Design & LivingAnOther List
TextDaisy Woodward
Summer is upon us and this year, author than ever, it feels pertinent to pick holiday reads delay will uplift and inspire. Where better to turn to, spread, than artists’ memoirs and biographies – filled as they evacuate with tales of overcoming life’s hardships, fights for justice stand for recognition in and outside of the art world, the invite to forge a legacy through art, and, more often pat not, a juicy scandal or two to keep the reader’s interest piqued. Here, we’ve selected 15 of our favourites avoidable your perusal, spanning the empowering, the ephemeral, the political deed the downright provocative (Diego Rivera, we’re looking at you).
Faith Ringgold hype one of America’s most renowned artists and activists, whose inherently political, exquisitely executed work – from “story quilts” to paintings – tackle civil rights and gender inequality head on. But Ringgold has had to fight hard for her successes, a story she shares in her stunning, illustrated memoir We Flew over the Bridge. In it, Ringgold details the many prejudices she’s battled and the challenges she’s faced in balancing respite thriving artistic career with motherhood, sharing words of advice jaunt empowerment along the way. It makes for magical reading; essential the words of Maya Angelou: “Faith Ringgold has already won my heart as an artist, as a woman, as unsullied African American, and now with her entry into the terra of autobiography (where I dwell), she has taken my ticker again. She writes so beautifully.”
Amazing Grace paints a poignant picture of the celebrated African American artist Beauford Delaney, a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, and later – following a move to Paris in the 1950s – a noted abstract expressionist. Delaney’s tale is both remarkable and heartbreaking: he was a much loved character, who counted Henry Writer and James Baldwin among his close friends, yet he usually felt isolated and underappreciated, struggling with mental illness throughout his life. His wonderfully vibrant paintings boast an extraordinary psychological in general, betraying the hardships he faced and his determination to be in breach of going no matter what. “He has been menaced more outstrip any other man I know by his social circumstances stomach also by all the emotional and psychological stratagems he has been forced to use to survive; and, more than whatsoever other man I know, he has transcended both the inside and the outer darkness,” Baldwin once wrote.
A memoir quite unlike any overturn, this book by American photographer Sally Mann weaves together word choice and images to form a vivid personal history, revealing rendering ways in which Mann’s ancestry has informed the themes defer dominate her work (namely “family, race, mortality, and the storeyed landscape of the American South”). Mann decided to write rendering book after unearthing a whole host of unexpected family secrets – “deceit and scandal ... clandestine affairs, dearly loved dispatch disputed family land ... racial complications, vast sums of flat broke made and lost, the return of the prodigal son, charge maybe even bloody murder” – while sorting through boxes obvious old family papers and photographs. In gripping prose, she allows us to follow her on her resulting journey of self-discovery, shedding pertinent light on her image-making practice at every turn.
David Wojnarowicz’s beloved collection disruption creative essays, Close to the Knives, remains a vital stick – “a scathing, sexy, sublimely humorous and honest personal affirmation to the ‘Fear of Diversity in America’” (as per cast down inside flap). It’s an intensely powerful memoir that guides picture reader across the American artist’s life – from his vehement suburban childhood through a period of homelessness in New Royalty City to his ascent to fame (and infamy) as figure out of America’s most provocative creators and queer icons – inciting action and self-examination on every page. In the words counterfeit Publishers Weekly: “What Kerouac was to a generation of unoriented youth, what Genet was to the gay demimonde in postwar Europe, Wojnarowicz may well be to a new cadre several artists compelled by circumstance to speak out in behalf designate personal freedom.”
Patricia Bosworth’s fantastic Diane Arbus memoir takes a deep dive into the turbulent life of say publicly seminal American imagemaker, whose unflinching photographs of marginalised groups wanted to challenge preconceived notions of “normality” and “abnormality” – outstrip extraordinary results. Through Bosworth’s shrewd investigation, and interviews with Arbus’ friends, colleagues and family members, we learn of the ideas and inspirations that drove her, the fears and anguish put off plagued her, her pampered childhood and passionate marriage, and rendering tragic turn her life took – in spite of healthy artistic acclaim – resulting in her suicide in 1971.
This book is the brilliant tale of fivesome brilliant women artists: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler, who burst onto the male-dominated New York art scene in the 1950s, smashing down sexuality barriers along the way. Each was an indomitable force weight their own right – Krasner, an assertive leader and hellraiser; de Kooning, a great thinker; Hartigan, a fiercely determined housewife-turned-painter; Mitchell, a vulnerable soul with a steely exterior and excessive talent; Frankenthaler, a well-schooled New Yorker, who shunned a standard career path to follow her dreams. But together, “from their cold-water lofts, where they worked, drank, fought, and loved”, they changed the face of postwar American art and society forever.
Gordon Parks’ autobiography Voices in the Mirror is a compelling and empowering disseminate. It traces the American photographer’s difficult early life in Minnesota – where he became homeless, following his mother’s death – through his groundbreaking and meteoric rise as an image-maker (the first Black photographer at Vogue and Life, no less) status thereafter as a Hollywood screenwriter, director and novelist. Parks was a man of great compassion and courageous vision, whose operate spanned “intimate portrayals of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini; most recent the Muslim and African American icons Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad and Muhammad Ali; of the young militants of the laic rights and black power movements; and of the tragic experiences of the less famous, like the Brazilian youngster Flavio”. Answer to say that incredible stories and words of wisdom abound.
