The books we collectively select are mostly published by independent presses and reflect the themes explored in our exhibitions and public programs. We are interested in a variety of disciplines, connecting contemporary art with poetry, literature, music, and theory.
Our collection of books introduces yet-unknown or recently translated international voices. To this end, each season, our guest artists and artists in residence also make a selection of books to acquire for our store. Their suggestions make lesser known references accessible to our local audience.
Related to the Exhibition
Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education
Henry A. Giroux
In dialogue with our exhibition On Education, this book examines how neoliberal policies have reshaped higher education, prioritizing profit over learning. Giroux champions student movements resisting these forces—much like the occupation of over 200 schools in São Paulo, Brazil in 2015, documented in Graziela Kunsch’s Escolas (2016), on view at Amant as a part of On Education. Kunsch’s work captures the collective action of students fighting school closures, echoing the broader struggle against education cuts worldwide.
Published by Haymarket Books.
Staff Picks
Pocketbook Series
Collection includes:
A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass
Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friederich Engels
Amant Café Manager Graham Hall shares, “I love this series because Domain has taken approachable classics and curated them as a ‘starter kit for radical liberatory thought.’ And as someone who always carries around a book, the size is convenient!”
Published by Domain.
Brutalism
Achille Mbembe
Visitor Engagement Representative Jesse Prince shares, “As someone who’s developed an interest in architecture and tries to stay on top of current events, I find this book timely. Brutalism is often seen as this cold and uninviting style, which Mbembe likens to the world’s current political climate. Alongside his critique, Mbembe proposes new ways of thinking about the world that move away from modern colonialism, capitalism, and the mistreatment of people and environment.”
Published by Duke University Press.
Immediacy or, the style of too late capitalism
Anna Kornbluh
Production Manager Stuart Lorimer shares, “Anna defines immediacy as the cultural style of our present, discussing art objects that reject mediation in favor of the now, as well as those that champion the individual often through embodied, sensorial experiences. Her arguments often hit with a dark humor and remind me to slow down, to question the modes and media of this current moment.”
Published by Verso Books.
Making Of
Mara McKevitt
Curatorial Assistant Jésus Charris shares, “What I like the most about this book is that it feels like a puzzle. Mara combines formal language with elements of film scripts, love letters, and even obituaries, creating a fragmented but cohesive story that mirrors the process of filmmaking itself. The format feels almost like a found footage piece—fragmented yet revealing, offering insights into not just the making of a film, but the human experience behind it.”
Published by Clementin Seedorf.
Supporting Role
Jason Hirata
Associate Curator Ian Wallace shares, “Like Jason Hirata’s work as a whole, this book is a wry survey of the often-invisible dependencies and unsung types of labor that scaffold artistic authorship. Consisting of an eclectic mix of checklists, press releases, visual descriptions, exhibitions reviews, invoices, and CVs that have accompanied Hirata’s work and exhibitions from 2019 to 2024, Supporting Role deftly demonstrates how support shapes and defines the process of producing an exhibition.”
Published by Reliable Copy.
Published by Amant
SIREN (some poetics)
Edited by Quinn Latimer
SIREN (some poetics) examines what lies beyond borders and binaries—ancestral, technological, epistemological, literary, patriarchal, corporeal, emotional, or otherwise. Devoted to the voice—as aesthetic signature or the production of self and sound—and the avatar-like bodies we build and break around it, the exhibition considers technologies of myth and mouth, earth and alarm, gender and poetics. Through the work of approximately seventeen artists and poets of various generations and geographies, the show posits practices that employ a grammar of sign and sound systems, at once figuring, resisting, writing, and voicing the visual field.
Moving away from the cool, clinical, conceptual, and mostly two-dimensional exhibitions that have so often stood for language and poetry as a visual art practice, with the white cube standing in for the pale architectonic page, SIREN is situated in the dank earth and its kaleidoscopic ecosystems. Both human and nonhuman forms of language-making and poetics are put forth, from precolonial myth to ludic science fiction, the bootlegged oracular line to critical fabulation, fungal networks to gut bacteria, text to textile to poem to prism to algorithm. Indeed, the works on view in this book often emit and evidence a kind of parapoetics: poetry as opaque metabolic structuring, or as some wild surfacing.
Published by Amant and Dancing Foxes on the occasion of SIREN (some poetics).
Cuentos de Cuentas
Carla Zaccagnini
Cuentos de Cuentas brings together six recollections from Carla Zaccagnini’s childhood in Brazil and Argentina in the 1980s that are relayed by a narrator who questions her own ability to adequately remember what happened. Each episode is structured around a specific object—a tent, a jar, a vest, a dollar bill-that is pivotal in enabling secret economic transactions. Ultimately, they bring the reader to ask: How can we really determine value? How can we distinguish what is true from what is false? Zaccagnini’s texts are punctuated by childhood drawings, magazine and press clippings, and photographs from her family archive.
Published by Amant and K. Verlag, on the occasion of Cuentos de cuentas / Accounts of Accounting.