Our country and world are clearly in the midst of seismic changes—politically, environmentally, socially, economically. How do we prepare for the uncertain future we’re facing?

In the days leading up to the presidential inauguration, we posed this question to an array of artists, writers, curators, and Walker staff members. Inspired by reading lists from the #CharlestonSyllabus to Public Books’ Trump Syllabus 2.0, we asked them to share recommendations for articles and books, poems and novels that could prove instructive in the coming years. Their suggestions range from the tactical to the poetic, the historic to the ultra-contemporary, optimistic to brace-for-the-worst realism.

We’ll be updating this list as more responses come in. Want to help us expand it further? Please leave your own recommendations in comments.

Chloë Bass

Artist, writer

The Wall Street Journal’s “Red Feed Blue Feed”

While we may not have access to people with political opinions far outside of our own, or, more likely, may not want to spend time embroiled in emotionally exhausting discussions, it’s still important to know what people are seeing—and sharing—via social media. These forms of sharing still constitute a lot of what we think we know. As the graphic shows, and will continue to show, the contrast is stark. “a range of reflections on resilience,” by Adrienne Maree Brown, November 9, 2016

I think learning from personal language and reactions is important. Adrienne Maree Brown does a wonderful job of articulating her feelings and responses just after Election Day 2016, and many of these feelings may correspond to things we’re still feeling. Let’s admit to those things and put language to them so that we can then put them aside and keep moving, resiliently. As Brown states: “things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. we must hold each other tight & continue to pull back the veil.” Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda, available in English/en Español (2016)

We need to learn how to operate towards progress, for sure, but worst-case scenario, at least we can jam signals, put up consistent opposition, and resist moving backwards any further that we already have. The Tea Party, a minority government group, successfully jammed government signals for years. Let’s learn from these tactics and use them for better outcomes. Also: forgive me if this is over-stepping, but I want to question the title, “Reading List for the New America.” I think calling it “the New America” misses some major aspects of what’s going on—and has been going on for awhile: that this really is an America that has continued to exist since the nation’s founding. Is there a group that could meet to talk about the title choice? Maybe it’s too late for that, but I want to remain kind of clear on my own stance that what we need to do is prepare ourselves for ongoing revolution in a way that resists even the paradigms of “old” and “new” and accepts that our nation contains contradictions at all levels.

Philip Bither

McGuire Senior Curator of Performing Arts, Walker Art Center

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2015) by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

A Christmas present from my daughter: I thought I knew a lot of this, but I’m finding it eye-opening on many fronts. The Plot Against America (2004) by Philip Roth

Eerily prescient to the rise of Trump. I read it when it was released in 2004 and plan to revisit very soon.

Tania Bruguera

Artist

Chris Cloud

Artist; Social Media Specialist, Walker Art Center

Kimberly Drew

Founder of Black Contemporary Art, co-founder of Black Futures, Social Media Manager at The Met

The Green Book (1936–1967) by Victor H. Green and George I. Smith

This series of guidebooks was created to “give the Negro traveler information that will keep him from running into difficulties, embarrassments and to make his trips more enjoyable.”

Faye Driscoll

Choreographer; creator of Thank You For Coming: Play (Out There 2017), Thank You For Coming: Attendance (Out There 2016), others

Hope in the Dark Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (2016) by Rebecca Solnit

Adrienne Edwards

Curator at Large, Walker Art Center; Curator, Performa

Zora Neale Hurston, “Crazy for This Democracy” (1945) in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing…(1979), edited by Alice Walker

A poignant reflection on the malicious role of racism in American society, of which Jim Crow was merely the latest manifestation at the time of its writing, and that is as strikingly relevant today: “Why this sentimental over-simplification… I have been made to believe in this democracy thing, and I am all for tasting this democracy out. The flavor must be good. If the Occident is so intent in keeping the taste out of darker mouths that it spends all those billions and expends all those millions of lives… to keep it among themselves, then it must be something good. I crave to sample this gorgeous thing.” American Civilization (1950–1953) by C.L.R James

An unfinished manuscript written by the Trinidadian Marxist writer and theorist while he was living in the United States. He was deported in 1953, never finishing the text, which was edited and published posthumously in 1993 by Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart, whose introduction explain, “Its central theme was the struggle of ordinary people for freedom and happiness, a struggle which he found to be most advanced in America. At the same time James recognized that the forces mobilized to repress these popular energies had never been so developed, or so brazenly employed, as in the twentieth century.” To this one might add, until now. The Angela Y. Davis Reader (1998), edited by Joy James

