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Amplify Arts

Publishing

Amplify’s publishing program attends to the specific histories, ecologies, and cultural knowledge of our region while remaining connected to broader national and global conversations. Alternate Currents (AC), Amplify’s imprint, supports and circulates inquiry-driven work, rooted in creative research, that affirms publishing as a site of care, experimentation, and shared learning. 

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Alternate Currents Blog
Hermit Jim and the Massive Fire
Hermit Jim and the Massive Fire

by Patrick Mainelli

“What would it be like to live so deliberately? To be still.”

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Alternate Currents Blog
Small Energies
Small Energies

Panel Discussion

“To become interested, to become aware and compost, is such an easy way into that system of reciprocity and care with what is around you.”

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 What We See When We’re Biking in Omaha
What We See When We’re Biking in Omaha

by 陳原君 | Yuanjun Chen

“On the evening of September 29, 2022, a protest took place at Dewey Park to oppose the removal of the Harney Street bike lane.” 

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Flyover Queer Culture: Returning to BFF’s Rural Billboards
Flyover Queer Culture: Returning to BFF’s Rural Billboards

by T Reckling

“The intersectional LGBTQIA2S+ political struggles in areas with conservative governments show us a mode of becoming.“

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Given All This
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Given All This
$15.00

In 2021, Alternate Currents addressed issues surrounding the future of for- and non-profit arts and cultural institutions broadly conceived, their position within the communities that support them, and the shared cultural logic from which colonialism and museums emerged. 


Given All This responds to broad questions posed around institutional critique, arts economies, organizational hierarchies, cultural labor, and museum collections and archives. The essays, discussions, and creative work made in response to those questions and anthologized here shifts away from institutional frameworks and toward an emerging set of shared values that guide how we care for ourselves and each other when faced with institutional failings. 


Given the pandemic, given renewed calls for racial equity and justice, given the accelerated impacts of a changing climate--all this--the collected works in this publication are not offered as “solutions” to institutional failings, but rather as invitations to more critically examine the ways in which our cultural institutions might become a collective commons to question where we’ve been, how we’ve changed, and what the future might hold.


Contributors: Corson Androski, Katie Bettin, Jody Boyer, Allegra Hangen, Lex Jonae, Jared Packard, Ilaamen Pelshaw, Sarah Rowe, Lillian Snortland

Publisher: Amplify Arts

Publish Date: 2021

ISBN: 9798985297201

Language: English

Format: Paperback

Dimensions: 9” x 16”

Price: Sold Out

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This Place
This Place
$15.00

This place is a crossroads; a midpoint; a place to gather; a place to pass over. It roots the work put forth in the pages of this book on common ground. Throughout 2022, ten artists and organizers, all Alternate Currents cohort members, selected a specific place in Omaha, Nebraska, traditional Umoⁿhoⁿ lands, to center in their creative practice and research. 


Ranging from a commercial hotel to public (and “public”) parks, an artist-run gallery space to an urban agriculture plot, a sound research lab to reclaimed tribal land, their investigations resulted in work that sketches a collective portrait of this place and how we orient ourselves to it, find a sense of belonging in it, and deepen our relationship with it. 


Contributors: Katie Bettin, Caitlin Cass, Daniel Castañeda, Shannon Elder, Alex Jacobsen, Holly Lukasiewicz, David Muñoz, Nathaniel Ruleaux, Lee Running, Joelle Sandfort

Publisher: Amplify Arts

Publish Date: 2022

ISBN: 9798985297201

Language: English

Format: Paperback

Dimensions: 9” x 16”

Price: $15.00

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We Free Us
$15.00

In  2023, Alternate Currents worked to interrogate how artists and organizers might more thoughtfully align their practices with anti-capitalist orientations, and the movement lineages they come from, to build relationships, rest, and shore up regenerative modes of exchange. Sharing resources and holding cultural goods in common surfaced again and again as viable working practices for distributing wealth, knowledge, and power more equitably. Their ongoing investigations into the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of ‘commoning’ manifest in this publication in three sections: Embodiment, Systems, and Exchange. 


By holding cultural resources in common, questioning private ownership and the processes of enclosure, and finding joy in the privilege of being together we can say clear-eyed and with gratitude that together, ourselves, We Free Us.


Contributors: Joy Cotton, Amanda Huckins, Alex Jacobsen, Aspen M. Laboy, Artur Melika, Nathaniel Ruleaux, Lauren Simpson, Bilgesu Sisman, Valerie St. Pierre Smith, Mi’oux Stabler, Casey Albert Welsch

Publisher: Amplify Arts

Publish Date: 2023

ISBN: 9798985297232

Language: English

Format: Paperback

Dimensions: 9” x 16”

Price: $15.00

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  • Amplify publishes original works that deepen critical thought and discussion around the complexities and pluralities of place. Our publishing program as a whole supports a wide range of genres, including essays, photo essays, criticism, research, interviews, creative nonfiction, poetry, and hybrid forms that document and interpret the cultural traditions, ecologies, and civic histories of our region.

  • Our definition of “region” encompasses the Tallgrass Prairie Ecoregion, the Loess and Glacial Drift Hills, and the Missouri Alluvial Plain in what is now Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana.

  • We select Alternate Currents blog and Journal contributors through an annual open call process. Up to 10 artists, organizers, researchers, scholars, and writers working within the region, or with meaningful connections to it, are selected each year by a panel of reviewers composed of arts professionals, educators, and members of Amplify’s staff, board, and community advisory group. Each applicant’s submission materials are reviewed independently by panelists, then discussed as a group before final selections are made. Artist book projects are cultivated and developed as part of our Fellowship program. Learn more about the Fellowship here.

  • Contributors receive financial compensation, critical feedback, and editorial support from members of Amplify’s staff to help them fully realize their work. We promote and circulate work published online and in print through our communications and distribution channels, connecting broader audiences to creative work produced in the region.

 
Amplify Arts
950 South 10th Street,
Omaha, NE, 68108,
United States
402-996-1092 info@amplifyarts.org
Hours
Mon 9am-5pm
Tue 9am-5pm
Wed 9am-5pm
Thu 9am-5pm
Fri 9am-5pm
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950 S 10th Street #15, Omaha, NE 68108