Hollis Taggart

We’re proud to present our list of the best art books of 2024 for your holiday reading, and perhaps to inspire your gifting this winter. Our editors and critics read across genre, subject, and pace this year, from memoirs and graphic novels to catalogs, artist books, and everything in between. Hyperallergic Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian muses on the poignant work of photographer Diana Markosian in Father, while critic Alexandra M. Thomas recommends Nikki A. Greene’s book reframing the study of Black visual art and musical production. Read on for Reviews Editor Natalie Haddad on Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects, Associate Editor Lisa Yin Zhang on scholar Anne Anling Cheng’s essay collection, my love of Audrey Flack’s memoir, and more ordered by publication date in the list below. As always, we approach the “art book” category with flexibility, considering titles that seam the art world with its incalculable intersections with other fields. Let us know what your top books of 2024 are, and happy reading! —Lakshmi Rivera Amin, Associate Editor

Hollis Taggart is pleased to announce that the gallery will be representing the estate of the Cuban-American artist Rafael Soriano (1920-2015). In tandem with this, the estate has announced a catalogue raisonné devoted to the artist, edited by the art historian Alejandro Anreus. Both announcements follow two major museum acquisitions of the artist’s work, including three paintings acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in August, and one painting acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art last month. Hollis Taggart has also announced the gallery will be presenting a solo exhibition of Soriano’s work from June 5 through July 18, 2025. This will be the artist’s first solo show in New York City.

Hollis Taggart is pleased to announce the representation of the estate of the second generation Abstract Expressionist Charles Cajori, which will be launched with an exhibition of his work at the gallery later this month. Known for blending bold abstraction with figural experimentation, Cajori’s canvases display a mastery of color and dynamism. Charles Cajori: Turbulent Space, Shifting Colors is the first exhibition of the artist’s work in NYC in nearly in a decade, and will function as a “mini-retrospective,” featuring works from the early 1950s to the late 1970s.

“If I were to die tomorrow, no one would say, ‘Too bad, she was so young’,” wrote the artist Audrey Flack in the epilogue of With Darkness Came Stars, her memoir published earlier this year, months before she passed away in June. You might expect such thoughts about mortality from someone about to mark her 93rd birthday, but you would not necessarily expect it from Flack—a vivacious artist always moving, creating, reinventing and, in that particular moment, opening a solo show at New York’s Hollis Taggart Gallery as well as planning her first solo institutional exhibition in years.

When I was at Washington & Lee, and also at law school at Tulane, I had no sense of being an art dealer…I simply liked art and was starting to collect (modestly) at that time.  Mostly prints and British watercolors. My studies in business and art history ended up being useful, as well as my law background, in my eventual decision to enter the art business. I use all 3 disciplines in the business!

Hollis Taggart is saddened to announce the passing of artist Audrey Flack on June 28 at age 93. A pioneering artist whose fierce spirit and brilliance helped shape the history of post-war American art, Flack lived a life fully consecrated to the making of art. As she noted in her memoir published a few months ago: “the history of art became my history; the making of art, my truth; and the essence of art, my religion.” Flack was prodigiously creative and productive right up until her passing, and this year alone saw profiles of Flack published in Vogue, New York Magazine, New York Times book review, ARTnews, and Artnet.

At age 10, in 1918, Norman Carton and his mother were in hiding during pogroms unleashed by the Russian revolution; six years later the same boy found himself safe and sound in Philadelphia, rescued from Eastern Europe by the intervention of his older brother, who had already relocated to the States.  The pogroms in Ukraine during the Russian civil war resulted in the murder of up to 250,000 Jews.  Carton had escaped with his family through Romania and immigrated to the U.S. in 1922.

“Since it was 41 years of notes, it would have been an 1,800-page book if everything had gone in,” said 92-year-old artist Audrey Flack on writing her  memoir from her home studio on the Upper West Side earlier this year. “The book doesn’t have everything that I’ve experienced, but it has a lot.” Published by Penn State University Press, With Darkness Came Stars begins with a moment of crisis for the artist, wherein in her early 50s she faced a “painting block” prohibiting her from finishing the work for a forthcoming show.

In the early 1970s, the artist Audrey Flack traveled to the Basílica de la Macarena in Seville, Spain, to see a carved-wood statue called Macarena Esperanza, a polychrome depiction of a weeping Virgin Mary adorned with jewels, crystal tears, and false eyelashes. Flack is Jewish, but she was no less overcome by the Macarena’s sorrowful splendor: Here was a mother shedding tears for her child—Flack could relate—but she was also regal, grand, beautiful. Flack photographed the statue and, once back home in New York, made several paintings based on her pictures, capturing each resplendent detail in high definition.

Only in the darkest moments of our lives do the brightest stars appear. An artist, mother, teacher, and rebel, Audrey Flack is counted among the most important American artists of the twentieth century. In With Darkness Came Stars, she recounts and reflects upon a life fully lived.