Curator Book Club: What’s the High’s Decorative Arts Curator Reading?
Monica’s reading about architecture, the environment, Polish lit…and hanging out with her Vizsla dogs.
By Monica Obniski, Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, High Museum of Art
Hi, I’m Monica Obniski — the High’s new Curator of Decorative Arts and Design! Originally from Chicago (with an accent to match), I look forward to my new journey in Atlanta. While working from home during the coronavirus lockdown, I’ve been busy reading, entertaining my adorable lady Vizsla dogs, cooking with reckless abandon, and digitally exploring the High’s collection.
I came to the High from the Milwaukee Art Museum, where I served as the Demmer Curator of 20th- and 21st-Century Design and oversaw the reinstallation of the museum’s modern and contemporary design galleries. Among my many projects there, I worked on Jaime Hayon: Technicolor, which originated at the High in 2017.
Previously, I also worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and served as Assistant Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago. I received my MA from the Bard Graduate Center and my PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
In addition to my curatorial duties, I look forward to leading the High’s Piazza activations, a multiyear initiative of site-specific commissions designed to engage visitors of all ages in participatory art experiences.
Here are the five books on my bedside table right now (in alphabetical order)!
- Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962): This book was so powerful, so incendiary, that it catalyzed the modern environmental movement in the United States and abroad — especially in the Nordic countries. Nearly sixty years later, what have we learned?
- Jane Hall’s Breaking Ground: Architecture by Women (2019): I’m excited to dig into this beautifully produced book of over two hundred buildings designed by women from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to gain inspiration for future projects.
- Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007): I’m rereading this gem, given our current homebound situation. I really enjoy cooking, and so one of the silver linings from our coronavirus-infected lives is the ability to be at home, creating meals with grains and vegetables obtained from local farms (thanks to delivery services!)
- Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006): With more spare time than I’ve had in years, I am going back to older Disegno articles (shout-out to Disegno for making its content free online during corona-madness), which include Kieran Long’s 2018 article about the fifth iteration of Sweden’s national pamphlet that began with a chilling extract from McCarthy’s postapocalyptic book — inspiring me to immediately buy it.
- Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights (2007): After reading a 2018 New Yorker review of this Polish writer’s recently translated book, I’ve had this one on my shelves for several months. Now is the time to dig into her experimental, postmodern work of mini essays, in an effort to do some armchair traveling!
Stock up on books from local Atlanta bookstores! We’ve included links to Charis Books — the South’s oldest independent feminist bookstore. Charis is currently closed to the public, but open for online orders! Media mail shipping rates start at $3.
