THE INFINITE LIBRARY
1ST ED. 2023
Paulo Freire
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good
adrienne maree brown
Broderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Gloria Anzaldúa
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents
Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD
Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011
edited by Nato Thompson
The Life of Lines
Tim Ingold
Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)
Dean Spade
Youth Activist Toolkit
Renee Gsch and Julia Reticker-Flynn
DIY PhD Deck
Sarita Doe
The Antiracist Deck: 100 Meaningful Conversations on Power, Equity, and Justice
Ibram X. Kendi
The Black School Process Deck
1ST ED. 2023
Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari
Lab Girl
Hope Jahren
Where the Crawdads Sing
Delia Owens
La Castañeda Insane Asylum: Narratives of Pain in Modern Mexico
Cristina Rivera Garza
The Overstory
Richard Powers
Braiding Sweetgrass
Robin Wall Kimmerer
The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life
David Quammen
American Dirt
Jeanine Cummins
Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art
Nancy Princenthal
Where is Ana Mendieta?
Jane M. Blocker
Arte Hoy: Ana Mendieta
María Ruido
1ST ED. 2023
Sara Ahmed
Complaint!
Sara Ahmed
The Sense of Brown
Jose Esteban Muñoz
1ST ED. 2023
Robert Pogue Harrison
The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
Wendell Berry
Skin: Surface, Substance + Design
Ellen Lupton
The Artificial Kingdom: On the Kitsch Experience
Celeste Olalquiaga
Art and Science
Siân Ede
The Future of Nature: Writing on Human Ecology from Orion Magazine
selected and introduced by Barry Lopez
Creating Things That Matter: The Art and Science of Innovations That Last
David Edwards
1ST ED. 2023
Elizabeth A. Brown
The Shape of a Pocket
John Berger
The Laugh of the Medusa
Hélène Cixous
Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories
Cookie Mueller, introduction Olivia Laing, edited by Hedi El Kholti, Chris Kraus, and Amy Scholder
Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art
edited by Timothy Clark, C. Andrew Gerstle, Aki Ishigami, and Akiko Yano
1ST ED. 2023
Anonymous, translated by A. K. Ramanujan
Speaking of Shiva is a book of lyrics/free verse sayings from Karnataka, India (where I was born and raised) and it has been an important one for me in my formative years. These intense, anti-establishment poems question traditional belief systems, customs, class, and caste.
1ST ED. 2023
William H. Gass
I Remember
Joe Brainard
Bluets
Maggie Nelson
Autobiography of Red
Anne Carson
Earth Room
Rachel Mannheimer
1ST ED. 2023
Donna Haraway
Donna Haraway's ideas have been an inspiration, both for my personal artistic practice and in my collaborations within the collective Worm School. In this collaborative project we embrace Haraway's claim that'thinking is a materialist practice with other thinkers' and set about composting our research together-holding conversations around various media that reflect craft practices and proposals for alternate futures and reimagined pasts.
In particular I recommend looking at The Camille Stories, the final chapter of Staying With The Trouble. Through an experimental speculative fiction exercise, Haraway explores her ideas for 'making-with' the more-than-human. What results is a strange, playful and optimistic proposal for 'on-going' within a vibrant, complexly entangled living-and-dying world.
The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present
Byung-Chul Han
Contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han takes an in depth look at the decline of ritual in modern society.Han describes ritual practice as a process of making yourself at home in the world and making time habitable, a way of orienting ourselves around ritual objects that pass down generations, creating stability and a sense of belonging. His theory highlights the slipperiness of the current moment, in which we find ourselves drowning in an unending stream of new information and imagery. Surrounded by a late-stage capitalist culture, we are prompted to consume a torrent of cheaply made mass produced objects, in an attempt to furnish and fulfill our lives.
I found this book to be cathartic. It put a finger to a sentiment I had been having trouble articulating: that ritual may be integral to a generative object-making practice, one that feels nourishing rather than extractive. But in a world that no longer holds an understanding and respect for the ritual object, this realization is melancholic. It leaves one feeling that there is a pressing need to re-member our communities and connections to the people, beings, and places of our present.
Poetry is Not a Luxury from Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
Audre Lorde
Poetry is Not a Luxury is poetic, fluid and bursting with optimism. The way Audre Lorde's words wind back and forth over and around themselves conjures a familiar choreography to that of clay and fiber craft practices. Lorde redefines the erotic as the essential creative impulse of humanity, a playful instinct for collaborating and making new ideas and realities pos-sible. The erotic is the sharing of joy, found in the places where you come to meet others and form bridges.
It is dancing, singing, cooking, and craft-those intangible cultural practices that bind us to each other, our land, and our ecologies. Lorde disregards the capitalist impulse toward individualism-to engage with ourselves is to be engaged in community. This text seems crucial reading as we learn to move beyond the cult of the artist-genius and the institutionalized hierarchy of academia that goes alongside it.
