Books About Women Artists | Published Oct-Dec 2024

Here we list all the new books about women artists—from the past, and also from the present—that have come to our attention, published in the third quarter of this calendar year. Each description is drawn from the blurb on the publisher’s website. Do you know of other titles that should be on this list? Please let us know by comment or by email (Erika@artherstory.net).

For young readers

Marina Abramovic Turned Herself Into Art and Wasn’t Sorry, written and illustrated by Fausto Gilberti. Publisher: Phaidon, 2024.

Marina Abramovic is a world-famous artist who uses her body to perform in unexpected and unusual ways that make an audiences think. She once sat back-to-back with her partner and had their hair tied together for over 17 hours. Another time, museum visitors watch her scrub 1,500 cow bones for six hours a day. This innovative book tells an inspiring story about the pioneering performance artist who is also the first among women artists to hold a major solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. In this innovative volume, Marina Abramovic and her cutting-edge work are brought to life for young readers like never before.

Fiction

The Vow, by Jude German. Publisher: She Writes Press, 2024.

Accused of dressing as a boy to study in the prestigious galleries of eighteenth-century Italy, child prodigy Angelica Kauffman has set high goals for herself. She is determined to become a history painter, a career off-limits to women. To ensure her success, she has vowed never to marry. Time and time again, Angelica faces the insurmountable obstacles and great personal sacrifices that come with being an independent woman. The vows she makes, big and small, are repeatedly challenged. Will she break free from the traditional male/female binary and the many oppressive social dictates of her time and learn to “paint with her soul” … or is a vow of a different sort necessary if she is to answer the deepest call of her heart?

Adult non-fiction

Gesina ter Borch, by Adam Eaker. Publisher: Lund Humphries, 2024; North American publisher, Getty Publications.

Gesina ter Borch was a Dutch watercolorist and draughtswoman whose work survives primarily in the form of three albums of watercolors and calligraphy, now held at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Despite the fact that her oeuvre is securely attributed and thoroughly cataloged, Ter Borch has surprisingly never been the subject of a dedicated monograph, until now. For the first time, this book highlights Ter Borch’s watercolors and calligraphy in their own right, as well as her work as an art teacher, an archivist, and an artist’s model, and questions a historiography of women’s art that frequently values oil painting over other media, and work for the market over “amateur” production.

Women Pioneers of the Arts & Crafts Movement, by Karen Livingstone. Publisher: Thames and Hudson, 2024.

This book celebrates the work and ambition of the women who were at the heart of the most influential art and design movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It shines a light on the vital contribution of figures such as May Morris, Gertrude Jekyll, Annie Garnett, and many others, and describes the Arts and Crafts Movement from the perspective of these women who worked against the odds as artists, makers, teachers, authors, and entrepreneurs. Richly illustrated, it includes reproductions of works by these and other women—textile design, embroidery, bookbinding, illustration, painting, enameling, stained glass, metalwork, furniture design, and architecture—much of it previously unpublished. Featuring objects from the V&A’s renowned Arts and Crafts collection, the book also includes key pieces from other museums and private collections across the UK.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: The Glaciers, Edited by Rob Airey. Publisher: Lund Humphries, 2024.

In May 1949, the Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham visited the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland. It was a trip which would have a profound and lasting impact on her work. Charting the journey, the beautiful work it stimulated and wider questions around glacial landscapes, this publication provides insights that will expand our understanding of both an acclaimed body of work and the artist who created it. Including a complete catalog of the glacier paintings, this book presents the definitive account of a trip that would transform the artistic imagination of one of the foremost British painters of the 20th century.

Korean Feminist Artists, by Kim Hong-hee, with a contribution from Kim Hyesoon. Publisher: Phaidon, 2024.

