THE CLASSROOM
The Classroom, is a long-running program that provides space for artists, writers, designers, and publishers to highlight new releases at NYABF and fosters dialogue around important themes in artists’ book publishing. The NYABF 2022 Classroom is organized in collaboration with David Senior, Director of Library & Archives at SFMOMA, and is hosted by Dia Art Foundation.
All programs were recorded and archived on our Youtube Channel. See below!
12:00—1:00 pm
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1:00-2:00pm
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2:00-3:00pm
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The Conditions of the Archive—Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos, with Oluremi C. Onabanjo
From January 15 to February 12, 1977, more than 15,000 artists, intellectuals and performers from 55 nations worldwide gathered in Lagos, Nigeria, for the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, also known as FESTAC’77. Among the musicians, writers, artists, and cultural leaders in attendance were Ellsworth Ausby, Milford Graves, Audre Lorde, Queen Mother Moore, and Sun Ra. Serving as the photographer for the US contingent of the North American delegation, Brooklyn-based photographer Marilyn Nance made more than 1,500 images throughout the course of the festival—one of the most comprehensive photographic accounts of FESTAC’77. Last Day in Lagos, co-published by Fourthwall Books (Johannesburg) and CARA (New York), draws from Nance’s extensive archive, most of which has never before been published. In this presentation, editor of Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos, Oluremi C. Onabanjo will unpack the various stages of her close collaboration with Nance that yielded this distinctive photobook. Presented by Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA).︎︎︎ Watch here
1:00-2:00pm
Porneia: Movimento de Arte Pornô 1980-1982, with Eduardo Kac and Tie Jojima
This conversation between artist and poet Eduardo Kac and Tie Jojima addresses the Movimento de Arte Pornô, which Kac founded in 1980, in Rio de Janeiro, and developed with other artists and poets in Brazil through the end of 1982. The images and texts Kac created during this period have just been published by Nightboat Books as Porneia: Movimento de Arte Pornô 1980-1982. A leading figure in contemporary art, Kac is known for his digital, holographic and online works that anticipated the global culture we live in today, as well as for launching Bio Art and for developing Space Art. Kac is joined in conversation with Tie Jojima, an Assistant Curator at Americas Society and a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she is writing the first Ph.D. dissertation focused on the Movimento de Arte Pornô. Presented by Nightboat Books.︎︎︎ Watch here
2:00-3:00pm
Publishing as Legacy Work, with Drew Sawyer and Silas Munro on Darrel Ellis
This conversation with curator Drew Sawyer (Brooklyn Museum) and publication designer Silas Munro (Polymode) will launch a recent monograph by the New York–based mixed-media artist Darrel Ellis (1958–1992). Known for his experimental approach to painting and photography, Ellis explored the psychic terrain between surface, memory, and lyric self-representation. Working in part from his late father’s photographs of Black family life in the 1950s, Ellis projected, deconstructed, and re-imaged his family history, creating uncanny portraits marked by voids and warps. Ellis was on the cusp of major recognition when his life was cut short by AIDS in 1992, at the age of 33. Sawyer and Munro will discuss Ellis’s unique and prescient artwork and reflect on the role of publishing in focusing renewed attention on artistic legacies, in particular what it means to create the first in-depth monograph and primary published resource for an artist and their legacy. Presented by Visual Aids.︎︎︎ Watch here
3:00-4:00pm
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4:00-5:00pm
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Run O’ The River / Bitter Medicine, with Linda Zeb Hang and Keith Graham
Linda Zeb Hang and Keith Graham’s Run O’ The River / Bitter Medicine is a printmaking odyssey and book expedition through psychedelic terrain. Visionary poems, drawings, schematic assemblages, instant aura-reading photographs, and encoded glyphs congeal to reveal psychic and hypnagogic micro-climates. The authors and artists will begin with a reading and guided meditation, followed by a conversation with Vivian Sming on how flexibility, instinct, and intuition have directed the artists, on the cusp of widening medicinal and recreational adoption of psilocybin. Co-presented by FIST and Sming Sming Books.︎︎︎ Watch here
4:00-5:00pm
Tender Noted and Earnestly, with Shala Miller, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, and Corinne Butta
This conversation celebrates the release of Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju’s debut publication, Earnestly (Archive Books). Ilupeju will be in conversation with Shala Miller, author of Tender Noted (Wendy’s Subway), and Corinne Butta, the editor of both artists’ publications. Earnestly is a book that collages texts from the artist’s transdisciplinary practice in order to reckon with the author’s changing body and the afterlife of trauma within the tangle of race relations, sexual politics, and family history. Ilupeju celebrates embodied writing for its self-transformative power and for the gentle revelations made possible through its sharing. Shala Miller is the author of Tender Noted, a meditation on the intersection of desire, mourning, and listening to one’s skin while coming to understand the practice of love. The book’s organizing principle is the echo: between text and image and between bodies and the stages, rooms, and affects they inhabit. Presented by Archive Books.︎︎︎ Watch here