Books to delve into

Lucy R. Lippard  Undermining, A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West.    

Sant Khalsa Prana: Life with Trees

Rebecca Solnit Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas    

Suzi Gablik
‍The ReEnchantment of Art

“[Lippard’s] strength lies in the depth of [her] commitment—her dual loyalty to tradition and modernity and her effort to restore the broken connection between the two.”—Suzi Gablik, The New York Times Book Review. Award-winning author, curator, and activist Lucy R. Lippard is one of America’s most influential writers on contemporary art, a pioneer in the fields of cultural geography, conceptualism, and feminist art. Hailed for “the breadth of her reading and the comprehensiveness with which she considers the things that define place” (The New York Times), Lippard now turns her keen eye to the politics of land use and art in an evolving New West. Working from her own lived experience in a New Mexico village and inspired by gravel pits in the landscape, Lippard weaves a number of fascinating themes—among them fracking, mining, land art, adobe buildings, ruins, Indian land rights, the Old West, tourism, photography, and water—into a tapestry that illuminates the relationship between culture and the land. From threatened Native American sacred sites to the history of uranium mining, she offers a skeptical examination of the “subterranean economy.”

"The subject of trees has been a focus of Khalsa's work for nearly five decades. Included are her earliest landscapes, photographs of the Santa Ana Watershed, sculptures and installations of works inspired by her research on air quality, and documentation of her life changing experience planting more than 1,000 trees in 1992 for a reforestation project in Southern California.
The book was inspired by a series of one person exhibitions presented at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, California in 2018, titled The Forest For the Trees. Included are essays by Betty Ann Brown and Colin Westerbeck, and interview excerpts with Khalsa conducted by Patricia Watts, founder/curator of ecoartspace in 2017.
Sant Khalsa is an artist and activist. She is Professor of Art, Emerita at California State University, San Bernardino and resides in Joshua Tree".

Like the bestselling Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, this book is a brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, one that provides a vivid, complex look at the multi-faceted nature of New Orleans, a city replete with contradictions. More than twenty essays assemble a chorus of vibrant voices, including geographers, scholars of sugar and bananas, the city’s remarkable musicians, prison activists, environmentalists, Arab and Native voices, and local experts, as well as the coauthors’ compelling contributions. Featuring 22 full-color two-page-spread maps, Unfathomable City plumbs the depths of this major tourist destination, pivotal scene of American history and culture and, most recently, site of monumental disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill.The innovative maps’ precision and specificity shift our notions of the Mississippi, the Caribbean, Mardi Gras, jazz, soils and trees, generational roots, and many other subjects, and expand our ideas of how any city is imagined and experienced. Together with the inspired texts, they show New Orleans as both an imperiled city—by erosion, crime, corruption, and sea level rise—and an ageless city that lives in music as a form of cultural resistance. Compact, lively, and completely original, Unfathomable City takes readers on a tour that will forever change the way they think about place.

"The Reenchantment of Art" describes Gablik's hope for a new art, born out of a new cultural paradigm embracing a revitalized sense of community, an enlarged ecological perspective, and access to mythic and archetypal sources of spiritual life. In the course of her argument, Gablik introduces the reader to a number of figures for whom this paradigm offers a fresh approach to making art: artists such as Fern Shaffer, who performs empowerment rituals to mark the seasonal equinoxes; David T. Hanson, Andy Goldsworthy and Rachel Rosenthal, whose work attempts to heal our wounded planet; and others such as Tim Rollins, Suzanne Lacy and Mierle Laderman Ukeles who address the gravest social issues. The book offers a programme of fundamental interest to anyone who cares about the future of art - a 'reenchantment' to challenge and inspire."