Moki Cherry: Here and Now, Reading List

1.
Here and Now Postcard Pack, (ICA, 2023)

Limited edition pack of 8 postcards, containing assorted works by Moki Cherry, and archival imagery of the Cherry family:

2.
Communicate, How? Paintings and Tapestries, 1967-1980 Moki Cherry (Corbett vs. Dempsey, 2021)

Communicate, How? assembles a selection of Moki Cherry’s most significant works, all of them drawn from the schoolhouse in Sweden where the family archives still reside. These include major tapestries that were used in performance and several that functioned as announcements for Organic Music Society events or other performances.

3.
Organic Music Societies (Blank Forms, 2022)

Don Cherry and Moki Karlsson met in Sweden in the late '60s. They married and began to perform together, dubbing their mix of communal art, social and environmental activism, children's education and pan-ethnic expression "Organic Music". Their home in Tågarp became a locus of artistic production, attracting free-spirited musicians, poets, actors and artists with the promise of collective life.

4.
Revolutionary Letters Diane di Prima (Silver Press, 2021)

Diane di Prima began writing her ‘Letters’ in 1968, conjuring a potent blend of utopian visions, ecological urgency and spiritual insight. By turns a manifesto for breaking free, a manual for street protest and a feminist broadside, these poems are as relevant to the convulsions and crises of today as they were fifty years ago.

5.
The Cricket: Black Music in Evolution 1968-69 (Blank Forms, 2022)

A rare document of the 1960s Black Arts Movement featuring Albert Ayler, Amiri Baraka, Milford Graves, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and many more, The Cricket fostered critical and political dialogue for Black musicians and writers. Edited by poets and writers Amiri Baraka, A.B. Spellman, and Larry Neal between 1968 and 1969 and published by Baraka’s New Jersey–based Jihad productions shortly after the time of the Newark Riots, this experimental music magazine ran poetry, position papers, and gossip alongside concert and record reviews and essays on music and politics.

6.
Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines Alexis Pauline Gumbs (PM Press, 2016)

Oppressed mothers create a generous space for life in the face of life-threatening limits, activate a powerful vision of the future while navigating tangible concerns in the present, move beyond individual narratives of choice toward collective solutions, live for more than ourselves, and remain accountable to a future that we cannot always see. Revolutionary Mothering is a movement-shifting anthology committed to birthing new worlds, full of faith and hope for what we can raise up together.

7.
States of the Body Produced by Love Nisha Ramayya (Ignota, 2019)

In her visionary debut, Nisha Ramayya conjures an opalescent world by way of Tantric ritual and myth. Thousand-petalled lotuses bloom inside skulls, goddesses with dirty feet charm honeybees, strains of jazz standards bleed into anti-national anthems. States of the Body Produced By Love weaves essays, poetry and images together to offer fierce meditations on diasporic identity, language and resistance.

8.
Design as Art Bruno Munari (Penguin, 2008)

Munari insisted that design be beautiful, functional and accessible, and this enlightening and highly entertaining book sets out his ideas about visual, graphic and industrial design and the role it plays in the objects we use everyday. Lamps, road signs, typography, posters, children's books, advertising, cars and chairs - these are just some of the subjects to which he turns his illuminating gaze.

9.
Return of a Native Vron Ware (Repeater, 2022)

The English countryside is often seen as timeless, remote and shielded from the harshest problems of modern life. Yet, as Return of a Native reveals, it is to rural England that we must look for the roots of our current crises. Vron Ware brings her experience of writing about racism, colonial history, war and feminism to show us how to look at the land in a new light. With one eye on the parish and another on the distant horizon, she leaves no stone unturned in this quest to understand how we humans arrived at this place.

10.
Interaction of Color Josef Albers (Yale, 2013)

Josef Albers’s classic Interaction of Color is a masterwork in art education. Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this influential book presents Albers’s singular explanation of complex color theory principles. Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, Interaction of Color first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten color studies chosen by Albers, and has remained in print ever since.

