This Mortal Coil: the Human Body in History and Culture by Fay Bound Alberti; 2016 examines the cultural history of how we understand our bodies.

*Recommended by grantee Dario Robleto

In Abject Performances Leticia Alvarado draws out the irreverent, disruptive aesthetic strategies used by Latino artists and cultural producers who shun standards of respectability that are typically used to conjure concrete minority identities. In place of works imbued with pride, redemption, or celebration, artists such as Ana Mendieta, Nao Bustamante, and the Chicano art collective known as Asco employ negative affects—shame, disgust, and unbelonging—to capture experiences that lie at the edge of the mainstream, inspirational Latino-centered social justice struggles. Drawing from a diverse expressive archive that ranges from performance art to performative testimonies of personal faith-based subjection, Alvarado illuminates modes of community formation and social critique defined by a refusal of identitarian coherence that nonetheless coalesce into Latino affiliation and possibility.

*Recommended by grantee Xandra Ibarra

"Castro Street (1966) is a visual nonstory documentary film which uses the sounds and sights of a city street -- in this case, Castro Street near the Standard Oil Refinery in Richmond, California -- to convey the street's own mood and feel. There is no dialogue in this non-narrative experimental film."

*Recommended by grantee Tina Takemoto

Writer and curator, Claire Barliant reflects on the use of ‘post’ in identity politics.

Bloom’s book focuses on the conquest of the North Pole and how visual media defined and shaped American national ideologies from the early twentieth century to the present.

*Recommended by grantee Janet Biggs.

This article from writer and translator, Elliott Colla explores the iconoclasm of ISIS and "object veneration" which relates closely to the role of encyclopedic museums in contemporary culture.

*Recommended by grantee Kamrooz Aram

Based on the novel of the same name, the film takes place in the 1970s. It follows the protagonist Dan Freeman, the first black CIA agent, who leaves the force to train black "Freedom Fighters" in Chicago.

*Recommended by grantee EJ Hill

With sections devoted to Art Matters grantees James Luna, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wojnarowicz.

Grantee Malik Gaines of My Barbarian, discusses the subject of ‘positionality’ and ambiguity in his own performative work.

Artists Chitra Ganesh and grantee artist Mariam Ghani of the experimental archive Index of the Disappeared, present audio recordings from the “Radical Archives” conference, which they organized at New York University in April as part of the Index’s 2013–14 residency at NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute.

A non-fiction, absurdist thriller written by a novelist and takes place in 1980s cold-war Guatemala.

*Recommended by grantee Yoshua Okon

With chapters on Art Matters grantees James Luna, Fred Wilson, Pepón Osorio, and Renee Green, amongst others.

This is one of the final works published by Guattari that deals with three interconnected networks inspired by the ideas of Gregory Bateson: the mind, society and the environment.

*Recommended by grantee Yoshua Okon

London-based writer and curator Nav Haq reflects on the current status of art after identity politics.

"Venus in Two Acts" by Saidiya Hartmann was published in 2008 and examines the ubiquitous presence of Venus in the archive of Atlantic slavery and wrestles with the impossibility of discovering anything about her that hasn’t already been stated. As an emblematic figure of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world, Venus makes plain the convergence of terror and pleasure in the libidinal economy of slavery and, as well, the intimacy of history with the scandal and excess of literature. In writing at the limit of the unspeakable and the unknown, the essay mimes the violence of the archive and attempts to redress it by describing as fully as possible the conditions that determine the appearance of Venus and that dictate her silence.

*Recommended by grantee Michelle Dizon

Writer and art historian Mostafa Heddaya examines the challenges of linguistic translation in the field of modern and contemporary art.

*Recommended by grantee Gelare Khoshgozaran

One of the most successful writers from Jamaica comes out in the New York Times.

*Recommended by grantee Simone Leigh

Jones offers a rebuttal to the claim that we are beyond identity politics and chides the art world for making facile proclamations about post-feminism, post-queer, and post-black identities in exhibitions that are designed to cater to phobia about the deleterious effects of political correctness.

The article speaks to prison abolition, the importance in understanding how systemic oppression functions, and how critical it is to imagine a more humane present and future through a world without prisons.

*Recommended by grantee Maria Gaspar

Lee considers the ‘three phases’ of queer sexuality in the arts since the Aids Crisis and how might representation be currently at stake.

A collection of essays that examines complex relationships inside art, culture, political economy, immaterial production, and the public realm today

Personal blog of writer, social justice facilitator, pleasure activist, healer, and doula Adrienne Maree Brown

*Recommended by grantee Tunde Olaniran

A project by 2007 grantee Carlos Motta that includes an online journal, a database of interviews, a book, and other resources on themes relating to queer culture, from critical perspectives on marriage equality to HIV/AIDS now.

Salamon considers questions of transgendered embodiment via phenomenology psychoanalysis, and queer theory.

The article chronicles the language and philosophical positions of global warming and how we arrived at the term ‘Anthropocene’.

*Recommended by grantee Janet Biggs

XTRA: Contemporary Art Quarterly 11:1

A seminal history of identity politics in the arts focusing on the legacies of Felix Gonzales Torres, Adrian Piper and Kori Newkirk

The curator and critic Sheikh discusses the relationship between picturing and politicking and asks “how to make representations political without being caught up in the politics of representation?”

An incisive look at the ‘cultural turbulence’ of what has been termed, political art, activist art, interventionist art, collectivized art, socially engaged/ relational/participatory/dialogical art.

Last September, the State of California suspended the mandate that all Californian fourth-graders work on a "Mission project." And even though this decision is a move in the right direction considering that the project was focused on having students build replicas of the various Missions, the mainstream media (the LA Times in this example) used mild language in their reporting: "... the impending death of the fourth-grade "mission project," the assignment given to thousands of California schoolchildren over the years to construct models of the historic pre-statehood religious structures that were, in real life, built by Spanish missionaries using forced Native American sweat labor." NOTE: Sweat labor has a completely different connotation than slavery. Onward.

*Recommended by grantee Judith Walgren

Drawing from his transmedia project “Question Bridge: Black Males,” the artist Hank Willis Thomas examines the racial context of the 2012 killing of Jordan Davis as the man who shot the 17-year-old Florida resident, Michael Dunn, is retried for murder.

Creative Time chief curator Nato Thomson interrogates the implications of social networking and the overabundance of image production on the socially-engaged art community.

An online archive of work made by women of color using art and technology. BSC member Anna Luisa Petrisko is featured here. Curated and designed by Lauren Valley, 2018.

*Recommended by grantee Black Salt Collective

A group of San Francisco-based Asian-American activists ask their communities to join #BlackLivesMatter in solidarity.

*Recommended by grantee Betty Yu

Queens of the Night, Xina Xurner featuring San Cha, Sarah Gail, & White Boy Scream, 2018.

Xina Xurner is a LA-based band that combines DIY and power electronics, mutated vocals, and bad drag performance. Their music combines a variety of genres (including happy hardcore, industrial, noise, disco), to create diva-dance anthems that evoke a sense of death, decay, and transformation.

*Recommended by grantee Young Joon Kwak

"One body to an-other. Spanning time, sharing space, marking place, blending breath, sensing touch. An emerging inter-face addresses both parties in this mise-en-scene of togetherness. The function and development of the encounter is reliant upon shared economies of exchange, identification and understanding."

*Recommended by grantee Sandra Haydee Alonso