LIBRARY
The library at CTHQ is assembled through contributions from Creative Time’s vast and vital community of artists and practitioners. Texts and materials span genre, format and languages, and we continue to cultivate the library as a growing resource in our space.
Featured Titles
Exile and Pride: Disabiilty, Queerness, and Liberation
Eli Clare
I’d also recommend Mess And Mess And by Douglas Kearney, M Archive by Alexis Pauline Gumbs and The Gentrification of the Mind by Sarah Schulman!
– J Wortham
Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work
Edwidge Danticat
As a migrant artist this book accompanied me during the early times of my creative career, specially anytime I needed to find other migrant creatives in the field. I want to share this text with other migrant artists who may need this book!
– Sonia Guiñansaca
ABC No Rio Dinero
Alan Moore And Marc Miller, Editors
You can say it’s vain to cite my own book, but this anthology was produced with the conviction that our own collective history was important, and that if we didn’t take care of recording it no one else would. DIY in 1985. The experience of assembling the book with Marc, and working with the different artists involved, conditioned the rest of both our lives.
– Alan W Moore
The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis
Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh connects our climate crisis to Western colonialism and calls for restoring nonhuman voices and agency to our stories. He begins with the nutmeg tree, finds the human body more like a coral reef than a single species, and knows trees may someday garden us. I thought with “The Nutmeg’s Curse” while making the first iteration of “Meditation Ocean”, a collaborative, iterative project working for climate justice through underwater meditations and terrestrial actions. The two works share a vitalist politics and a belief that humans and more than humans live in constellation with one another.
– Hope Ginsburg
Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism
Arielle Aisha Azoulay
I am obsessed with Arielle’s idea that we can bend time and history to offer our solidarities. This book is part of an essential arc of undoing and redoing central to my work in which opening our imaginations to what might be is essential.
– Laura Raicovich
Everything You Know About Indians is Wrong
Paul Chaat Smith
This book has been central to my artistic practice – Smith’s essays weave humor, criticism, and a grounded sensibility to explore how images make and shape our realities.
– Adam Khalil
Complete Index
Sorting by ALPHABETICAL (TITLE)
1984
George Orwell
1949
The book 1984 is influenced by the time of its creation and directly reacts to totalitarian regimes, and it gave me an absolute basis in realizing what I grew up in and understanding a number of things in Czechoslovakia. The book helped me understand the concept of FREEDOM and how each of us can significantly influence them, and this is what I constantly strive for in my work.– Kateřina Šedá
ABC No Rio Dinero
Alan Moore And Marc Miller, Editors
1985
You can say it’s vain to cite my own book, but this anthology was produced with the conviction that our own collective history was important, and that if we didn’t take care of recording it no one else would. DIY in 1985. The experience of assembling the book with Marc, and working with the different artists involved, conditioned the rest of both our lives.
– Alan W Moore
all about love
Bell Hooks
2001
After the overturning of Roe v. Wade, I was heartbroken, angry, and exhausted. A dear friend and collaborator gave this book to me when I wasn’t sure I could summon the sense of purpose or energy to continue to do the work; to advocate, to support myself and my community, to continue to create space for the challenging conversations that still need to happen.– Jodi Waynberg
Animals As Legal Beings
Maneesha Deckha
2022
This book will make the practice of eating animals a thing of the past which then can preserve life on Earth. The title appears in my painted and printed lists on paper. I hope that I will obtain permission to include the entire text in my book/art and sculpture.– Diana Wege
Art and Climate Change
Maja And Reuben Fowkes
2022
It is a careful and meaningful analysis of eco-conscious art practices that establish amidst climate breakdown. It helped me a lot to formulate my own artistic responses on and during times of a climate emergency.– Oliver Ressler
Art As Social Action
Sholette And Chloë Bass
2018
“Art as Social Action . . . is an essential guide to deepening social art practices and teaching them to students.” ―Laura Raicovich, president and executive director, Queens Museum– Gregory Sholette
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet
Anna Tsing, Elaine Gan, Et Al
A great anthology on multispecies struggle in the Anthropocene– Terike Haapoja
As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation
Zoé Samudzi And William C. Anderson
2018
Zoé Samudzi’s and William C. Anderson’s As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation is an important and accessible tool for contending with many contradictions in U.S. culture regarding rights, personhood, and democracy. Their attention to how the white imagination and idea of white innocence dominates antiracism approaches and their advocacy for a collective care ethos has helped me to identify and derail violent institutional practices in hegemonic museums. This focus also supports my efforts to make my curatorial praxis work in partnership with and alongside communities fighting networked forces of capitalist anti-Black, patriarchal racial-coloniality.– La Tanya S. Autry
BENGAL DIVIDED: HINDU COMMUNALISM AND PARTITION, 1932–1947
Joya Chatterji
1994
After 25 years, this is still one of the most thorough analyses of the root causes of Partition. Chatterji goes beyond the typical explanations which emphasize British intrigue, national factions, and the escalating violence around 1947. Instead, she reaches back to the first partition of Bengal in 1905 and then traces how the politics of the Hindu bhadralok class ossified around land ownership that excluded Muslims and lower-caste Hindus. The Partition of Bengal became “inevitable” as a result of a toxic mixture of entrenched privileges that could only be preserved in “Bengal divided”.– Naeem Mohaiemen
Black Futures
Kimberly Drew And Jenna Wortham
2020
The book is a creative inspiration for us- it’s collection of liberated and emancipated futures illustrated through text, images and art. In our work at CAB we are often working with communities, like CAAAV’s Chinatown Tenants Union – where we are fighting the day to day conditions (evictions, landlord harassment, big developers) but we often don’t make the time to dream and envision we want to create together. It’s great to see how artists, activists and collectives have articulated their visions.– Betty Yu
Black, White, and in Color
Hortense Spillers
N//A– J Wortham
Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology
Astrida Neimani
2017
A text in which hyfrofeminism offers a powerful tool to visualize and act upon interdependency.– Ilaria Conti
Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body And Primitive Accumulation
Silvia Federici
2004
Crucial perspective on the underpinnings of the human condition.– A.l. Steiner
CAMP status! Seven Years of Engaging Art on Migration Politics
Edited And Published By Camp / Center For Art On Migration Politics’ Founders And Curators, Frederikke Hansen & Tone Olaf Nielsen
2020
CAMP status! is edited by CAMP’s founders and curators, Frederikke Hansen & Tone Olaf Nielsen, and tells the complete story of CAMP’s foundation and its unique production of migration engaged exhibitions, events, publications, and educational programs from 2013–2020. The publication reflects on CAMP’s methodologies and conclusions and presents, in addition to a detailed chronology, a series of essays by Matthias Hvass Borello, Frederikke Hansen & Tone Olaf Nielsen, Anders Juhl & Marianne Ping Huang, Sabine Dahl Nielsen & Anne Ring Petersen, and a conversation between CAMP’s founders and Nora El Qadim. One aim of the publication is to contribute to the documentation of those contemporary artists of the 2010s, who dealt with issues of decolonization, racism, and migration politics. Another aim of the book is to serve as a guide of sorts for anyone interested in establishing new exhibition venues focused on ethical, political, and politicized issues. The publication is designed by artist and graphic designer Kristina Ask / Print Matters! and is printed in a 60-page hardcover edition. Available in Danish and in English.– Tone Olaf Nielsen
Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State
Sam Stein
2019
We have collaborated with Sam Stein in the past, his book and past research articles about gentrification in Chinatown and displacement have really helped us sharpen our analysis of the system of displacement operates (the role of real estate developers, the state, and art washing) CAB member, Betty included a chapter of his book in her Queens Museum piece and it was featured in a study group discussion through her Apexart show she curated– Betty Yu
Colonize This!
