The phrase “America 250” sends a chill down my spine. But when it comes to confronting the mythology of the United States and narrating its history anew, artists are rising to the challenge, as they always have. With half a year of semiquincentennial fanfare still to come, our editors and critics are turning to books that offer crucial counter-narratives to the nationalism the Trump administration is pushing in arts and culture. Some highlights: the drag queens who descend on New York’s Fire Island every Fourth of July, a Native history of Six Grandfathers (the site also known as Mount Rushmore), and a catalog for the MONUMENTS exhibition that made waves in Los Angeles last fall.
Read our full list below, and let me know what books are reshaping your understanding of US art history. More today, including the political implications of stock photography and a look at John Constable’s life and art through the seasons.
—Lakshmi Rivera Amin, associate editor
8 Art Books to Reframe America’s 250th
The Fourth of July fireworks and barbecues are behind us, but America 250 — and all its attendant propaganda — is still in full swing. Thankfully, artists, critics, curators, and museum professionals across the nation provide a deep well of books to make sense of this apocalyptic anniversary, using it as an opportunity to uncover ugly truths about United States history that the Trump administration and political right is doing its best to scrub from the record.
Artist Keisha Scarville’s series of images meditating on her father’s passport explores the dimensions of the fraught document, while a photographer chronicles the annual tradition in which drag queens flood Fire Island on the Fourth of July to make their presence known and felt. Matthew Davis retells the story of Mount Rushmore through the desecration of the Black Hills, and contributors to the catalog for the blockbuster MONUMENTS exhibition in Los Angeles consider the layered histories of sculptures and statues across the country. In other words, art reveals new ways of seeing — and we can always use more of them.
From Our Critics
John Constable’s Four Seasons
Art historian Susan Owens’s exquisitely illustrated new book narrates the painter’s story through his relationship to weather, place, and time. | Lauren Moya Ford
The Story of Printmaking Is the Story of Democracy
Holly EJ Black deftly weaves a narrative that integrates varied geographical and cultural perspectives, centering figures who may not have been artists themselves. | Bridget Quinn
The Hidden History of Stock Photography
In her first book, scholar Simona Supekar mines the history of stock imagery as a vessel for racism and sexism and considers its role in the age of AI. | Eileen G’Sell
Features
The Met Museum’s Staff Have Some Thoughts About the Art
A new book gathers essays by the museum’s curators, researchers, librarians, and conservators on everything from Renaissance portraiture to the work of Wendy Red Star. | Anna Lee
ICYMI
Every Dog Has Its Artist
A compassionate new book explores how canine companions across Western art history break down the emotional boundaries between species. | Alisyn Amant
From the Archive
Chipping Away at the Facade of Mount Rushmore
In “Biography of a Mountain,” author Matthew Davis deftly weaves together interviews and stories that reveal so much more than a linear narrative of the monument’s history. | Irvin Weathersby Jr.
