This week, our editors share eight novels we’re reading about art, museums, and the various perils lurking therein — from a painting that shatters how a poet understands his mother in Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! to Isabella Hammad’s story of a Shakespearean troupe in Occupied Palestine. No spoilers, of course, but some highlights in no particular order to whet your appetite: queer coming of age in New York’s blue-chip gallery scene, an internship at Harvard’s controversial Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and a lost letter
discovered by a book conservator at the Met Museum.
Speaking of archaeology and ethics, I also highly recommend reading art crime professor Erin L. Thompson’s review of These Were People Once, a new book investigating the illegal online trade in human remains and the social media algorithms that enable it. And did you know that the New Testament was written down largely by enslaved people in Europe? Sarah E. Bond explains below.
Read on for a sumptuous visual history of color wheels and swatches that would give Lowe’s paint chips a run for their money, the coolest artist you’ve never heard of, and more. Happy reading!
— Lakshmi Rivera Amin, Associate Editor
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Delve into the tales of a queer book conservator at The Met, an actress in the West Bank, a painter with a secret, and other characters whose lives intersect with art. | Hrag Vartanian, Hakim Bishara, Natalie Haddad, Lakshmi Rivera Amin, and Lisa Yin Zhang
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In 1927, Pressoir carried 30 pounds of art-making supplies on a bike ride from France to Italy. It was just the beginning of an inimitable artistic journey. | Bridget Quinn
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Damien Huffer and Shawn Graham’s These Were People Once mines the illicit online sale of human remains and the social media algorithms that enable it. | Erin L. Thompson
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MORE TO READ
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The Enslaved People Who Wrote Down the New TestamentArt history has long concealed the scribes who put swaths of the Bible and early Christian writings on paper. | Sarah E. Bond
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Three tomes give new meaning to “full color” by chronicling the visual history of color charts, swatches, palettes, and more. | Sarah Rose Sharp
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