Keep saying to myself that I need to get the discipline back in my reading practice. Feel like I've been floating around in books with all the traveling. I also spent the last couple of weeks getting caught up on New Yorkers and Harpers issues while on car trips, at hot springs, while camping, etc. Then came home to about ten books I had ordered after the MLA. So I've got a lot of options to get through.

But several things I finished while on the road...

Peggy Larson and Lane Larson's The Deserts of the Southwest. Basic intro to desert plants and animals, all new to me though.

Then read once I got home, Miwon Kwon's One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Reading this for my class and for the Suzanne Lacy visit next week. Kwon's arguments are interesting. She transitions the move in public art from art in public spaces to more community based engagements. The middle of the book discusses the controversies around Richard Serra's Tilted Arc and Richard Ahearn's sculptures at the 44th precinct. Then ends by making this distinction between community based (art that is about a community or where an artist goes into a community and works with them as an art expert to make a piece) and collectivist (where there is a provisional group with no distinction b/t artists and community members).