As a typically avid reader, I did NOT read enough books in 2023—something I plan to remedy in 2024. Below is a cumulative list of books I’d like to read this year—and likely into 2025 because I am realistic about how much free time I have. I’ve also included books that I have read, bookmarked, and underlined in recent years. Mostly nonfiction, monographs, exhibition catalogs, essays, and social and cultural analyses with a theme of caregiving, creativity, community, and reproductive justice. In no particular order…
My “Want To Read” List:
Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance, edited by Sophie Hamacher and Jessica Hankey
Stranger Fruit, Jon Henry
The Archaeology of Mothering: An African-American Midwife's Tale, Laurie A. Wilkie
Architects of Care: From the Intimate to the Common, Brittany Utting
Women, Race, Class, Angela Y. Davis
The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker
Curating with Care: Routledge Research in Art Museums and Exhibitions, edited by Elke Krasny, Lara Perry
Queer Exhibition Histories, edited with text by Bas Hendrikx
The Mother Artist, Catherine Ricketts
Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls, Kai Cheng Thom
Boobs in the Arts: Fe:male Bodies in Pictorial History, edited by Natanja von Stosch and Juliet Kothe
Art & Social Practice Workbook, by Erin Charpentier & Travis Neel
MILK: An Intimate History of Breastfeeding, Joanna Wolfarth
Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, Lauren Elkin
The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—Or Being Denied—An Abortion, by Diana Greene Foster
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Cousins, Kristen Joy Emack
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer
To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood, ICA Boston
Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood, Lucy Jones
How Not To Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents), Hettie Judah
Motherhood, by Ann Coxon
All About Love, bell hooks
Like a Mother, Angela Garbes
Reproductive Justice: an Introduction, Loretta J. Ross
Mothering While Black, Dawn Marie Dow
Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa, Marilyn Chase
Loie Hallowell: Plumb Line, Loie Hallowell
An Artist and A Mother, edited by Tara Carpenter Estrada, Heidi Moller Somsen, and Kaylen Buteyn
My Kingdom for a Title, Pope.L
The Equity Mindset, Ifeomasinachi Ike
Hide, Wood, and Willow: Cradles of the Great Plains Indians, Deanna Tidwell Broughton
My “Read and 10/10 Recommend” List:
Art/Curation
Museum Metamorphosis: Cultivating Change Through Cultural Citizenship, nico wheadon okoro
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks
Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, Angela Garbes
Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundation, Theory, Practice, edited by Lynn Roberts, Whitney Peoples, Erika Derkas, Pamela D. Bridgewater, Loretta Ross
Designing Motherhood, Michelle Millar Fisher, Amber Winick
Picturing Motherhood Now, Nadiah Rivera Fellah, Emily Liebert, Rosalyn Deutsche
Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, Dorothy E. Roberts
Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology, Deirdre Cooper Owens
Revolutionary Mothering, edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams
Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, Camille T. Dungy
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, bell hooks
The Baby on the Fire Escape, Julie Phillips
The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Memoir of Early Motherhood, Louise Erdrich