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Gary Simmons: Public Enemy Reading List

March 1, 2024
by Dr. Kitty Oliver

The reading lists presented here all relate to the themes present throughout Gary Simmons: Public Enemy.

These lists were compiled by the artist, PAMM Education staff, and by invited cultural expert and academic, Dr. Kitty Oliver. We hope to add more lists in the coming months.

PAMM Education’s reading lists are intended as a continuation of the work begun by MCA Chicago, where Public Enemy was first exhibited. We are indebted to MCA Chicago’s generosity in the formation of this educational content. Feel free to access MCA Chicago’s reading lists here: MCA Chicago Reading Lists

PAMM invites visitors to casually peruse these books either in person in The Reading Room, located the Kleh Gallery within the Gary Simmons: Public Enemy exhibition, or search your local libraries in Miami-Dade or Broward counties for reading at home.

PAMM’s addition to Gary Simmons’ and MCA’s lists are organized around three target audiences:

  1. Early literacy and challenged or banned books in Florida schools
  2. PAMM Library: African Diaspora, Latinx and the Caribbean cultural writings and critiques
  3. Academic and scholarly focus centered on South Florida, compiled by Dr. Kitty Oliver

Early literacy and challenged or banned books in Florida schools

The following books all come from lists of challenged and banned books in Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties. PAMM Teaching Artist, Rosa Naday Garmendia, and Education Manager, Darwin Rodriguez, sourced some of these titles from local news reports and school board hearings.

The ABCS of Black History
Rio Cortez

The Hill We Climb
Amanda Gorman

Love to Langston
Tony Medina

The 1619 Project: Born on the Water
Nikole Hannah-Jones

The Hate U Give
Angie Thomas

To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee

The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison

PAMM Library: African Diaspora, Latinx and the Caribbean cultural writings and critiques

PAMM is a space for research for artists and scholars in our local community. This list was collated by PAMM Education intern Gabriel Tua and PAMM Digital Coordinator and Librarian Victoria Ravelo. Learn more about the library and how to schedule a visit here: PAMM Library

A reading list by artist Gary Simmons

Academic and scholarly focus centered on South Florida, compiled by Dr. Kitty Oliver

This list of readings reflects an interrogation of race in America through the complexities of race and ethnic relations in South Florida, a cultural crossroads, and arguably the most diverse area in the country.

The books encourage readers to explore aspects of Florida’s racial history from Jim Crow segregation to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s through reflections of people who came of age with integration and the post-integration era, and engage with some of today’s most widely-cited racial theories and analyses for a broader view.

The oral histories, memoirs, essays, and fiction cover a spectrum of racial experiences of people who self-describe as Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, and Caribbean, creating a cross-cultural conversation shedding light on our shared history.

Elsewhere on this site you will find digital stories featuring video interviews with residents who were born in South Florida or migrated here from other countries or other parts of the U.S. They include discussions of a range of topics including Black-White relations, dealing with multiple identities, and immigrant and generational perspectives.

-Dr. Kitty Oliver

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Wake
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Originally launched on February 16, 2000, by Dia Art Foundation for its Artist Web Projects series, Gary Simmons’s interactive internet project Wake took many of the themes, ideas, and processes quintessential to his largely material-based practice and transposed them to the relatively new medium of the web.
Gary Simmons: Public Enemy
Exhibition
Gary Simmons: Public Enemy is the first comprehensive career survey of the work of multidisciplinary artist Gary Simmons (b. 1964, New York; lives in Los Angeles). The most in-depth presentation of Simmons’s work to date, the exhibition covers thirty years of the artist’s career, encompassing approximately seventy works. 
December 5, 2023 – April 28, 2024
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Dr. Kitty Oliver Dr. Kitty Oliver is an author, oral historian, media producer and scholar with an MFA in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in Comparative Studies focusing on race and ethnic communication.
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