Arts & Culture
Anthologies, portraits, memoirs and more; stories that explore the expansive, yet intricate roles that the arts and culture play in each of us
(Listed alphabetically by author)
ArtMill: A Story of Sustainable Creativity in Bohemia
Barbara Benish tells her story as a female artist who found a way to build a life in a rural, post-totalitarian, foreign country, it is a testament to the resilience of the people of that small nation that was sacrificed in the tumultuous chess game of colonial superpowers dividing up Europe after the devastation of WWII.
More Letters from the Edge: Outrider Conversations
A collection of letters exchanged between the author and four “outriders”—artists, writers, and activists who risk everything to confront censorship, injustice, and the constraints of convention.
Letters from the Edge: Outrider Conversations
By excerpting from letters she exchanged with five irreverent writers and artists, Margaret Randall constructs conversations that open windows on four pivotal moments in her life and on world events.
Portraits of Peacemakers: Americans Who Tell the Truth
This third volume in the Americans Who Tell the Truth series features Robert Shetterly’s striking color portraits and profiles of fifty peace activists as well as essays by Chris Hedges, Kali Rubaii, Paul K. Chappell, Medea Benjamin, Alice Rothchild, and David Swanson.
See Me: Prison Theater Workshops and Love
Encounters, transformations, and reflections from in-prison and post-release theater workshops, each essay is a collaboration between two or three people who connected profoundly in the temporary community that a workshop can create.
Random Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty— 30th Anniversary Edition
By Anne Herbert, Paloma Pavel, Mayumi Oda
Foreword by Desmond Mpilo Tutu
A parable of hope and peace for all ages with beautifully crafted words and exuberant watercolor illustrations, Random Kindness offers a poetic and empowering message for world peace. Recognizing “we are right on the edge of destroying ourselves,” this modern allegory inspires taking joyful steps to end violence.
I Opened the Gate Laughing: An Inner Journey — 20th Anniversary Edition
By Mayumi Oda
A tribute to the power of spiritual practice, creative expression, and true self-acceptance I Opened the Gate Laughing is the story of one woman’s journey to creative freedom through gardening and the teachings of Zen. I Opened the Gate Laughing is a resource for anyone seeking a slower pace, a sacred space, and a garden path.
Luck
By Margaret Randall
Illustrations by Barbara Byers
Luck is a collection of essays that combines scholarly research with personal experience, producing texts both intimate and illuminating. Always attentive to the world around her and the one within, Randall has brought us her most relevant and powerful essays to date.
Stuff: Instead of a Memoir
By Lucy r. Lippard
Stuff: Instead of a Memoir is a short, abundantly illustrated autobiography of the American art writer, activist, and curator Lucy R. Lippard. Describing tchotchkes, photographs, and art in her unpretentious New Mexico home, the author informally narrates key events and relationships in her 86-year-long, highly creative life.
Art in a Democracy: Selected Plays of Roadside Theater,
Vol 1 & Vol 2 (set)
Edited by Ben Fink
This two-volume anthology tells the story of Roadside Theater’s first 45 years and includes nine award-winning original play scripts; ten essays by authors from different disciplines and generations, which explore the plays’ social, economic, and political circumstances; and a critical recounting of the theater’s history from 1975 through 2020.
Art in a Democracy: Selected Plays of Roadside Theater, Volume 1: The Appalachian History Plays, 1975–1989
Edited by Ben Fink
The plays in Volume 1 offer a people’s history of the Appalachian coalfields, from the European incursion through the American War in Vietnam. Roadside has spent 45 years searching for what art in a democracy might look like.
Art in a Democracy: Selected Plays of Roadside Theater, Volume 2: The Intercultural Plays, 1990–2020
Edited by Ben Fink
The plays in Volume 2 come from Roadside’s intercultural and issue-specific theater work, including long-term collaborations with the African American Junebug Productions in New Orleans and the Puerto Rican Pregones Theater in the South Bronx, as well as with residents on both sides of the walls of recently-built prisons.
In the Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does It Mean to Be Educated?
By Arlene Goldbard
Through her evocative paintings and narrative, author Arlene Goldbard has portrayed eleven people whose work most influenced her—what she calls a camp of angels. She sees each as a brave messenger of love and freedom for a society that badly needs “uncolonized minds.”
Portraits of Earth Justice: Americans Who Tell the Truth
By Robert Shetterly
This second volume in the Americans Who Tell the Truth series, is a collection of environmental and climate activists whose stunning color portraits Robert Shetterly painted with the intention of honoring their work and bringing them to a wider audience.
The Book of Judith: Opening Hearts Through Poetry
Edited by Spoon Jackson, Mark Foss, and Sara Press
The Book of Judith honors Judith Tannenbaum and echoes her own determination to perceive contradiction without judgment. For the next generation of teaching artists in Corrections and elsewhere, the book serves as an inspiration on the qualities needed to survive and thrive in a multi-faceted, ever-changing environment.
Meeting the Moment: Socially Engaged Performance, 1965–2020, by Those Who Lived It
By Jan Cohen-Cruz and Rad Pereira, Forewords by Carlton Turner and Jill Dolan
Meeting the Moment explores experiences of a diverse range of progressive theater and performance makers in the U.S. The work offers insight into the challenges and adaptations of the industry, recognizing limitations due to discrimination and unequal opportunity that performance artists have faced over the past 55 years.
Divining Chaos: The Autobiography of an Idea
By Aviva Rahmani, Foreword by Lucy Lippard
Divining Chaos provides a personal memoir of eco-artist Aviva Rahmani, offering her Trigger-Point theory thesis and unparalleled exclusivity to the moments in her life that shaped her as an artist and activist. Rahmani shares intimate decisions that shaped her life’s work.