11.
Thought Forms Annie Besant & C.W. Leadbeater (Dover, 2020)

A classic of the Theosophical tradition, this treatise explores the concept of what thoughts "look" like. Written by a pair of prominent Theosophists, it provides a way to visualize the invisible realms within and around us. These simple, clearly expressed, and well-illustrated discussions address the meaning of colour, thought forms built by music, the nature of helpful thoughts, and related subjects.

12.
Free Jazz Ekkehard Jost (Da Capo Press, 1994)

In Free Jazz, Jost paints a group of ten 'style portraits'--musical images of the styles and techniques of John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, the Chicago-based AACM (which included Richard Abrams, Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Anthony Braxton, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago), and Sun Ra and his Arkestra. As a composite picture of some of the most compelling music of the 1960s and '70s, Free jazz is unequaled for the depth and clarity of its analyses and its evenhanded approach.

13.
How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers Hettie Judah (Lund Humphries, 2022)

For too long, artists have been told that they can't have both motherhood and a successful career. In this polemical volume, critic and campaigner Hettie Judah argues that a paradigm shift is needed within the art world to take account of the needs of artist mothers (and other parents: artist fathers, parents who don't identify with the term 'mother', and parents in other sectors of the art world).

14.
Gaia and Philosophy Lynne Margulis (Ignota, 2023)

In the 1970s, microbiologist Lynn Margulis and atmospheric chemist James Lovelock developed the Gaia theory. Embracing the circular logic of life and engineering systems, the Gaia theory states that Earth is a self-regulating complex system in which life interacts with and eventually becomes its own environment. Gaia describes a living Earth: a body in the form of a planet.

15.
Quantum Listening Pauline Oliveros (Ignota, 2022)

What is the difference between hearing and listening? When do you stop hearing the sound? When does memory begin? Is sound intelligent? Does sound have consciousness? Beginning in the 1960s, musician and composer Pauline Oliveros started experimenting with bringing together meditation, political activism and experimental music, eventually creating Deep Listening – a practice that she said was for “humanitarian purposes; specifically healing”.

16.
Cups, Plates, Bowls & Sculptures: Ceramics 1950–1999 JB Blunk (Dent-de-Leone, 2019)

California-based artist JB Blunk created an extensive body of work in wood and stone, cast bronze, painting, jewelry and clay. Ignoring the traditional separation of sculpture and furniture he worked without a conception of fixed categories, and his attitude towards these classifications suggests the Japanese disregard of the distinction between art and craft.

17.
Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology (Sternberg Press, 2022)

Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology is devoted to Amazonia, its peoples, allies, and nonhuman spirits, and their myriad material and immaterial practices, from certain cosmopolitics and visual languages to past and present forms of resistance. In all their various lines (and circles) of ecological and epistemological thought, the artists, elders, writers, theorists, shamans, curators, poets, and activists whose ideas, images, and struggles compose this book, are concerned with Amazonia as both a place and a point of view.

18.
Artist, Activist, Writer, Mother, Warrior Monica Sjöö (Legion Projects, 2022)

Monica Sjöö was a prolific artist who spent most of her life in the UK, where she became a central figure in spiritual feminist circles such as the Goddess movement. She dedicated her life to fighting injustice and was an active member of grassroots initiatives throughout her life, including Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. Her political activism and relationship to myth and land is present in all of her art, which included painting, collage and drawing.

19. 
Under The Radar: Underground Zines and Self-Publications 1965 – 1975 (Spector Books, 2019)

The mid-1960s witnessed a boom in underground and self-published works. Hectographs, mimeographs, and offset printing not only allowed for the production of small, lowcost print runs but also promote a unique aesthetic: using wild mock-ups, messianic amateurs combined typescript aesthetics, handwriting, scribbled drawings, assemblages of collaged visuals, porn photos, snapshots, and comic strips.

20.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants Robin Wall Kimmerer (Penguin, 2020)

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings - asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass - offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world.