In the sprawling, splashy “New Humans” exhibition inaugurating New York’s newly expanded New Museum (sound new enough for you?), a mechanical apparatus quietly whirrs. This tumbler, by the artist Steffani Jemison, is slowly but surely agitating and refining dredged debris: glass, coins, stone.
Having studied comparative literature as an undergraduate, Jemison often moves between writing and art in thoughtful if seemingly unlikely ways, as in her novella A Rock, A River, A Street (2021) and her solo show opening this month at Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, Germany, which explores the “language of birds.”
Jemison’s spare works are underpinned by deep research, often into alternative literacies that have functioned as tools of resistance and that blur the boundaries between drawing and writing. She discussed several examples memorably in a 2019 essay for Artforum, where she writes, “I am looking for a route to drawing, and a route to writing, that does not pass through any masters at all.”
Intrigued by her unique lens on literature, I asked her to single out five books on her shelf: books she keeps coming back to, finds herself recommending often, and so on. She spoke about her choices below with a calm yet exacting clarity—a rare kind of clarity that manages to expand instead of foreclose. —Emily Watlington
