Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation


Adrienne Maree Brown - 2021
    She still travels the country helping organizations, especially Black organizations, clarify their goals, articulate their values, and negotiate conflicts. This work is based on her theory of Emergent Strategy and often takes the shape of multi-day workshops called "Emergent Strategy Immersions." In adrienne's verson, facilitation and mediation aren't simply tools for organizations, they are life skills that we all must practice, and through which the goals and values of organizations will align with those of the individuals within them. This is to say that this is not just a book for nonprofits. Her core audience has been requesting a book on applying Emergent Strategy to facilitation and mediation work for a long time. This book will serve as a textbook for the many workshops adrienne gives each year and a primer for everyone else. The book is a deeper dive into practicing Emergent Strategy in real time, drawing from the lessons of her facilitation work, and a year and a half of experiments with immersing people into emergent strategy community through her Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute. The book will be intriguingly structured, with the introduction (or Heart) in the middle and the front and back halves of the book devoted to Facilitation and Mediation respectively. Beyond that, it borders on a choose-your-own-adventure book in that the lessons are brief and to the point, highly practical, and you can move through the book in a number of ways to meet your needs. Adrienne's approach is rooted in a Black feminist worldview. These days, the world is hungry to hear more about that worldview and to take leadership and learn best practices from it.

How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art


David Salle - 2016
    Engaging with a wide range of Salle’s friends and contemporaries—from painters to conceptual artists such as Jeff Koons, John Baldessari, Roy Lichtenstein, and Alex Katz, among others—How to See explores not only the multilayered personalities of the artists themselves but also the distinctive character of their oeuvres.Salle writes with humor and verve, replacing the jargon of art theory with precise and evocative descriptions that help the reader develop a personal and intuitive engagement with art. The result: a master class on how to see with an artist’s eye.

A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen


Martín Espada - 2000
    There are conquerors, slaves, and rebels from Caribbean history; the "Mayan astronomer" calmly smoking a cigarette in the middle of a New York tenement fire; a nun staging a White House vigil to protest her torture; a man on death row mourning the loss of his books; and even Carmen Miranda.

Black Girls Don't Cry: Unveiling Our Pain and Unleashing Hope


Angelica Leigh - 2012
    It provides scriptural solutions to life altering problems such as low self-esteem, abuse, and depression. Black Girls Don’t Cry frees us from the bondage of regrets, encourages us to drop the baggage from our past, and moves us forward towards a renewed strength in Christ.

Can't Pay, Won't Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition


Debt Collective - 2020
    This concise, energetic manifesto from the Debt Collective is in equal parts informative and inspiring, and is sure to become a crucial reference point for activists and debt cancellation campaigners. Includes a foreword from Debt Collective co-founder and acclaimed activist-author, documentarian, and musician Astra Taylor.

Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin


Lawrence Weschler - 1982
    Traces the life and career of the California artist, who currently works with pure light and the subtle modulation of empty space.

Doing Democracy: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements


Bill Moyer - 2001
    But the road to success for social movements is often complex, usually lasting many years, with few guides for evaluating the precise stage of a movement's evolution to determine the best way forward.Doing Democracy provides both a theory and working model for understanding and analyzing social movements, ensuring that they are successful in the long term. Beginning with an overview of social movement theory and the MAP (Movement Action Plan) model, Doing Democracy outlines the eight stages of social movements, the four roles of activists, and case studies from the civil rights, anti-nuclear energy, Central America, gay/lesbian, women's health, and globalization movements.Bill Moyer is the originator of the MAP Model; he and his coauthors combine several decades of movement experience.

Art on My Mind: Visual Politics


bell hooks - 1995
    Always concerned with the liberatory black struggle, hooks positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be an empowering and revolutionary force within the black community.

Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989


Julie R. Enszer - 2018
    Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidences through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and video tapes. Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 gathers this correspondence for readers to eavesdrop on Lorde and Parker. They discuss their work as writers as well as intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer. Sister Love is a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the minds and friendship of two great twentieth century poets.

A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre


Anne Bogart - 2001
    In it, Anne Bogart speaks candidly and with wisdom of the courage required to create 'art with great presence'. Each chapter tackles one of the seven major areas Bogart has identified as both potential partner and potential obstacle to art-making. They are Violence; Memory; Terror; Eroticism; Stereotype; Embarrassment; and Resistance. Each one can be used to generate extraordinary creative energy, if we know how to use it.A Director Prepares offers every practitioner an extraordinary insight into the creative process. It is a handbook, Bible and manifesto, all in one. No other book on the art of theatre comes even close to offering this much understanding, experience and inspiration.

Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay


James Alison - 1997
    For James Alison, a gay Catholic theologian, the key to moving beyond resentment is a radical re-conversion to the gospel message of God’s love and understanding that even those in power are our brothers and sisters.

Art Held Hostage: The Story of the Barnes Collection


John Anderson - 2003
    The Barnes Collection has been conservatively valued at more than $6 billion and includes some 69 Cézannes (more than in all the museums of Paris combined), 60 Matisses, 44 Picassos, 18 Rousseaus, 14 Modiglianis, and no fewer than 180 Renoirs. Yet the Barnes is in crisis. Its founder, Dr. Albert C. Barnes (1872), grew up in the slums of late-nineteenth-century Philadelphia only to become first a physician and later a pharmaceutical king. By 1920, this self-made man was already well on his way to becoming one of the great art collectors of his day. But this is also the story of Richard Glanton, who escaped poverty in rural Georgia to become a high-flying, politically powerful Philadelphia lawyer. It was Glanton who took the Barnes art on its celebrated worldwide tour, renovated the galleries-and presided over a decade of expensive litigation. The most famous of these court cases—this one in federal court—pitted the Barnes against its wealthy neighbors. The goal: A 52-car parking lot for the Barnes. The cost: more than $6 million in legal fees. Today, Glanton is no longer president of the Barnes, and the new board is seeking to move the collection into the city. Yet another court case will decide whether they can or not. The battle of the Barnes has only just begun. "Here, at long last, is the whole truth about the Dickensian legal tug-of-war—unimaginably tangled, unsparingly vicious, unprecedentedly cynical—that threatens the survival of one of the greatest private art collections of the twentieth century. From now on, anyone who seeks to understand the desperate plight of the Barnes Collection will have to start by reading this important book." —Terry Teachout, author of The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken "John Anderson has produced a riveting account of curators, trustees, and lawyers fighting for control of the world-famous Barnes Collection of French impressionist art from the 1950s to the present. Based on hundreds of revealing interviews, Art Held Hostage reads like a superb mystery novel: This gem of investigative reporting is a sure contender for the national best-seller lists." —Howard R. Lamar, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History, Yale University

Art Worlds


Howard S. Becker - 1982
    Argues that art works are not the creation of isolated individuals but result from cooperation between different artists, suppliers of materials, art distributors, critics, and audiences, who together make up the art world.

Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement


Marshall Ganz - 2008
    Since the 1900s, large-scale agricultural enterprises relied on migrant labor--a cheap, unorganized, and powerless workforce. In1965, when some 800 Filipino grape workers began to strike under the aegis of the AFL-CIO, the UFW soon joined the action with 2,000 Mexican workers and turned the strike into a civil rights struggle. They engaged in civil disobedience, mobilized support from churches and students, boycottedgrowers, and transformed their struggle into La Causa, a farm workers' movement that eventually triumphed over the grape industry's Goliath. Why did they succeed? How can the powerless challenge the powerful successfully?Offering insight from a longtime movement organizer and scholar, Ganz illustrates how they had the ability and resourcefulness to devise good strategy and turn short-term advantages into long-term gains. Authoritative in scholarship and magisterial in scope, this book constitutes a seminalcontribution to learning from the movement's struggles, set-backs, and successes.

Listening to Images


Tina M. Campt - 2017
    Campt explores a way of listening closely to photography, engaging with lost archives of historically dismissed photographs of black subjects taken throughout the black diaspora. Engaging with photographs through sound, Campt looks beyond what one usually sees and attunes her senses to the other affective frequencies through which these photographs register. She hears in these photos—which range from late nineteenth-century ethnographic photographs of rural African women and photographs taken in an early twentieth-century Cape Town prison to postwar passport photographs in Birmingham, England and 1960s mug shots of the Freedom Riders—a quiet intensity and quotidian practices of refusal. Originally intended to dehumanize, police, and restrict their subjects, these photographs convey the softly buzzing tension of colonialism, the low hum of resistance and subversion, and the anticipation and performance of a future that has yet to happen. Engaging with discourses of fugitivity, black futurity, and black feminist theory, Campt takes these tools of colonialism and repurposes them, hearing and sharing their moments of refusal, rupture, and imagination.