The Center for the Arts Evergreen Book Chat meets on the third Wednesday of every month from 3-5 pm in person or on Zoom. CAE’s Book Chat is free to all CAE members. We choose fictional AND nonfictional books based in the world of arts and culture and have lively discussions about the world of art. Some past titles have been The Art Forger, Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet, Clara & Mr. Tiffany, Oil & Marble, Dancing for Degas, The Lacuna, Lust for Life, and The Last Painting of Sara DeVos. We encourage you to support local, independently-owned bookstores if you are purchasing selections for CAE’s book chat. We’d love for you to join us. Please consider becoming a CAE member and we’ll add you to our Book Chat list. See below for upcoming dates and titles. Happy Reading!

Wednesday, January 21, 2026 – 3 pm
Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez
In Person at CAE OR online at: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87039246090?pwd=EcXStky4vEjqrWKLRGnnZ74BabySNa.1

1985. Anita de Monte, a rising star in the art world, is found dead in New York City; her tragic death is the talk of the town. Until it isn’t. By 1998 Anita’s name has been all but forgotten―certainly by the time Raquel, a third-year art history student is preparing her final thesis. On College Hill, surrounded by privileged students whose futures are already paved out for them, Raquel feels like an outsider. Students of color, like her, are the minority there, and the pressure to work twice as hard for the same opportunities is no secret.

But when Raquel becomes romantically involved with a well-connected older art student, she finds herself unexpectedly rising up the social ranks. As she attempts to straddle both worlds, she stumbles upon Anita’s story, raising questions about the dynamics of her own relationship, which eerily mirrors that of the forgotten artist.

Moving back and forth through time and told from the perspectives of both women, Anita de Monte Laughs Last is a propulsive, witty examination of power, love, and art, daring to ask who gets to be remembered and who is left behind in the rarefied world of the elite.

Wednesday, February 18, 2026 – 3 pm
Mona’s Eyes by Thomas Schlesser
In Person at CAE OR online at: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85483568823?pwd=XO1ilbrWi9KDp55UDmacXatXprRflz.1

Ten-year-old Mona and her beloved grandfather have only fifty-two Wednesdays to visit fifty-two works of art and commit to memory “all that is beautiful in the world” before Mona loses her sight forever.

While the doctors can find no explanation for Mona’s brief episode of blindness, they agree that the threat of permanent vision loss cannot be ruled out. The girl’s grandfather, Henry, may not be able to stop his granddaughter from losing her sight, but he can fill the encroaching darkness with beauty. Every Wednesday for a year, the pair abscond together and visit a single masterpiece in one of Paris’s renowned museums. From Botticelli to Basquiat, Mona learns how each artist’s work shaped the world around them. In turn, the young girl’s world is changed forever by the power of their art. Under the kind and careful tutelage of her grandfather, Mona learns the true meaning of generosity, melancholy, love, loss, and revolution. Her perspective will never be the same—nor will the reader’s.

Mona’s Eyes is a heartfelt, enlightening journey across five centuries of Western art history. With the emotional impact of The Elegance of the Hedgehog and the readability of The Little Paris Bookshop, Thomas Schlesser’s sensational debut novel is at once a moving book about the beauty of life and a deeply touching story about the special bond between a girl and her grandfather.

Wednesday, March 18, 2026 – 3 pm
Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College by Helen Molesworth
In Person at CAE OR online at: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88092358875?pwd=gEdwb3ab68Xt9MeXybEMnzbD7ZBauz.1

In 1933, John Rice founded Black Mountain College in North Carolina as an experiment in making artistic experience central to learning. Though it operated for only 24 years, this pioneering school played a significant role in fostering avant-garde art, music, dance, and poetry, and an astonishing number of important artists taught or studied there. Among the instructors were Josef and Anni Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Karen Karnes, M. C. Richards, and Willem de Kooning, and students included Ruth Asawa, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly.

Leap Before You Look is a singular exploration of this legendary school and of the work of the artists who spent time there. Scholars from a variety of fields contribute original essays about diverse aspects of the College—spanning everything from its farm program to the influence of Bauhaus principles—and about the people and ideas that gave it such a lasting impact. In addition, catalogue entries highlight selected works, including writings, musical compositions, visual arts, and crafts. The book’s fresh approach and rich illustration program convey the atmosphere of creativity and experimentation that was unique to Black Mountain College, and that served as an inspiration to so many. This timely volume will be essential reading for anyone interested in the College and its enduring legacy.

