With its contemplative atmosphere, gorgeous lighting, and dramatic backdrop, the beach is a natural place for art. Picasso loved the seaside for both its human and marine attractions, and there are plenty of ways for everyday art-lovers to bring their passion to the waterfront as well. For those who can afford it, nothing beats catching waves on a Damien Hirst-designed surfboard. For the rest of us, it's enough to spread out on one of the Art Production Fund's beach towels--designed by artists from Ed Ruscha to Jeff Koons--with a great art book. Here are a few of our summer reading picks.

Overdue shows spotlighting black artists and the legacy of the civil rights movement have been everywhere since Barack Obama's election, and this month the New Museum takes a two-pronged approach to the subject with a retrospective of work by Emory Douglas, the Black Panthers' official "revolutionary artist", and a survey of David Goldblatt's photographs of apartheid-era South Africa . The Studio Museum in Harlem will also showcase emerging black U.K. painter Hurvin Anderson. Elsewhere on the art-historical dial, fans of Expressionism will enjoy the Neue Galerie's Oskar Kokoschka exhibition, and MoMA's "In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960–1976" will examine that city's mind-expanding effect on artists.

When New York's most adventurous galleries put on shows featuring groups of their favorite artists, it helps to prioritize. Topping this month's list are the offerings at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, Harris Lieberman Gallery, Galerie Lelong, Jen Bekman Gallery, Paul Kasmin Gallery, and Bose Pacia Gallery . Then be sure to check out Deitch Projects' "Black Acid Co-Op", an exciting collaboration by Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman, whose "meth lab" piece was a hit at Art Basel Miami. Finally, Steve McQueen will screen his Buster Keaton-inspired film "Deadpan" in Times Square, and MoMA will stay open late every Thursday, providing tapas, live music, and films as part of the museum's celebration of Brazilian culture.

Emory Douglas was born in 1943 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and has been a resident of the Bay Area since 1951. He became the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party in 1967, a role he held until the party disbanded in the early 1980s. During the Party’s active years he served as the art director overseeing the design and layout of the Black Panther, the Party’s weekly newspaper. Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, Douglas made countless artworks, illustrations, and cartoons, which were reproduced in the paper and distributed as prints, posters, cards, and even sculptures. All of them utilized a straightforward graphic style and a vocabulary of images that would become synonymous with the Party and the issues it fought for.

Born in South Africa in 1930, David Goldblatt has been documenting the changing political landscape of his country for more than five decades. His photographs capture the social and moral value systems that governed the tumultuous history of his country’s segregationist policies and continue to influence its changing political landscape. Goldblatt began photographing professionally in the early 1960s, focusing on the effects of the National Party’s legislation of apartheid. The son of Jewish Lithuanian parents who fled to South Africa to escape religious persecution, Goldblatt was forced into a peculiar situation, being at once a white man in a racially segregated society and a member of a religious minority with a sense of otherness.