A must-read for change agents and radical intellectuals, which gathers in one tome Davis’s essays on prison reform, anti-racism, feminism, aesthetics and culture, and coalition building with particularly astute readings of these necessities in the American context. “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” (1981), in Sister Outsider (1984), by Audre Lorde

Lorde considers anger as insight and therefore a path to collective understanding and action among women: “Women responding to racism means women responding to anger; the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation… The angers between women will not kill us if we can articulate them with precision, if we listen to the content of what is said with at least as much intensity as we defend ourselves against the manner of saying.” Toward a Political Philosophy of Race (2009) by Falguni A. Sheth

A fierce analysis of how race is produced and reified in liberal societies in order to preserve state power and its institutions. Perhaps most important is the multiplicity of race upon which Sheth insists by considering the particularities of Arabs, Asians, and other people of color in the persistence of race as a tool of political power. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (2011) by Judith Butler

Butler doing what she does best: reworking the body, revealing the ways it resists in order to illumine how it performs in the context of forces that seek to delimit it through race, gender, and sexuality. Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race (2015) by Emily S. Lee

Lee’s poignant philosophical intervention addresses the ways in which race is experienced by a range of people, including Latinas, Jews, black Americans, and Asian Americans in the context of banal, everyday settings in which life shaping incidents occur and thereby are made scenes where individuals come to know themselves.

Sam Gould

Cofounder and editor of Red76; creator of Beyond Repair, a community print-shop/art project in Minneapolis’s Midtown Global Market

Gordon Hall

Artist, contributor to the Walker’s Artist Op-Ed series (Read “Reading Things: On Gender, Sculpture, and Relearning How to See”)



Ann Hamilton

Visual artist

Both of my picks have “hope” in the title—and have moved and motivated me deeply. They’ve filled me with the hope and resilience that motivate us to keep working, the hope that shows us where we have been, the hope that sets in motion a clear and long-term vision for the cloudy path that is ahead. These are the books that sustained us after 9/11 and come off the bookshelf again. Hope in the Dark Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (2016) by Rebecca Solnit Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2008) by Jonathan Lear

Lear considers the fate of the Crow Nation and what it means when everything the Crow Nation lived for and believed in has vanished.

Thomas Hirschhorn

Artist, creator of The Gramsci Monument (2013), Cavemanman (2002), Abstract Resistance (2006), others

The Terror of Evidence by Marcus Steinweg

Steinweg’s capacity to implicate the other is beautiful, bright, precise, and logical, grounded in everyday questions, which to him are always big questions.



Cynthia Hopkins

Composer, writer, musical performance artist; creator of This Clement World (2013), Accidental Nostalgia (2005), others

Blessed Unrest (2007) by Paul Hawken

This book gave me hope when I was learning about the climate crisis. It proposes that human civilization is part of a biosphere that, like any organism, has an immune system compelled to spring into action when the health of that organism is threatened. The environmental movement springing into action in defense against threats to the health of the biosphere is compared a human body’s immune system springing into action in defense against disease. In much the same way, social justice movements have the power to rise up and defend the health of this nation, and the noble principles upon which it was founded (such as basic human rights), against threats posed by President Trump. Selection from Abraham Lincoln’s Inaugural Address (1861)

This brief quote from Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address seems appropriate to consider at this time of intense division between wildly opposed points of view within a single electorate. One could argue that the last time this country was so fractured, it was on the brink of a civil war. “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Kemi Ilesanmi

Executive Director, The Laundromat Project

Brittany Cooper, “The Racial Politics of Time,” TED Talk, October 2016

Dr. Cooper gave this TED Talk before Trump Time was upon us, but it fully captures the reality of how this new political era continues to steal time—literal, metaphoric, psychic—from Black and Brown people and communities. I ask myself, how can we take back our time and power to narrate our world?

Misa Jeffereis

Visual Arts Curatorial Assistant, Walker Art Center

“The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic, June 2014

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of a racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole. I Want a President: Transcripts of a Rally by Zoe Leonard, et al. (Art Resources Transfer)

Documentation of a November 6, 2016 rally/reading inspired by Zoe Leonard’s 1992 text on the High Line in New York. The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism (2016) by Kristin Dombek

“They’re among us, but they are not like us. They manipulate, lie, and cheat. They may be irresistibly charming and accomplished. But narcissists are empty… Or maybe they’re too full of themselves; experts disagree. But one thing is for sure: They don’t have empathy. And we do.” Empathy may be our strongest weapon moving forward.