The Living Stones: Cornwall
Ithell Colquhoun
Ithell Colquhoun was a queer, British surrealist painter who, during the 1940s, lived and worked in a remote village in Cornwall, UK at the edge of the island. This area is famed for its enduring folk cus-toms, its wild landscape, and its neolithic monuments. The Living Stones reads as a studio diary and trav-elog of the area. To read it is to time-travel into this ethereal landscape with Ithell as your guide. Collquhoun's subtle and reserved descriptions are threaded with an animist connection to land, place, and culture, and the book exemplifies a relational artistic practice.
Always Coming Home
Ursula K. Le Guin
I think this book is Le Guin's most realized example of her Carrier Bag Theory. It reads as an anthropological study of a people yet to come, the inhabitants of a post-anthropocene California, thousands of years from our present. For her fictional Kesh people, Le Guin invented songs, poems, cultural objects, ideol-ogles, tools, ceramics, architectures, animals, land practices and crafts. She worked with a musician on an accompanying record of folk songs played on instruments designed specifically to emulate the Kesh way of thinking. These songs were so convincing, they had trouble copyrighting the material. They were told you can't copyright folk songs, that they belong to the people. Le Guin's craft is powerful and she has given so much to us in this text.
Embedded within its encyclopedic volume is a three part novella told from the perspective of North Owl, who is born into the Kesh valley as a half house per-son. Her father is an outsider. In her adolescence, she must travel to the edges of her world and enter the society of her father: a patriarchal monotheism, not unlike the western colonial ethic we might recognize from our own world. By following North Owl on this journey, we learn how to see the structures that bind us with both eyes open. If I have to choose one Le Guin book to recommend, it's this one. Always Coming Home speaks to them all. It is her life's work. Her Carrier Bag Theory pointed to the path, and Always Coming Home will show us how to walk it.
1ST ED. 2023
MC Richards
Subversive Ceramics
Claudia Claire
Confrontational Ceramics: The Artist as Social Critic
Judith S. Schwartz
Finding One’s Way With Clay: Pinched Pottery and the Color of Clay
Paulus Berensohn
Shards: Garth Clark on Ceramic Art
edited by John Pagliano
The Ceramics Reader
edited by Kevin Petrie and Andrew Livingstone
Orthodox Theology: An Introduction
Vladimir Lossky
Handbuilt Ceramics
Jo Taylor
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
Wassily Kandinsky
After God (Religion and Post Modernism)
Mark C. Taylor
Byzantine Sacred Art: Selected Writings of the Contemporary Greek Icon Painter Fotis Kontoglous on the Sacred Arts According to the Tradition of Eastern Orthodox
Constantine Cavarnos
Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post- Historical Perspective
Arthur C. Danto
Arresting Images: Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions
Stephen C. Dubin
Art as Experience
John Dewey
The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence
Ann Kibbey
The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing
James Elkins
Book X from The Republic
Plato
On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art
James Elkins
Experience and Education
John Dewey
Spirituality in Contemporary Art: The Idea of the Numinous
Jungu Yoon
Poetics
Aristotle
History Of Dogmas, Volume 3
J. Tixeront
Lectures on Art
John Ruskin
Aesthetic fitness: How sexual selection shaped artistic virtuosity as a fitness indicator and aesthetic preferences as mate choice criteria
Geoffrey Miller
Ceramics
Philip Rawson
Modern Man in Search of a Soul
C.G. Jung
White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture
Jan Nederveen Pieterse
Cultivating the Spirit: How College Can Enhance Students’ Inner Lives
Alexander W. Astin, Helen S. Astin, and Jennifer A. Lindholm
Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas
Elaine Pagels
Installation Art: A Critical History
Claire Bishop
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Marshall McLuhan
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
Camille Paglia
The Varieties Of Religious Experience: A Study In Human Nature
William James
Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe
Greg Epstein
What would Jesus see in the world today? A Jewish take.
Aaron Rosen
1ST ED. 2023
Octavia E. Butler
The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture
Kevin Quashie
Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness
Da’Shaun L. Harrison
Textures: The History and Art of Black Hair
edited by Tameka Ellington and Joseph L. Underwood
The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales
told by Virginia Hamilton, illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon
1ST ED. 2023
Nader Khalili
Ceramic Houses also explores the theme of people and land belonging to each other in mutuality that is engaged with in Our Sacred Waters: Theorizing Kuuyam as a Decolonial Possibility. There is much information about architecture, displacement, tradition, engineering, and creating resourcefully. Beautiful diagrams are side-by-side with anecdotes from a teacher traveling with an international group of students through Iran. Building on thoughtful observation of resources, tradition, and engineering principles, this book bridges an unexpected connection between ceramics and housing as a human right.
