2026 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.
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.
Monique Donesia
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1984.
Specifically: “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”
hooks, bell. Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. The New Press, 1995.
Bayles, David, and Ted Orland. Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking. Image Continuum Press, 1993.
Rubin, Rick. The Creative Act: A Way of Being. Penguin Press, 2023.
Kim Bissett
Bascom, Mansfield. “Wharton Esherick: The Journey of a Creative Mind”, Published by Harry N. Abrams, 2010.
Burlingham, Cynthia. “Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield”, Published by Prestel, 2009.
Johnson, Fenton. “At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life”, Published by W.W. Norton & Company, 2021.
Johnson, Robert and Ruhl, Jerry. “Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations”, Published by HarperOne, 2009.
Miller, Dana. “Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective”, Published by Whitney Museum of American Art, 2012.
Sudek, Josef and Farova, Anna. “Josef Sudek: The Window of My Studio”, Published by Torst, 2016.
Sutnik, Maia-Mari. “Josef Sudek: The Legacy of a Deeper Vision”, Hirmer Publishers, 2021.
Williams, William Carlos. “Kora in Hell: Improvisations”, City Lights Books, 1969.
Curator’s Pick for this show:
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.” Milkweed Editions, 2013
Curator’s Pick for this show:
The Poetics of Space
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas, Beacon Press, 1994.
Gumbo Ya-Ya
Saxon, Lyle, Edward Dreyer, and Robert Tallant, editors. Gumbo Ya-Ya: A Collection of Louisiana Folk Tales. Houghton Mifflin, 1945.