By Lisa Yin Zhang, Lakshmi Rivera Amin, Hakim Bishara, Hrag Vartanian, Sophia Stewart, Nageen Shaikh
Hyperallergic
April 1st, 2026
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s first catalog in 25 years, Molly Crabapple chronicles the Jewish Bund, a photographer captures a Black Southern waterway, and more
April showers bring unread book towers … and we’re here to add a few more to your list! With a focus on retelling history through an artist’s lens, here are our recommendations for books to read this spring. New York-based Molly Crabapple brings her background as a painter and organizer to bear on a book about the Jewish Bund, while Susan Simensky Bietila narrates her decades-long career as an environmental activist and feminist artist. In catalogs, the first comprehensive tome on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha fleshes out the artist’s inner life and experimentation, long overshadowed by her creative legacy, as a 50-year survey of Chicano camera culture and photography contextualizes the evolving art form. More food for the imagination below. —Lakshmi Rivera Amin
Front Lines: A Lifetime of Drawing Resistance by Susan Simensky Bietila | PM Press, February
Susan Simensky Bietila proudly makes art on the front lines of activist movements. She starts this impressive memoir by sharing her own family’s history, from fleeing the pogroms of Russia to living in government housing in Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood. The book is full of funny and human moments, like when she admits that her “first political jolt” occurred during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when she was in high school. “We were all terrified,” she writes. “Some of the girls had sex with their boyfriends because they wanted to have that experience before the bomb fell.”
She has also included a wide range of her editorial and activist graphics, such as her collage covers from the radical leftist publication The Guardian. The book provides ample evidence of her role in various Wisconsin environmental and labor movements, not to mention her history with early feminist activism in New York City and elsewhere. Essays, comics, graphics, and commentary convey the fascinating life she has lived as an embodied activist and artist, committed to change and leaving the planet better than she found it. —Hrag Vartanian
