As an independent publisher, we love to stay current with the new books being released in our industry and we're often lucky to get a sneak peek at what's coming out soon or what just hit the market. Today, we're sharing a few top picks of new art books for your summer reading and beyond!

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7 New Art Books to Add to Your Library in 2022

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1) How To Create And Sell NFTs - A Guide For All Artists

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Written for artists of all levels, ages and mediums, How To Create And Sell NFTs - A Guide For All Artists from bestselling author Magnus Resch and curator Tam Gryn explores how artists can launch their own NFT projects. It looks beyond the hype around overpriced JPEG and explains the key concepts of NFTs, Blockchain and the metaverse. It’s the necessary resource for artists who are examining the fundamentals of starting an NFT project.

In particular you will learn:

• What are NFTs?
• What is the blockchain?
• How can I create my first NFT project?
• What marketplaces should I use to sell my NFTs?
• What is the most effective marketing strategy?
• How do NFTs fit into my existing art practice?

This indispensable guide features business advice from the NFT world’s foremost specialists, such as Justin Aversano (#1 NFT photography artist), IX Shells (#1 NFT female artist), Deeze (#1 NFT collector), Jerry Saltz (#1 art critic), Duncan Cock-Foster (Co-Founder, Nifty Gateway), Adam Lindemann (Top NFT collector), Noah Davis (Yugo Labs), Raj Gokal (Co-Founder, Solana), artists FEWOCiOUS, Kenny Schachter, Micah Johnson, Snowfro, Studio Drift, Jen Stark, Trevor Jones, Krista Kim, Claire Silver and many more.

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2) Friends to Keep in Art and Life

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From the author of the bestselling ballbuster Men to Avoid in Art and Life comes Friends to Keep in Art and Life, a hilarious and relatable celebration of female friendships.

Pairing classical paintings with funny, irreverent captions, Nicole Tersigni honors all sorts of sacred female friendships and the miscellaneous nonsense that brings women closer together. Focusing on five major friend types (the Work Friend, the Nurturing Friend, the Hide a Body for You Friend, the Up for Anything Friend, and the Super Honest Friend), Tersigni's meme-style humor perfectly captures all of the weird-but-special, intimate, cherished, and often laugh-out-loud moments that define female friendship.

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3) Great Women Painters

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Great Women Painters is a groundbreaking book that reveals a richer and more varied telling of the story of painting. Featuring more than 300 artists from around the world, it includes both well-known women painters from history and today's most exciting rising stars.

Covering nearly 500 years of skill and innovation, this survey continues Phaidon's celebrated The Art Book series and reveals and champions a more diverse history of art, showcasing recently discovered and newly appreciated work and artists throughout its more than 300 pages and images.

Artists featured include: Hilma af Klint, Eileen Agar, Sofonisba Anguissola, Cecily Brown, Leonora Carrington, Mary Cassatt, Elaine de Kooning, Marlene Dumas, Nicole Eisenman, Jadé Fadojutimi, Helen Frankenthaler, Artemisia Gentileschi, Maggi Hambling, Carmen Herrera, Gwen John, Frida Kahlo, Tamara de Lempicka, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, Plautilla Nelli, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paula Rego, Bridget Riley, Jenny Saville, Dana Schutz, Lee Krasner, Yayoi Kusama

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4) Art Is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night

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Jerry Saltz is one of our most-watched writers about art and artists, and a passionate champion of the importance of art in our shared cultural life. Since the 1990s he has been an indispensable cultural voice: witty and provocative, he has attracted contemporary readers to fine art as few critics have. An early champion of forgotten and overlooked women artists, he has also celebrated the pioneering work of African American, LGBTQ+, and other long-marginalized creators. Sotheby's Institute of Art has called him, simply, “the art critic.”

Now, in Art Is Life, Jerry Saltz draws on two decades of work to offer a real-time survey of contemporary art as a barometer of our times. Chronicling a period punctuated by dramatic turning points—from the cultural reset of 9/11 to the rolling social crises of today—Saltz traces how visionary artists have both documented and challenged the culture. Art Is Life offers Saltz’s eye-opening appraisals of trailblazers like Kara Walker, David Wojnarowicz, Hilma af Klint, and Jasper Johns; provocateurs like Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, and Marina Abramović; and visionaries like Jackson Pollock, Bill Traylor, and Willem de Kooning. Saltz celebrates landmarks like the Obama portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, writes searchingly about disturbing moments such as the Ankara gallery assassination, and offers surprising takes on figures from Thomas Kinkade to Kim Kardashian. And he shares stories of his own haunted childhood, his time as a “failed artist,” and his epiphanies upon beholding work by Botticelli, Delacroix, and the cave painters of Niaux.

With his signature blend of candor and conviction, Jerry Saltz argues in Art Is Life for the importance of the fearless artist—reminding us that art is a kind of channeled voice of human experience, a necessary window onto our times. The result is an openhearted and irresistibly readable appraisal by one of our most important cultural observers.

5) African Art Now

This deluxe hardcover survey, featuring profiles of 50 artists on the rise, is the definitive guide to contemporary African art.

With African artists attracting sizable audience numbers to museums, setting sky-high auction records, and appearing in mainstream press, it has become impossible to overlook the cultural significance of contemporary African art today. Author and curator Osei Bonsu's engaging profiles of leading African artists—along with gorgeous full-color reproductions of their work—introduce readers to a generation of movers and shakers whose innovative artwork reflects on Africa as both an idea and an experience. Using diverse forms, languages, and expressions to articulate what it means to be a part of the world, these artists generate alternate histories and imaginative futures—work that is both personal and political, universal and incredibly specific. Their work helps define contemporary African art as a vast artistic and cultural movement.

Amoako Boafo, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, and Bronwyn Katz—from household names to up-and-coming artists, African Art Now features some of the most exciting artists working today.
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6) Vitamin D3, Today's Best in Contemporary Drawing

Over the past 50 years, drawing has been elevated from a supporting role to a primary medium, ranking alongside painting as a central art form. Since Phaidon's publication of the first such surveys (Vitamin D in 2005 and D2 in 2013), contemporary artists have continued to explore drawing's possibilities - from intimate to large-scale works, in a diversity of mark-making processes and materials. Vitamin D3 showcases more than 100 such artists, as nominated by a global panel of more than 70 international art experts.

The more than 70 nominators include such iconic figures as: Iwona Blazwick, Louisa Buck, Mark Coetzee, Thelma Golden, Laura Hoptman, Geeta Kapur, Pablo León de la Barra, Christine Macel, Kate Macfarlane, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Zoe Whitley.

The more than 100 selected artists include: Miriam Cahn, Robert Crumb, Tom Friedman, Tania Kovats, Claudette Johnson, Rashid Johnson, Otobong Nkanga, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Deanna Petherbridge, Christina Quarles, Qiu Zhijie, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Wael Shawky, Emma Talbot, and Johanna Unzueta.

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7) Prime, Art's Next Generation

Prime, Art's Next Generation features 107 artists born since 1980, as chosen by a new generation of art experts and leaders.

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Thanks so much for reading! If you are looking for even more art book recommendations, check out our list of 5 Art Books by Women Authors We Love and 15 Essential Books for Emerging Artists.

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Alicia Puig has been a contributing writer for Create! Magazine since 2017. Find more of her work: www.aliciapuig.com