Reading List
Each SHED project begins long before the installation goes up. It starts in the margins of a book, in a half-remembered story, a family recipe, a dream, or a diagram. It begins in conversation.
For SHED’s 2025 season, we’ve invited artists to share their reading lists—not as a definitive bibliography, but as a kind of intellectual and emotional map. These aren’t just books—they’re windows into what shapes the work: research, archives, memories, field guides, and fragments that become embedded in the creative process.
A curated compilation of the books, essays, and research materials shaping each artist’s project, process, and thinking.
Some lists come from the artists. Others are built in dialogue, evolving over the course of a residency or exhibition. Together, they trace the conceptual threads behind each project—what’s being studied, remembered, questioned, or reimagined.
These lists are here to be revisited, passed around, and absorbed slowly.
They are part of our commitment to making process public. To consider reading as a form of listening to the artists we work with and invite our viewers to dig deeper into the shows we curate.
Margaret Kammerer
After Art — David Joselit
Blas Isasi
The Jaguar Within: Shamanic Trance in Central and South American Art — Rebecca R. Stone
Art and Vision in the Inca Empire — Adam Herring
Paradise — Toni Morrison
Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle — Katherine McKittrick
The Image of the City — Kevin Lynch
Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality — Evelyn Hammonds
Grieving While Black: An Antiracist Take on Oppression and Sorrow — Breeshia Wade
Shabez Jamal
Travis Morehead
Brown Dog of the Yak — Rick Bass
On Not Knowing — Emily Ogden
“The Labor of Gratitude” (excerpt from The Gift) — Lewis Hyde
The Book of Qualities — J. Ruth Gendler
Against the Great Defeat of the World — John Berger
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek — Annie Dillard
Tao Te Ching — trans. Stephen Mitchell
Gravity and Grace — Simone Weil
Experiments in Imagining Otherwise — Lola Olufemi
Listening to Insects: NE Ohio’s Crickets and Katydids — Lisa Rainsong
What is Landscape? — John R. Stilgoe
“The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” — Ursula K. LeGuin
Restoring Tallgrass Prairie: An Illustrated Manual for Iowa and the Upper Midwest — Shirley Shirley
Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969! — Mierle Laderman Ukeles
Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert — Sunaura Taylor
Health Communism — Beatrice Adler-Bolton & Artie Vierkant
R Kauff
Backwoods Chairmakers: In Search of the Appalachian Ladderback Chairmaker — Andy Glenn
A Short History of Black Craft in Ten Objects — Robell Awake
The Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society — Lucy Lippard
Wellness for Makers: A Movement Guide for Artists — Missy Graff Ballone