Art & Photography Reading List

In compiling this list of recent titles, we were stunned by the immense diversity contained within the “Art Book” category. We are thrilled to share works of art, photography, critique, and history that span decades and cross oceans. Featuring books published in collaboration with the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation and the McCord Museum, our Art & Photography reading list interrogates culture and presses the limits of the art book.

Gabor Szilasi
The Art World in Montreal, 1960–1980

Edited by Zoë Tousignant

Expanding on a solo exhibition of his photographs that took place at the McCord Museum in 2017, this book presents twenty years of Gabor Szilasi’s candid and personal documentation of Montreal art openings. Brought to light over fifty years after they were taken, the featured images reveal the centrality of one of Canada’s leading photographers to the milieu he calls home. Ce livre est disponible en français.

Art and Politics
The History of the National Arts Centre, Second Edition

By Sarah Jennings

In this new and revised edition of Art and Politics, Sarah Jennings covers the highs and lows of Canada’s most important national performing arts institution over the course of five decades, bringing the story up to the present. Told through the voices of those who created the organization, the book affirms that the National Arts Centre embodies its motto: “Canada is our stage.”

Tear Gas Epiphanies
Protest, Culture, Museums

By Kirsty Robertson

Tear Gas Epiphanies traces the as-yet-untold story of political action at museums in Canada from the early twentieth century to the present. Robertson provides an ambitious and wide-ranging survey of key points of intersection between museums and protest – a valuable resource for students and scholars, as well as arts professionals working with museums.

What Was History Painting and What Is It Now?

Edited by Mark Salber Phillips and Jordan Bear

Exploring the resilience of this distinctive mode of visual representation, What Was History Painting and What Is It Now? brings together an internationally distinguished group of scholars to trace the endurance, adaptation, and mutation of history painting. This collection reconsiders the prestigious genre of painting and the vibrant ways in which the tradition resonates through the art of the present.

The Global Flows of Early Scottish Photography
Encounters in Scotland, Canada, and China

By Anthony W. Lee

A timely book, The Global Flows of Early Scottish Photography tells of an era when cameras emerged to give shape and meaning to some of the most defining moments brought about by globalization in the nineteenth century. Beautifully written and richly illustrated in full colour, the book weaves narratives to show that even the earliest pictures were sites of fierce historical struggle.

Our Rural Selves
Memory and the Visual in Canadian Childhoods

Edited by Claudia Mitchell and April Mandrona

Through the innovative use of visual studies, autoethnography, and memory-work, Our Rural Selves explores representation, imagination, and what it means to grow up rural in Canada. Illustrating often neglected and overlooked aspects of adolescence, this collection suggests new ways of studying social connectedness and collective futures.

Process Cinema
Handmade Film in the Digital Age

Edited by Scott MacKenzie and Janine Marchessault

Process Cinema is the first book to trace the global development of handmade and hand-processed film in its historical and contemporary contexts. This volume brings together a range of renowned academics and artists to examine artisanal films, DIY labs, and filmmakers typically left out of the avant-garde canon, addressing the convergence and tension between the digital and the resurging analog in modern process cinema.

Diversity Counts
Gender, Race, and Representation in Canadian Art Galleries

By Anne Dymond

Drawing on numeric and discursive data from nearly one hundred institutions, Diversity Counts reveals that while some galleries are relatively equitable, many continue to marginalize female and racialized artists. A thoughtful examination of the duty of public galleries to represent underserved communities, Dymond’s study brings the art world up to date on the urgency of social transformation.

Illustrating El Cid, 1498 to Today

By Lauren Beck

Uncovering the racial, gendered, and political impacts of one of Spain’s most legendary heroes, Illustrating El Cid, 1498 to Today traces the development of more than five centuries of illustrations and problematizes their reception and circulation in Spain and abroad. Beck uncovers how the legend of the Cid endured as a projection of Spanish identity, appropriated as a symbol of pride and propaganda in the region’s visual culture.

Art as Revolt
Thinking Politics through Immanent Aesthetics

Edited by David Fancy and Hans Skott-Myhre

How are contemporary artistic and popular cultural practices providing pathways to post-capitalist futures? Contributors to Art as Revolt employ philosophies of immanence to address this question, developing an interdisciplinary conversation about art and politics. Refusing comfortable closure, the authors construct the book as a “Dionysian machine,” a generator of possibility that calls readers to forge a brighter world.

Saturn and Melancholy
Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art

By Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl
Edited by Phillippe Despoix and Georges Leroux
With a preface by Bill Sherman

The new edition of the famed work Saturn and Melancholy makes the original English text available for the first time in over fifty years. Rooted in the tradition established by Aby Warburg and the Warburg Library, the book unites the disciplines of Philosophy, Medicine, Literature, Art History, and Religion to deliver a groundbreaking history of melancholia.