Edited By Daisy Hernandez & Bushra Rehman
In my first year in college I entered political spaces that felt broken and lacked nuance. This book brought range of BIPOC contributors that offered me language, framework around concepts of feminism and intersectionality. Crucial to my political learning and unlearning. So much was learned from this book which I apply now to my cultural work. A decade later I was also asked to contribute to this 2nd edition of the anthology.– Sonia Guiñansaca
Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work
Edwidge Danticat
As a migrant artist this book accompanied me during the early times of my creative career, specially anytime I needed to find other migrant creatives in the field. I want to share this text with other migrant artists who may need this book!
– Sonia Guiñansaca
Čtyřlístek
Jaroslav Němeček, Ljuba Štíplová
1969-1970
I was fundamentally influenced by the Czech comic Four-leaf clover, which I read non-stop in my childhood. The quartet of animals that live together in a common house in the fictional village of Třeskoprsky was for me an image of friendship and a functioning society. Each of them knew something – the cat Myšpulín was a bright inventor, the pig Bobík was a fearless strongman, the female Fifinka was a good housewife and the hare Pinďa was an excellent runner. Only by working together could they solve everything, and that was the essential thing that I learned in “literature” at the time. I understand that it may seem small to some, but I really draw from it to this day.– Kateřina Šedá
Culture and Imperialism
Edward W. Said
1993
Edward W. Said’s Culture and Imperialism should be required reading. While it focuses on literature, the book elucidates a great deal more broadly about the role of aesthetics and culture in furthering imperialism. In doing so, it exposes roots of various exploitative practices that pervade the arts, museums, funding, etc. Said’s attention to counternarratives is vital. Too often we don’t learn about the many ways people fought domination. As an art historian and curator, Culture and Imperialism helps me oppose that persistent neutrality myth/scam that various people in hegemonic museum spaces use to maintain and consolidate power for themselves.– La Tanya S. Autry
Curating and the Educational Turn
Paul O’neil And Mick Wilson Eds.
2010
I’m co-organizing a triennial at the ICA at VCU about the intersection of art and education. As an educator in accredited programs who also works with artists who use education as a medium in alternative structures, I’m interested in the ways that institutional and anti-institutional pedagogical models can learn from one another. This anthology of texts surveys many of the practitioners and initiatives during the educational turn in both curatorial and artistic practice in the early 21st century. I want to share this with others who are interested in education as a tool for art and politics.– Noah Simblist
Decolonizing Wealth
Edgar Villanueva
2018
Decolonizing Wealth is another excellent book for all of us in the nonprofit sector to understand how the money works. Villanueva is coming at his discussion from the point of view of a foundation program officer and a tribally enrolled Native American. He is great at uncovering what he calls the altruistic façade of the nonprofit funding sector, and makes usable suggestions on how we can decolonize our organizations.– Tom Finkelpearl
DESHE BIDESHE [IN A LAND FAR FROM HOME]
Syed Mujtaba Ali
1948
A novelist and raconteur, Ali was rendered spiritually bereft by the 1947 Partition, and spent many years in Kolkata, far from his family in East Bengal. Though his European travels are widely quoted, it is this story of Afghanistan that was his most popular book. While many humorous elements that reappear in his later travel stories are already present here, including the faithful manservant who alternates between comedy and pathos, the real reveal are the signs of the ‘great game’ being played out in Afghanistan 1927-1929. Bandits and royals battle, while British diplomats and Russian officers plan intrigues.– Naeem Mohaiemen
Design & Solidarity
Rafi Segal And Marisa Morán Jahn; Contributors Include Ai-jen Poo, Arturo Escobar, Michael Hardt, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, And Others
2023
So I’m humbly suggesting to donate this book I’ve published — but not because I wrote it but because my interlocutors/contributors have profoundly influenced my work and I think their perspectives are helpful to other artists. In addition, I strove to make some of the contributors’ work and thoughts *accessible* through dialogue.– Marisa Morán Jahn
Designs for the Pluriverse
Arturo Escobar
2018
As an activist and design anthropologist from Colombia, Arturo Escobar’s work is highly relevant to today’s conversations about (de)futuring and epistemological pluralism. He’s articulate, offering critical perspectives that should be shared with every art and design student.– Marisa Morán Jahn
Dialogues in public art,” Mierle Laderman Ukeles: On Maintenance and Sanitation Art.
Tom Finkelpearl
2001
It succinctly joins feminism, public art, politics, how to be an artist, etc. It is a breezy read in interview form. Mierle Laderman Ukeles is a role model for me. Her influence in my work can be seen in my insistence on preserving intimacy even as I try to scale up the reach of my public projects.– Paul Ramirez Jonas
Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment
Leslie Kanes Weisman
1994
Insightful perspective on the history and power function of built structures that relate gender inequality and male dominance. This reading has been a source of inspiration and guidance. It served to complement and broaden my vocabulary towards observations I had already made.– William Cordova
Dylan Robinson
Hungry Listening
2020
I recommend this all the time for an example of how opacity—the right to transparency—can and should be claimed by and for those whose cultural survival can only be ensured by operating outside of the white gaze.– Aruna D’souza
Everything You Know About Indians is Wrong
Paul Chaat Smith
This book has been central to my artistic practice – Smith’s essays weave humor, criticism, and a grounded sensibility to explore how images make and shape our realities.
