Ah, November, the Sunday of the calendar year! Gift lists with pricey coffee-table books abound. Social media’s book influencer community is rife with “10 before the end” challenges inviting us to read ’til we and/or the Times Square Ball drops. The scaries are real.
In art reading, though, this month is the perfect time to shift our gazes back to the illimitable histories that will far outlast the year-end frenzy. In AX Mina’s review of Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials, we get a thoughtful examination of witch trials and their contemporary afterlives — including how we render the accused in art, from memorials in Salem to a public artwork by Louise Bourgeois. Mina, who co-hosts the Five and Nine podcast on magic and economic justice, offers an invigorating perspective that may challenge your understanding of this seemingly bygone period.
Journeying into another wellspring of history, scholar John Edwin Mason guides us through a biography of a trailblazing anti-Apartheid photographer whose exile to the United States cut him off from one muse while introducing him to another. Ernest Cole, he writes, “died penniless and almost-forgotten in New York City, in February 1990.” But his life story and work are well worth your time.
More below, including a feast for the eyes in the form of John Craxton’s feline art, Japanese women photographers, and the desk calendar that Nelson Mandela kept during his decades-long incarceration. And another update from my subway reading: I’m late to the game with Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit, but feel grateful to have it as my companion during a tumultuous election week. Delving into the history of roses as political symbols, hothouse flowers, and objects of desire, Solnit offers a grounding reminder of our ultimate role as custodians rather than rulers of nature, and the ways it takes care of us in return. — Lakshmi Rivera Amin, Associate Editor
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