This unprecedented visual survey celebrates the work of 42 contemporary artists, from rising stars to globally recognized names, including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kyungah Ham, Kimsooja, Lee Bul, Mire Lee, Minouk Lim, Haegue Yang, and Yun Suknam. Organized by themes including queer politics, ecofeminism, the diaspora, and abstraction, Korean Feminist Artistsfeatures artworks across painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, installation, handicrafts, and performance. Through rich imagery and insightful writing, the book explores the quest of these pioneering artists for social, cultural, and sexual equality, from their confrontations with the mainstream art establishment to the significance of their aesthetic and political interventions.

Jennifer Guidi: Full Moon, by Jennifer Guidi. Publisher: SKIRA, 2024.

The monograph Full Moon epitomizes Jennifer Guidi’s practice and the evolution of her artistic process. Guidi’s immersive work operates within both the physical and metaphysical world. While her surroundings of Los Angeles, where she set up her studio after graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago, are palpable through her work; her practice is, however, deeply rooted in the spiritual and metaphysical worlds. Guidi’s very process of creating these serene, repetitive works is akin to a meditative practice. The search for symmetry in her work, such as sunrise and sunset, light and dark, goes hand in hand with a scientific study of geometry and color theory, creating works that are not only visually in harmony but are also epistemologically balanced.

300 Mason Jars: Preserving History, by Joanne Thomson. Publisher: Heritage House, 2024.

The fragmented history of one family’s hope, challenge, failure, and persistence is beautifully depicted in this book of watercolor images by artist Joanne Thomson. Combining still-life painting with visual storytelling, Thomson presents everyday artifacts—from flowers to fruits, tools to toys, and photographs to farm equipment—and places them in, on, beside, or behind a glass jar. Carefully gathered from the artist’s family members and the natural environments where they lived, the simple objects in this collection represent the depth and complexity of daily life. Beautiful to look at and infinitely fascinating to ponder, 300 Mason Jars is a stunning addition to any art lover’s library.

Abramović-isms, by Marina Abramović, Edited by Larry Warsh. Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2024.

For decades, Marina Abramović has broken boundaries in iconic works such as The Artist Is Present (2010), where she sat in silence across from members of the public at the Museum of Modern Art for eight hours a day for three months, and Rhythm 0 (1974), a six-hour performance in which she stood next to a table holding seventy-two objects, including a scalpel and a loaded gun, and a sign suggesting audience members could do to her whatever they wanted. Gathered from interviews, lectures, writings, and other sources, Abramović-isms is a unique collection of quotations that offers a window into the mind of this iconic trailblazer.

Tracey Emin Paintings, by Tracey Emin, with a conversation with David Dawson and an essay by Jennifer Higgie. Publisher: Phaidon, 2024.

Dame Tracey Emin’s practice includes painting, drawing, film, photography, sewn appliqué, sculpture, and neon, but in recent years she has focused on painting. Inspired by artists Egon Schiele and Edvard Munch, her paintings are provocative, confrontational, and vulnerable. They are at once deeply personal and universal, and it’s for this reason her work is revered around the world, and she has become an international icon. The book features more than 300 images of Emin’s gestural and expressive figurative paintings, from the 1990s to today.

Exhibition catalogs

Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art, Edited by Robert Schindler, Bernd Ebert, and Anna C. Knaap. Publisher: MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, 2024.

In the first half of the 18th century, Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750) was celebrated across Europe for her sumptuous floral still lifes. Admired for both its artistry and its meticulous depictions of flowers, fruit, and insects, her work was largely overlooked in the centuries following her death. Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art, and the exhibition it accompanies (in Munich, Toledo and Boston), introduces today’s audiences to Ruysch’s achievements and explore the pioneering roles of women artists and scientists in the Dutch Republic in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Women Painters in Rome Guidebook, Edited by Ilaria Arcangeli. Publisher: Officina Libraria, 2024.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Roma pittrice. Artiste al lavoro tra XVI e XIX secolo (Rome paints. Women Artists at Work Between the 16th and 19th Centuries), at the Museo di Roma in Palazzo Braschi, this guide highlights to an even wider audience the presence of several women artists who where either born in Rome or made the eternal city their place of study and work, even if only for short but decisive periods. Starting from the artists represented in the Capitoline collections, such as Maria Felice Tibaldi (Subleyras), Angelica Kauffman, Laura Piranesi, Luise Seidler and Emma Gaggiotti (Richards), the book includes other important artists who worked in the city, such as Lavinia Fontana, Artemisia Gentileschi, Giovanna Garzoni and many others, sometimes less known, whose oeuvre has been rediscovered in recent decades.

Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All that It Implies, Edited by Dalila Scruggs. Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2024.

Accomplished printmaker and sculptor, avowed feminist, and lifelong activist Elizabeth Catlett built a remarkable career around intersecting passions for formal rigor and social justice. This book, accompanying a major traveling retrospective, offers a revelatory look at the artist and her nearly century-long life, highlighting overlooked works alongside iconic masterpieces. The book’s essays address a range of topics, including Catlett’s early development as an artist-activist, the impact of political exile on her work, her pedagogical legacy, her achievement as a social realist printmaker, her work with the arts community of Chicago’s South Side, and the diverse influences that shaped her practice.

Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund, by Caitlin McGurk, with an introduction by Emily Flake. Publisher: Fantagraphics, 2024.

This gorgeous art book celebrates the work and legacy of Barbara Shermund, one of the first female cartoonists for humor and lifestyle magazines in the United States, including The New Yorker and Esquire. Readers will discover Shermund’s unique and vibrant life and art, and gain an understanding of how women’s place in the history of cartooning has been controlled and sublimated by greater societal and cultural allowances. Through close readings, archival research, reproductions of original art, correspondence and photographs, this volume uncovers and celebrates a trailblazing female magazine cartoonist, and rightfully places her in the canon of cartoon art history.

Portia Zvavahera: Zvakazarurwa, Texts by Sinazo Chiya, Tandazani Dhlakama, Tamar Garb, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Fiona Bradley, and Andrew Nairne. Publisher: Kettle’s Yard, 2024.

Portia Zvavahera is one of the outstanding artists of her generation. Born in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1985, she has developed a unique combination of print/painting techniques to register a private world of dreams, fantasies and figural constructions. This new publication accompanies a major exhibition, curated by Tamar Garb, which will include reproductions of brand new works created on the occasion of this exhibition alongside a selection of recent and older paintings which reveal the depth and richness of Zvavahera’s practice. The book opens up how Zvavahera’s works emerge from dreams; being figurative without being illustrative, registering a world of feminine experience and fantasy.

Megan Rooney: Echoes and Hours, Edited by Andrew Nairne and Amy Tobin. Publisher: Kettle’s Yard, 2024.

Megan Rooney’s sensuous and compelling paintings reinvigorate the power of abstraction. They embody a sense of boundless energy and life, whilst reflecting the artist’s deep knowledge of painting and the potential of each viewer’s encounter. This major new book accompanies Rooney’s first solo exhibition in the UK. It explores the variations in her painting practice across a series of new works made for the exhibition. The book illustrates these works, including a temporary mural at Kettle’s Yard painted directly on the gallery walls, as well as documenting earlier, formative paintings. Three newly commissioned essays and an interview with the artist in her studio explore Rooney’s practice and the resonances of her hugely captivating work.

Barbara Walker: Being Here, Texts by by Poppy Bowers, Hannah Vollam, Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd, Eddie Chambers, Alice Correia, Leanne Green, and Rianna Jade Parker. Publisher: The Whitworth Art Gallery, 2024.

This first-ever survey exhibition by British artist Barbara Walker charts her compelling figurative practice from 1990s to today. For over twenty-five years, Walker has been making intensely observed and empathetic figurative work that creates space for Black presence, power and belonging. Ranging from delicate graphite drawings on archival documents to a monumental charcoal wall drawing, Walker tackles wide-ranging themes such as the policing and surveillance of Black life, 20th-century war histories, immigration and Old Master paintings to challenge conventions of representation and the histories they are rooted in.