– Adam Khalil
Exile and Pride: Disabiilty, Queerness, and Liberation
Eli Clare
I’d also recommend Mess And Mess And by Douglas Kearney, M Archive by Alexis Pauline Gumbs and The Gentrification of the Mind by Sarah Schulman!
– J Wortham
Fascist Pigs
Tiago Saraiva
It’s a great book about fascism and pigs. Good for anyone working on political ecology.– Terike Haapoja
Feminist International: How to Change Everything
Véronica Gago
Drawing on her experiences in the Latin American feminist Ni Una Menos movement, Véronica Gago helps us envision collective revolution from the ground up.– Julia Bryan-wilson
Framer Framed
Trinh T. Minh-ha
1992
“Framer Framed” interrogates western framing of Indigenous and Post-Colonial societies through the scripts and visuals of three of Trin T. Minh-ha’s films.– Ghana Thinktank
From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public
Bruno Latour
2005
Deep thinking about presenting evidence as a fundamental element of political practice– Thomas Keenan
Get the Message/ A decade of Art for Social Change
Lucy Lippard
1984
This feminist reader on art for social change from the 1974 to 1984 offers key historical texts and analysis.– Laura Raicovich
Go to Yan’an: Culture and National Liberation
Tricontinental: Institute For Social Research
2022
The publication recovers the history of the Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature in 1942 in China, bringing together hundreds of cultural workers and revolutionaries to discuss over three weeks the relationship between art and politics, and in the concrete practices of revolutionary struggle. https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-yanan-forum/– Tings Chak
Hip-Hop as Philosophical Text and Testimony: Can I Get A Witness?
Lissa Skitolsky
December 2020
I first met Lissa Skitolsky at a conference for Genocide and Holocaust studies where we both were presenting lectures. Hearing or reading Lissa’s work is like the feeling of a lightbulb turning on in my mind. She clarifies and identifies the matter of white supremacy as a pathology and its intersections with Black philosophy and Hip-Hop. She was one of the first people, and with this book, to make me feel seen–to help me shed feelings of cognitive dissonance while living as a Black man in America.– Donchristian Jones
How to Start and Run and Commercial Art Gallery
Edward Winkleman
2009
The book was a beautiful starting place when I decided to open a gallery. Incredibly thought provoking and informative.– Hannah Traore
Hungry Listening
Dylan Robinson
2020
There is what Dylan names hungry listening and there is niicugni, which in Yugtun means pay attention. There is extractivism and there are reciprocal relations. Hungry Listening, the book is a practice of listening through sovereignty; it de-centers self and suggests an understanding of listening as “an ecology in which we are not only listening but listened to.” There is a chapter settlers are asked not to read. Dylan writes an articulation of a particular sense and I recognize it because it is how I aim to work with, understand and pay attention with and to all of my senses.– Emily Johnson
I wanted to carve out a world both culture specific and race-free’: an essay by Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison
August 8 2019
“History versus memory, and memory versus memorylessness. Rememory as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past. And it was the struggle, the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting, that became the device of the narrative. The effort to both remember and not know became the structure of the text.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/08/toni-morrison-rememory-essay Not the Only One literally proclaims– ‘I am your rememory’– Stephanie Dinkins
In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life
Bell Hooks
1995
Although the entire book (Art on My Mind) is great, this essay stands out particularly for its personal and direct writing style, its relatability and generosity, and its ability to use personal example as a way to demonstrate larger social conclusions about the power of image-making, image-arrangement, and image interpretation over time. I can never forget this one, not matter how many images I make and display as part of my practice. It only becomes more relevant.– Chloë Bass
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
1952
When I finally read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison I was in my thirties. It was hard to believe I had not read the text in high school. The book seemed so central to understanding America that it convinced me we were choosing to keep our collective heads in the sand as a nation. One line from the book “The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead” has become a guiding thought for my work. Looking at the American project from this lens one can easily deduce substantial course correction is needed. The statement also suggests we have the responsibility to do all in our individual and collective powers to start new endeavors well with the entire collective in mind and/or to make efforts to improve faults in the foundation, blatant injustices, blind spots, or worse.– Stephanie Dinkins
Jurnal d’Usine ( Factory Journal)
Simone Weil
1934-1935
A book, I wish I had read earlier. I much admire her engagement and proximity. Philosopher and teacher, Simone Weil wanted to understand what mean to be a worker in an assembly line. She got a job in Renault factory during one year ( 1934) and she describe her experience in the ‘Factory Journal’.– Lara Almarcegui
Kakala
Konai Helu Thaman
1993
“A collection of poetry that provides insight into her experiences as a Tongan woman in the realm of academia within non-Tongan contexts/societies.” – https://creativetalanoa.com/2012/03/12/kakala-by-dr-konai-helu-thaman/– Ghana Thinktank
Kin-dling and other Radical Relationalities
Emily Johnson And Karyn Recollet
2019
Karyn Recollet and I wrote this about our ongoing process into and with the kinstillatory. We ask of this collective work, how do we make consensual, nurturing, respectful, and loving relationships with one another, the lands we occupy, our more-than-human kin on earth, with stars and constellations, ancestors, and beings yet to come? It is ongoing work, accompanied by monthly fires held at Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side of Mannahatta and we invite you to GATHER HERE. A lot is happening in the time/space envelope of the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. This is a practice of provocating. This is an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.– Emily Johnson
La cultura del trabajo
Santiago Eraso Beloki
This article opened to me a new way to think the idea of work in many ranges from that of “duty” that haunts our lives like the ghost of a religious faith essentially directed firmly against any carefree enjoyment of life and the joys it offers, to linking our lives with a kind of moral asceticism of productive effort is closely linked to our condition as disciplined subjects. The culture of work continues to be understood as a sign and path of individual self-sufficiency. The goal is for humanity to stop treating the relationship with work as the center of gravity of all its social and individual activities.– Alonso Gil
Las tres ecologías
Félix Guattari
Editorial PRE-TEXTOS Traducción de José Vásquez Pérez y Umbelina Larraceleta
This publication showed to me that ecological disturbances of the environment are only the visible part of a deeper and more considerable evil, related to the ways of living and being in society on this planet. It is about making innovative practices intertwine in individual and collective subjectivities, within new technical-scientific contexts and new geopolitical coordinates.– Alonso Gil
Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
1929
The letters address the poetic power of honoring, loving, and living questions. But not just any questions because enquiries illicit answers in their likeness. If you ask a combative question, you’ll get a combative answer. If you ask a simplistic question, you’ll get a simplistic answer. But the opposite is also true. It’s hard to resist a generous question. We are fluently trained to ask blunt materialistic, capitalistic, questions. Reading these letters reminds me to ask questions of moral imagination. It inspires me to ask better quality of questions that draw forth searching, dignity, and transformation.– Ed Woodham
Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
1903-1908
