What We’re Reading This Month

The stories of American artists don’t live only in their paintings. They live in the books that ask new questions of old work, and in the letters, journals, and biographies that bring us closer to the people behind the art. At HAHS, we believe reading around an artist is part of understanding the work itself: where pen meets palette.
Each month we choose a book connected to an artist, a place, or the wider world of American art history. Some are biographies. Some are field guides. Some are the very books that sat on an artist’s own desk. All of them are worth your time, and all of them will send you deeper into the stories these extraordinary places have to tell.

July 2026

Madoo: The Making of an American Garden

by Alejandro Saralegui and Kendell Cronstrom (Timber Press, 2026)

“Madoo is magical and endlessly inspiring, a wonderful place to escape to and discover all year round.”

— Aerin Lauder

In the 1960s, painter, poet, and gardener Robert Dash began transforming a fallow farm field in Sagaponack into something that defied easy description: part studio, part sanctuary, part ongoing work of art. Over decades Madoo became a gathering place for some of the most important artists and poets of the 20th century, among them John Ashbery, Fairfield Porter, Willem de Kooning, and James Schuyler. Sumptuously photographed by Tria Giovan and filled with Dash’s own paintings and drawings alongside archival material, this book is both a portrait of a place and a record of a creative life lived entirely on its own terms.

Continue the story

Madoo Conservancy

📍Sagaponack, New York

Robert Dash made Madoo for 45 years, and no photograph fully prepares you for it. The garden shifts with every season, every hour of light, exactly as Dash intended. This book is the best companion you can bring through the gate, but the gate itself is the point.

Earlier selections

June 2026

Glorious Country: How the Artist Frederic Church Brought the World to America and America to the World by Victoria Johnson (Scribner, 2026)

Buy the Book

More selections coming next month.

The people who know these artists best are the ones who tend their homes, walk their grounds, and keep their stories alive. If you’re a HAHS member site and there’s a book that belongs in this conversation, we’d love to hear about it.