What we are reading:
Meeting 49: The Clemente w/ Department of Transformation (DOT)
A reading packet including excerpts from Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street and Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, Ana Hjorn Guttu’s video How To Become a Non-Artist, and as well as interviews with artists Rebecca Raue and Michael Crowe about their ongoing projects with children.
What we have read:
Meeting 0: The Emily Harvey Foundation
Meeting 1: The Emily Harvey Foundation
Joseph Grigely, Exhibition Prosthetics (London: Bedford Press, 2009).
Meeting 2: The Emily Harvey Foundation
Pamela Bianchi, “Invisible Mazes-Visible Perception,” Stedelijk Studies Journal 7 (2018).
Meeting 3: The Emily Harvey Foundation
Julie Ault, "Three Snapshots from the Eighties: On Group Material," Curating Subjects, ed. Paul O’Neill (Open Editions/Occasional Table, 2007).
Meeting 4: Field trip: American Folk Art Museum storage, Long Island City, Queens
Meeting 5: The Dream House
Gavin Wade, “Eastside Projects,” OnCurating 2 (2008), Céline Condorelli, Support Structures (London: Sternberg Press, 2010), and Eastside Projects, Eastside Projects User’s Manuals (2015–present).
Meeting 6: Field trip: An Incomplete History of Printed Matter’s Art Book Fair at Hauser & Wirth
Becky Howland and Ann Messner recall The Real Estate Show, A Book about Colab (and Related Activities), ed. Max Schumann ( Printed Matter, 2016), 101-113.
Meeting 7: Broodthaers Society of America
Marcel Broodthaers, Open Letters (English translations here), and AVIS (1968–72).
Meeting 8: Field trip: Judd Foundation at 101 Spring St, Manhattan
Meeting 9: april april
Judy Radul, “Marquee Moon,” This is Television, ed. Ariane Beyn, Daad Artists-In-Berlin Program, Judy Radul (Sternberg Press, 2018), Tish Wrigley, “Jonas Mekas on Filmmaking,” AnOther (December 2012), and Maboula Soumahoro, excerpt from Black is the Journey, Africana the Name, (Polity Press, 2022).
Meeting 10: Soft Network
Sabine Breitwieser, “Performance without Curators: Art and the Public Sphere,” Timing: On the Temporal Dimension of Exhibiting, eds. Beatrice Von Bismarck, Rike Frank, Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer, Jörn Schafaff, Thomas Weski (Sternberg Press, 2014) and Nancy Princenthal, “Scott Burton,” Parkett 10 (1986).
Meeting 11: Soft Network
Scott Burton, “Lecture on Self,” Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art & Performance 1965–1975, ed. David Getsy (Soberscove Press, 2012) and Gordon Hall, “Read me the part a-gain, where I disin-herit everybody,” commissioned by EMPAC / Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, 2014.
Meeting 12: Soft Network
David Getsy, “Queer behaviour: Scott Burton’s public sculptures,” Burlington Contemporary (May 2023) and Scott Burton, My Brancusi (Museum of Modern Art, 1989).
Meeting 13: Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program at anonymous gallery
Adrian Piper, “Porgy (1988),” Out of Order, Out of Sight: Volume I: Selected Writing in Meta-Art 1968-1992 (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1996) and Laura Serejo Genes & Kiyoto Koseki’s exhibition guide for if Work.
Meeting 14: Center for Book Arts
Ulises Carrión, The New Art of Making Books, originally published in Kontexts no. 6-7, 1975, and was printed by Center for Book Arts in 1975 at the request of the author and distributed free to the Center's members.
Meeting 15: Center for Book Arts
David Reinfurt, “G-E-S-T-A-L-T,” The Serving Library (May 2016).
Meeting 16: Center for Book Arts
A reading packet of excerpts of interviews and writings from Temporary Services.
Meeting 17: Goethe-Institut New York
Dan Graham, introduction to Video–Architecture–Television, ed. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1979).
Meeting 18: Field trip: Blind Dates Recursive 02 at Dia:Beacon
Rita McBride, Arena (1997) and Darling Green, notecards.
Meeting 19: Goethe-Institut New York
Churner, Leah, “Un-TV,” Moving Image Source co-presented with Reverse Shot (Museum of the Moving Image, 2011). We also recommend Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman’s Television Delivers People (1973), and Anna Canepa, ed., “Video,” Art-Rite, No. 7 (1974).