I am constantly travelling and carry very little with me. Only one book stays by my side, like a bible continuously healing. It supports me to enter deep spaces of solitude and reflection with courage. In its exploration of love, connecting with one’s inner world, god – this profound spirituality supports me in connecting my creativity to the vast energies beyond me, and to draw from the world that surrounds me. If my practice is my transformation and my life, then hopefully this leaning in or leaning outwards is visible. (This book has been of immense value to me post-burnout.)– Chantal Wong
Mama Looking For Her Cat
Kuo Pao Kun
1988
Mama Looking For Her Cat is constantly floating in and out and around the ways I think about the multiplicity of ways in which individuals communicate with each other across vast cultural and linguistic differences.– Heman Chong
Maria Thereza Alves: Seeds of Change:
Many
2023
Plant seeds harbor many histories. Those dumped in port areas in Europe and the East Coast during colonial time, are another evidence of the colonial trade of enslaved people.. Maria Thereza Alves investigates this history through botany in a 20-year art project, Seeds of Change.– Carin Kuoni
Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary
Leigh Claire La Berge
2023
Reading between the lines of this book, you will find a love affair. This book is evidence of a partnership in anticapitalist praxis that I share with Leigh Claire (the author). During the years that she wrote this book, we decided to have a child. We named our son Lion to reimagine the figure of the imperial Lion as an accomplice, working with the Black Panther, the Sabotabby, and the witch’s cat. Leigh Claire thinks about current events in the context of 400 years. I ask: What do we do, today?– Caroline Woolard
Midnights Children
Salman Rushdie
I read the book when I was very young. It told me more about the complexity of South Asia’s past and Partition than any school history book– Shilpa Gupta
Museum Metamorphosis
Nico Wheadon
2022
This publication was written by a peer and should be read by anyone navigating the artworld through museums or institutions who are interested in transforming the archaic models that are in place. This book explores us who are often underrepresented yet the majority population to reimagine the role of institutions and how our work and ideas are situation in these frameworks. I have learned so much from this publication as my practice continues to grow, on how to be conscious of the need for systemic change and tangible transformative actions in the artoworld as we move forward collectively.– Cannupa Hanska Luger
Museums and Wealth
Nizan Shaked
2022
If we are really getting serious about exposing the financial underpinnings of our cultural institutions — I am not throwing any stones! This inclues including the Queens Museum where I worked for years and of course Creative Time which is asking for this recommendation — then a great start is with texts like this. In this book, Shaked takes a deep dive into the influence of wealth in the non-profit arts sector. We’re all implicated. At the very least we should understand how.– Tom Finkelpearl
My Cocaine Museum
Michael Taussig
It was the first time I could grasp Marxist theory and how it relates to a material practice as an artist. Taussig has an incredible way of drawing theory into everyday life. He is a shape shifter. Text is his medium, but stories he wraps into his marxist critique of capitalism become dimensional, vibrant, animated images that will invoke any artist to manifest their ideas. This book has informed over a decade of work which can be found in our survey exhibition book: In Place, Out of Place. We were blessed by an essay that Michael Taussig wrote for us called Gloves and Bread. https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/58257/– Amy Franceschini
Nicomedes Santa Cruz. Obras Completas I. Poesia (1949 – 1989)
Nicomedes Santa Cruz
1990
Nicomedes Santa Cruz’s poetry is grounded is onomatopoeic and reverberates a turbulent fluidity of Afro Peruvian rituals, customs, vernacular that ascribe metaphysical rhythms that shape and reshape structural awareness. This resource impacted my process in further forming my visual tenants in filmmaking, sculpture and installation. There is a constant syncopation that cascades within my work due to Nicomedes Santa Cruz’s poetry.– William Cordova
Nominalisme pictural – Marcel Duchamp, la peinture et la modernité
Thierry De Duve
1984
I understood in reading this book, why by signing a Ready-Made – which has no signature – Marcel Duchamp does not eradicate the signature as sign of autorship, but reinforces it by asserting it – he creates a new concept of author. To read this book impacted my life because Thierry De Duve minutely, pitilessly describes the type of school I studied, the ‘Kunstgewerbeschule’. This school is somewhere between the ‘Bauhaus’, the ‘Werkbund’, and different other types of schools. It was precious to me, to read their influences because the author, in doing so, took my dreams as artist seriously.– Thomas Hirschhorn
On Decoloniality
Walter D. Mignolo
2018
I like very much the wildness of their writing style of Walter, besides his true belief and passion for the subject of the book. The book help me in my research in Kyrgystan related to the ambivalent topic of Russian and post soviet imperialism.– Gluklya ( Natalia ) Pershina
Pandaemonium, 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers
Humphrey Jennings
1985
This resource was read in 1987 as part of research for Hidden Cities exhibition , which I held in my studio in a former Textiles factory in Footscray, Melbourne Australia. I was 25 at the time and it rocked my sculpture world as to the perils of industrialisation, the demise of nature and environment, and the inability of humans to make change. For a young artist then it was the intense approach to research that I have followed since, and especially when we were being well warned of greenhouse gas effects at that time.– Huhana Smith
Paranoid and Reparative Reading or You’re so Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay is About You
Eve Kosofsky Sedwick
1972
I think it’s an important work for this moment, to help us move toward repairing what is damaged. In my own work, it has led away from critiquing how things are and proposing new ways that things could be. It’s visible in my practice in that I am always trying to model new and ameliorative ways of being together.– Darren O’donnell
Performing Civic Identity: The Iconic Photograph of the Flag Raising on Iwo Jima
Robert Hariman And John Louis Lucaites
2002 – https://sites.uni.edu/fabos/seminar/readings/Harriman.pdf
The photograph of Raising the Flag is iconic. It marks a turning point in History when the US wins the second World War. This image became and continues to a symbol for nationalism, and everything is marks and represents. It is also an example of how powerfully complex, layered with meanings, dangerous and manipulative images can be. I studied this text when I moved to the US and started to teach Photography & Media. It influenced the way I taught. It confirmed the importance of the project I was doing on the history of protests and revolts and inform my research on the iconography of conflicts and revolutions.– Lara Baladi
Perspective as Symbolic Form
Erwin Panofsky
I read this text maybe 30 years ago, and it changed the way I see things… the way I see “seeing”, and representation. It made me aware that seeing isn’t merely a biological act that coincided with looking.– Tony Chakar
Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary
Ashish Kothari, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria,, Alberto Acosta
October 1, 2019
This book is a rich resource of different perspectives and analysis on environmental issues and how they impact and shape human life across the world. Reading this book expanded my perspective on how different communities are conceptualizing, analyzing, and ultimately fighting The book’s hyper-collaborative spirit reflects my own collaborative process where I rely on building and fostering relationships with various communities and audiences. The differences of voices and experiences allows for the complexity of these issues revolving the environment, shared resources, and human life, a comparative way of understanding environmental struggles.– Carolina Caycedo
Politics of Art
Hanan Toukan
2021
Toukan weaves and unravels stories of complex aesthetic production in 3 cities where art making is both challenging and revelatory as political practice.– Eric Gottesman
Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism
Arielle Aisha Azoulay
2019
I am obsessed with Arielle’s idea that we can bend time and history to offer our solidarities. This book is part of an essential arc of undoing and redoing central to my work in which opening our imaginations to what might be is essential.
