Seen Summer Art Reads
Carrie Scott's must-read art books
August is here, and we’re in the home stretch of summer. Like many of you, I’m doing my best to make the most of what remains of the season. Summertime is book time, so I invited curator Carrie Scott to recommend some of her favorites. Carrie has exquisite taste, and she always shows me something new. I was delighted when she recommended four art books to add to my list. I’ll let her take it from here. Enjoy! —AA
For the first couple of years of my academic career, I thought art history was something you memorized, a sequence of movements and masterpieces that had already been decided. The longer I worked in galleries and alongside artists, the more I realized that art history isn’t fixed at all. Every generation decides which stories to tell, which artists to celebrate, and, perhaps more importantly, which voices have been left out.
That’s why these four books belong together.
They don’t just add a few overlooked artists to the existing canon. They ask much bigger questions about who gets to make art, who gets written into history, how images shape our understanding of women, and even why art matters beyond the market or the museum. Together, I think they offer a broader, richer, and more generous way of thinking about culture.
I’ve never really believed in “beach reads.” If I finally have uninterrupted time to read, I want to come back from it having changed my mind about something. These books all did that for me. Some fundamentally reshaped how I think about art history. Others challenged assumptions I didn’t even realize I was carrying.
And I still need to get through Ninth Street Women — I am about halfway — so this felt like the perfect excuse to start a small book club. The idea is wonderfully unambitious: read all four books, and then get together on Zoom to talk about them. No expertise required. Just people who are curious about art and interested in seeing it differently. Interested in joining me? Subscribe to the Seen newsletter for details.
If these books help a few more people question the stories we’ve inherited, they’ll have done exactly what the best art history books are supposed to do.
If you’ve ever felt like the art world handed you a map with no roads on it, this is the book. Judah’s spent years talking to artists who didn’t follow the tidy, upward-sloping career everyone pretends is standard—the ones who started late, took a different career first, raised kids, got sick, lost confidence, walked away in disgust, and came back anyway. It’s frank, it’s funny, and it treats its reader like an actual adult with an actual life. If you’re an artist who’s ever felt behind, start here.
Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel
Fair warning: this book is enormous. Nearly a thousand pages! But it’s the definitive account of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler—five women who were there at the birth of Abstract Expressionism and then got quietly written out of the story everyone tells about it. This is the corrective. Pack it if you’re going anywhere for more than a weekend.
Women in the Picture: Women, Art and the Power of Looking by Catherine McCormack
This book will change how you look at every painting you’ve ever taken for granted. McCormack takes apart what women’s bodies have been made to mean in Western art—from Titian and Botticelli straight through to Picasso—and then hands you something better: the women artists, from Berthe Morisot to Judy Chicago to Kara Walker, who took that imagery back and made it say something else entirely. You will not look at a museum the same way again, and that’s the point.
Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Save Lives by Daisy Fancourt
This is the one for anyone who’s ever felt a little sheepish about how much better they feel after a gallery visit, like it’s not a “real” reason. Fancourt’s a University College London professor who’s spent fifteen years researching why the arts are genuinely, measurably good for your health—and she makes the case properly, with the science to back it. If you’ve ever wondered whether your art habit counts as self-care, it does, and now you have the receipts.
About the author
Carrie Scott is an English-American curator, writer, and broadcaster based in London. She has led galleries including Nicole Klagsbrun in New York and James Harris in Seattle, and founded her own curatorial consultancy in 2008, where she curates exhibitions for galleries, institutions, and private clients in Europe, North America, and Asia.
For a decade, Scott served as Director of Nick Knight’s archive and the SHOWstudio Shop as part of her consultancy, collaborating on projects at the intersection of art and fashion. She later presented The Art Show on Sky Arts.
Scott holds a Master’s degree in Art History, writes and comments extensively on contemporary art, and is a nominator for the Prix Pictet.
In 2024, she founded Seen, a next-generation art consultancy dedicated to making the art world more transparent and accessible through real-time communication and digital storytelling. Follow her on Instagram @carriescottcurates.