SYMPOSIUM
Every year, the Lillian Wald Symposium at Henry Street Settlement in conjunction with the Humanities at Cooper Union will provide a reading list that goes along with the theme for that year.
Readings from that list will be made availabe in the Cooper Library, reviving the “Reading Room” at Cooper Union where books and articles from Great Hall discussions were brought into the Library and made available to the public.
READINGS
2025
PROMPTS:
What is the relationship between a sense of place and ways of knowing that are required for the arts and creative practice to survive, for those practices to be shared and embodied?
How can we look at culture as an infrastructure of norms and institutions rather than products of that infrastructure?
The content of art may be an orientation in space and time. The work of art, a way to embody that orientation and see what’s revealed by that framework in our daily life. Creative practice becomes method, a way of navigating, manipulating, and re-articulating the resources available given the infrastructures at play. Creative practice reveals counter-structures supporting forms of life that may not be recognized by the dominant market. How can we utilize the tools of previous movements that fought gentrification, and how do we translate those methods into terms relevant today in order to make the spaces we need?
With the capture of spaces that were public by making “civic” participation the price of the ticket to enter that “public,” how does care become an operation that constructs a space, holds and maintains social relations, and prohibits the dispossession of those means? How does this reorientation allow our practices to grow or attend to or change shape so as to question what is considered valuable?
How do we reconsider spaces where we encounter objects from the past that inevitably change our present orientation to the world and, therefore, the future of these spaces– whether created by us or those spaces we are encouraged, forced, to occupy? What does this have to do with our ethics? How do we reconsider our participation in systems that seem to overdetermine our sense of what kinds of work are valuable? From the point of view of the objects themselves, we occupy a future context with respect to when they were made, thus posing the question, “what do we do with this space, today?”
READING LIST
Artists Surviving in NYC:
Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York by Marin Kosut
Gentrification:
St. Marks is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street by Ada Calhoun
CHARAS: The Improbable Dome Builders by Syeus Mottel
The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination by Sarah Schulman
The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950-1980 by Aaron Shkuda
Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin
Artists and Urban Planning:
Counter Institution: Activist Estates of the Lower East Side by Nandini Bagchee
Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York’s Seward Park Urban Renewal Area by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani
Arts for Living by Kim Förster
DIY on the Lower East Side: Books, Buildings, and Art After the 1975 Fiscal Crisis by Andrew Strombeck
Artist Housing:
Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places, and Policies That Transformed a City edited by Nicholas Dagen Bloom and Matthew Gordon Lasner
Loft Law: The Last of New York City’s Original Artists Lofts by Joshua Charow
The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists of New York by Peter Trachtenberg
Lower East Side Artists:
Sweet Oblivion: The Urban Landscape of Martin Wong by Dan Cameron and Carlo McCormick
Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years of the WOW Café Theater edited by Jill Dolan, Holly Hughes, and Carmelita Tropicana
The Queer Nuyorican: Radicalized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida by Karen Jaime
Offbeats: Lower East Side Portraits by Clayton Patterson and John Strausbaugh
Maybe the People Would Be the Times by Lucy Sante
Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration by David Wojnarowicz