– Laura Raicovich
Practicas creativas de re-existencia
Adolfo Alban Achinte
2006
This book has been central to my curatorial practice. The notion of “resistance as re-existence” that Achinte articulates when discussing potential futures of Afrodescendent communities in Colombia is a powerful tool to forge paths toward epistemic justice, as the “form of life alter-active to the Eurocentric hegemonic project.”– Ilaria Conti
Propaganda Art in the 21st Century – The MIT Press
Jonas Staal
– Prerana Reddy
Przewodnik Krytyki Politycznej
Artur Żmijewski
2012
What about this text makes you want to share it with others? This text discusses the controversial and thought-provoking work of contemporary artist Artur Żmijewski. The text suggests that his art extends beyond the traditional realm of art, drawing from politics, scientific discourse, and social movements. It also highlights his experimentation with audiences and other creators, and his involvement as a curator at the Berlin Biennale. However, the text argues that his work actually confronts viewers with their own shame and discomfort, challenging societal and psychological resistance and the temptation of cynicism. Sharing this text with others can spark a conversation about the role of art in society, its boundaries, and its ability to provoke reflection and challenge conventional thinking. The controversial nature of Żmijewski’s work invites debate and may lead to interesting discussions on the artist’s intentions and the impact of his art on viewers. How has this resource impacted your creative process? The original text about his art has made me ponder the role of art in society and the ways it can provoke reflection and challenge conventional thinking. As an artist myself, I find Żmijewski’s confrontational approach and his focus on societal and psychological resistance to be particularly thought-provoking. His seemingly shameless art actually confronts viewers with their own shame and discomfort, challenging them to face difficult topics and emotions. The impact of this resource on my creative process has been significant. Żmijewski’s work has inspired me to consider tackling challenging subjects in my own art and to provoke deeper reflection in my audience. I’ve come to appreciate the power of art to engage people in meaningful conversations and potentially spark social change. How is this text visible in your practice? (as I described above).– Tomáš Rafa
Public Servants: Art and Crisis of the Common Good
Joanna Burton, Shannon Jackson, Dominic Wilsdon
2016
We edited this book to collect thinkers and artists who work at the intersection between art and public service and take seriously issues of publicness, service, and institutional resources. We’d be happy to donate a copy of the book– Shannon Jackson
Publics and Counter Publics, Chapter 2
Warner, Michael
2002
This text is a clear, and jargon free, way to understand public sphere theory as it relates to the arts. It has given me a lot of the language I use to discuss making art in the public realm. It is also a tremendous alternative to art as critique of the status quo AND art as conforming to the status quo. Its fingerprints are all over my work.– Paul Ramirez Jonas
Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Making of a Political Space
Wu Hung
2005
China and the Chinese context is understood only superficially by art audiences in the US, if not wholly misunderstood. With this study Wu Hung provides an English language readership with a cultural anthropology of one of the world’s key urban spaces, given its history at once celebrated and notorious. Being a symbol of so many aspects of China, Chinese civilization, and Chinese political culture, not mention a usable (if heavily policed) site, many contemporary artists have addressed Tiananmen Square in their work. This is the book that unpacks the many layers of meaning sited in Tiananmen.– Dan S. Wang
REST IS RESISTANCE: A MANIFESTO
Tricia Hersey
2022?
