Book of Earth: A Guide to Earth, Pigment, and Raw Color
$35.00
Art meets science in Book of Earth, artist and ochre specialist Heidi Gustafson’s guide to creating color with Earth’s extraordinary pigments, exploring their fascinating uses today and throughout history and culture.
Part anthropological study, part art book, and part how-to, Book of Earth is an immersive introduction into the world of ochre, a naturally occurring mineral used to make pigment. Each chapter delves into Heidi Gustafson’s rare pigment archive and provides a thorough exploration of natural color, while challenging our notions of the inanimate world. Featuring practical advice and techniques for creating your own pigments and applying these skills in everyday life, Gustafson also includes contributor essays offering historical and cultural perspectives on color cultivation and the meaning of pigments to various cultures.
224 Pages.
Wet Dream
Wet Dream by Erin Robinsong is an expansive book of ecological thinking for living on a wet planet on fire. Erotic and political, vibrating with pleasures, medicines, and unrest, these poems metabolize toxic logics and traverse enmeshed ecologies through the wetness that connects. A pulse of agency to the heart.
120 Pages.
Underland
In Underland, Robert Macfarlane delivers an epic exploration of the Earth’s underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself. Traveling through the dizzying expanse of geologic time—from prehistoric art in Norwegian sea caves, to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, to a deep-sunk "hiding place" where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come—Underland takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind.
Global in its geography and written with great lyricism, Underland speaks powerfully to our present moment. At once ancient and urgent, this is a book that will change the way you see the world.
496 pages.
To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet
To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet documents the burgeoning eco art movement from A to Z, presenting a panorama of artistic responses to environmental concerns, from Ant Farm’s anti-consumer antics in the 1970s to Marina Zurkow’s 2007 animation that anticipates the havoc wreaked upon the planet by global warming. This text is the first international survey of twentieth and twenty-first-century artists who are transforming the global challenges facing humanity and the Earth’s diverse living systems. Their pioneering explorations are situated at today’s cultural, scientific, economic, spiritual, and ethical frontiers. The text guides students of art, design, environmental studies, and interdisciplinary studies to integrate environmental awareness, responsibility, and activism into their professional and personal lives.
Written by Linda Weintraub.
384 Pages.
The Second Body
Essay by Daisy Hildyard.
Every living thing has two bodies. To be an animal is to be in possession of a physical body, a body which can eat, drink and sleep; it is also to be embedded in a worldwide network of ecosystems. When every human body has an uncanny global presence, how do we live with ourselves? In this timely and elegant essay, Daisy Hildyard captures the second body by exploring how the human is a part of animal life. She meets Richard, a butcher in Yorkshire, and sees pigs turned into boiled ham; and Gina, an environmental criminologist, who tells her about leopards and silver foxes kept as pets in luxury apartments. She speaks to Luis, a biologist, about the origins of life; and talks to Nadezhda about fungi in an effort to understand how we define animal life. Eventually, her second body comes to visit her first body when the river flooded her home last year. The Second Body is a brilliantly lucid account of the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth.
128 Pages.
The Mushroom at the End of the World
$0.00
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing.
A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction.
By investigating one of the world’s most sought-after fungi, The Mushroom at the End of the World presents an original examination into the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth.
352 pages.
The Glacier is a Being
This book project examines the many ways of glacial expression, the diverse shapes and colors they assume, how they influence their surroundings and how they mingle with it. Swiss photographer JULIAN STETTLER looks at glaciers as living beings, as active protagonists in the web of reality. Glaciers are born out of the permanent metamorphosis from snow to ice. They are uniquely dynamic; viscous and brittle at the same time. From the human perspective, we can only ever perceive slices of them; they exist in a different time dimension, so vastly different that it goes beyond human grasp. With bacteria and algae teeming on their backs, they make their way down.
The main part of the fascinating book contains 90 abstract glacier photographs, as well as a 14-page poem by poet, artist and writer Daniela Naomi Molnar. In addition, three texts by journalist, researcher, poet Anne-Sophie Balzer, Gian-Luca Kämpfen (landscape architect) and David Touchette (microbiologist) will be part of the book.
The photographs were taken between 2021 and 2023 on twelve Swiss glaciers.
144 Pages, 90 Images.
Staying with the Trouble
In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene, preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene, as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices. The Chthulucene, Haraway explains, requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures. Theoretically and methodologically driven by the signifier SF—string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, so far—Staying with the Trouble further cements Haraway's reputation as one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time.