Our Sacred Waters: Theorizing Kuuyam as a Decolonial Possibility
Charles Sepulveda, from Decolonization: Indigineity, Education & Society, Vol. 7 No. 1 (2018): Indigenous Peoples and the Politics of Water
This essay is filled with hard truths and generous possibility. Written by a scholar with familial roots in the earliest human emergence along the riparian ecosystem known as the Santa Ana River in Southern California, this piece asserts belonging to the relationship between water and soil and all the living beings among them. Through oral family history and documented historical accounts, the life of the river is made vivid and tangible, as is the abuse wrought upon the people and place under colonization. This essay changed the way I move through this land I was born and raised on, and moved me towards the heart of my practice with soil. Thanks to the Native people who have stewarded their land, knowledge and relationships into the present. I have a path as kuuyam/guest with a mandate to assist in the restoration of health to the land and people.
The Girl With the White Flag
Tomiko Higa
‘The Girl With the White Flag’ is an autobiographical account of childhood survival during the battle of Okinawa. Tomiko Higa was 5 years old when she was separated from her family, and while bombs rained down on the island, Tomiko sought safety, sustenance, and companionship among the non-human beings she was raised in familiarity with.
I am Uchinaanchu (Okinawan), and it has been difficult for me to access narratives translated to English that provided me with the specificity this book is filled with. The land and people of the Ryukyu (Okinawan) islands are stereotypically defined through a lens of conquest and empire, but this text offers self-definition through relationships to land and nature, which is an important component of my practice with clay. There is agony and magic in this amazing account, and it impacted the shape of my life.
1ST ED. 2023
N. K. Jemisin
Neuromancer
William Gibson
The Hidden Life of Trees
Peter Wohlleben
Young Mungo
Douglas Stuart
1ST ED. 2023
Octavio Paz
This is a work that connects literature to materiality to time and to geography in a prayer-like meditation on life and death.
Alturas de Macchu Picchu (The Heights of Macchu Picchu)
Pablo Neruda
This work dives deep into the historical nature of labor, the hierarchy of land, society, and materiality.
La soledad de América Latina (The Solitude of Latin America)
Gabriel Garcia Márquez
A crucial piece of writing in understanding not only the Latin American struggle, but the struggle the world over to define life on our own terms and to have our story made believable.
1ST ED. 2023
Neil MacGregor
Vitamin C: Clay and Ceramic in Contemporary Art
Clare Lilley
The Nature and Art of Workmanship
David Pye
Live Form: Women, Ceramics, and Community
Jenni Sorkin
Braiding Sweetgrass
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person
MC Richards
Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work
edited by Tamara H. Schenkenberg
Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective
edited by Elizabeth A. T. Smith
Eva Hesse
Elisabeth Sussman, James Meyer, Briony Fer, Renate Petzinger, Ann Temkin, and Gioia Timpanelli
1ST ED. 2023
Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund
1ST ED. 2023
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility
edited by Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley and Johanna Burton
Queering the Text: Biblical, Medieval and Modern Jewish Stories
by Andrew Ramer, foreword by Rabbi Jay Michaelson, afterword by Rabbi Camille Shira Angel and Rabbi Dev Noily
1ST ED. 2023
Laurie Lisle
Portrait in Sepia
Isabel Allende, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
Love in The Time of Cholera
Gabriel García Márquez
The Reader
Bernhard Schlink
A Bed of Red Flowers: In Search of My Afghanistan
Nelofer Pazira
The Unconsoled
Kazuo Ishiguro
Dropped Threads: What We Aren’t Told
edited by Carol Shields and Marjorie Anderson
All Passion Spent
Vita Sackville-West
The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood
The Robber BrideMargaret Atwood
1ST ED. 2023
Octavia E. Butler
Parable of the Talents
Octavia E. Butler
Mind of My Mind
Octavia E. Butler
A Dictionary of Color Combinations
organized by Sanzo Wada
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
Ursula K. Le Guin
Jun Kaneko
Susan Peterson
The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, Essays from 1977-1982
Audre Lorde
Gymnastics Safety Manual, Second Edition
edited by Eugene Wettstone
Point and Line to Plane
Wassily Kandinsky
Betty Woodman
Janet Koplos, Betty Woodman, and Arthur C. Danto
The Intuitionist
Colson Whitehead
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Annie Dillard
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
adrienne maree brown
All About Lovebell hooks
1ST ED. 2023
bell hooks
Ways of Seeing
John Berger
Gender Trouble
Judith Butler
Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine
Margaret Whitford
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection
Julia Kristeva
WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution
edited by Cornelia Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark
Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