This book is rooted in spiritual energy and centered in Black liberation, womanism, somatics, and Afrofuturism. All the things I love. Dreamwork has been a part of my upbringing and practice my whole life but Tricia really opened my eyes to the path of collective dreaming. I’ve been so blessed to work with the Nap Bishop herself through my work There Are Black People In The Future and An Invitation for Black and Indigenous artists to Dream a collaborative with Kite – which led to Cosmologies our Creative Time Project.– Alisha Wormsley
Rules for Radicals
Saul Alinsky
1971
This essential text from Saul Alinsky that outlines a lot of his organizing work and strategies in Chicago helps to give a sense of the history in that city that made it such a hub of socially engaged artists working there in the decades that followed and the spirit they brought to the work.– Jen Delos Reyes
Seven
Anita Agnihotri
For its lyricism and rawness– Shilpa Gupta
SHARE COVER IMAGE Race and Modern Architecture A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present
Edited By Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis Ii, Mabel O. Wilson
2020
A must read for understanding the history for how we live, work and play in cities. It gave me more depth and rigor for understanding the Why. It’s a living text that we reference on everything that we do. It’s reference book that I use on every project.– Marquise Stillwell
Signature Evet Context
Jacques Derrida
1971 (French), 1998 (best English translation)
Breathtaking analysis of language and its power.– Thomas Keenan
Simulacra and Simulation
Jean Baudrillard
2017 (originally published in French in 1994)
This reality reframing text by Jean Baudrillard is an exercise in thinking more deeply about how mediations and translations of human experience shape the way we understand the world around us and in turn, ourselves. For me, this text has been a springboard for deep interrogation of media and visual culture as both places for liberation and oppression. How can we both enact and make visible the ideas and hopes for liberation while moving within a space of capitalist culture that shapes how we understand what’s possible? Though this text can be hard to read, with some time, it can open space for thinking radically about how we move, what we stand in (our reality) and what we stand for (our future). I hope this text brings expansive thinking about how we approach defining, making and living our futures.– Sheetal Prajapati
Social Works
Shannon Jackson
2011
I wrote this book to understand relations between performance and social practice; it’s publication coincided with me speaking at the 2012 Creative Summit when Occupy started. I’d be happy to donate a physical copy.– Shannon Jackson
Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics
Shannon Jackson
– Prerana Reddy
Spider Speculations: The biophysics of storytelling
Jo Carson
mid-2000s
Jo’s writing is a pathway for socially engaged theater artists to daydream new modes of storytelling. What do you hear in community stories that creates dynamic and complex plays? Lean into conflict and complexity.– Ashley Sparks
Spiral as Ritual
Shanekia Mcintosh
December 2021
This book of poems provided me immense solace, calm, and feelings of resilience amidst the pandemic and global socio-political strife. As a Black and Queer person, I needed these words at this time, and will always return to these poems for support and fellowship– Donchristian Jones
Staying with the Trouble
Donna J. Haraway
2016
Harraway´s notions of speculative fabulation are a positive tool for imagining better futures, contrary to other end of the world tales, Harraway gives agency to the reader by insisting on the importance of the collective (making kin) as a way to deal with the challenging times.– Pia Camil
Studies Into Darkness: The Perils and Promise of Freedom of Speech
Many
2022
As the Trump regime demonstrated through its abuse of 1st amendment, freedom of speech can lead to violence and death and needs to be considered v carefully.– Carin Kuoni
Temporary Autonomous Zone
Hakim Bey
1991
This book came into my hands in my early twenties. From chaos and dissent it made me see the possibility of existing poetically and politically. In practice, I saw myself living outside the structure and sailing like a pirate through the streets of my city.– Adriana García Galán
The Against Nature Journal (T.A.N.J. #1 THINKING THROUGH RELIGION)
Council, Legal Agenda, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut
2020
This interdisciplinary intersectional publication draws from diverse fields (theology, law, medicine, gender and LGBTQI activism) to map out the ways that the concept of nature has been misused in defining values, social and knowledge constructs that justify oppression and criminalisation of homosexuality. The depth and range of this journals content powerfully presents the ways constructed beliefs and language unconsciously condition our biases and truths. I am committed to designing spaces where we encounter diverse views, beliefs and embodied experiences that chafe at assumptions and belief systems.– Chantal Wong
The Arab Apocalypse
Etel Adnan
This is a seminal text capturing postcolonial feminist + queer aesthetics in civil war-era Lebanon. The cosmic, dissonant, chaotic poetic form informs my work as a DJ, writer, programmer and thinker.– Shirine Saad
The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art
Sholette
2022
“You don’t decide to become an activist, somehow while watching the wounds of the world twirl around you, it seeps into the blood, commanding your attention and demanding actions that push against the tides of tradition. Sholette has focused all of his work, his teaching/writing and his life on confronting systems of power that left unchecked could destroy us all.” Carrie Mae Weems– Gregory Sholette
The Art of the Revolution will be Internationalist
Tricontinental: Institute For Social Research
2018
This dossier traces the history of graphic production in post-Revolutionary Cuba, particularly through OSPAAAL. Cuba, once a darling of U.S. imperialism, would carve its own path towards socialism. Among the Revolution’s inheritances was a well-developed means of mass communication and a U.S.-trained labour force. Overnight these advertising experts and art school kids would turn into the graphic artists of the Cuban Revolution. Like the artists of the Cuban Revolution, it is the imperative of cultural workers of today to seize what we know in order to dream and to construct a world that is not only possible, but necessary. https://thetricontinental.org/the-art-of-the-revolution-will-be-internationalist/– Tings Chak
The Black Family Reunion Cookbook: Recipes & Food Memories from the National Council of Negro Women, Inc
National Research Council
1992
Blackness grows and shifts on a daily basis and one place we can check in on whats hannaneen is the family reunion. This collection is personal, written by people that love food but also, clearly, love each other, and all of each other (where applicable). In part this is an inspiration for the cookbook I just put out, Lunch With Leroy At Home, Vol. 1.– Azikiwe Mohammed
The Cheese and the Worms
Carlo Ginzburg
1976
I think historical scope and depth is a good thing for contemporary artists to care about. This book is a pleasure to read but also theoretically significant, a book about the oppressed (a modest farmer who dared have his own cosmology), reconstructed from the records of the oppressor (the Inquisition). My work often uses the past to allow us to deal with difficult present matters and this book has always been a great model.– Pedro Lasch
The Civil Contract of Photography
Ariella Azoulay
Dec 18, 2012 – https://jpgenrgb.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/ariella-azoulay-the-civil-contract-of-photography.pdf
This text has become foundational to understanding the responsibility we have as humans in relation to participating in, producing and consuming images.– Lara Baladi
The Darker Side of the Renaissance
