"This hybrid series of interviews and playlists centers women and non-binary artists of the African diaspora and their use of multi-sensory input as pathways to new approaches in their practices and alternative ways of seeing. The goal of BOP is to open a dialogue about sensory input and how it affects artistic practices through community and musical connection."

*Recommended by 2022 Artist2Artist Fellow, M. Carmen Lane.

"In the words of the curator, Dr. Melissa Brown, 'I’ve come to learn the importance of archives while working as a graduate student for the African American Digital Humanities Initiative (AADHUM). Our work has centered around how digital tools and data can represent the longevity, diversity, and uniqueness of the African Diaspora. As always, I focus on Black women and their work so I decided to compile a list of resources on Black women.'"

*Recommended by 2022 Artist2Artist Fellow, Dr. Treasure Shields Redmond

Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, 2016

*Recommended by 2021 grantee Margaret Namulyanga

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What to do when everything feels broken | Daniel Alexander Jones

"This gift is a mantra, a recipe, an affirmation."

*Recommended by 2021 grantee Renita Martin

Denise Ferreira da Silva, ON DIFFERENCE WITHOUT SEPARABILITY, 2016.
*Recommended by 2021 grantee, Carolyn Lazard

"2021" by Jota Mombaça, 2019. Installation/Performance presented as part of "The Present Is Not Enough – Performing Queer Histories and Futures" at HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, Germany.

*Recommended by 2021 grantee, Rheim Alkhadi

"In A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane, the author focuses his wide-awake subconscious mind on thematic standards--father, mother, lover, sex, the imagination itself--and recasts them into madcap parable, surrealistic fables, and grotesque fantasies."
*Recommended by 2021 grantee, John W. Love Jr.

"Black Seed was becoming a voice in, and for, indigenous anarchism, from a perspective that is different from, and definitely in dialog with, more traditional indigeneity, and more traditional anarchist thinking. Urban, nihilist, green, brown, black, mixed, liminal, antipolitical, anti-anthropological, rejecting both the perspective that ancient peoples had all the answers and certainly that anyone now has... or even that all the answers would be possible or desirable."
*Recommended by 2021 grantee, Indigenous Action

"A comprehensive guide with beautiful photographs and concise descriptions of Jordan's diverse wonders."

*Recommended by 2010 and 2021 grantees, The Rocca Family.

"Education and the Significance of Life is a penetrating inquiry into the nature and requirements of the kind of education which can lead to self-fulfillment and to world peace. Krishnamurti stresses self-knowledge and creating an environment free from fear to help create an atmosphere in which real education can take place."

*Recommended by 2010 and 2021 grantee, The Rocca Family.

"Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice offers an exciting guide to ways of listening and sounding. This book provides unique insights and perspectives for artists, students, teachers, mediators and anyone interested in how consciousness may be effected by profound attention to the sonic environment."
*Recommended by 2010 and 2021 grantee, The Rocca Family.

Brightmoor Connection is a water and food station that strategically assists 1700 households who are living without water and who are food insecure.

*Recommended by 2020 Mutual Aid grantee, Artists & Allies

"Juan Carlos Ruiz, a Mexican pastor in Brooklyn, does everything from human-rights advocacy to grocery delivery." - Jonathan Blitzer, The New Yorker

*Recommended by 2020 Mutual Aid grantees Guadalupe Maravilla and House Lives Matter

‍"The comments posted on gofundme.com's medical fundraisers form a revealing archive. These messages express care, well wishes, sympathy and generosity in the face of personal adversity and systemic failure. This is an archive of mutual aid in response to a ruthless for-profit health system. It is an archive that should not exist."

- Johanna Hedva's Get Well Soon (2020)‍

*Recommended by 2020 Mutual Aid grantees House Lives Matter and one group that has requested to remain anonymous.

"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

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

"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

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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

*Recommended by grantee Tunde Olaniran

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

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

*Recommended by grantee Betty Yu

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

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.

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

The curator and critic Sheikh discusses the relationshipbetween picturing and politicking and asks “how to makerepresentations political without being caught up in the politics ofrepresentation?”

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

*Recommended by grantee Janet Biggs

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

A collectionof essays that examines complexrelationships inside art, culture, political economy, immaterial production,and the public realm today

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

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

Jones offers a rebuttal to the claim that we are beyondidentity politics and chides the art world for making facileproclamations about post-feminism, post-queer, and post-black identities inexhibitions that are designed to cater to phobia about the deleterious effectsof political correctness.

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

*Recommended by grantee Simone Leigh

This is one of the final works published by Guattari thatdeals with three interconnected networks inspired by the ideas of GregoryBateson: the mind, society and the environment.

*Recommended by grantee Yoshua Okon

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

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

*Recommended by grantee Yoshua Okon

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

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

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

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

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

*Recommendedby grantee Janet Biggs.

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

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