Pride of place.
For Pride Month, we're spotlighting four books that explore LGBTQ+ identity, visibility, and creative expression through the lenses of photography, art, architecture, and design. Thoughtful, visually rich, and full of fascinating characters, they uncover overlooked histories, offer fresh perspective, and challenge a few assumptions along the way.
Pictures for Charis
By Kelli Connell
Aperture, 2024
Drawing from the life and writings of Charis Wilson, Kelli Connell retraces the California landscapes Wilson shared with photographer Edward Weston. Working with her former partner, Betsy Odom, Connell reimagines the photographer-subject relationship through a contemporary lens, raising questions about gender, sexuality, authorship, and representation across generations.
Queer Histories
Edited by Adriano Pedrosa and Julia Bryan-Wilson
KMEC Books, 2025
Gathering more than 200 works from artists across generations and geographies, Queer Histories examines LGBTQIA+ lives through themes of community, activism, spirituality, survival, and visibility. Published in conjunction with a major exhibition at MASP, the volume approaches queerness not only as an identity but as a lens for reinterpreting history and recovering narratives long pushed to the margins.
Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Modern: Architecture and the Black American Middle Class
By Jacqueline Taylor
MIT Press, 2023
This study of architect, artist, and educator Amaza Lee Meredith reveals how architecture became a vehicle for identity, ambition, and self-determination within the emerging Black middle class of the early twentieth century. Through Meredith's life and work, Jacqueline Taylor expands our understanding of modernism, challenging long-held assumptions about race, gender, and who gets included in the story of modern architecture.
Bruce Goff: Material Worlds
Edited by Alison Fisher
Art Institute of Chicago, 2025
While Bruce Goff is often celebrated for his unconventional architecture and experimental use of materials (from glass slag to shag carpet), this catalog also considers how his queer identity informed a lifelong practice built around individuality, nonconformity, and self-invention.
Through essays, drawings, photographs, and archival materials, the book offers a fuller portrait of an architect who defied categorization and treated his life as an extension of his creative practice.
Metal head.
A striking slim spine of solid powder-coated steel supports a cantilevered round tabletop and base. Couple the well-tuned Note Large Side Table with sofas, lounges and beds to create a floating workable surface in a pinch.