Walter Mignolo
1995
Given that people are finally paying attention to decolonial thought, I think it is important to read this foundational work. Many other endeavors, political and artistic, have been influenced by this work. My black mirror series has become an ongoing dialogue with this book’s arguments and research.– Pedro Lasch
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Jane Jacobs
1961
Jacob’s classic accessible work continues to timely illustrate elements of the ideal urban community. It supports opposition to the current urban fairy tales of the luxury-city that disregards the importance of natural limits of density, diversity, landmark historic buildings, and small businesses that employ thousands of workers. She reminds us of the vitality of civic space and how it bolsters our well-being. Residents and shopkeepers (my audience for public visual and performance art) are naturally drawn to the life of the street, and who, in the course of their activities, closely observe patterns and actions.– Ed Woodham
The Egg and the Sperm
Emily Martin
1991
“The Egg and the Sperm”, Emily Martin’s foundational text in feminist science studies, invites us to reconsider scientific metaphor as something that has social and cultural context, and indeed an arena where we can make new choices aligned with a feminist future. Many people are indoctrinated into the false conception that science is a set of closed objective conclusions, rather than an open, dynamic, and continuously changing conversation. Emily’s call-to-action to “wake the sleeping metaphors in science” is a core principle that I engage in every work I carry out.– Janani Balasubramanian
The Field of Cultural Production
Pierre Bourdieu
1993, English translation
During my academic study, this book helped me to understand better, and to devise methods for investigating cultural history within the artworld. It built my sense of the field begun by Laurence Alloway’s article, “Network: The Art World Described as a System”, Artforum, September 1972.– Alan W Moore
The Four Pivots
Shawn A Ginwright, Phd
2021
This book weaves together action and protocol to mindfully engage in community (art)work, which extends beyond the making of an object to affect longterm change.This book shows how healing must be at the root of all (art)work paying attention to social change, narrative change and even decolonization. As I remain committed to practicing longterm actionable care for the communities, materials and ideas I am working with, this book reminds me when it’s time to check back in on the core values of a project and those who may be impacted by it.– Cannupa Hanska Luger
THE FUTURE IS DISABLED: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-samarasinha
2022
Leah writes about disability justice at the end of the world. I love everything Leah writes because they seem to write what so many of us feel but struggle to say. I want to share this text for any sick and disabled people, especially high risk and immunocompromised people, who might be feeling extreme isolation and are wondering what a future might look like, when most of us have died and the rest of us are surviving a pandemic that the world refuses to acknowledge is ongoing.– Carolyn Lazard
The Hundreds
Lauren Berlant And Kathleen Stewart
2019
The Hundreds is both a deeply personal and a deeply political piece of writing that demonstrates the importance of affect (emotion) as an interpretive element for everyday life, the power of collaboration (in this case for writers, but I believe it goes beyond that), and the importance of limitations as an element of creative practice. It’s fun, easy, and inspirational to read, and leaves a lasting sense of deep thought for the reader.– Chloë Bass
The Jungle
Upton Sinclair
1906
It launched my second book (bookart) of canon of environmental literature. The first anthology professed the sanctity of land. The second expounds on the sanctity of animals. I will include the entire text in the book. I have also used the title in a painting and a print that are simply lists of significant books that I believe, if read by a critical mass of people, will bring about what could be very nearly peace on Earth. The book will also be a part of a sculpture that appears to be 4 impossibly large books each atop one another.– Diana Wege
The Life of Poetry
Muriel Rukeyser
1949
Muriel Rukeyser’s wonderful collection of essays on what poetry is and what it *does* is one I return to consistently, not least because Rukeyser is among relatively few American writers who have recognized the intrinsic continuities between science and art as meeting-places of imagination. As I continue to advocate for the artistic community to work with scientists as authentic and sustained co-creators, Muriel’s wisdom continues to ground and inspire me.– Janani Balasubramanian
The Mishomis Book: The Voice of the Ojibway
Edward Benton-banai
This book has inspired me, and hopefully others, to believe in the importance of art, storytelling, and creative endeavors to furthering political goals and understandings of self and peoplehood.– Adam Khalil
The New Politics of the Handmade
Edited By Anthea Black And Nicole Burisch
2021?
I’m super interested in the global perspective on “craft” (defined by who?) and how it relates and is in conversation with the global politics of media and tech. My practice focuses on Black/Indigenous femme’s relationship to craft, land/space and spirit but also technology and the role we’ve played. I have to assume that Black/Indigenous women are the most advanced technology and our craft is our survival. Working on two films utilizing craft. One about mothering in the pandemic and the other survival.– Alisha Wormsley
The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis
Amitav Ghosh
2021
Amitav Ghosh connects our climate crisis to Western colonialism and calls for restoring nonhuman voices and agency to our stories. He begins with the nutmeg tree, finds the human body more like a coral reef than a single species, and knows trees may someday garden us. I thought with “The Nutmeg’s Curse” while making the first iteration of “Meditation Ocean”, a collaborative, iterative project working for climate justice through underwater meditations and terrestrial actions. The two works share a vitalist politics and a belief that humans and more than humans live in constellation with one another.
– Hope Ginsburg
THE TRUTH ABOUT STORIES: A NATIVE NARRATIVE
Thomas King
2003
Exploring the gulf between the ongoing lives of Indigenous people on Turtle Island, and the narratives constructed within biased media about Indigenous people, writer and educator Thomas King dives into the power of stories and their importance on making and recognizing life.– Theodore (ted) Kerr
The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (Forthcoming Books)
Jalal Toufic
2009
I find Toufic’s approach to memory, memorialization, and the negotiation of both personal and collective trauma to be creative and useful. I was first introduced to this work by Walid Raad and in my writing about the ways in which contemporary artists from Israel-Palestine and Lebanon address complex histories, Toufic’s use of the vampire as a metaphor for a haunting presence of absence helped me out of the traditional tropes of memory theory. More recently in Richmond, where the debate around confederate monuments reached a fever pitch in the summer of 2020, these ideas were also helpful.– Noah Simblist
The Woven Universe Selected Writings of Rev. Maori Marsden
Charles Te Ahu Karamu Royal
2003
This text on the writings of Rev Māori Marsden was critical for understanding a Māori world view and how his deep intelligence resonates on many levels.– Huhana Smith
This Is What Inequality Looks Like
Teo You Yenn
2018
Teo You Yenn’s intense and rigorous journey across 200 interviews with individuals in Singapore discussing their experiences of living in poverty in a near utopian society is a must read.– Heman Chong
TRUTH IS CONCRETE A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics
Steirischer Herbst Festival And Florian Malzacher 2014
SternbergPress 2014 Gratz Austria
The book confirmed many of my practices…Artistic strategies in Real Politics– Lia Perjovschi
TUPILAKOSAURUS: An Incomplete(able) Survey of Pia Arke’s Artistic Work and Research
Edited And Published By Kuratorisk Aktion (frederikke Hansen & Tone Olaf Nielsen) With Contributions By Pia Arke, Lars Kiel Bertelsen, Tine Bryld, Erik Gant, Søren Jønsson Granat, Mirjam Joensen, Stefan Jonsson, Carsten Juhl, Anders Jørgensen, Mette Jørgensen, Inge Kleivan, Kuratorisk Aktion, Jan-erik Lundström, Iben Mondrup, Sara Olsvig, Søren Bro Pold, Irit Rogoff, Mette Sandbye, Kirsten Thisted, Finn Thrane
2012
TUPILAKOSAURUS: An Incomplete(able) Survey of Pia Arke’s Artistic Work and Research constitutes the first monograph on the seminal work of Greenlandic-Danish visual artist and thinker Pia Arke (1958-2007). The richly illustrated 400-page book constitutes the first survey in print of Pia Arke’s collected works, practice, and methodology. In essays and images, the book documents Arke’s lifelong artistic engagement with the silence that surrounds Denmark’s colonial presence in Greenland since 1721 and examines how she by unearthing the ‘little’ history of Greenland’s colonization managed to say something decisive about the much ‘bigger’ history of Western imperialism and the dynamics of today’s world order. Arke would devote her professional life to breaking this silence and to giving voices and visuals to the causes and effects of the Greenland-Denmark relation – and in a larger sense to the relation between the ‘West and the rest.’– Tone Olaf Nielsen
Two Dairies : Gluklya and Murad
Gluklya /natalia Pershina -yakimanskaya And Murad Zorava
13 October 2022
I want to share it with others as I think it is important to share the value which is this book contained . Text is visible in drawings and the recent Gluklya show in Amsterdam at Framer Framed The diaries of Gluklya and Murad emerge from their respective time in Bijlmerbajes, a former prison-turned-refugee center on the edge of Amsterdam, in 2017. In one tower of the prison complex, Gluklya was then renting an artist studio; in the other, Murad lived during his asylum-seeking process in the Netherlands. Two Diaries follows Gluklya’s struggles against the bureaucracy of the asylum seekers’ center and her work to engage with its residents in her artistic process, as well as her coming to terms with the fundamental inequality of her own situation and those of the individuals she tries to reach through her projects. In navigating this inequality through art, Gluklya begins to write a diary and proposes to her new collaborators in Bijlmerbajes to do the same. Murad, whose diary reckons with his own experience as a refugee, accepts this invitation. While awaiting his residency status, Murad writes on the impact of the asylum process on his agency, the adjustment to the Netherlands and the pain of the distance between himself and his loved ones, his homeland and the ongoing political struggles there.– Gluklya ( Natalia ) Pershina
Undermining – A Wild Ride in Words and Images through Land Use Politics and Art in the Changing West
Lucy Lippard
2014
A fantastic book by the highly esteemed curator, art critic and activist Lucy Lippard. Fantastic in language, content and form, it is very actual even 8 years after it has been published.– Oliver Ressler
Wages Against Artwork
Leigh Claire La Berge
2019
Reading between the lines of this book, you will find a love affair. This book is evidence of a partnership in anticapitalist praxis that I share with Leigh Claire (the author). During the years that she wrote this book, it became clear to us that we were destined to support each other emotionally, intellectually, physically, and materially. Leigh Claire thinks about current events in the context of 400 years. I ask: What do we do, today?– Caroline Woolard
War in the Neighborhood
Seth Tobocman
– Francisca Benitez
Wayward Lives
Saidiya Hartman
This is one of the most important texts for me when it comes to thinking about archives and how to make the past speak in a way that resists not just the silence of archives but the way they work to structure an anti-black world– Aruna D’souza
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
Saidiya Hartman
2019
Unpredictable and untold stories as the source of textured and indefatigable inspiration for planetary existence.– A.l. Steiner
What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking
Abby Fisher And Nancy Fisher
1881
This was the first African-American cookbook that wasn’t also a slave instruction manual of some sort. How we live and what we are surrounded by come together in what memories we can share / offer to other people in the form of recipes. This is the first publicly purchasable edible memory transcription. I attempt to make work around how we exist and nothing is more what we exist as than what we eat at home to steel us against what waits for us outside.– Azikiwe Mohammed
When (Art) Worlds Collide: Institutionalizing the Alternatives” from Alternative Art New York: 1965-1985
Essay Author: Arlene Goldbard; Editor: Julie Ault
2002
Artists Alliance’s ideological heritage is rooted in New York City’s alternative arts movement, so I often return to this compilation. Arlene Goldbard’s essay is an instructive survey of the social, economic, and political forces that allowed for and ultimately dismantled the counter-institutional movement in NYC. Not to mention, she is a formidable advocate for cultural democracy and the former Chief Policy Wonk for the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture.– Jodi Waynberg
WOMANIST ETHICS AND THE CULTURAL PRODUCTION OF EVIL
Emilie M. Townes
2006
To understand evil as a cultural production is to recognize, from the outset, that the story can be told another way. It can be told in such a way that the voices and lives of those who, traditionally and historically, have been left out are now heard with clarity and precision. Even more, these voices can then be included into the discourse – not as additive, or appendage – but as a resource and codeterminer of actions and strategies. – Introduction, Emilie M. Townes– Theodore (ted) Kerr
Women For Peace: Banners From Greenham Common
Charlotte Drew
2021
I learned about this book as I was researching for a project in Europe. Learning about the environmental struggles lead by the women of Greenham Common broadened my understanding of how different struggles across continents are linked together. It was interesting to see the banner form be utilized to express a variety of environmental issues by the women of Greenham. I also utilize banners to visually express the concerns of different environmental movements in Latin America. Reading the history of the Greenham Common’s created an interesting conversation between my own work and the work of the women.– Carolina Caycedo
Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics
Bell Hooks
1990
I want to share this text because bell hooks passed away in 2021 and she was a mentor to me. Her work as a Black cultural critic and in conversation with cultural producers and visual artists makes visible the interdisciplinary nature of my creative practice as a researcher and organizational alchemist.– Judy Pryor-ramirez
Your Silence Will Not Protect You
Audre Lorde
2017 (with writings from 1997 onwards)
This books is a collection of essays and poetry by Audre Lorde. I have returned to this book over and over in the last 4 years – reading one essay or one piece of poetry at a time. This collection of words provides clarity for me about the personal, emotional and collective labor, love and courage that is required to live in change work – to breathe it, experience it, know that it is part of you in every step you take and in every space you move through. Change is you and us, love and pain. I return to this this text as a reminder to to always move with purpose, with your struggles and your victories, with conviction and most importantly, with each other.– Sheetal Prajapati