12 Art Books to Kick Off Summer

Hyperallergic's Lakshmi Rivera Amin presents a curated list of 12 art books for summer reading, including a novel lampooning the art world, Megan O'Grady's meditation on art and living, Kory Stamper's exploration of color lexicography, Nan Goldin's reissued photo essay, and Jennifer Higgie's prose poetry novel. The roundup also features Vincenzo Latronico's 'Perfection,' Nina Burleigh's satirical 'Turn Around, Don’t Drown,' and a graphic novel by Naoki Matayoshi and Shinsuke Yoshitake, among others.

From men on dog leads to public breast-fondling, Valie Export’s art demanded a total feminist revolution

Valie Export, the pioneering Austrian feminist artist known for her provocative and confrontational performances from the 1960s onward, is the subject of a reflective essay by writer and academic Hettie Judah. The article revisits Export's radical works such as *Hyperbulia* (1973), where she crawled naked through electrified wires; *From the Portfolio of Doggedness* (1968), in which she led a man on a dog lead through Vienna; and *Action Pants: Genital Panic* (1969), where she walked through a cinema with exposed genitals. Judah draws on her own interviews with Export, who died in 2023, and discusses the artist's manifesto demanding that women use art to reshape consciousness and achieve liberation.

Tourism and Accessibility: Travel is for Everyone. A New Issue of the Pax Newsletter is Coming, Subscribe for Free

Turismo e accessibilità: il viaggio è per tutti. È in arrivo un nuovo numero della newsletter Pax, abbonarsi è gratis

The article announces an upcoming issue of Pax, a newsletter by Artribune focused on cultural tourism. The new issue, arriving Friday, May 29, explores accessibility in travel and cultural tourism, featuring an interview with Anna Rizzo, author of "I paesi invisibili" (2022), and highlighting organizations like Traveleyes and NoisyVision, the latter founded in 2011 by Dario Sorgato to make nature exploration accessible to people with sensory disabilities. It also includes a map for outdoor leisure combining art, recreation, and nature at Italian villa parks, museums, and art centers, along with curated itineraries, trekking updates, cultural initiatives, and hospitality projects—including one by Michelangelo Pistoletto.

The Art of Performing Maintenance

This article explores the work of artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who in 1969 wrote her "Manifesto for Maintenance Art" after experiencing a crisis of meaning following the birth of her first child. She proposed that routine maintenance tasks—like cleaning, cooking, and laundry—could be redefined as art when performed in public, particularly in museums. The article traces her early exhibitions at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, where she swept and mopped as performance, and her later projects interviewing passersby on New York City sidewalks and embedding herself in a Manhattan office building, where she invited workers to declare their maintenance tasks art.