Risking a Somersault in the Air: Conversations with Nicaraguan Writers (Revised edition)
First published in 1984, Risking a Somersault in the Air is a collection of interviews with fourteen of Nicaragua’s most important writers-revolutionaries. Filling in the gaps with new photographs and updates on the writers in the time since the original edition, the book looks at the sacrifices, conflicts, and solutions of the creative artists of Nicaragua’s revolution. Randall shows how Nicaragua, like its poetry, is an expression of great love, imagination, and liberation.
Artists in My Life
By Margaret Randall, Forewords by Mary Gabriel and Ed McCaughan
Artists in My Life is a collection of intimate and conversational accounts of the visual artists that have impacted the renowned poet-activist Margaret Randall on her own journey as an artist. Each story offers insight into the artist’s life and work, and analyses the impact it had on Randall’s own work and its impact on the larger art community. The work strives to answer bigger questions about visual art as a whole and its lasting political influence on the world stage.
Ecoart in Action: Activities, Case Studies, and Provocations for Classrooms and Communities
Edited by Amara Geffen, Ann Rosenthal, Chris Fermantle, and Aviva Rahmani
Compiled of 67 members of the Ecoart Network, a group of more than 200 internationally established practitioners, EcoArt in Action stands as a field guide for practical solutions to critical environmental challenges. Each contribution provides models for ecoart practice that are adaptable for use within a variety of classrooms, communities, and contexts.
Cultivating Creativity
The product of over three decades of teaching design studios and creativity seminars primarily at the University of Washington, Cultivating Creativity offers firsthand, on-the-ground accounts of encouraging creative expression in the classroom. In this lively book, course instructors will find a wealth of creativity-awakening exercises and strategies that can be adapted to suit a variety of disciplines.
Healing from Genocide in Rwanda: Rugerero Survivors Village, an Artist Book
By Susan Viguers and Lily Yeh
Healing from Genocide in Rwanda demonstrates the power of art in the service of healing and is a testimony to responsive community process in a highly sensitive environment. The work immerses readers in the stories of two Rwandans who as small children experienced the 1994 Genocide. It tells of the horrific tragedy each survived, the courage necessary for surviving, and the humanity they embody.
Portraits of Racial Justice: Americans Who Tell the Truth
The first volume of Robert Shetterly’s Americans Who Tell the Truth portrait series, Portraits of Racial Justice takes a multimedia, interdisciplinary approach, blending art and history with today’s issues concerning social, environmental, and economic fairness. Shetterly’s paintings, as well as profiles of those portrayed, illuminate a community of people not only willing to recognize the shortcomings of America’s history, but most importantly, individuals who offer their visions of a better world moving forward.
My Life in 100 Objects
My Life in 100 Objects is a personal reflection on the events and moments that shaped the life and work of one extraordinary woman. With a masterful, poetic voice, Margaret Randall uses talismanic objects and photographs as launching points for her nonlinear narrative. Interwoven throughout are her most precious relationships, her growth as an artist, and her brave, revolutionary spirit.
Conversations with Diego Rivera: The Monster in His Labyrinth
By Alfredo Cardona Peña
Translated by Alvaro Cardona-Hine
A year of weekly interviews (1949–1950) with artist Diego Rivera by poet Alfredo Cardona-Peña disclose Rivera’s iconoclastic views of life and the art world of that time.
Beginner’s Guide to Community-Based Arts, 2nd Edition
By Mat Schwarzman
Illustrated by Keith Knight
Ten transformative local arts projects come alive in this illustrated training manual for youth leaders and teachers. This energetic guidebook demonstrates the enormous power of art in grassroots social change.
Openings: A Memoir from the Women’s Art Movement, New York City 1970–1992
By Sabra Moore
Forewords by Lucy R. Lippard and Margaret Randall
An account of the women’s art movement in New York City from 1970 to 1992 and how these women created politically and personally effective art works, exhibitions, actions, and institutions.
Awakening Creativity: Dandelion School Blossoms
By Lily Yeh
International artist Lily Yeh guides a participatory process of artistic expression that uplifts a distressed community. Her open, joyful approach to art-making is a model for building healthy cultural esteem.
By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives
By Judith Tannenbaum and Spoon Jackson
A two-person memoir that explores education, prison, possibility, and which children our world nurtures and which it shuns. At the book’s core are two stories that speak up for human imagination, spirit, and the power of art.
Arts for Change: Teaching Outside the Frame
Beverly Naidus shares her passion and strategies for teaching socially engaged art, offering, as well, a short history of the field and the candid views of more than thirty colleagues.
Art and Upheaval: Artists on the World’s Frontlines
By William Cleveland
Foreword by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Author William Cleveland tells remarkable stories from Northern Ireland, Cambodia, South Africa, United States (Watts, Lost Angeles), aboriginal Australia, and Serbia, about artists who resolve conflict and heal unspeakable trauma.
Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Social Change Writing
Practical guidance to help both citizens and professionals influence democratic process through written letters, articles, reports and public testimony.
New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development
An inspiring, foundational book that defines the burgeoning field of community cultural development.
Works of Heart: Building Village Through the Arts
Revised Edition
By Lynne Elizabeth and Suzanne Young
Citizen artists revitalize places, celebrate culture, and inspire social change in this beautiful introduction to community-engaged arts.
Performing Communities: Grassroots Ensemble Theaters Deeply Rooted In Eight U.S. Communities
By Robert H. Leonard and Ann Kilkelly
Introduction by Jan Cohen Cruz
Edited by Linda Frye Burnham
Ensemble theater is one of the vibrant, meaningful American performance forms today. It’s more than art—it’s a social movement.