bell hooks
Queer Times, Queer Becomings
edited by E.L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen
Space, Time, and Perversion
Elizabeth Grosz
Queer Phemonology: Orientations, Objects, Others
Sara Ahmed
The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice
Alexandra M. Kokoli
Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism
Elizabeth Grosz
The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism
Elizabeth Grosz
Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism
Elizabeth Grosz
Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto
Legacy Russell
Feminist Visual Culture
edited by Fiona Carson and Claire Pajaczkowska
The Bodies of Women:Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Differences
Rosalyn Diprose
The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (2nd Edition)
edited by Amelia Jones
Narcissus Reflected: The Myth of Narcissus in Surrealist and Contemporary Art
David Lomas
The Sacred and the Feminine: Imagination and Sexual Difference
edited by Griselda Pollockand Victoria Turvey-Sauron
Carnal Art: Orlan’s Refacing
C. Jill O’Bryan
Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the SensesMichael Taussig
1ST ED. 2023
Robert Farris Thompson
Parable of the Sower
Octavia E. Butler
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
1ST ED. 2023
Clarice Lispector
Los muertos
Maria Rivera
Poetry and Knowledge
Aimé Césaire
Unseen Mendieta: The Unpublished Works of Ana Mendieta
Olga Viso
Codex Borgia
The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten
The Black Flower & Other Zapotec Poems
Natalia Toledo, translated by Clare Sullivan
Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison
Women in Mexico: A Past Unveiled
Julia Tuñón Pablos
The Artist’s Struggle For Integrity
James Baldwin (speech)
Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Paulo Freire
David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale
Elena Filipovic
Bless Me, Ultima
Rudolfo Anaya
The Wild Iris
Louise Glück
Motherworld: A Devotional for the Alter-Life
Destiny Hemphill
Bhagavad Gita
Vyasa
Teaching to Transgress
bell hooks
Regarding the Pain of Others
Susan Sontag
Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement
Rita Gonzalez, Howard Fox, and Chon A. Noriega
Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph
Deana Lawson, Arthur Jafa, and Zadie Smith
Go Tell It On The Mountain
James Baldwin
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge
Carlos Castañeda
Caliban and the Witch
Silvia Federici
Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn
David Hajdu
Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined
edited by Margot Norton and Vivian Crockett
Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery
Pueblo Pottery Collective, Elysia Poon, and Rick Kinsel
El Laberinto de la Soledad
Octavio Paz
Codex Seraphinianus
Luigi Serafini
Free Jazz Communism: Archie Shepp-Bill Dixon Quartet at the 8th World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki 1962edited by Sezgin Boynik and Taneli Viitahuhta
1ST ED. 2023
Magdalene Odundo
I find this text to be such a beautiful conversation about art, life, poetry and clay. Magdalene Odundo’s work has had a big impact on my practice, since I first saw it as a BFA student in London many years ago, and this conversation with the poet Ben Okri is one that I have enjoyed immensely.
1ST ED. 2023
George Oppen
The Infinite Conversation
Maurice Blanchot
Females: A Concern
Andrea Long Chu
UlyssesJames Joyce
1ST ED. 2023
edited Howie Chen
Modern Love
Constance DeJong
Top Stories
edited Anne Turyn
A Rock, A River, A Street
Steffani Jemison
Black Phoenix: Third World Perspective on Contemporary Art and Culture
edited by Rasheed Araeen and Mahmood Jamal
Assembling a Black Counter Culture
DeForrest Brown, Jr.
Trinh T. Minh-ha: The Twofold Commitment
Trinh T. Minh-ha
The All Night Movie
Mary Heilmann
Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Live Audio EssaysLawrence Abu Hamdan
1ST ED. 2023
Pumla Makeleni
Zulu Pottery
Elizabeth Perrill
Amandebele
Peter Magubane
My Life and Work
Gerard Sekoto
Call Me Woman
Ellen Kuzwayo
Trails and Tribes in Southern Africa
Peter Becker
Major Rock Paintings of Southern Africa
R Townley Johnson
Beauty of the Heart: The life and times of Charlotte Mannya Maxeke
Zubeida Jaffer
World Art: Africa
Peter Stepan
The Bushmen photography by Peter Johnson & Anthony Bannister, text by Alf Wannenburgh
1ST ED. 2023
Monique Wittig
The Straight Mind and Other Essays
Monique Wittig
The Vice Consul and The Ravishing of Lol Stein are how I learned about French Feminist Theory, besides reading Luce Irigaray. I am working on an ongoing series of portraits based upon Wittig’s epic poem Les Guérillères. Witting challenges the role of gender in the French language. I stretched and interpreted her series of vignettes in Les Guérillères, exploring non-gender specific, lesbian and genderfluid portraiture in my ceramic works dating from 2014 – present.
The Vice-Consul
Marguerite Duras
The Ravishing of Lol Stein
Marguerite Duras
I based a series of works on Duras in the late 1980’s, a series of cast bronze wigs, that were portraits of women without objectifying them. I reflected upon the woman as an absence in Duras’ writing. The woman is always pursued and never found.