Meeting 20: Cauleen Smith: The Wanda Coleman Songbook at 52 Walker
A reading packet of interviews and poems by Wanda Coleman. We also recommend Cauleen Smith's interview with Coleman's brother George Evans, and this recording of Coleman reading her poem “I Live for My Car.”
Meeting 21: Off Paradise
Amelia Groom, “There’s Nothing to See Here: Erasing the Monochrome,”e-flux journal 37 (September 2012), Nana Adusei-Poku “On Being Present Where You Wish to Disappear,” e-flux journal 80 (March 2017) and Audrey Wollen, “GIRLS OWN THE VOID.” We also recommend this collection of additional readings on the topic of empty exhibitions.
Meeting 22: Off Paradise
A reading packet including excerpts by Robert Smithson, Lucy Lippard and George Kubler.
Meeting 23: Off Paradise
Walter Grasskamp, “The White Wall – On The Prehistory Of The ‘White Cube,’” OnCurating 9 (2011) and two exhibition manifestos: Matsuzawa Yutaka, “Anti-Civilization Exhibition” and Palle Nielsen, “Working Group for ‘The Model,’” Exhibition, ed. Lucy Steeds (London: Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014).
Meeting 24: SculptureCenter
An excerpt from Simryn Gill and Michael Taussig, Becoming Palm (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017) and Filipa Ramos, Vincent Normand, and Tristan Garcia in conversation, “Theater, Garden, Bestiary,” Mousse 55 (October-November 2016).
Meeting 25: MARCH
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, excerpt from Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press) and Wolfgang Kemp, “The Narrativity of the Frame,” The Rhetoric of The Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork, ed. Paul Duro (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Meeting 26: Field trip: York College public art collection and the Yeh Art Gallery at St. John’s University, Queens
We recommend you learn more about Tom Lloyd and the Storefront Museum and, to expand on To Mend the Heat, please watch the wonderful Milford Graves documentary.
Meeting 27: SculptureCenter
A reading packet including excerpts by Anne Boyer, Linda Nochlin, Roland Barthes, Brian Dillon, Brandon Avery Joyce, and Paul Virilio.
Meeting 28: Soft Network
A reading packet including excerpts by Rosalind Krauss, László Moholy-Nagy, The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, Mirko Zardini, Dragan Espenschied, Variable Media Network, Günther Anders, and Jacques Derrida.
Meeting 29: Ross Knight, Continuous Squeeze at Off Paradise
A reading packet including poems by Wisława Szymborska, and excerpts from Graham Harman, “The Third Table,” Joseph Strau, “The Lamp and the Ribbon,” and David Getsy, “Immoderate Couplings.”
Meeting 30: Field trip: Paul Gardère: Vantage Points at Stuyvesant-Fish House
Tatiana Flores and Michelle A. Stephens, “Relational Undercurrents, Toward an Archipelagic Model of Insular Caribbean Art,” and Alejandro Anreus, interview with Paul Gardère.
Meeting 31: Soft Network
Antonin Artaud, “The Theater and Cruelty,”The Theater and its Double (Grove Press, 1958), Jack Smith Art Crust of Spiritual Oasis (Artists Space, 2018), and Arnold Aronson, “New Homes for New Theater,” Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography (University of Michigan Press, 2005).
Meeting 32: Manifold Books, Amsterdam
Nick Mauss, “Remaking Ghosts: On Rosemary Mayer,” and Rosemary Mayer, “Surroundings,” Art-Rite, No. 5 (April 1977) and Some Days In April (1979).
Meeting 33: O-Overgarden, Copenhagen
A reading packet including excerpts from Siri Hustvedt, “Becoming the Other in Translation,” and Alix Rule and David Levine, María Iñigo Clavo, and Anthony Reed.
Meeting 34: Celador, Brussels
A reading packet including a transcription of an audio work by Eduardo Costa, and texts by Scott Burton and Rosemary Mayer.
Meeting 35: Hermes Payrhuber at International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP)
A reading packet including excerpts by Brian O’Doherty, Louise Bourgeois, Albrecht Barthel, and John Baldessari. We also recommend Alex Kitnick, “Imitate Baldessari: Artists, Teachers, and the Making of Conceptual Art,” October 191 (Winter 2025).
Meeting 36: Off Paradise
Gaston Bachelard, excerpt from chapter 9, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
Meeting 37: Institute for the Study of Latin American Art (ISLAA)
Mela Dávila Freire, Off-Register: Publishing Experiments by Women Artists in Latin America, 1960–1990 (Center for Book Arts, 2023) and two short texts from HAMBRE HAMBRE, ACCIÓN GRÁFICA URGENTE (2022).