ALTERNATE MARCH SELECTION: Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community by Martin Duberman

Wednesday, April 22, 2026 – 3 pm
The Versailles Formula by Nancy Bilyeau
In Person at CAE OR online at: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82548566197?pwd=bBZzBKKNW5TYhDM2JuqZrYP7RDqf9y.1

Genevieve Sturbridge thought she’d left danger behind in London. Now she lives a quiet life in the countryside with her husband and son. But an invitation to dine at Sir Horace Walpole’s eerie Gothic estate pulls her back into a deadly world of deception, espionage and murder.

At the mysterious dinner party, Genevieve uncovers a shocking secret — a rare pigment of pure blue is being produced again. Coveted by royalty, chemists and spies, its formula is priceless . . . and lethal.

Some will kill to possess it. Others will kill to keep it buried.

Only Genevieve can recognise the formula and stop it falling into the wrong hands. But when a ghost from her past resurfaces, Genevieve must determine who she can trust. Years ago, this secret nearly cost her and her husband their lives. Now, someone is willing to kill for it once more.

Genevieve must discover the truth before time runs out, because this time the price of failure will cost more than just her own life.

NO BOOK CHAT IN MAY

Wednesday, June 17, 2026 – 3 pm
The Bohemians by Jasmin Darznik
In Person at CAE OR online at: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84523260173?pwd=558ORtMn6vXYLCNEh2UsZt2SQxpa4k.1

In this novel of the glittering and gritty Jazz Age, a young aspiring photographer named Dorothea Lange arrives in San Francisco in 1918. As a newcomer—and naïve one at that—Dorothea is grateful for the fast friendship of Caroline Lee, a vivacious, straight-talking Chinese American with a complicated past, who introduces Dorothea to Monkey Block, an artists’ colony and the bohemian heart of the city. Dazzled by Caroline and her friends, Dorothea is catapulted into a heady new world of freedom, art, and politics. She also finds herself falling in love with the brilliant but troubled painter Maynard Dixon. As Dorothea sheds her innocence, her purpose is awakened and she grows into the artist whose iconic Depression-era “Migrant Mother” photograph broke the hearts and opened the eyes of a nation.

A vivid and absorbing portrait of the past, The Bohemians captures a cast of unforgettable characters, including Frida Kahlo, Ansel Adams, and D. H. Lawrence. But moreover, it shows how the gift of friendship and the possibility of self-invention persist against the ferocious pull of history.

Wednesday, July 15, 2026 – 3 pm
The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever by Prudence Peiffer
In Person at CAE OR online at: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83626915665?pwd=ePSbwcSCG7xdbW6SUShYxJDerA8kbM.1

For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became the quiet epicenter of the art world. Coenties Slip, a dead-end street near the water, was home to a circle of wildly talented and varied artists that included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. As friends and inspirations to one another, they created a unique community for unbridled creative expression and experimentation, and the works they made at the Slip would go on to change the course of American art.

Now, for the first time, Prudence Peiffer pays homage to these artists and the unsung impact their work had on the direction of late twentieth-century art and film. This remarkable biography, as transformative as the artists it illuminates, questions the very concept of a “group” or “movement,” as it spotlights the Slip’s eclectic mix of gender and sexual orientation, abstraction and Pop, experimental film, painting, and sculpture, assemblage and textile works. Brought together not by the tenets of composition or technique, nor by philosophy or politics, the artists cultivated a scene at the Slip defined by a singular spirit of community and place. They drew lasting inspiration from one another, but perhaps even more from where they called home, and the need to preserve the solitude its geography fostered. Despite Coenties Slip’s obscurity, the entire history of Manhattan was inscribed into its cobblestones—one of the first streets and central markets of the new colony, built by enslaved people, with revolutionary meetings at the tavern just down Pearl Street; named by Herman Melville in Moby Dick and site of the boom and bust of the city’s maritime industry; and, in the artists’s own time, a development battleground for Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. The Slip’s history is entwined with that of the artists and their art—eclectic and varied work that was made from the wreckage of the city’s many former lives.

Wednesday, August 19, 2026 – 3 pm
The Lost Van Gogh by Jonathan Santlofer
In person at CAE or online here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84811486787?pwd=QzDWrRNaadGf9zDjObEOQTZQqJm5ZM.1

For years, there have been whispers that, before his death, Van Gogh completed a final self-portrait. Curators and art historians have savored this rumor, hoping it could illuminate some of the troubled artist’s many secrets, but even they have to concede that the missing painting is likely lost forever.

But when Luke Perrone, artist and great-grandson of the man who stole the Mona Lisa, and Alexis Verde, daughter of a notorious art thief, discover what may be the missing portrait, they are drawn into a most epic art puzzles. When only days later the painting disappears again, they are reunited with INTERPOL agent John Washington Smith in a dangerous and deadly search that will not only expose secrets of the artist’s last days but draws them into one of history’s darkest eras.

