realities, these texts, which are concerned with limit cases, alterities, and alternative temporalities, refuse any reliance on the imperial ontologies of European expansion. Zac examines these works to explore the slippage that exists between science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality and literary speculation as an aesthetic tool that can be used to imagine other possible worlds. You can read a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Zac Zimmer works as an Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. His research explores questions of literature, aesthetics, politics, and technology in the Americas.In addition to his current research on the cultural infrastructure of technosystems, he co-facilitates the Ethics & Astrobiology reading group, part of UCSC's Astrobiology Initiative. In the Literature department, he teaches classes on Latin American literature, science fiction, ethics & technology, and the poetics of California infrastructure. The image for this episode is the view from the Hubble Space Telescope, showing the birth of a sun-like star, retrieved from Flicker for High Theory by Lili Epstein. Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Most people hate and fear uncertainty. It causes such stress and anxiety that we often choose certain surrender over doubt, becoming passive, dependent, addicted―and more anxious than ever. Doubling down on the certainties promised by technology and micro-management only makes things worse, leaving no opportunity for innovation, adaptation or invention. Artists live with uncertainty constantly―but instead of waiting for the future, they run towards making it, with agency and freedom. What can we learn from them, about facing into a future that grows more uncertain daily? At a time when organizations of all kinds crave innovation but complain their people lack creativity and initiative, the arts have never been so essential to our future. We may not all be artists, but we can learn to think like them. In Embracing Uncertainty: How Writers, Musicians and Artists Thrive In An Unpredictable World (Policy Press, 2025) Margaret Heffernan makes a compelling argument for the vital integration of art into all aspects of our lives and for artists to guide us with their stamina, freedom and endurance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Karen L. Bowen and Dirk Imhof join Jana Byars to talk about their new book, The Burgeoning European Print Trade: The Distribution of Prints Via the Plantin-Moretus Press of Antwerp (Harvey Miller, 2025). The European print trade is an evocative topic. Not only art historians, but social, cultural, and economic historians all agree that it was of vital importance in the Early Modern Period, as the conveyer of established icons, as well as the most recent imagery and news. Yet, thus far it is often discussed solely on the basis of tantalizing, isolated case studies. Bowen and Imhof's ground-breaking publication will address this significant lacuna by demonstrating in unprecedented detail how booksellers were routinely engaged in the extensive international distribution and sale of hundreds of thousands of prints annually between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. Based upon the exceptionally well-preserved archives of the renowned Plantin-Moretus Press of Antwerp, this book presents the often-overlooked interwoven worlds of booksellers and print sellers, while documenting Antwerp's continued fame for the production and distribution of prints. Together with a remarkable array of clients, ranging from the cultivated and influential elite to ordinary laymen, these figures provide palpable examples of suppliers, buyers, and middlemen that reveal how they interacted with one another. Simultaneously, this work illuminates numerous critical related topics, ranging from how prints were priced and the relative quantities in which they were sold, to the importance of national and professional networks in these transactions. The result is an essential, novel study that clarifies how the print trade worked in practice during a burgeoning period in its evolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In Transatlantic Disbelonging: Unruliness, Pleasure and Play in Nigerian Diasporic Women's Art (Duke University Press, 2025), Bimbola Akinbola redirects the focus in diaspora studies from questions of loss and longing to acts of unapologetic self-definition through the study of Nigerian diasporic women artists navigating disparate geographies, allegiances, and identities. Drawing on the work of contemporary visual and performance artists, experimental filmmakers, and writers—including Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Zina Saro-Wiwa, ruby onyinyechi amanze, and Nnedi Okorafor—Akinbola articulates how these artists use their experiences as cultural outsiders to redefine home and national belonging on their own terms. Taking a capacious interdisciplinary approach, she explores how these women employ anti-respectability, taboo, the erotic, and play to challenge oppressive colonial legacies and expectations pertaining to gender and morality. For the artists in this book, their artmaking is a form of homemaking that embraces ambivalence and reinvents alienation as possibility. Theorizing these practices as acts of “disbelonging,” Akinbola radically reimagines diasporic identity formation, illustrating how artists use creative practices to enact and embody belonging and community in expansive ways. Bimbola Akinbola is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Dr. Abigail E. Celis is an assistant professor of art history and museum studies at the Université de Montréal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The first in-depth exploration of the work of artist Cory Arcangel, a pioneer of DIY-new media art whose influential “hacks” subvert the confines of Big Tech. Cory Arcangel (b. 1978)—perhaps best known for Super Mario Clouds, the most referenced artistic game hack in art history—became one of the first artists from a new generation of punk DIY–new media geeks to capture the attention of the art world.Combining the hands-on skills from the 1990s net art scene and the 2010s post-internet art's fondness for memes and the generic image, Arcangel demonstrated the way cultural expressions are intimately connected to media technologies and how these technologies can be pranked for cultural critique. In The Cory Arcangel Hack: Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice (MIT Press, 2025), Eivind Røssaak shows how Arcangel's body of work defines a particular strain of postconceptual art that is fundamental for understanding the digital world we live in.Today, the question is not what comes first, humans or machines, but what the forces regulating expressive flows are. Arcangel's aesthetic and micropolitical critique of mediation at the level of codes and chips enables us to think critically with computational articulations through specific aesthetic clashes and disjunctions, identified in the book as critical “flow-cut arrangements.” This book explores three dominant arrangements in Arcangel's work—the flow-break hack, the flow-remix hack, and the flow-parody hack—that pinpoint areas of both creativity and concern before and after platform capitalism.Matthis Frickhoeffer is a scholar of critical theory and French thought with a background in literature studies, linguistics and art theory. His work focuses on questions of form, semiotics, and intertextuality. He teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Museums often served nationalist and imperialist interests in the past, but the primary force in the 21st century is the market. Museum franchising—exemplified by the Louvre Abu Dhabi—is one of the most visible cases of the increasing entanglement of art and museums with capital interests. Such projects are often touted as global enterprises diversifying the art world. Frequently, critics of these controversial projects question these claims and market influence. The intersection of these two forces—increasing capitalization and moving toward inclusivity—creates a fundamental tension, and that is the subject of Beth Derderian's Art Capital: Museum Politics and the Making of the Louvre Abu Dhabi (Stanford UP, 2026). Focusing on the decade between the Louvre Abu Dhabi's announcement and its eventual opening, the book analyzes how major shifts away from the 19th- and 20th-century paradigm of culture-state representation play out in museums' and artists' everyday practices. Derderian traces the emergence of a new logic, wherein the ways that artists represent the state shift, as does the notion of what constitutes 'good art.' In addition, these intersecting forces spur preemptive erasures that neutralize and depoliticize difference for museum publics. Drawing on ethnographic research with artists, curators, museum staff, gallerists, art teachers, and other arts professionals, this book analyzes the UAE art world as a microcosm of these massive, epistemic changes. Beth Derderian is Assistant Professor of Modern Middle East Studies and Anthropology at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In Belle Époque Paris, the Eiffel Tower was newly built, France was experiencing remarkable political stability, and American women were painting the town and gathering at a female-only Residence known as The American Girls' Club in Paris. Opened in 1893, The Club was the center of expatriate living and of dedication to a calling in the fine arts, and singularly harbored a generation of independent, talented, and driven American women.Now in The Club: Where American Artists Found Refuge in Belle Epoque Paris (Bloomsbury, 2025), curator, art historian, and podcast host Jennifer Dasal presents the untold story of the Club, the philanthropists who created it, and the artists it housed. These women forged connections in the arts and letters with luminaries like Auguste Rodin and Gertrude Stein or became activists through their relationships with the likes of Emmeline Pankhurst. But just as importantly, these women's lives revealed the power of the Club itself, and the way that having a safe home for single women of ambition allowed them to grow as teachers, artists, suffragists, and people. A Neuroscientist's Guide to a Healthier, Happier Life Our guest is: Jennifer Dasal, who is the creator and host of the ArtCurious podcast, the author of ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History. She holds an MA in art history, and is the former curator of modern and contemporary art at the North Carolina Museum of Art. She lectures frequently on art both locally and nationally Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: Artisans and Designers Thanks To Life In The Garden Behind The Moon Jumping Through Hoops Your Art Will Save Your Life The Artists Joy Speaking While Female My What-if Year We Take Our Cities With Us Pursuing Life Abroad Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