Carol
Patricia Highsmith
BelovedToni Morrison
1ST ED. 2023
Beatrice Wood
Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry
Camille T. Dungy
Color and Fire: Defining Moments in Studio Ceramics, 1950-2000
Joe Lauria, Gretchen Adkins, Garth Clark, Rebecca Niederlander, Susan Peterson, and Peter Selz
Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina
edited by Adrienne Spinozzi
Ana Mendieta: La tierra habla (The Earth Speaks)
Anna Lovatt
Anna Maria Maiolino
Helen Molesworth, Bryan Barcena, Briony Fer, Sergio B. Martins and Anne Wagner
Bigger, Better, More: The Art Of Viola Frey Davira S. Taragin, Patterson Sims, and Susan Jeffries
1ST ED. 2023
Lisa A. Lowe
This work helped me think through connections between some of the material-based research I have done into global commodities like porcelain, tea, cochineal, indigo, opium and sugar. I thought about these connections in relationship to domestic interiors depicted in the Victorian literature I grew up reading, as well as between Asian indentured labor, plantation slavery, and the plants and products that emerged from these plantation economies and labor.
Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect
Mel Y. Chen
Coming from an art semiotics background, I immediately loved how Mel used a linguistic framework to think through the racial, sexual, and gendered rhetoric surrounding charged matter and deftly dealt with heavy, dark histories with precision and perversity.
The Tiger Flu
Larissa Lai
The Tiger Flu is this amazing science fiction book (loosely connected to Salt Fish Girl, also by Larissa Lai) that thinks through virology, regeneration, cloned and hybrid species entanglements, corporate control of the environment, new forms of kinship, deep memory, and time. I haven’t loved a science fiction story this much since N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy.
Voyager
Srikanth Reddy
This poem is an erasure poem written from the autobiography of Kurt Waldheim, the UN Secretary General whose voice is on the Voyager Record NASA sent out into space in the 1970s to greet extraterrestrials or future humanity with a representation of humanity (full of all the limitations and problems you can imagine such a project would expose). It becomes a poem about power and world in the most sparse and heart-hitting way. Reddy cuts Waldheim’s text, originally a bit of a soft-power pedaling to try to exonerate himself from Nazi war crimes, and it becomes a tale into the inferno of human greed, desire, and violence. I’ve made work in response to the Voyager record’s history and Reddy’s poem, teach his poem in my classes, and continue to return to it all the time.
1ST ED. 2023
Rebecca Walker
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
Cathy Park Hong
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Barbara Ehrenreich
The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service WorkMiliann Kang
1ST ED. 2023
Grayson Perry
Crying in H Mart
Michelle Zauner
Clay: The History and Evolution of Humankind’s Relationship with Earth’s Most Primal Element
Suzanne Staubach
Striking Distance: Bruce Lee and the Dawn of Martial Arts in AmericaCharles Russo
1ST ED. 2023
Errol Manners
The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985
Maurice Tuchman
Shelter
edited by Lloyd Kahn and Bob Easton
The Encyclopedia of Myths and Legends
Stuart Gordon
The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images
Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS)
The World We Live InLincoln Barnett
1ST ED. 2023
Cathy Park Hong
Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans
David L. Eng & Shinhee Han
Double Consciousness from The Souls of Black Folk
W. E. B. Du Bois
Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse
Homi Bhabha from OCTOBER 28, Spring 1984, Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis
Detail of the Rice Chest Monica Youn from Harper’s Bazaar February 2021 Issue
1ST ED. 2023
Jamaica Kincaid
I Always Knew: A Memoir
Barbara Chase-Riboud
Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World
Jessica Marie Johnson
The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies
Tiffany Lethabo King
Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two IslandsStuart Hall
1ST ED. 2023
Erling Kagge
1ST ED. 2023
Lucy R. Lippard
In this book, Lucy Lippard looks back at 60s–70s U.S. land art and reconsiders some of her critical takes from that era. I admire her for publicly revising her ideas more than 40 years later, as well as her commitment to her own local art world in New Mexico, where she lives. I wish more canonized art writers would revise/correct/amend their writing as part of a public practice! Lippard is far from perfect, but it seems like she’s trying to own that.
Ceramic Houses & Earth Architecture: How to Build Your Own
Nader Khalili
Khalili’s interests and experiments have been enormously influential on my practice and its connections between ceramics and soil. As a visionary architect, he merged material exploration with careful attention to how different kinds of people actually live in the world. There’s a section in this book called How to Fire a Room!
Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina
edited by Marina Sitrin
I learned about horizontalism during the Occupy movement in 2011–2012 and immediately recognized in it aspects of the work of Brazilian artists Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape. The different voices edited together in this book have helped me envision alternate ways of living life, of coming together with others, and of supporting all life that is really different to how I grew up. I currently manage a ceramics facility as part of my academic job, and culturing the studio so it is a place where people can be sideways and sensitive (a beautiful phrase from Julius Eastman) is a big part of my job.
