Steffani Jemison’s Bookshelf Reveals the Literary Logic Behind Her Art
At the newly expanded New Museum in New York, a small mechanical tumbler in “New Humans” quietly processes debris — glass, coins, stone — while Steffani Jemison’s larger practice continues to move between art and writing with unusual ease. The American artist, who studied comparative literature as an undergraduate, has built a body of work that treats language as material and research as form.
That approach is visible in her novella A Rock, A River, A Street, published in 2021, and in a solo exhibition opening this month at Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, Germany, which explores the “language of birds.” It also animates a 2019 essay for Artforum, in which Jemison wrote, “I am looking for a route to drawing, and a route to writing, that does not pass through any masters at all.”
Asked to name five books she returns to often, Jemison chose titles that reflect her interest in revision, Black studies, and experimental storytelling. John Keene’s Counternarratives, published by New Directions, stands out for her as a book that fills historical gaps by shifting voice, document, and point of view. She points to “Rivers,” which retells Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective, and “Acrobatique,” a fictional first-person account of Miss La La, or Anna Olga Albertina Brown, the Black circus performer painted by Degas.
Jemison also recommends Kevin Quashie’s Black Aliveness, published by Duke University Press, which she describes as a celebratory theory of Black world-making rooted in Black feminist poetics. The book, she says, is scholarly but accessible, and its attention to the subjunctive tense opens space for imagining relations, community, and aliveness into being.
Her list continues with Lydia Davis’s Essays One, S.A. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland, and Nazareth Hassan’s Slow Mania, along with Hassan’s plays Bowl EP and Practice. Taken together, the selections suggest a practice that sees literature not as a separate discipline, but as a parallel way of thinking about history, form, and the unfinished work of representation.
