Books like The Mission of Art — picked by fans

I love this book for many reasons, but to start, I love that the title is a poetic metaphor, I love that the story is almost a hundred years old but still speaks to the rebellious spirit alive within young readers, and I love that the book is loosely based on Zora’s real life and the real place of Eatonville, Florida.

I love that readers get to experience the past and can envision their own future while reading this book. I laughed, cried, and found pieces of myself within the quotes snitched to this story. 

I loved this book by K.Y Robinson because the short collection possessed power on every page, and K.Y’s exploration of vulnerability, navigating emotions, and expressing sexuality helped me understand myself in a way that I didn’t before being introduced to her work.

The Chaos of Longing provided company during a time when I believed I was alone in this world and grew into a lifelong poetic companion as I continue to grow into myself. 

I was actually introduced to this title due to its 2010 film adaptation by Tyler Perry of the same title. I was captivated by the different points of view, characters, and lives that unfolded on the screen, so much so that I sought out a physical copy of the publication it was based on.

I loved this book because it taught me strength—told and shown from the points of view of multiple women in different challenging circumstances. I loved that there was an exploration of love, lust, happiness, tragedy, and ultimately becoming and accepting the version of woman that you are.

This publication was actually very instrumental and inspirational in my own journey of writing and publishing. This story inspired me to tell my own, out loud and unapologetically. 

As an independent author and creative, at times I lose sight of my personal “why” and motivation for creation.

I love Black Women Writers at Work by Claudia Tate, because it served as a reminder of the importance of diversity, the range writers can have, and the longevity creative output can maintain with the support of their audience. I appreciated that Claudia asked each author specific questions related to their work and not just generic questions related to the topic and technique of writing.

This book was not only entertaining for me, but extremely informative. I loved it so much that I started with the audiobook and was gifted a physical copy! 

Originally published in 1958 as a textbook, when Aesthetics was updated, it was recognized as the “summa” of the aesthetic theory of art. This is the view that something is art just in case it is made with the intention to afford a certain magnitude of aesthetic experience. Because of his emphasis on aesthetic experience, Beardsley defended the notion of the autonomy of art – the idea that art is essentially independent of all other social practices. Using this lens, Beardsley explores an impressive range of topics including literature, fiction, pictorial representation, criticism, and interpretation.

The Art of Kind and Flowing Relationships helps you discover who you are and how you function from the agent Chinese Energy philosophy. The book also lets you understand how you see the world and how others perceive you.

From that angle, the author helps you to understand what you can do to understand other people and build solid and flowing relationships.  

I regularly go to this book to see how I can approach people differently by understanding them deeper, less about me and what I’m all about.

I am married to an auction veteran and have written on art and antiques in an earlier life so Frayn’s satirical farce hits all the right notes for me. A farce without slamming doors but plenty of misunderstandings and self-inflicted confusion.

Martin Clay, a philosopher turned amateur art historian and art expert, tumbles down the rabbit hole of self-delusion as he convinces himself that a painting he barely glimpsed is a lost Bruegel. He searches countless documents to find the facts that he twists to prove his hunch leading the reader on a deep dive into Dutch political and art history. Moral equivocation, adultery, tax evasion, double-dealing, plot twists and turns—everything a good farce should be.

Nehamas’s lucid prose and lovely illustrations take us away from politics to a very different topic, our individual experience of art in all its many forms, from popular media to highfalutin forms, as an arena for the freedom of our imagination and taste.

I love Nehamas’s personal and personable voice, which cuts through centuries of theory to speak to the reader, one person to another. Few philosophy books are so accessible or have such beautiful pictures!

This book outlines how the visual field operates at a psychological level.

I am an architect and cannot believe that we don’t teach straight from this and other Arnheim books more often. If you want to know what is happening to you, why you get chills up your spine when looking at art, read this book.

Arnheim is a psychologist, not a designer, so he breaks art down from this perspective.

Because of his prior reputation as a metaphysician and epistemologist, when Nelson Goodman turned his attention to the philosophy of art, he lent unprecedented prestige to aesthetics. In his book, Goodman treats art as a matter of symbol systems whose major structures include representation, exemplification, and expression. Given his emphasis on symbolism, Goodman regarded artistic projects, like picturing, as conventional and he maintained that our conviction of the realism of pictorial representations was merely an affair of our habituation to various styles. Languages of Art is a book noteworthy for its bold and bracing literary style.