The MIT Press has released a new wave of books on art and visual culture, and the lineup runs from activist art and trans aesthetics to skateboarding, lowriders, and the screen philosophy of Vilém Flusser. The publisher calls them “Bold New Books in Art and Visual Culture from the MIT Press,” and the endorsement from Victoria Hindley, Senior Acquisitions Editor, frames the collection as a refusal of easy answers.
Hindley on the Collection
Hindley says the books “examine how art, architecture, and design impact our lives and influence our perception of the world.” She describes them as works that “probe visual and material culture — charting the power that runs through it — and refuse easy answers.”
She adds that the books “surface overlooked subjects, take bold risks, and generate transformative knowledge, revealing how the environments and objects we shape, in turn, shape us.”
The Radical Unpresent
Gregory Sholette’s The Radical Unpresent looks at how artists and activists are navigating the collapse of historical time in our current moment. Dread Scott, an artist, calls Sholette “another intellectually passionate and original discourse on our current crises and how artists can intervene in even the most dominant contexts, jolting the way we see the world.”
Lucy R. Lippard, author of Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change, praises the book for deepening the dialogue around international activist art.
The Society of the Screen
Martha Schwendener’s The Society of the Screen traces how Vilém Flusser’s early vision of a world dominated by glowing screens grew out of his lifelong engagement with experimental art. Geoffrey Batchen, author of Negative/Positive: A History of Photography, writes that the book “provides a deep dive into the work of a thinker about images and visual information who has never seemed more relevant than right now.”
Anarchitecture After Everything
Jack Halberstam’s Anarchitecture After Everything brings together radical politics and trans aesthetics, looking at bodies and built environments as connected systems. Mabel O. Wilson, author of Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture, calls it “a dazzling, groundbreaking series of meditations on the relationality of trans bodies and buildings.”
Claire Bishop, author of Artificial Hells and Disordered Attention, describes the book as “a blazing manifesto.”
Shimmer and Tumbados
Shimmer, edited by Mark W. Scala and Nora N. Khan, collects writing from contemporary artists and authors on how art and technology can reshape humanity’s relationship with nature and society. Pamela Horn, Director of Content at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, says the book shows what is possible “if emergent technologies coexist with artists’ dreams and visions: a fresh, vital, and nonbinary world can foster hope and care for creatures and the planet.”
Tumbados, edited by Guadalupe Rosales, is the first book to examine Rosales’ practice of fostering collective storytelling, a subject often overlooked in the public record and in official memory. It is a co-publication with the Storefront for Art and Architecture.
True World Skate
True World Skate, by Suridh Hassan and Ryo Sanada, is a deep dive into global indie skate culture in unexpected places like Ohio and Serbia. The book is described as a “fast-moving collage of thrilling photographs, oral history, and deck art [that] captures the evolution of skate culture…there’s a beauty and a bravery and a renegade spirit to it all.”
What We Make of It
The collection is notable for its range. Rather than sticking to familiar ground, the MIT Press has published books on activist art, skateboarding, and the work of a philosopher whose ideas about screens now seem urgent. The endorsements from artists and critics feel personal rather than promotional.
The books also share a common thread: they treat art as something that shapes how we see the world, not just a mirror of it. That is a view worth holding onto, especially when the world feels uncanny and the future feels uncertain.
Here is the full list, in the order the MIT Press presents it:
- The Radical Unpresent by Gregory Sholette
- The Society of the Screen by Martha Schwendener
- Anarchitecture After Everything by Jack Halberstam
- Shimmer, edited by Mark W. Scala and Nora N. Khan
- Tumbados edited by Guadalupe Rosales
- True World Skate by Suridh Hassan and Ryo Sanada
For readers interested in how art connects to politics, technology, and everyday life, this is a strong set of titles to start with.
Source material: “Bold New Books in Art and Visual Culture from the MIT Press,” Hyperallergic.
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