The Psychoanalysis of Fire
Gaston Bachelard
Better known in the art world for his book The Poetics of Space, in this volume, Bachelard ruminates on fire and all its metaphoric richness. In my work, I am interested both in harnessing fire and in how objects and ideas get buried and excavated. The psychoanalytic world view is a fascinating one for me—at the very least it highlights how it is not just our brains holding memories and emotions, but our bodies, and every vessel overflows eventually! How do we attend to the leaks and escaping steam? This is a crucial question.
1ST ED. 2023
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Tombs of Atuan
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Farthest Shore
Ursula K. Le Guin
Tehanu
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Other WindUrsula K. Le Guin
1ST ED. 2023
Jane Bennett
Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies
Maddie Mortimer
Eva Hesse: Diaries
Eva Hesse and Tamara Bloomberg
Autobiography of Red
Ann Carson
Studio and Cube: On the Relationship Between Where Art Is Made and Where Art Is Displayed
Brian O’Doherty
Painting Beside Itself
David Joselit from OCTOBER 130, Fall 2009.
The Nature of Fun
David Foster Wallace from Fiction Writer Magazine, September 1998
Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Rebecca Solnit
On Beauty and Being Just
Elaine Scarry
Lunch Poems
Frank O’Hara
Bluets
Maggie Nelson
The Overstory
Richard Powers
BewildermentRichard Powers
1ST ED. 2023
Alice Winchester and Jean Lipman
Treasures of American Folk Art: From the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center
Beatrix T. Rumford and Carolyn J. Weekley
American Folk Painting
Jean Lipman and Mary Black
Good Night Richard Rabbit/ Good Night Little A.B.C.
Robert Kraus, illustrated by N.M. Bodecker
Alice In Wonderland/Peter Pan (Dandelion Library)
Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie, edited by Josette Frank, with illustrations by Marjorie Torrey
Where the Wild Things Are
Maurice Sendak
Chicken Soup with Rice
Maurice Sendak
The Dwindling Party
Edward Gorrey
The Gashlycrumb Tinies
Edward Gorrey
20th Century Russian Poetry: Silver And Steel: An Anthology
selected with an introduction by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, edited by Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward
And the Ass Saw the Angel
Nick Cave
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers
Breakfast of Champions
Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse Five
Kurt Vonnegut
Little Pictures: Fiction for a New Age
Andrew Ramer
Playing With Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage
Elizabeth Siegel
Tales of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated with wood-engravings Fritz Eichenberg
Andersen’s Fairy Tales: Junior Deluxe Editions
Hans Christian Andersen
Grimm’s Fairy Tales: Junior Deluxe Editions
Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm
I have a lot of books. Many years ago, when I began to make the books that I owned, I often questioned why I had so many books. They were important to me because I didn’t get rid of them and I moved them with me from place to place. At that time, I didn’t read books so much as I looked at them. Besides the covers and pictures that I loved to lose myself in, I was comforted by the idea of a book, that is, a collection of words, thoughts, pictures, and stories all sandwiched between two pieces of cardboard. I am comforted by the smell of old books. I love finding old photos and notes that I’ve left behind. In used books, I am always excited to find the former owners’ names, inscriptions, birthday notes, highlighted sentences, and abandoned bookmarks.
These books have meant a great deal to me at specific times in my life. They’ve helped me take my medicine, be okay with being a weirdo, be inspired, see the world through weirdo-colored glasses and appreciate it, start smoking Pall Mall cigarettes, be creative, ignore the rules of grammar because that is a way of seeing too, enjoy simple things like breathing, sleeping, looking at pictures, and the taste of hot water, not feel so isolated, develop a dark sense of humor, and feel better about my isolated times of woe because no one is as miserable as a 20th century Russian Poet.
1ST ED. 2023
Susan Stewart
Living, Thinking, Looking
Siri Hustvedt
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
Betty Edward
The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing
James Elkins
1ST ED. 2023
Yoshimoto Banana
Kitchen
Yoshimoto Banana
NP
Yoshimoto Banana
Lizard
Yoshimoto Banana
Hardboiled & Hard Luck
Yoshimoto Banana
Snakes and EarringsKanehara Hitomi
1ST ED. 2023
Niki de Saint Phalle
The Creative Act: A Way of BeingRick Rubin
1ST ED. 2023
Maureen Mackey
Contemporary Black American Ceramic Artists
donald a clark and Chotsani Elaine Dean
Textures: The History and Art of Black Hair
edited by Tameka Ellington and Joseph L. Underwood
1ST ED. 2023
Toni Morrison
Sula
Toni Morrison
The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography
Jennifer C. Nash
The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust
Marianne Hirsch
Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle
Katherine McKittrick
Haptic Memory: Resituating Black Women’s Lived Experiences in Fiber Art Narratives
Sharbreon S. Plummer
Off-Modern Homecoming in Art and Theory
Svetlana Boym from Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory edited Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller
The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto
Martine Syms for Rhizome.org, Dec 17, 2013.
