Four November books make fragments, candy and queer portraits speak

By Olivia Hart

Palazzo Strozzi’s exhibition, which opened in September in Florence, spans more than 4,500 years of global sculpture history and now has a 240-page companion book. The Power of the Fragment in Sculpture, by C. D. Dickerson III and Andrew Sears, comes from Chicago University Press at £40 in hardback.

What does a broken statue make visible?

Chicago University Press frames the study around the enduring fascination with fractured statues: the power dynamics of iconoclastic dismantling and defacement, and the ways different cultures treat broken objects. New research cited in the volume suggests Michelangelo’s terracotta Model of a Nude Woman, made around 1533, may have been intentionally created incomplete.

After Palazzo Strozzi, the exhibition will travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC next year. The move from Florence to Washington extends the book’s argument that damage is not merely an aesthetic condition but a record of acts, power and changing cultural treatment.

Can sweets carry political force?

Nancy Spector’s newly revised and expanded Felix Gonzalez-Torres assesses the relevance today of an influential conceptual artist who died from an AIDS-related illness in 1996. Published by Phaidon, the monograph runs to 352 pages and costs £39.95 in hardback.

Phaidon calls the original edition, issued almost two decades earlier to accompany Gonzalez-Torres’s 1995 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, the canonical text on the artist. The revision asks how that authority holds up after his death and in a changed present.

Gonzalez-Torres became known especially for his sweet installations, usually mounted in piles in the corners of rooms. Ben Luke, the critic and host of The Art Newspaper’s podcast, puts their range plainly: “The candy pieces, like all his works, encourage a wealth of meanings, and can be everything from stridently political to gently lyrical.”

Can 26 artists build one vocabulary?

Gabriela Galcerán’s edited The Voice of the Artist(s): another vocabulary grew from a video project devised by the cultural producer. In it, 26 artists each chose a word, one for every letter of the alphabet, and responded in their own way.

Sternberg Press publishes the 360-page, £23.50 paperback. Its five thematic chapters include “Power + Politics” and “Agency + Language”, and draw connections among the responses. Contributors include Lynn Hershman Leeson, Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Gary Hill.

Galcerán’s verdict is characteristically exact: “They all made me flinch, each for a different reason.” She adds: “I love the wide range of tones and registers that make up this choral effort. Some are intimate, some political, some humorous or oblique.” The form is less a manifesto than a score, allowing contradiction to remain audible.

What does a 20-year portrait archive add?

Faces and Phases, edited by Renée Mussai and published by Mack, runs to 464 pages and costs £65 in hardback. It marks the 20th anniversary of South African artist and activist Zanele Muholi’s project, which has documented Black lesbian and bisexual women, along with queer, trans, non-binary and gender-fluid people, for more than 20 years.

The anniversary edition includes new sitters photographed in São Paulo, Salvador, London, Porto and Los Angeles. Mack says participants’ testimonies often accompany the photographs, sharing personal stories, feelings and lived experiences. Portrait and testimony therefore operate as one account rather than illustration and caption.

Muholi was born in Durban in 1972, at the height of apartheid in South Africa. In the early 2000s, the photographer began raising awareness of the hypocrisies and hate crimes that persist against the country’s LGBTQ+ community. The project’s scale—more than two decades of photographs and testimony—makes that history part of the book’s architecture, not just its subject.

The new sitters and locations keep the anniversary edition from reading as a sealed retrospective. For a project built around sustained testimony, that is a better kind of expansion than a simple increase in page count.

The direction is outward: the sculpture show reaches Washington DC next year, while Muholi’s anniversary volume extends the photographic archive to São Paulo, Salvador, London, Porto and Los Angeles; what follows will depend on what those rooms and pages make visible.