Thomas Lax

Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art, The Museum of Modern Art

Lucy Lippard

Writer, critic, activist, curator; author of The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (1998), others

Kalup Linzy

Video and performance artist

A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (2005) by Eckhart Tolle

“In his insightful look into humanity’s ego-based thinking, Eckhart Tolle provides practical teachings for waking up to a new, enlightened mind-set. If you’re seeking a more loving self and a more loving planet, A New Earth has the tools to begin your transformation.” —Oprah.com

Nisa Mackie

Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs, Walker Art Center

Okwui Okpokwasili

Artist; she performs her Walker-commissioned work Poor People’s TV Room January 19–21 as part of Out There 2017

Delicious Foods (2016) by James Hannaham

Filled with humor and pathos, this picaresque novel is a sly wake-up call for those of us who think slavery is a relic of the distant past.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Artist, writer, creator of How to Suffer Politely (And Other Etiquette), others

Paul Schmelzer

Writer; Managing Editor, walkerart.org

A People’s Art History of the United States (2015) by Nicolas Lampert

Lampert chronicles the pivotal role the arts have played in social change, from the graphic agitation in the abolitionist and anti-war movements to the activism of ACT UP, Gran Fury, and the Yes Men. A look back in order to move forward. “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” (1991) by Wendell Berry

“As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn’t go. ” The Twilight of American Culture (2000) by Morris Berman

Written pre-9/11 and updated in 2006, the book begins by describing the ways in which symptoms of the fall of Rome—massive wealth inequality, an evaporating social safety net, rampant anti-intellectualism, etc.—are actually mainstream cultural values in America today. “Internal barbarisms,” Berman calls them. He then makes a case for the “new monastic individual.” These new monks, or “native expatriates,” he writes, “could provide a kind of record of authentic ways of living that could be preserved and handed down, to resurface later on, during healthier times.” He likens it to the characters in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 who, faced with brigades of book-burners, memorize the entirety of great works of literature to save them and pass them on orally.

Dread Scott

Artist; creator of A Man Was Lynched By Police Yesterday (2016), What is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag? (1988), others

“Call to Action” (2016) by refuseFascism.org

This call—”No! In the name of humanity. We refuse to accept a fascist America”—has been signed by Cornel West, Alice Walker, Rosie O’Donnell, John Landis, Chuck D, Marc Lamont Hill, Pastor Gregg L. Greer, Carl Dix, Robin D.G. Kelley, as well as many artists, and sharply calls out the Trump/Pence regime as fascist and calls on people to stop them before they can consolidate power. The New Communism (2016) by Bob Avakian

Witt Siasoco

Artist; Studio and Community Arts Associate, Minneapolis Institute of Art

Victoria Sung

Visual Arts Curatorial Assistant, Walker Art Center

In Search of Sacco and Vanzetti: Double Lives, Troubled Times, and the Massachusetts Murder Case That Shook the World (2012) by Susan Tejada

President Obama reminded us in his farewell address last week that “the stereotypes about immigrants today were said, almost word for word, about the Irish, Italians, and Poles.” This world is played out in Tejada’s study of Boston in the 1920s and the trial of two Italian-American radicals convicted of robbery and murder. (I should add that Siah Armajani recommended this book to me while we were in his studio talking about his work Sacco and Vanzetti Reading Room, of which he made four in the late 1980s.) Despite mounting evidence that the two men were not at the scene of the crime, the prosecution exploited the jury’s prejudices and made the case about Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti’s radical beliefs, underlining their status as immigrants and outsiders. Sacco and Vanzetti represented the Other in an era long past, but the dangers posed by prejudice and irrational fear feel as relevant as ever.

Hank Willis Thomas

Artist; co-founder, For Freedoms, an artist-run super-PAC

The End of Protest (2016) by Micah White

“In The End Of Protest Micah White heralds the future of activism and declares the end of protest as you know it. Drawing on his unique experience as the co-creator of Occupy Wall Street, a contagious protest that spread to eighty-two countries, White clearly articulates a unified theory of revolution and the principles of tactical innovation that are destined to catalyze the next generation of social movements.”—endofprotest.com Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell

JoAnn Verburg

Photographer; creator of Julia Breaking Through (1983), Terrorized (2006), others