Body Marks of the Past in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Home
Ágnes Zsófia Kovács from Metacritic Journal of Comparative Studies and Theory Volume 7, Issue 1 July 2021: The Objects of Memory, the Memory of Objects
Worldbuilding Between Burrows and Spaceships
Ladi’Sasha Jones for The Shed
Canary from Grace Notes: PoemsRita Dove
1ST ED. 2023
Malidoma Patrice Somé
Of Water and the Spirit
Malidoma Patrice Somé
This book taught me how to believe in the unknown and how to reconnect with my ancestors through learning about ritual healing.
1ST ED. 2023
Laozi
The Notebook
Ágota Kristóf
The Poems of HafezShamseddin Hafez, translated by Reza Ordoubadian
1ST ED. 2023
1ST ED. 2023
Anne Truitt
Agnes Martin: Writings Agnes Martin, edited by Dieter Schwarz
1ST ED. 2023
Richard Powers
The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World
Michael Pollan
Architecture Without Architects
Bernard Rudofsky
The Unfashionable Human Body
Bernard Rudofsky
The Box Man
Kōbō Abe
Diary of a Mad Old Man
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt
Too Loud a Solitude
Bohumil Hrabal
Perfume: The Story of a Murder
Patrick Süskind
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Haruki Murakami
Just Kids
Patti Smith
The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country
Amanda Gorman
SHAPES: The OG v14, Spring 20
Amy Sillman
Amy Sillman: Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings
Amy Sillman, edited by Charlotte Houette, François Lancien-Guilberteau, and Benjamin Thorel, foreword Lynne Tillman
Collected Poems
James Merrill
The Art of Travel
Alain de Botton
Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations
edited by Clark Coolidge
Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art
Mary Gabriel
Roget’s Thesaurus
Peter Mark Roget
Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art
Michael Shnayerson
Lost Illusions: A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Honoré de Balzac
Cousin Bette
Honoré de Balzac
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka
Donald Judd Writings
edited by Flavin Judd and Caitlin Murray
The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League,1936-1951
Mason Klein and Catherine Evans
Prune
Gabrielle Hamilton
Six Memos Next for the Millennium
Italo Calvino
A Distant Episode
Paul Bowles
Ulysses
James Joyce
The Arcanum: The Extraordinary True Story
Janet Gleeson
The Art of Eating
M.F.K. Fisher
A Small Place
Jamaica Kincaid
Being Mortal: Illness and What Matters in the End
Atul Gawande
Chronicles: Volume OneBob Dylan
1ST ED. 2023
Edited by Isabelle de Metz and Shelby Kendrick
Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World
Timothy Morton
Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival
Christopher Benfey
The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be
J.B. MacKinnon
Just Kids
Patti Smith
When I Was a Child
Charles Shaw
Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements
Jane Hutton
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Rebecca Solnit
Clay: The History and Evolution of Humankind’s Relationship with Earth’s Most Primal Element
Suzanne Staubach
Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City
Matthew Gandy
Pots of Promise: Mexicans and Pottery at Hull-House, 1920-40
edited by Cheryl R. Ganz and Margaret Strobel
The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena
Jean Baudrillard
The Animal That Therefore I AmJacques Derrida
1ST ED. 2023
Bruce Nauman, edited by Janet Kraynak
Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism
Elizabeth Grosz
This Sex Which Is Not One
Luce Irigaray, translated by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke
The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque
Gilles Deleuze
Where I Was From
Joan Didion
Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West
Rebecca Solnit
1ST ED. 2023
Maggie Nelson
Ways Of Seeing
John Berger
This book reminds me to look at things in all directions and often, to question and celebrate what can be gained by restraint and focus.
Syzygy, Beauty
An Essay by T. Fleischmann
One Man’s Meat
E.B White
This book reminds me that things will always be the same and can never be the same. Timeless ideas and sentiments are everything.
The Ocean World of Jacques Cousteau Volumes 1-20
Jacques Cousteau
The Artificial Kingdom: On the Kitsch Experience
Celeste Olalquiaga
On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
Susan Stewart
Look at the real, look at the fake. It’s important to remember there’s so much we’ll never see or understand, yet we still capture and commemorate.
1ST ED. 2023
Hannah Higgins
This books helps me think about the Cartesian Grid that is the basis of 3D digital modeling space. It reminds me that this form has followed humans through time and place and makes me wonder if this seemingly mathematical and predictable form is somehow also natural.
1ST ED. 2023
Irving Finkel and Jonathan Taylor
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Charles C. Mann
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Rebecca Solnit
The Poetics of Space
Gaston Bachelard
Bluets
Maggie Nelson
Participation
edited by Claire Bishop
Kerry James Marshall: Mastry
Ian Alteveer, Helen Molesworth, Dieter Roelstraete, and Abigail Winograd
Dwan Gallery: Los Angeles to New York 1959-1971
James Meyer with Contributions by Virginia Dwan and Paige Rozanski
Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-1977
edited by Matthew S. Witkovsky with contributions by Mark Godfrey, Robin Kelsey, Anne Rorimer, Giuliano Sergio, and Joshua Shannon
Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective
edited by Elizabeth A. T. Smith
100 Artists’ Manifestos: From The Futurists To The Stuckists
edited by Alex Danchev
Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto
Legacy Russell
Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table
Ruth Reichl
A Brief History of Time
Stephen Hawking
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.
