Arts & Culture

In order of publication date

$16.95 Hardcover
40 pages • 6.9 x 8.1 inches
Color illustrated throughout
Date: 04/09/2024
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-228-4

A Parable of Hope and Peace for All Ages

With beautifully crafted words and exuberant watercolor illustrations, 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. It expands upon the idea that “we are all in the circle together,” and presents a timeless parable for readers of all ages. In the playful style of 12th century Japanese picture scrolls, Mayumi Oda’s art depicts humans as animals who lose their way when their leaders become confused and drawn to violence. The message of this book is the sweet realization that each person can become an agent of goodness and beauty.

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$34.95 Hardcover
96 pages • 7.5 x 8.5 inches
Color illustrated throughout
Date: 04/09/2024
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-232-1

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. Born in Japan, Mayumi Oda comes back to the practice of Buddhism at beautiful Green Gulch Farm retreat center in Northern California, where she finds a new tranquility and creative spirit through her pen, her brush, and her trowel to overcome the constraints of a traditional upbringing and the sadness of the end of a marriage. This enchanting book is a meditation on the search for inner peace and reawakening. awash with luscious prints and watercolors, beautifully designed, and filled with vivid stories and verse. I Opened the Gate Laughing is a resource for anyone seeking a slower pace, a sacred space, and a garden path.

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$44.95 Hardcover
8 x 8 inches
300 color images
Date: 09/12/2023
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-224-6

Colorfully written and illustrated memoir of the activist art writer Lucy Lippard.

Stuff: Instead of a Memoir is a short, abundantly illustrated autobiography of the American art writer, activist, and sometime 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, starting with her family roots and her childhood in New York, Louisiana, Virginia, and Maine. Through anecdotal and often humorous memories, we follow the author through her youth, adulthood, relationships, and her thirty-five years in New York City, where she organized dozens of exhibitions, authored hundreds of articles, and co-founded Heresies: A Feminist Journal of Art and Politics, the artist’s-book center Printed Matter, and activist artists group PAD/D. Lippard touches on the roles she played in Conceptual Art and the Feminist Art movement in the 1960s through the 1980s. Her accounts of more recent years focus on the art, landscape, culture, and communities of the American Southwest, where she moved in the early 1990s. This “anti-memoir” also mentions Lippard’s twenty-five books, but few of her many honors.

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$50.00 Paperback
576 pages • 6 x 9 inches
24 black and white images
Date: 03/14/2023
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-202-4

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. The plays in Volume 1 offer a people’s history of the Appalachian coalfields, from the European incursion through the American War in Vietnam. 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.

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$26.95 Paperback
224 pages • 6 x 9 inches
12 black and white images
Date: 03/14/2023
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-194-2

The plays and essays 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. The work raises questions such as, What are common principles and common barriers to achieving democracy across disciplines, and how can the disciplines unite in common democratic cause?

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$26.95 Paperback
256 pages • 6 x 9 inches
12 black and white images
Date: 03/14/2023
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-190-4

The plays and essays in Volume 1 offer a people’s history of the Appalachian coalfields, from the European incursion through the American War in Vietnam.

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$34.95 Hardcover
128 pages • 8.5 x 11 inches
51 color images
Date: 09/20/2022
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-187-4

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 crisis of climate change and environmental degradation is the greatest crisis humanity has ever confronted, and it is made many times harder because so many powerful institutions, governments, and corporations are invested in an economy of exploitation. The people in this book diagnose the truth of the problem and point a way forward. Besides fifty inspiring portraits and profiles, the book features original essays by Bill McKibben, Leah Penniman, Diane Wilson, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Bill Bigelow.

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$19.95 Paperback
224 pages • 5.5 x 8.5 inches
5 black and white images
Date: 08/02/2022
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-174-4
Also available as hardcover or eBook

The Book of Judith honors Judith Tannenbaum but also reflects, through both form and content, on the complexities of seeing both the parts and the whole. The book presents different aspects of Judith—poet, teaching artist, friend, mentor, colleague—through a collection of original poetry, prose, essay, illustration, and fiction from 33 contributors. In so doing, it 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.

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$30.00 Paperback
352 pages • 6 x 9 inches
59 black and white images
Date: 06/28/2022
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-166-9
Also available as hardcover or eBook

Divining Chaos provides a personal memoir of eco-artist Aviva Ramani. The story gives insight into her Trigger-Point theory thesis and unparalleled exclusivity to the moments in her life that shaped her as an artist and activist. Detailing the history that led Rahmani to two seminal projects: Ghost Nets, restoring a coastal town dump to flourishing wetlands, and The Blued Trees Symphony, which applied the premises to challenge natural gas pipelines with a novel legal theory about land use, Ramani shares intimate decisions that shaped her life’s work.

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$26.95 Paperback
320 pages • 6 x 9 inches
18 black and white images
Date: 05/31/2022
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-154-6
Also available as hardcover or eBook

Meeting the Moment explores experiences of a diverse range of progressive theater and performance makers in the U.S. Cohen Cruz and Pereira present the struggles of artists who stand on the line of both rigorous art-making and community care. 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. The book’s voices from the field point to more diverse and inclusive practices and give hope for the future of the art.

