Required Reading
This week: Iranian heritage sites, a Native artist’s anti-ICE beadwork, France’s Braille Museum, mapping Black-owned bookstores, the business behind America’s sauna frenzy, and more.
We've all encountered the particularly sad sight of a museum reading room, full of books, that ultimately sits empty. For KoozArch, Maryam Eskandari considers a show that comprises the reading room itself, reorienting space in the process:
To step into the Reading Room at the MAK Center is to enter an argument staged in space. Installed within architect R.M. Schindler's Kings Road House, the exhibition unfolds less like a gallery than a rehearsal studio. Light pools on tables scattered with journals and pamphlets, zines and artist books. Readers lean over spines and margins, their postures echoing the pitched diagonals of Schindler's planes. This is no mausoleum of publications but rather a site alive with rustling paper, penciled annotations, the half-audible murmur of someone reading aloud to a friend. Books here are not props. They are devices, each one activating another line in a distributed conversation.
The curatorial team — Beth Stryker and Robert J. Kett, alongside commissioned furniture by Ryan Preciado, and Mimi Zeiger’s table residency restaging the Table for Reading — position the printed page as an architectural medium. No neat models or polished renderings, no vitrines demanding reverence. Instead, the room itself behaves as an epistemic infrastructure: a network of surfaces and gestures, a choreography of attention that makes discourse tangible. To call it an exhibition feels misleading; it is in fact closer to a switchboard.
Anti-ICE messages rendered in Peyote-stitched beads have cropped up on utility poles around Los Angeles, thanks to the work of Mvskoke artist Kimberly Dawn Robertson. Susana Canales Barrón spoke with her for LA Public Press:
Anti-immigrant enforcement, she noted, has spanned centuries in this country, entangled with the longer history of settler colonialism and the surveillance of Native peoples.
“I thought to myself, OK, it may take me a couple of months to get these out in the street,” Robertson said, adding that understanding the long history of violence allowed her to work slowly. The slower method insists that the moment is ongoing.
In this way, Robertson’s bead bombs quietly invert the logic of mass production. Where screen printing enabled the rapid dissemination of a single image across a neighborhood, beadwork concentrates attention on the singular object and the labor embedded within it. She deliberately chose pony beads, larger and more conspicuous than traditional seed beads, to amplify that effect.
Elle Decor's Pratishtha Rana visits an exhibition that traces Indian history through its chairs, treating them not as products but as cultural heirlooms:
The exhibition is a natural extension of what their archives hold. Around 1,500 to 2,000 chairs, cabinets and other pieces are kept like sculptures in their opposite godown in Wadala and Walkeshwar; beautifully raw and awkwardly stacked atop each other. Sourcing in the past used to be synonymous to exploration. A trip of seven to ten days around India in the 80s and 90s has now moved online, thanks to our smartphones. “WhatsApp has made this whole thing very unromantic,” sighs Chiki. “Mahendra and Anand would sometimes buy wood like a pack of cards. Then six months later, it would come out to be a fabulous chair, a cabinet or something like that.” Chiki, who says the team works with third and fourth-generation artisans, goes on to share, “We have the eye for buying the best. And the best doesn’t have to be wow or ornate. We look at the wood, the construction, the period and the beauty.”
Days after US and Israeli airstrikes killed dozens of students at a girls' school in Iran, Sina Toosi writes in the Nation about American media's sinister erasure of Iranians who oppose both the regime and foreign militarism:
Pakhshan Azizi, an Iranian Kurdish political prisoner sentenced to death, delivered a similar message. While rejecting the charges against her, she rebuked US warmongering, its backing of Israel’s war, and the sanctions that have battered ordinary Iranians. If Washington truly cared about human rights, she wrote, it must end its attacks, its support for war, and the sanctions that have inflicted relentless suffering.
This is the part of the Iranian story rarely told in American debates. In Washington, the discourse often reduces Iran to two caricatures: the ruling elite in Tehran and the exiles who promise that pressure and war will bring about regime change. But inside the country, a third current has always existed. It is anti-authoritarian and anti-war at the same time. It rejects both domestic tyranny and foreign intervention. It demands self-determination through nonviolent civic struggle.
A judge ordered Greenpeace to pay $345 million to the Dakota Access Pipeline developer for its involvement in coalitional protests in 2016 and 2017, which made waves across the country, Mary Steurer writes in North Dakota Monitor:
Greenpeace was one of many activist groups that participated in a movement to halt the pipeline’s construction. Those protests were started by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and ultimately drew thousands to rural south-central North Dakota to demonstrate.
Energy Transfer sued Greenpeace in Morton County in 2019, accusing it of organizing violent attacks against the pipeline company during the protests and of waging a misinformation campaign to sabotage its business. The lawsuit is against three separate organizations affiliated with Greenpeace — Greenpeace USA, Greenpeace Fund and Greenpeace International.
The first comprehensive map of Black-owned bookstores in the US is finally here, Phil Lewis writes on his Substack:
With the launch of Amazon.com and the rise of major chains like Barnes & Noble, many Black-owned bookstores closed during the late ‘90s and into the 2000s. Char Adams, author of “Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore,” estimates that only 54 Black-owned bookstores were operating nationwide by 2014.
In 2020, the number of Black-owned bookstores saw a jump due to renewed interest in Black authors and books as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests around George Floyd’s murder. Even now, as the Trump administration attempts to erase Black history, Black-owned bookstores are continuing a comeback.
New York Magazine's Madeline Leung Coleman explores the strange and lucrative business of American saunas:
Luke Carstens and Shayna Olsan left jobs in finance and marketing to open Akari, their wood-paneled Williamsburg bathhouse, at the end of 2023. Carstens says their now two Brooklyn locations are profitable even though, out of concern for overcrowding, they operate under a membership model that allows only several hundred people to be members of each location at any one time; when I visit their Greenpoint location on a weeknight, it is pleasantly sleepy, with around a dozen people drifting between the saunas and sipping buckwheat tea. In a few months, they’ll open their third location, on the Lower East Side. “But, you know, we make significantly less than somebody else who allows for onetime visits,” Carstens adds.
Disability advocate Haben Girma, the first deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law School, takes us through her visit to the Louis Braille Museum in France:
This and absolutely diabolical interior design (I'm lookin' at you, Blank Street!):
"Okay, I like it, Picasso" final boss — who is also a painter in her own right:
Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon and comprises a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