Difficult WomenRoxane Gay
1ST ED. 2023
Flannery O’Connor
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
John Ashbery
Part Object Part Sculptureedited by Helen Molesworth
1ST ED. 2023
add image
1ST ED. 2023
Jane Bennett
The Severed Head: Capital Visions
Julia Kristeva
Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space
Brian O’Doherty
Passages in Modern Sculpture
Rosalind E. Krauss
On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
Susan Stewart
Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum
Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino
The Story of the Eye
Georges Bataille
Circe
Madeline Miller
Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov
The Golden Notebook
Dorris Lessing
Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other PoemsRobin Coste Lewis
1ST ED. 2023
Jeff Smith
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Creative Act: A Way of Being
Rick Rubin
Where the Children Take Us: How One Family Achieved the Unimaginable
Zain E. Asher
Daybook: The Journal of an ArtistAnne Truitt
1ST ED. 2023
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, From Slavery to the Present
Jacqueline Jones
Root Magic
Eden Royce
Solimar: The Sword of the Monarchs
Pam Muñoz Ryan
1ST ED. 2023
Paulus Berensohn
David Smith by David Smith: Sculpture and Writings
edited by Cleve Gray
The Shape of Content
Ben Shahn
Stephen De Staebler: Matter and Spirit
edited by Timothy Anglin Burgard, foreword by Dore Ashton
Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected With Japan, for the Use of Travellers and Others
Basil Hall Chamberlain
Clay: The History and Evolutionof Humankind’s Relationship with Earth’s Most Primal Element
Suzanne Staubach
Ceramic Glazes
Cullen W. Parmelee
Hands in Clay: An Introduction to Ceramics
Charlotte F. Speight and John Toki
Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person
MC Richards
Fired by Ideals: Arequipa Pottery and the Arts and Crafts Movement
Suzanne Baizerman, Lynn Downey, and John Toki
Images in Clay Sculpture: Historical and Contemporary Techniques
Charlotte F. Speight
Make It In Clay: A Beginners Guide to Ceramics, 2nd Edition
Charlotte F. Speight and John Toki
1ST ED. 2023
Octavia E. Butler
Adulthood Rites
Octavia E. Butler
Imago
Octavia E. Butler
1ST ED. 2023
Ingrid Fetell Lee
This book is a manifesto for makers, deeply supportive of the many gifts the world is given when artists and designers create things. It also offers practical direction for anyone wanting to make their day to day experiences (or life in general) more intentional, artful, joyful, and meaningful.
Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us
Ivy Ross and Susan Magsamen
This book provides hard (neuro)science on the value of the arts to human health and longevity.
1ST ED. 2023
N. K. Jemisin
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
Parable of the Sower
Octavia E. Butler
The Underground Railroad
Colson Whitehead
Homegoing
Yaa Gyasi
Passing
Nella Larsen
This book looks into blackness in varied ways and offers refuge. The stories allow me to dream in a way that is extremely generative to my sculpture practice and break free of the rules of certain mediums and techniques in the same way that many of the characters are able to break free from their environments.the arts to human health and longevity.
1ST ED. 2023
Alexandra Kleeman
My Ántonia
Willa Cather
The English Understand Wool
Helen DeWitt
I’ve been gravitating towards thorny and unlikeable characters who do fucked up things. Perhaps this is a response to the growing dystopic and hypercapitalist currents rolling through America. For better or worse, I’m revitalized by the morally dubious protagonists and deadpan humor in this book.
1ST ED. 2023
Anne Anlin Cheng
Bleeding from All 5 Senses
Mario Santiago Papasquiaro
The Fifth Season
N. K. Jemisin
The Obelisk Gate
N. K. Jemisin
The Stone Sky
N. K. Jemisin
The Descent of Alette
Alice Notley
The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty
Yanagi Sōetsu
1ST ED. 2023
Ahmed Naji
I love Jewad Selim and the Baghdad Modern Art Group’s work and in this book, one gets to see his sketches and inspirations that eventually developed into beautiful paintings and sculptures. He’s an artist who knew how to meld influences from the East and West, something that appeals to me in my practice. I’ve been mining these works on the internet, and wanting so badly to have a proper publication of them to add to my library so I was ecstatic when I found out this book existed. These images remind me of how my mother used to paint, she was inspired by the people of Baghdad, the architecture and the landscapes in a similar way, and being surrounded by her work at a young age really shaped my understanding of art and the warmth and beauty of a place and its people.
1ST ED. 2023