Meeting 38: Desnivel Gallery with Carmelle Safdie
Katherine Jackson, “Context—strategy and the changing nature of art,” and Victoria Lane and Judy Vaknin, “Barbara Steveni and the embodiment of the archive,” Barbara Steveni: I Find Myself (Modern Art Oxford, 2025).
Meeting 39: Rujuta Rao at The Here & There Collective’s Studio Residency Program
Siah Armajani, “The Meaning of Place in Art and Architecture,” Design Quarterly, No. 122 (1983), and Rujuta Rao, “Menu as Score,” LIKE A FEVER (Asia Art Archive, July 2025).
Meeting 40: O-R-G
JÚVEL, “Jellyfish Manifesto” (2025) and Rita McBride, “Some tips to give your work a life,” Rita McBride: Arena Momentum, (Dia Art Foundation, 2023).
Meeting 41: Emmelines
“Rehearsing Failure” by Kathrin Busch (Putting Rehearsal to the Test: Practices of Rehearsal in Fine Arts, Film, Theater, Theory, and Politics, 2016).
Meeting 42: Off Paradise
A reading packet including excerpts from Peter Walsh, “Muse Tube: Television and the American Avant-Garde” (2003), Sergei Eisenstein, “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form” (1949), and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art" (1982)
Meeting 43: Off Paradise
A reading packet including excerpts from Jennifer L. Roberts, “Introduction to Seeing Scale” (Terra Foundation Essays 2: Scale, 2016), Prudence Peiffer, The Slip (2023)
Meeting 44: Off Paradise
A reading packet including Sidney Tillim’s,“Rosenquist at the Metropolitan,” from Artforum, 1968, and Henry Geldzahler’s, “Rosenquist’s F-111,” from The Metropolitan Museum Art Bulletin, 1968.
+31 Meeting 45: Manifold Books with Jeremy Johnston and Yann Chateigné Tytelman
A reading packet including excerpts from Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood’s Anachronic Renaissance, Hanna B. Hölling’s introduction to “Object—Event—Performance,” Guy Brett’s “Hélio Oiticica: A Principle of Renewal,” and Marie Heilich’s “The Same Dead Thing Alive: Contemporary Archives in L.A. and Beyond.”
Meeting 46: Ulterior Gallery
A reading packet including Allen Ruppersberg’s “Fifty Helpful Hints on the Art of the Everyday,” along with excerpts from Tetsuo Kogawa’s “A Radioart Manifesto,” and Eva Weinmayr’s “One Publishes to Find Comrades.”
+31 Meeting 47: Manifold Books with Peter Lemmens, Nell Donkers and Vivian van Saaze
A reading packet including Hito Steyerl, Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?, and Honggyun Mok, “works and laziness.”
+31 Meeting 48: Manifold Books with Philipp Gufler and Andrew Walsh-Lister
A reading packet including Philipp Gufler, “Art Award of the City of Munich to Cosy Pièro,” Philipp Gufler, Nicholas Maniu, Christina Spachtholz, “In Search of Paul Hoecker – Two Travel Reports,” Andrew Walsh-Lister, “afterword to tendentious,” and Lily Greenham, tendentious.
What should we read?
Maybe there is something newer than these suggestions? To keep expanding our points of view, please let us know of texts that aren't on the usual art history suggested reading lists.
Lucy Steeds. “Contemporary Exhibitions: Art at Large in the World.” Lucy Steeds. Ed., Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art, 2014.
Doherty, Claire. “Curating Wrong Places...Or Where Have All the Penguins Gone?” Paul O'Neill, Ed., Curating Subjects. London: De Appel, 2007.
Enwezor, Okwui “Curating Beyond the Canon” Paul O’Neil Ed., Curating Subjects. London: De Appel, 2007.
Enwezor, Okwui, “World Platforms, Exhibiting Adjacency, and the Surplus Value of Art” mith, Terry, et al. Talking Contemporary Curating. New York, Independent Curators International, 2015.
Filipovic, Elena “David Hammons, Untitled Knobkerry 1994” Filipovic, Elena Ed., The Artist as Curator. Milan Mousse Publishing, London: Koenig Books, 2017.
Groys, Boris. “Exhibitions, Installations, and Nostalgia” Smith, Terry, et al. Talking Contemporary Curating. New York, Independent Curators International, 2015.
Wild, Kim. Theater Garden Beastarium. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019.
Lace, Inga. Ed., Instituting Ecologies: Fellowship Reader #2, Amsterdam: De Appel, 2019.