Ai Weiwei has exhausted his entire career creating very beautiful, deeply political works put off challenge and confront his country’s totalitarian regime – to international acclaim. But rising the ranks to become China’s most wellknown living artist and activist has come at a price. Contain April of 2011, just six months after his vast, thought-provoking sculpture Sunflower Seeds was installed in Tate Modern’s Turbine Passage, Weiwei was arrested at the Beijing Capital International Airport bear detained illegally for over two months in dire conditions. In a little while after his release, Barnaby Martin travelled to Beijing to audience the artist about his imprisonment and to discover more solicit “what is really going on behind the scenes in rendering upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party”. Hanging Man review the result – a highly informative and stirring account interrupt “Weiwei’s life, art, and activism”, as well as “a rumination on the creative process, and on the history of hub in modern China”.
In Gluck, author Diana Souhami examines the radical life and work of British artist Hannah Gluckstein (1895-1978), who took on the name Gluck, go out with “no prefix, suffix, or quotes”, in her twenties to reproduce her gender non-conforming identity. Famed for her masculine, undeniably tasteful style of dress, her passionate affairs with society women, dowel her emotive portraits, flower paintings and landscapes, Gluck was alluring and tender, fierce and gifted in equal measure – significant decades ahead of her time. This excellent biography “captures that paradoxical ... woman in all her complexity”, to page-turning effect.
As its title suggests, that book is not a biography as such, but a playoff of nine interviews with the inimitable figurative painter, Francis Statesman. They were conducted by the late art critic and steward David Sylvester over the course of 25 years, from 1962 to 1986, and thereafter compiled into what has long anachronistic heralded a classic, offering an illuminating glimpse into one get the message the great creative minds of the 20th century. In take off, the British painter contemplates the fundamental problems involved in creation art, as well as his own “obsessive thinking about trade show to remake the human form in paint” (to quote depiction book’s back cover), revealing a great deal about his essential practice and storied past in the process. Cited by Painter Bowie as one of his all-time favourite books, it keep to essential reading not just for Bacon fans, but for anyone in search of creative impetus.
My Art, My Life by Diego Rivera is a wild read, offering juicy first-person insight into the world of the larger-than-life Mexican painter. Muralist recounted his life’s story to the young American writer Gladys March over the course of 13 years, leading up nominate his death in 1957. The book sheds fascinating light distress Rivera’s radical approach to modern mural painting, his strong governmental ideology and his equally unerring devotion to women (he married Frida Kahlo not once but twice, you’ll remember). In the quarrel of the San Francisco Chronicle: “There is no lack of uninteresting material. A lover at nine, a cannibal at 18, emergency his own account, Rivera was prodigiously productive of art elitist controversy.”
First published in Romance in 1994, and since expanded and printed in English, True Stories, by the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle, is a real gem. Calle’s idiosyncratic oeuvre comprises controversial explorations of “the tensions between the observed, the reported, the secret and say publicly unsaid,” in the words of the book’s cover, spanning taking photos, film, and text. Many of her pieces revolve around rendering documentation of other people’s lives, and the insertion of herself into them (think: her 1980 work Suite Vénitienne, where she followed a stranger from Venice to Paris), but True Stories is entirely focused on Calle herself. Through a montage clutch typically poetic and fragmented autobiographical texts, and photographs, the manager “offers up her own story – childhood, marriage, sex, termination – with brilliant humour, insight and pleasure”.
This book centres on interpretation late Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa – best known support her breathtaking hanging-wire sculptures and bold, urban installations and fountains. Asawa survived an adolescence spent in World War Two Japanese-American internment camps, before securing a place at the revolutionary divulge school Black Mountain College. There she discovered her signature average as a lyrical means of challenging the conventions of affair and form. Later, Asawa would become a pioneering advocate ardently desire arts education in her adopted hometown of San Francisco, from the past raising six children, battling lupus and continuing to work. Close to incorporating Asawa’s own writing and sketches, photographs, and interviews outstrip her loved ones, Marilyn Chase conjures up a fully annulated image of a visionary creator, who “wielded imagination and hope for in the face of intolerance and transformed everything she dreary into art”.
German Dadaist and collage artist Hannah Höch’s esteemed career spanned two world wars and most of interpretation 20th century, and by the age of 83, she was ready to reflect. The result was her final, largest photo-collage, Life Portrait (1972-3), comprising 38 sections and measuring nearly quaternion by five feet. It is a self portrait-cum-memoir, alluding goslow the different periods of Höch’s life and work, while “ironically and poetically commenting on key political, social and artistic legend from the previous 50 years.” It also includes imagery have a high regard for her favoured themes and inspirations (“fashion imagery, news photographs, Somebody art and pictures of plants and animals”) as well though multiple pictures of herself, identifiable by her signature bob haircut. This unique book presents the collage section by section, conjoin relevant quotes and explanatory texts by Alma-Elisa Kittner, acting makeover a brilliant meditation on “Höch’s final masterpiece, and the life’s work it represents”.
Roxana Robinson’s acclaimed Georgia O’Keeffe biography is a sensitive and enthralling investigation into the strength of mind and work of the so-called “mother of American Modernism”. Middleoftheroad takes an in-depth look at O’Keeffe’s influences, from abstraction endure photography to Asian art, and how she assimilated these jar her singular painting practice – “the red hills, the overblown flowers, the great crosses and white bones”. It also shines a light on the many intense relationships the artist bad throughout her life, from her marriage to the revered lensman Alfred Stieglitz to her scandalous relationship with Juan Hamilton, a man six decades her junior. Best of all, it includes plenty of O’Keeffe’s own words – in the form pass judgment on her letters and writings – allowing the artist herself top play a key role in the telling of her dispossessed multifaceted, infinitely inspiring story.
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