312 Pages.
The Spell of the Sensuous
In The Spell of the Sensuous David Abram draws on sources as diverse as the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Balinese shamanism, Apache storytelling, and his own experience as an accomplished sleight-of-hand of magician to reveal the subtle dependence of human cognition on the natural environment. He explores the character of perception and excavates the sensual foundations of language, which–even at its most abstract–echoes the calls and cries of the earth. On every page of this lyrical work, Abram weaves his arguments with a passion, a precision, and an intellectual daring that recall such writers as Loren Eisleley, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez.
368 pages.
I Love Artists
Drawing on four decades of work and including new poems published here for the first time, this selection of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poetry displays the extraordinary luminosity characteristic of her style―its delicate, meticulous observation, great scenic imagination, and unusual degree of comfort with states of indetermination, contingency, and flux.
154 Pages.
Hello, the Roses
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s Hello, the Roses opens up poetic form into long, shimmering lines shaped by the beauty and phenomenal fullness of the natural environment. She begins by exploring an array of unities perceived between myth and landscape, fashion and culture, experience and forgetting, boys and ravens. The poems of the middle section shift into an invisible world where plants, animals, and the self communicate and coexist through a process of mutual healing and imagination. Images of her New Mexico mesa suffering drought become walks through forests and gardens, and flow into the concluding poems where the individual’s relationship to night, weather, and cosmological time form a karmic temporal continuum, a mandala of perception bridging quartz and quantum bond. Throughout are the roses, transforming slowly, almost imperceptibly, deepening awareness, creating fields and nests, a rosette of civilization that reveals the embeddedness of all living things.
112 pages.
Doomstead Days
Brian Teare offers a new kind of nature poem for the late Anthropocene in these plein air meditations on the pleasures and perils of everyday life during global climate change
Doomstead Days is a lyrical series of experiments in embodied ecological consciousness. Drafted on foot, these site-specific poems document rivers, cities, forests, oil spills, mountains, and apocalyptic visions. They encounter refineries and urban watersheds, megafauna and industrial toxins, each encounter intertwining ordinary life and ongoing environmental crisis. Days pass: wartime days, days of love and sex, sixth extinction days, days of chronic illness, all of them doomstead days. Through these poems, we experience the pleasure and pain of being a body during global climate change.
176 pages.
Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics
In what ways is land, formed over the course of geological time, also contemporary and formed by the conditions of the present? How might art contribute to the expansion of spatial and environmental justice? Editors Emily Eliza Scott and Kirsten Swenson bring together a range of international voices and artworks to illuminate this critical mass of practices. One of the first comprehensive treatments of land use in contemporary art, Critical Landscapes skillfully surveys the stakes and concerns of recent land-based practices, outlining the art historical contexts, methodological strategies, and geopolitical phenomena. This cross-disciplinary collection is destined to be an essential reference not only within the fields of art and art history, but also across those of cultural geography, architecture and urban planning, environmental history, and landscape studies.
272 Pages.
Concordance
Concordance is a new collaborative work by three acclaimed contemporary artists: poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and sculptor Kiki Smith, working with book artist Anne McKeown. Inspired by Smith's image of a dandelion, whose floating silks she compares to reading, the poem traces agreements and embeddings of human and animal bodies, ideas, dreams, and emotion in a concordance of parallel and contingent contexts. "Then it's possible to undo misunderstanding from inside by tracing the flight or thread of empty space running through things." Then what if, in that bond, "images were Eros as words?" In Smith's etchings, reading, as Eros, is drawn as seeds, feathers, star-like explosions, pods, wide-eyed, unblinking owls. "Animals . . . open their eyes, and a mirror forms on the ground." The effects of the verbal images and gray-blue inked drawings are stunning and other-worldly.
42 pages.
CHORUS
At a time of simultaneous isolation and interconnection, this book is an inquiry into the edges of the self. Pushing back on capitalist messages of individuality, CHORUS instead seeks the multifaceted self that engages with the radical diversity that characterizes any healthy ecosystem or society. Moving between a remote canyon in New Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, New York City, the virtual world, the past, and the unstable future, the author asks, “Whose afterimage am I?”
The sprawling, celebratory, mourning chorus of this book is the sum of many voices; the words of other writers, poets, and artists are interwoven with the author’s words. This is a celebration of language’s capacity to supersede bodily limits, mortality, and existential loneliness. Daniela Naomi Molnar’s chorus encompasses violence, love, empathy, fear, a burning planet, a pandemic, heartbreak, desire, joy, and grief. Rather than seeking resolution, these poems look through the lens of a fragmented self, dwelling in plurality, discord, and harmony.
