Books by Aruna Dsouza

Andrea Carlson: A Constant Sky

by Dakota Hoska, Aruna Dsouza, Heid Erdrich

An Indigenous Futurist reimagining of landscape, addressing imperialism, ownership, and place.

This beautifully illustrated volume presents the layered imagery of contemporary Indigenous North American artist Andrea Carlson and is the first book that explores the work of this fascinating contemporary artist on the rise. Using oral and archival research, as well as art historical and philosophical theory, Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe descent) creates multipanel landscapes on the themes of museum collection practices, consumption, possession, and repatriation. Her work addresses the colonial construction of landscape genre painting and imperial concepts of land ownership and connection to place.

Published to accompany the artist’s first major museum solo exhibition at the Denver Art Museum, October 5, 2025–January 18, 2026.

Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts

by Aruna Dsouza

"An exploratory case study in institutional racism as it has manifested in the New York City art world” ―Brooklyn Rail
In 2017, the Whitney Biennial included a painting by a white artist, Dana Schutz, of the lynched body of a young black child, Emmett Till. In 1979, anger brewed over a show at New York’s Artists Space entitled The Nigger Drawings. In 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Harlem on My Mind did not include a single work by a black artist. In all three cases, black artists and writers and their allies organized vigorous responses using the only forum available to them: public protest.
Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts reflects on these three incidents in the long and troubled history of art and race in America. It lays bare how the art world―no less than the country at large―has persistently struggled with the politics of race, and the ways this struggle has influenced how museums, curators and artists wrestle with notions of free speech and the specter of censorship. Whitewalling takes a critical and intimate look at these three “acts” in the history of the American art scene and asks: when we speak of artistic freedom and the freedom of speech, who, exactly, is free to speak?
Aruna D’Souza writes about modern and contemporary art, food and culture; intersectional feminisms and other forms of politics; how museums shape our views of each other and the world; and books. Her work appears regularly in 4Columns.org, where she is a member of the editorial advisory board, as well as in publications including the Wall Street Journal, ARTnews, Garage, Bookforum, Momus and Art Practical. D'Souza is the editor of the forthcoming Making it Modern: A Linda Nochlin Reader.

Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (Clark Studies in the Visual Arts)

by Aruna Dsouza, Jill Casid

With globalization steadily reshaping the cultural landscape, scholars have long called for a full-scale reassessment of art history's largely Eurocentric framework. This collection of case studies and essays, the latest in the Clark Studies in the Visual Arts series, brings together voices from various disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds, each proposing ways to remap, decenter, and reorient what is often assumed to be a unified field. Rather than devise a one-size-fits-all strategy for what has long been a divided and disjointed terrain, these authors and artists reframe the inherent challenges of the global―most notably geographic, political, aesthetic, and linguistic differences―as productive starting points for study. As the book demonstrates, approaching art history from such alternative perspectives rewrites some of the most basic narratives, from the origins of representation to the beginnings of the “modern” to the very history of globalization and its effects.

Distributed for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

Shahzia Sikander Collective Behavior

by Fred Moten, Bhanu Kapil, Aruna Dsouza, Victoria Sung, Rosalind Morris

The definitive publication on internationally acclaimed artist Shahzia Sikander, one of the most influential feminist artists working today

Born in Pakistan and active in New York since the 1990s, Shahzia Sikander navigates the interplay of multiple identities, encompassing a range of artistic disciplines in her work and critically reinterpreting South Asian material history. Sikander's distinctly feminist iconography focuses on the narratives of immigrant women to challenge Eurocentric art histories and counter Orientalist scholarship. This volume, published to coincide with a major mid-career retrospective that premiered during the Biennale Art in Venice and will be held concurrently at the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art, is the first comprehensive exploration of Sikander's ideas and art. With hundreds of images, many presented as a full page or an entire spread, the richly illustrated book immerses readers in Sikander's vibrant and subversive art.