Artist Meetup Blog: Annotated Bibliography

In an attempt to make accessible the resources discussed in our Artist Meetup Blog, we have created this alphabetized annotated bibliography of all referenced material across all blog entries.


Alejandro Rodriguez. https://thepeacestudio.org/alejandro-rodriguez/
Alejandro Rodriguez is discussed in relation to a piece of advice he gave community organizer Jacob Wolos: “Lead through your vulnerability.”
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #3]

Alexander, Christopher. The Timeless Way of Building. Oxford University Press, 1979.
Excerpts from Christopher Alexander and Priya Parker are in conversation regarding how we can come together to physically gather as community. Christopher’s text describes a belief in community-architecture underpinnings that drive us all to gather.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #3]

Arts Ignite (formerly Artists Striving to End Poverty). https://artsignite.org/.
This organization has served as a great inspiration for how we conceptualize our meetups as the intersection between arts and activism.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #8]

Bryant, Kendra N. “‘Me/We’: Building an embodied writing classroom for socially networked, socially distracted basic writers.” Journal of Basic Writing, vol. 32, no. 2, 2013, pp. 51–79.
Bryant explains strategies devised for crafting hyperlocal classroom community—one such strategy being expanding the classroom out into digital space by using collaborative sharing and editing programs. This article helped to inspire the Artist Meetup Blog as a partner to our in-person gatherings each month.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #1]

Cameron, Julia. The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1992.
As an introductory exercise during many of our in-person gatherings, our members practice short nearly-guided free-writes to orient ourselves and the versions of ourselves we would like to bring into our meetings. This practice is inspired directly from Cameron’s morning pages practice.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #2]

“Citizens United Explained.” Brennan Center.
This comes into dialogue with the concept of personal and communal “voice.”
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #8]

Community organizer Jacob Wolos’ performance as part of the Artist as Citizen conference run by Arts Ignite (formerly Artists Striving to End Poverty).
This performance, and the conference as a whole, is discussed in this entry in relation to the meetups as a space for multimodal experimentation.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #8]

“Composer Ari Benjamin Meyers on Coming Together for ‘Rehearsing Philadelphia.'” YouTube.
This project is discussed as an example of the blurring of roles for collaborative, multimodal creation.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #8]

Gay, Ross. “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude.” Poetry Foundation.
An excerpt of this poem is brought up while discussing one of our Trading Post gatherings that centered the trading of recipes and cultural knowledge.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #1]

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress. Routledge, 1994.
A critical read for anyone interested in helping to form or guide a safe, healthy, liberatory community space.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #1]

“How Many Photos Are Taken Per Second, Minute, Hour, Etc.?” Photutorial.
A staggering statistic showing just how much information is readily available to us. This is included to help explain the technological revolution that has empowered so many people to be able to share their “voice” across the globe.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #8]

“The intersectionality wars.” Vox.
The blog entry that cites this article discusses intersectionality as a concept in relation to the suppression of voice. This article provides useful context for the entry.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #8]

Kaminsky, Ilya. “Of Strangeness That Wakes Us.” Poetry Foundation.
This essay is a playful musing on how we relate to and understand language as a tool that creates us.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #8]

New Jersey Civic Information Consortium (NJCIC). https://njcivicinfo.org/
With the shift in focus to the relationship between arts and ethics in Atlantic City, we pull inspiration for how we ought to move forward from our friends and supporters at NJCIC.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #8]

Olds, Larry. “An African Tree of Knowledge.” Teachers for East Africa and Teacher Education in East Africa: TEA/TEEA Newsletter, no. 5, July 2001.
Our “Tree of Knowledge” experiment is an adaptation of an activity put forth in Olds’ report.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #1]

Parker, Priya. “Creating a Temporary Alternative World.” The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. Riverhead Books, 2018.
Excerpts from Priya Parker and Christopher Alexander are in conversation regarding how we can come together to physically gather as community. Parker’s text discusses how we can bend our understanding of etiquette.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #3]

Plato. The Republic. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Socrates believes that poets are a threat to the functioning of his Republic. This is discussed in relation to the timeless understanding that the elevation of artists’ voices is a danger to control and oppression.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #8]

Polisi, Joseph. Artist as Citizen. Rowman & LIttlefield, 2004.
This book is the namesake of the conference once held at Juilliard.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #8]

Queer Headed. http://www.queerheaded.org.
Our friends and community partner Queer Headed are discussed. Queer Headed is a nonprofit committed to serving the intersection of queer and sober communities in the Atlantic City/Atlantic County area.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #3]

Ravilochan, Teju. “The Blackfoot Wisdom that Inspired Maslow’s Hierarchy.” The Esperanza Project, 2021.
Abraham Maslow haunts this entry’s musings on selfishness, togetherness, and community-making. This article provides invaluable insight into Maslow’s thinking, his time spent with the Blackfoot people, and the reasons so much of their community wisdom did not become a part of his Hierarchy of Needs.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #6]

“Rubric for Assessing Participating Artists for the 2024 SOAC Celebration of Expression.”
During the creation of the SOAC Celebration of Expression in 2024, we designed a rubric for community involvement. In the spirit of full transparency and open-source information-sharing, we made this document public for all to see and utilize.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #5]

Scott-Heron, Gil. “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”
This poem by Scott-Heron is a meditation on how and where “revolution” begins, and how we must find revolution within ourselves before we can envision it around us.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #8]

Sliwinski, Sharon. Human Rights in Camera. University of Chicago Press, 2011.
This text is a useful guide for how we understand the relationship between global spectatorship and human rights.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #8]

“Stories of Atlantic City’s Artists Meetups Celebrates Year One.” Atlantic City Focus.
Journalist Raymond Tyler reports on the 2024 Celebration of Expression event.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #7]

“Stories of Atlantic City’s Celebration of Expression highlights.” YouTube.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #7]

“Stories Of Atlantic City’s Celebration of Expression opening remarks.” YouTube.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #7]

“Stories of Atlantic City’s Celebration of Expression performances.” YouTube.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #7]

“Storytelling Leader Hosts Celebration of Atlantic City’s Stories and Artists.” Breaking AC.
Journalist Michelle Tomko interviews SOAC community organizer Jacob Wolos in advance of the 2024 Celebration of Expression event.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #7]

Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke University Press, 2003.
Taylor’s framework laid out in this text makes its way into the evolution of the meetups as a space for social practice and the evolution of held memory.
[noted in Artist Meetup Blog #6]


Our Artist Meetup series and this year’s Celebration of Expression have been supported by New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, a nonprofit that funds initiatives to benefit the State’s civic life and meet the evolving information needs of New Jersey’s communities. A first-in-the-nation project, the Consortium reimagines how public funding can be used to address the growing problem of news deserts, misinformation, and support more informed communities.