What is that rock you've just picked up? Which minerals is it made of, what's unique about it and what can it reveal about Earth's deeper story?Rocks: A Guide to the Stones Around Us and the Stories They Tell (Frances Lincoln, 2026) gives you the tools to answer these questions. Geologist and science illustrator Vojta Hybl guides you through more than 100 rock types, explaining how they form, what they look like and the geological processes they represent.This authoritative yet accessible guide includes clear explanations of igneous, volcaniclastic, sedimentary, metamorphic and anthropic rocks. It also discusses practical tips for spotting and identifying rocks, including detailed specimen illustrations that highlight key features for easy recognition. Alongside practical identification advice, Rocks invites you to see the ground beneath your feet in a new way, connecting everyday stones to billions of years of planetary change.Whether you're a curious walker, an outdoor enthusiast or simply fascinated by the natural world, this book will transform how you experience landscapes and help you read the stories written in stone. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Caryn Rose's Three Chords and Blessed Noise (2026) is an ode to the lost art of the tour diary. In November of 2025, Patti Smith and her band embarked on a short tour in the United States and Europe to commemorate this auspicious occasion and to allow us, the children of this particular revolution, to celebrate this achievement, these songs and these people. Rose headed off for a week of shows: Chicago, New York City, and Boston. One more time. Maybe one last time. As someone whose writing career has focused on rock and roll in its live form, and who spent several years researching and writing a book about Patti Smith (Why Patti Smith Matters, University of Texas Press, 2022), she felt this anniversary outing needed to be captured for posterity.  Rose didn't want to write yet something else that would get lost on the World Wide Web, she didn't want to be limited by word count, and she wanted something tangible. This is the end result. Less than a book, more than a zine. Caryn Rose is a music journalist and writer. Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Contemporary Art in the Post-Yugoslav Space explores the production, discussion, and consumption of contemporary art across the post-Yugoslav region. Bringing together 16 original contributions, the work explores how and why contemporary art discourses have continued to navigate the chronic difficulties facing local cultural economies since the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia's common federal space. Framed by the concept of hauntology, the contributors foreground various "ghosts" of the Yugoslav past — from its anti-fascist and non-alignment legacies, to histories of queer and feminist movements and artistic activism — as a lens for examining the present state of affairs both regionally and globally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In the Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France (Northwestern University Press 2025) explores the relationship between sensory experience, state ideology, and artistic form, examining literature and art inspired by comets that unsettled the heliocentric order to which French politics and culture aspired. Guest Claire Goldstein Professor of French and Director of the Humanities Program at UC Davis. Her research in ancien régime French-language literature and culture has explored subjects such as garden design, art and architecture; theater, ballet, and fête performances; astronomy; early modern fashion accessories; and early journalism. Claire's current projects include Jesuit school ballets; female itinerant clothing resellers; and the innovative and enterprising publishing practices of Nicholas de Blégny, a best-selling and long forgotten multi-hyphenate physician-author. Her scholarship is motivated by her abiding interests in visual and material culture, her curiosity about how the things people see, and the objects and material practices that they engage with, create cultural meanings. She is the author of In the Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth Century France (Northwestern UP, 2025) and Vaux and Versailles: The Appropriations, Erasures, and Accidents That Made Modern France (U Penn Press, 2007). Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progresson posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Marc Chagall is widely recognized as the preeminent Jewish artist of the 20th century, but little is known of his work to preserve Jewish culture. In this program, his granddaughter Bella Meyer interweaves images of Chagall's artwork and personal letters to reflect on his life, passion for Yiddish and dedication to perpetuating Jewish heritage and culture. This program originally took place on February 17, 2016. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art