The Classroom
Craft & Conceptual Art: Reshaping the Legacy of Artists’ Books, with Zanna Gilbert and Megan N. Liberty
On the occasion of the final venue of Craft & Conceptual Art: Reshaping the Legacy of Artists’ Books opening at Minnesota Center for Book Arts in August, exhibition curator Megan N. Liberty and Zanna Gilbert, Senior Research Specialist at Getty Research Institute, will be in conversation about the exhibition’s research process and resulting catalog. The two consider the challenges of working with archival materials, the process of sourcing and selecting historical images and texts, and how best to complement these with contemporary writing. The publication was designed specifically to be a research resource and to encourage further investigation, exhibitions, and writing into artists’ books. Gilbert and Liberty will address how this catalog can contribute to the existing canon of books on books, and how the design and layout choices take into consideration the publication’s research uses.
The World Has Already Ended: A Tale of Relations, with Star Feliz and Jennifer Uribe
The new publication, When Eye Land, builds on Star Feliz’s research-based installation practice, which centers colonial maps, travel photography, and historical and fabulated letters. Their work explores the construction of the Dominican Republic’s national identity as a spiritual, socio-political, ecological, and cognitive process. Jennifer Uribe, Afro-Dominican scholar and PhD candidate in the UCLA Department of Sociology, voyages into conversation with Feliz to bring ghosts and colonial calculations/hauntings/apparitions to the fore, from the seat of empire. Together, they explore how black feminist concepts of resistance and refusal transmute the excesses of violence that live within our collective identities. This is the origin story of nationalism, the anthropocenic break—the birth of Latin America, a persistent urging to conjure other worlds. Signing to follow at the Printed Matter table. Presented by Printed Matter, Inc.
TOTAL LANDSCAPING, with Anna Cho-Son and Nora Khan
Active Cultures and X-TRA present TOTAL LANDSCAPING, a gathering space and series of programs inspired by an ongoing eponymous reading group organized by the two LA nonprofits. This overarching project sets off an exploration of the spatial politics of LA, from orange groves and botanical gardens to the city’s utopic housing experiments. Co-organizers Anna Cho-Son and Nora Khan introduce the project and present findings from the group’s sessions to date. This panel introduces No Canyon Hills, a group of land stewards, plant wildlife activists, and residents mobilizing against the development of the Verdugo Mountains. Led and moderated by TOTAL LANDSCAPING curators Anna Cho-Son and Nora Khan, the conversation will explore organizing tactics, the need for living documents, and the future of housing in Los Angeles. Exploring the methodologies of co-operative study, site-specific investigations, and the importance of interdisciplinary gathering—and featuring special guests at the table—they ask: How might records, research, and conversation themselves uncover new ways to relate to the notion of site? Presented by Active Cultures and X-TRA.
Zines, with Ari Marcopoulos and Hamza Walker
On the occasion of Ari Marcopoulos’s latest publication, Zines (Aperture, 2023), the artist will be joined in conversation with Hamza Walker, curator and director of LAXART. Ari Marcopoulos: Zines is the first overview of the photographer’s committed zine practice, including a selection of recent personal zines never before released. Beginning in 2015 and presented chronologically per year, this collected volume features more than one hundred zines—including some made during the pandemic, when Marcopoulos worked primarily on the screen, making PDF zines—punctuated by individual images presented at full scale. Presented by Aperture.
a symphony a work in progress (pt. II, andante), with Yusuf Hassan and Kwamé Sorrell
Artists Yusuf Hassan and Kwamé Sorrell (co-publishers of BlackMass) discuss their 2023 LAABF exhibition: a symphony a work in progress (pt II., andante). Building on a show first staged at Printed Matter in 2022 by Hassan, the reimagined installation-as-publication carries on a performatory exchange around motifs in music, sculpture, and architecture through an array of printed pieces (including simple folded sheets, rubber stamp prints, xeroxes, broadsides, and c-prints). Hassan and Sorrell will speak to how the show assembles an improvisatory visual dialogue across a range of interests seen through the lens of publishing, grounded in the printed form. Presented by Printed Matter, Inc.
On the importance of multilingual publishing, with Naomi Spence and Haley Penn
Naomi Spence, Speciwomen’s Director of Artists Liaison and Guest Editor of Speciwomen Issue 5, and Haley Penn, ex-Editor of Graphite Journal at UCLA, will discuss the making of a bilingual issue on Cuba and its diaspora. Aligned with Speciwomen’s mission to shift representation in the arts, this conversation will survey how broadening access through multilingual publishing is impactful in order to reach a wider audience within the US and beyond. Spence and Penn will discuss the making of Speciwomen 5, from collaborating with artists overseas to the process of designing a bilingual issue, as well as through the diversity in discourse that translated works can create. The conversation will be followed by a brief introduction and screening of short films by Sandra Ramos, whose work plays the element of water in order to comment on political thought, power structures, and capitalist spaces. Presented by Speciwomen.