110 Pages.
Alive and Destroyed
$50.00
Alive and Destroyed: a Meditation on the Holocaust in Time contemplates the long aftermath of the twentieth century’s most notorious crime, drawing on contemporary scholarship, with a focus on dispersed and remote locations in the Holocaust’s vast geography.
Photography by Jason Francisco.
Writing by Menachem Kaiser.
160 pages.
A Treatise on Stars
$17.95
A Treatise on Stars extends Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s intensely phenomenological poetics to the fiery bodies in a “field of heaven…outside spacetime." Long, lyrical lines map a geography of interconnected, interdimensional intelligence that exists in all places and sentient beings. These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the cosmic loom, the channeling of daily experience and conversation, gestalt and angels, dolphins and a star-visitor beneath a tree. Family, too, becomes a type of constellation, a thought “a form of organized light.” All of our sense are activated by Berssenbrugge’s radiant lines, giving us a poetry of keen perception grounded in the physical world, where “days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.”
101 pages
GEOHAPTICS: Sensing Climate
$15.00
Essay by Daniela Naomi Molnar
Poems by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Sawnie Morris
70 pages
Curated by artist, writer, and educator Daniela Naomi Molnar, Geohaptics: Sensing Climate features international, national, and regional artists that include Athena LaTocha, Mitsu Salmon, Beili Liu, Ella Morton, Alexis Elton, Jason Francisco, Carol Padberg, Jonathan Marquis, Heidi Gustafson, and Sarah Gerats. Artworks range from investigating the Arctic region to New Mexico’s atomic histories, expressed through organic sculptural forms, video, performance, paintings, photography, and multimedia installation.
Fluid Gaze T-shirt
$20.00
This t-shirt was designed by our friends Luis and Roberto at IMEC in Nob Hill in conjunction with the exhibition Fluid Gaze (September 30–December 30, 2023).
Walls of Resistance / Walls of Pride
$12.95
Introduction by Deborah Jojola
28 pages, 24 postcards
Published: 2022
Twenty four full-color reproductions of some of New Mexico’s most beautiful and significant murals by indigenous artists, all in postcard form. Each page is perforated so the postcards can be easily removed. Introduction by Deborah Jojola (Isleta Pueblo/Jemez Pueblo), a painter, fresco artist, lithographer, teacher and curator.
Art Meets History New Mexico
$15.00
Introduction by Ric Kasini Kadour
47 pages
Published: 2022
The catalog for the two-part exhibition, Art Meets History: Many Worlds Are Born and Technologies of the Spirit, is now available from 516 ARTS, while supplies last. It features essays by co-curators Ric Kasini Kadour and Alicia Inez Guzmán, PhD, text about each of the artists, and photographs from the Albuquerque Museum Photography Archives.
Radical Reimaginings
$20.00
Introduction by Ric Kasini Kadour
96 pages
Published: 2020
Radical Reimaginings is a survey of artists working with collage who were asked to reimagine the world in response to unprecedented change taking place in the world in 2020. Forty artists from nine countries and multiple Indigenous peoples–Salish-Kootenai/Métis-Cree/Sho-Ban, Tlingit/Nisga’a, Oglala/Lakota, and Seneca Nation–offer a variety of perspectives. The voices of Black, Latinx, Native, and white Americans mingle with those from Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Canada, France, and Germany.
Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry
$15.00
Collected and with an Introduction by Joy Harjo, 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate
Forward By Carla D. Hayden, Librarian of Congress
240 pages
This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project—including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among others—to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. The chosen poems reflect on the theme of place and displacement and circle the touchpoints of visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment.
Feminisms Exhibition Catalog
$8.00
Feminisms
Exhibition Catalog
28 pages
Dialogue with curator Andrea R. Hanley & writer Lucy R. Lippard
Species in Peril Along the Rio Grande Exhibition Catalog
$20.00
Land Acknowledgement by Rosie Thunderchief with Roger Fragua and Brophy Toledo
Preface by Suzanne Sbarge, Executive Director of 516 ARTS
Essays by curators Josie Lopez, PhD and Subhankar Banerjee & journalist Laura Paskus
Species in Peril Tote Bag
$10.00
Tote Bag designed by Albuquerque artist Nina Elder
Printed by 111 Media Collective
Silkscreen on heavy cotton canvas
516 ARTS Tote Bag
$10.00
516 ARTS Tote Bag designed by artist Karl Hofmann
Silkscreen on heavy cotton canvas