10 Books About People Making Art Together

The ultimate novel of an artistic duo whose collaboration starts with animation and ends with true love. Come for the art school vibes, stay for the complex exploration of an uncategorizable relationship between a queer woman and a straight woman who bring out the best and worst in each other.

Speaking of art school vibes, this novel knocked my socks off for the ways it dramatizes the pressure cooker of artistic education, as well as the muse/artist relationship, queerness, class, and technology.

This work of narrative nonfiction book about the complicated friendship and tragic artistic collaboration between Zora Neale Hurtson and Langston Hughes reads like the best kind of novel.

My favorite book of 2022, this novel isn’t afraid to render, step by step, what it looks like for a group of young activists to craft together the world they want to see. It’s also extremely sexy (fans self)

In contrast to the previous, this novel is about what happens when a group of young activists believe they are making the world better but are actually making everyone’s lives worse. It’s also the funniest and most accurate depiction of a crunchy group house living situation I’ve ever read.

If you were a theater kid, you know first hand the ways that performance and mystery can bleed out of the stage and into your life. This novel follows two young high school students as they grapple with queerness, 9/11, and losing each other.

Another one for the theater kids, this novel takes the idea of group collaboration inherent in a stage production and unzips it, exposing the imbalances of power, gender, age, and point of view.

If race too is just an elaborate performance, then it’s one we’re all participating in. This funny, ambitious and strange novel is part dark academia campus novel, part PhD lit, and part satire of what happens when white people cannot leave well enough alone.

Once upon a time the famed musician Patti Smith and iconic artist Robert Mapplethorpe were just lost and strange kids with nothing to cling to but each other. A longitudinal true look at how meeting the right person can transform you into the artist you want to me.

The book that catalyzed my own novel, this is a reproduction of the original draft of the groundbreaking collaboration between large format photographer Berenice Abbott and art writer (and Abbott’s romantic partner) Elizabeth McCausland. This ambitious and prescient book that discusses gentrification and change in New York in the 1930s shows what the duo would have made had the world allowed queer women artists to create the authentic work of their dreams rather than censoring them.