Anything but mid.
Set within an adaptive reuse renovation of a former limousine garage not far from our HQ in Northeast Minneapolis, Midway Contemporary Art offers a unique haven for experimental, research-driven contemporary art. The nonprofit pairs rotating exhibitions and robust programming with a freely accessible library of 12,000 volumes on art, design, architecture, and theory. In honor of Midway’s 25th anniversary—and ahead of a new library annex designed by Berlin’s bplus.xyz, who also led the previous renovation—we invited founder and curator John Rasmussen to select this month’s books from Midway’s shelves. His picks center on the intersection of art and books, and the role collections and libraries (both as physical spaces and as containers of human experience) play in
shaping and holding culture.
Architecture For Reading In Public
By Neil Levine
Yale University Press, 2025
This book focuses on a single building: the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, designed by Henri Labrouste and completed in 1851. Groundbreaking in both innovation and democratic ambition, the library featured the first exposed iron frame used in a monumental public building—an approach that was at once structurally elegant and highly functional. Its vast open reading room, illuminated by gaslight at night, was designed to serve the expanding reading public of the mid-nineteenth century.
Baskerville’s Teardrop Explodes
By John Morgan
Ten Thousand Angels Press, 2026
Completed shortly before his death in September 2025, graphic designer John Morgan takes you through 31 books that influenced his highly influential practice. A collaborator to artists, architects, and cultural institutions alike, Morgan’s work was defined by precision, clarity and a deep curiosity around printed matter (as evidenced by his earlier book Uselessly, an exhaustive aesthetic exploration of the surviving first-edition copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses.) Morgan's books, including his last, are some of the most treasured in our collection.
Ex Libris
By Emily Jacir
dOCUMENTA (13), 2012
Ex Libris documents Jacir’s installation project produced for the 2012 contemporary arts exhibition dOCUMENTA (13), a work that commemorated the approximately 30,000 books looted from Palestinian homes, libraries, and institutions by Israeli authorities during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Focusing on traces of previous ownership like inscriptions, stamps, marginalia, worn bindings, pressed flowers, and handwritten dedications, Jacir spent years photographing the surviving volumes—often secretly, using a cellphone. Here books no longer become texts, but as evidence of interrupted lives, intellectual networks, and erased histories.
Wolfgang Tillmans: Nothing Could Have Prepared Us - Everything Could Have Prepared Us
Edited with text by Florian Ebner, Olga Frydryszak-Rétat.
Spector Books, 2026
In 2025, German artist Wolfgang Tillmans transformed the Centre Pompidou's public library into a 64,500 square foot exhibition space ahead of the institution’s five-year closure for renovation. The accompanying publication documents the project alongside exts and a survey of the artist’s work. Tillmans’s love of books and printed matter runs throughout the installation, with library tables repurposed as horizontal vitrines holding magazines, ephemera, and ibliographic materials.