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$22.95 Paperback
240 pages • 5.83 x 8.27
51 black and white illustrations
Date: 05/24/2022
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-183-6
Also available as eBook

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. She notes: The book provides insight into a country where artistic creativity has always been valued, regardless of what sort of government is in power.

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$30.00 Hardcover
240 pages • 5.83 x 8.27 inches
71 color images
Date: 04/12/2022
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-159-1
Also available as eBook

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.

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$39.95 Paperback
320 pages • 8.5 x 8.5 inches
45 black and white images
Date: 02/01/2022
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-146-1
Also available as hardcover or eBook

Compiled from 67 members of the Ecoart Network, a group of more than 200 internationally established practitioners, EcoArt in Action stands as a field guide that offers practical solutions to critical environmental challenges. Organized into three sections—Activities, Case Studies, and Provocations—each contribution provides models for ecoart practice that are adaptable for use within a variety of classrooms, communities, and contexts.

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$49.95 Hardcover
256 pages • 8.5 x 8.5 inches
350 color images
Date: 01/11/2022
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-119-5

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.

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$40.00 Paperback
144 pages • 7.5 x 9.25 inches
Color throughout
Date: 11/02/2021
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-134-8
Also available as hardcover

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. Their stories are framed by two chapters chronicling the transformation, in the Rugerero Survivors’ Village, of a concrete burial slab into a powerful Genocide Memorial with its bone chamber, designed by artist Lily Yeh and built by the villagers. An essential theme of the book is the importance of the dead for the living, of honoring the dead, of remembrance.

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$34.95 Hardcover
128 pages • 8.5 x 11 inches
51 color images
Date: 09/21/2021
ISBN: 978-1-61332-163-8

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.

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$24.00 Paper
250 pages • 5 x 8 inches 
100 color photographs 
Date: 09/15/2020
ISBN: 978-1-61332-114-0
Also available as hardcover and ebook

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. Through each “object,” Randall uncovers another part of herself, starting in a museum in Amman, Jordan, and ending in the Latin American Studies Association in Boston. Interwoven throughout are her most precious relationships, her growth as an artist, and her brave, revolutionary spirit.

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$21.95 Paper
312 pages • 5.5 x 8.5 inches
1 black & white photograph
Date: 02/04/2020
ISBN: 978-1-61332-110-2

A Man of the Theater tells the personal story of a theater artist caught between the two great upheavals of Iranian history in the 20th century. One is the White Revolution of the 1960s, the incomplete and uneven modernization imposed from the top by the dictatorial regime of the Shah, coming in the wake of the overthrow of the popular Mosaddegh government with the help of the CIA. The other one is the Iranian Revolution of 1979, a great rising of Iranian society against the rule of the Shah in which Khomeini’s Islamist faction ends up taking power.

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$28 Paper
144 pages, 98 color illustrations
Date: 09/04/2018
ISBN: 9781613320853

Citizen artists revitalize place, celebrate culture, and inspire social change in this beautiful introduction to community-engaged arts.

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$19.95 Paper
224 pages, 3 bw illustrations
Date: 07/09/2018
ISBN: 9781613320280

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.

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$23.95 Paper
Date: 09/12/2017
ISBN: 9781613320242

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.

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$12.95 Paper
Date: 01/03/2017
ISBN: 9781613320235

A Haiku-like text with the message that each person can become an agent of goodness and beauty.

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$34.95 Paper
416 pages, 7.5 x 9.2 inches, 950 color illustrations
Date: 10/25/2016
ISBN: 9781613320181

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.

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$21.95 Paper
Date: 12/01/2011
ISBN: 9781613320006

Acting Together, Volume ll, continues from where the first volume ends documenting exemplary peace-building performances in regions marked by social exclusion structural violence and dislocation.

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$21.95 Paper
Date: 07/22/2011
ISBN: 9780981559391

Courageous artists working in conflict regions describe exemplary peace-building performances and groundbreaking theory on performance for transformation of violence.

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$34.95 Cloth
Date: 06/01/2011
ISBN: 9780981559377

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.

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$19.95 Paper
Date: 04/26/2011
ISBN: 9780981559384

This new anthology of contemporary American poetry, short fiction and nonfiction, explores issues of identity, oppression, injustice, and social change.

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$19.95 Paper
Date: 10/01/2010
ISBN: 9780976605454

An inspiring, foundational book that defines the burgeoning field of community cultural development.

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$20 Paper
Date: 04/01/2010
ISBN: 9780981559353

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.

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$19.95 Paper
Date: 04/01/2009
ISBN: 9780981559308

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.

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$24.95 Paper
Date: 08/01/2008
ISBN: 9780976605461

Author William Cleveland tells remarkable stories from Northern Ireland, Cambodia, South Africa, United States (Watts, Lost Angeles), aboriginal Australia, and Serbia, about artist who resolve conflict and heal unspeakable trauma.

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$19.95 Paper
Date: 04/01/2006
ISBN: 9780976605447

Ensemble theater is one of the vibrant, meaningful American performance forms today. It’s more than art—it’s a social movement.

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