Beneath the paint and canvas, beneath the beauty and the legend, the artwork has become linked with something evil, something that continues to flourish on the dark web and on the shadiest corridors of the underground art world.

Wednesday, September 16, 2026 – 3 pm
Seeds of the Pomegranate by Suzanne Uttaro Samuels
In person at CAE or online here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83334755311?pwd=hqfKzzEPpR2aficLH0k32LxqptSU5H.1

In early 20th-century Sicily, noblewoman Mimi Inglese, a talented painter, dreams of escaping the rigid expectations of her class by gaining admission to the Palermo Art Academy. But when she contracts tuberculosis, her ambitions are shattered. With the Sicilian nobility in decline, she and her family leave for New York City in search of a fresh start.

Instead of opportunity, Mimi is pulled into the dark underbelly of city life and her father’s money laundering scheme. When he is sent to prison, desperation forces her to put her artistic talent to a new use—counterfeiting $5 bills to keep her family from starvation and, perhaps, to one day reclaim her dream of painting. But as Gangland violence escalates and tragedy strikes, Mimi must summon the courage to flee before she is trapped forever in a life she never wanted.

Wednesday, October 21, 2026 – 3 pm
Adventures in the Louvre by Elaine Sciolino
In Person at CAE OR online here: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84046272718?pwd=sYc0gKZpyoCXGheUMKwnZHbGBzS377.1

The Louvre is the most famous museum in the world, attracting millions of visitors every year with its masterpieces. In Adventures in the Louvre, Elaine Sciolino immerses herself in this magical space and helps us fall in love with what was once a forbidding fortress.

Exploring galleries, basements, rooftops, and gardens, Sciolino demystifies the Louvre, introducing us to her favorite artworks, both legendary and overlooked, and to the people who are the museum’s lifeblood: the curators, the artisans producing frames and engravings, the builders overseeing restorations, the firefighters protecting the aging structure.

Blending investigative journalism, travelogue, history, and memoir, Sciolino walks her readers through the museum’s front gates and immerses them in its irresistible, engrossing world of beauty and culture. Adventures in the Louvre reveals the secrets of this grand monument of Paris and basks in its timeless, seductive power.

Wednesday, November 18, 2026 – 3 pm
The English Masterpiece by Katherine Reay
In person at CAE or online here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88039564327?pwd=DXNnJw3JgVDCD2OpV81qUwdtWrNUra.1

As the recently promoted assistant to the Tate’s Modern Collections keeper Diana Gilden, Lily helps plan a world-class Picasso exhibit to honor the passing of the great artist–and she’s waited her whole life for this moment. The opening is beyond anyone’s expectations–the lighting, the champagne, the glittering crowd, and the international acclaim–until Lily does the unthinkable. She stops in front of a masterpiece and hears her own voice say, “It’s a forgery.” The gallery falls silent.

Lily’s boss, Diana, is polished perfection, schooled in art, and descends from European high society. She’s worked hard to become the trusted voice in London’s modern art scene and respected across the Continent. The Tate’s Picasso Commemorative is to be her crowning achievement, featuring not only the artist’s most iconic and intimate works, but a newly discovered painting–one she advised an investor to purchase. But when Lily makes her outrageous declaration, suspicion and scandal threaten everything Diana has achieved, as museums and collectors across Europe, already doubting most post-war acquisitions, fall into chaos and rumors of a world-wide forgery run wild.

All Lily has ever wanted is to follow in Diana’s footsteps and take the art world by storm in her own right. Yet one comment puts not only her own career at risk but also her mentor’s. Unless . . . Was she right? With the clock ticking and the clues starting to pile up against her, Lily must uncover the truth behind the Picasso before she loses not only the career she’s always wanted, but her freedom.

Wednesday, December 16, 2026 – 3 pm
The Porcelain Maker by Sarah Freethy
In person at CAE or online here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85334209274?pwd=9MzIt318D34yxYbAjKZXUC3PIb4t6I.1

Germany, 1929. At a festive gathering of young bohemians in Weimar, two young artists, Max, a skilled Jewish architect, and Bettina, a celebrated avant-garde painter, are drawn to each other and begin a whirlwind romance. Their respective talents transport them to the dazzling lights of Berlin, but this bright beginning is quickly dimmed by the rising threat of Nazism. Max is arrested and sent to the concentration camp at Dachau where only his talent at making exquisite porcelain figures stands between him and seemingly certain death. Desperate to save her lover, Bettina risks everything to rescue him and escape Germany.