Cindy Sherman: Anti-Fashion, Photos by Cindy Sherman and texts by Alessandra Nappo, Anne Ruygt, Hanne Loreck, Katharina Massing and others. Publisher: Hannibal Books, 2024.

For almost 50 years, the theme of fashion has been a constant in the work of US artist Cindy Sherman. Cindy Sherman: Anti-Fashion is the first to focus on this close engagement with fashion and approaches her photographic oeuvre from a new perspective. In so doing, it sheds light on the interplay between art and fashion. For Sherman uses her numerous commissions from magazines and her collaborations with renowned designers as a constant source of artistic inspiration. This book reveals the subject of fashion as the starting point for the artist’s critical investigation of gender, stereotypes, and our attitude to aging.

Sophie Calle: Overshare, Edited with text by Henriette Huldisch; Foreword by Mary Ceruti and texts by Eugenie Brinkeman, Aruna D’Souza, and Courtenay Finn. Publisher: Walker Art Center, 2024.

This volume accompanies the eponymous show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the first exhibition in North America to explore the range and depth of artist Sophie Calle’s practice across the past five decades. The presentation features photography, video, installations and text-based works, highlighting the artist’s virtuosic use of different mediums to explore broadly recognizable and emotionally resonant themes. Organized into four thematic sections—“The Spy,” “The Protagonist,” “The End” and “The Beginning”—the book takes a new approach to some of Calle’s most acclaimed works, including The Sleepers (1979) and Suite Vénitienne (1980), while also weaving in understudied works including Cash Machine (1991–2003) and Unfinished (2005).

Open Access

Betty Goodwin: Life and Work, by Jessica Bradley. Publisher: Art Canada Institute / Institut de l’art canadien, 2024.

One of the giants of contemporary art in Canada, Betty Goodwin emerged as a singular talent in the 1970s. In Betty Goodwin: Life and Work, author Jessica Bradley tells the story of this visionary creator’s remarkable career. Bradley highlights how, in 1968, Goodwin began putting pieces of clothing through a printing press. Her resulting Vest series—now celebrated as one of the major breakthroughs in contemporary printmaking—resonated with Goodwin’s early loss of her father, a vest maker. Achievements that followed included critical acclaim for her contribution to the art of drawing, participation in the Venice Biennale in 1995, and receipt of a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and the Order of Canada in 2003.

Doris McCarthy: Life and Work, by John D. Hatch. Publisher: Art Canada Institute / Institut de l’art canadien, 2024.

One of Canada’s pre-eminent landscape painters, Doris McCarthy had a career that spanned the Great Depression and the Second World War. McCarthy played a critical role in understandings of the nation’s 20th-century art world. In Doris McCarthy: Life and Work, author John G. Hatch explores McCarthy’s extraordinary trajectory, from her childhood in Toronto, to her weekly art lessons with Group of Seven member Arthur Lismer, to her receipt of a full-time scholarship to the Ontario College of Art. Doris McCarthy: Life and Work traces the career of the only Canadian landscape artist to work in every part of the country, forging a new vision for the genre that was distinct from the Group of Seven tradition.

New editions

Marisa Mori and the Futurists: A Woman Artist in an Age of Fascism, by Jennifer Griffiths. Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2024 (originally published in hardback, 2023).

Now available in paperback, this study presents a feminist critique of Mori’s art, converging on issues of gender, culture, and history to offer new critical perspectives on Italian modernism.

A World of Our Own: Women Artists Against the Odds, by Frances Borzello. Publisher: Thames and Hudson, 2024 (originally published by Watson-Guptill, 2000).

Art historian Frances Borzello takes readers deep into the restricted world of women artists of the past, showing how diligently they trained themselves, set up studios, and pursued sympathetic patrons. Now fully revised and updated, Frances Borzello’s engaging narrative continues to inspire.

New Books About Women Artists | Oct–Dec 2024