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Reading Room
Designed by Studio Giancarlo Valle
Curated by Some Other Books with Wendy’s Subway
February 23-July 8, 2018
Bard Graduate Center
18 W. 86th Street
New York, NY 10024
www.bgc.bard.edu
Hours:
Tue, Fri-Sun: 11am-5pm
Wed-Thurs: 11am-8pm
Wendy’s Subway returns to the Bard Graduate Center for a second year to present the Reading Room, a platform to promote engagement with artists’ books, periodicals, and other publications. This year’s collection is curated by Some Other Books, a NY-based publisher of artists’ books and multiples founded by artist Kristen Mueller in 2018. Open during gallery hours, the Reading Room welcomes readers to an open, comfortable, and convivial setting in which to explore the collection of over 200 titles.
The Reading Room, inspired by Bard Graduate Center's two exhibitions, Fabricating Power with Balinese Textiles and The Codex and Crafts in Late Antiquity is divided into two collections: Artists/Textiles— books focused on artists working with textiles in the fields of fine art, fashion, and publishing, and Artists/Books—focused on artists whose work takes the form of the book or zine. Each collection is comprised of a multitude of artists’ books, monographs, catalogues, periodicals, and zines produced in the last 10 years by an international array of publishers and artists, and also includes an extensive range of books for children. The Reading Room aims to introduce the reader to both a wide range of actors working today in the ever-expanding field of art book publishing, and to delve deeper into the work of contemporary textile artists and book-makers.
With books by: &: christophe daviet-thery, 2nd Cannons, Bom Dia Books, Colorama, Corraini Edizioni, Edition Patrick Frey, Extra Vitamins, Gloria Glitzer, Hardworking Goodlooking, Hato Press, JRP|Ringier, Kasper Andreasen, Miniature Gardens, Motto Books, New Documents, Nieves, Paraguay Press, Printed Matter, Purgatory Pie Press, Rondade, Sara MacKillop, Small Editions, Space Poetry, Textiellab and many more!
Once a month on selected Thursdays, the Reading Room will bring together writers, artists, and performers for a multi-disciplinary reading and talk series at the Bard Graduate Center, from 7 to 9pm. The Reading Room will also host a series of workshops to be announced soon.
*Some Other Books is a NY-based publisher of artists’ books and multiples founded by Kristen Mueller in 2018. Forthcoming publications include Reading Room, an artists’ book documenting the Bard Graduate Center Reading Room, and a book by visual artist, poet and textile designer Francesca Capone. Kristen Mueller’s artists’ books include 3b (2014-ongoing), Partially Removing the Remove of Literature (2014) and Language to Cover a Page (2014). They have been collected by libraries such as MoMA (New York) and KASK (Ghent), and have been exhibited at Artists Space (New York), Serralves (Portugal), Mendes Wood DM (São Paulo), and elsewhere.
Studio Giancarlo Valle is a creative design agency founded in architecture. They create indelible interiors, objects, and architecture, working across art, fashion, hospitality, and home.
Originally designed by Tyler Polich and Hannah Wilentz, Wendy's Subway Reading Rooms have previously been installed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York); White Columns (New York); NADA New York (with Aeromoto, Mexico City); Brown University, (Providence, RI); and the Carnegie Mellon University School of the Arts (Pittsburgh, PA).
Special thanks to Sanjana Iyer, Megan Toye, and all the artists and publishers who kindly donated books to the Reading Room. -
PUBLIC PROGRAMMING
READING AND TALK SERIES
Wendy’s Subway is pleased to present a monthly talk and reading series in conjunction with the Reading Room at Bard Graduate Center Gallery. The series features writers, poets, artists, archivists, and publishers in an interdisciplinary programming of performances, readings, talks and panel discussions on contemporary issues in art and book-making.
Readings are free and take place at 18 West 86th Street, New York City, starting at 7pm, with refreshments available from 6.30pm. -
Writers Who Publish
Thursday, March 29, 7pm
Wendy’s Subway invites three independent and small press New York-based publishers with writers at their helms to think about the intersections of writing, poetics, and publishing. Anna Gurton-Wachter and MC Hyland from DoubleCross Press, Isabel Sobral Campos from Sputnik & Fizzle, and Lee Norton from Ugly Duckling Presse will reflect on the relationships between their own practices as writers and as publishers in short presentations that interlace their own creative work, selections from past publications, and a myriad of other references and resources guiding their publishing and writing.
A selection of titles by each publisher will be on display and for sale for the evening.
DoubleCross Press is a publisher of small-run handmade poetry chapbooks and essays on small press culture. Founded in 2008 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama by MC Hyland, DoubleCross is now run by Hyland, Anna Gurton-Wachter, and Jeff Peterson in Brooklyn.
Sputnik & Fizzle publishes lectures and other interventions in the world of ideas and praxis. They aspire to cultivate a space where academics and multimedia artists cross paths, where texts disturb comfortable formal territories, where national and linguistic boundaries are transposed via translation, and where the discourses that shape social, political, ecological, scientific, and artistic life coincide. Sputnik & Fizzle was co-founded by Isabel Sobral Campos and Rita Sobral Campos.
Ugly Duckling Presse is a nonprofit publisher for poetry, translation, experimental nonfiction, performance texts, and books by artists. UDP was transformed from a 1990s zine into a Brooklyn-based small press by a volunteer editorial collective that has published more than 200 titles to date. UDP favors emerging, international, and “forgotten” writers, and its books, chapbooks, artist’s books, broadsides, and periodicals often contain handmade elements, calling attention to the labor and history of bookmaking. UDP is committed to keeping its publications in circulation with our online archive of out-of-print chapbooks and our digital proofs program. In all of its activities, UDP endeavors to create an experience of art free of expectation, coercion, and utility. -
Artists’ Archives
Thursday, April 26, 7pm
Artists’ Archives brings together three artist-writer-archivists working at the intersection of artists’ publishing, library and archival systems, and collecting practices. Sarah Hamerman (Princeton University Special Collections), Hailey Loman (Los Angeles Contemporary Archive), and Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz (Lesbian Herstory Archives / The Graduate Center Library).
Sarah Hamerman is an art librarian, writer and arts organizer based between New Jersey and New York City. Sarah currently works as Poetry Cataloging Specialist at Princeton University's Rare Books and Special collections, and has previously worked with the libraries of the MoMA and the Whitney Museum. Her writing and research focuses on artists' publishing and artists' networks, and she has contributed to Art Libraries Journal, Avant.org, Are.na, among other publications. Sarah is a co-organizer of the Cybernetics Library, an independent library project which looks to the history of cybernetic thought to uncover connections between art, technology and society. She organized a panel on artist-run reading spaces for the 2017 BABZ Art Book Fair, and was a presenter at the 2017 NY Art Book Fair conference.
Hailey Loman is a multi-disciplinary artist working in installation and performance. She is the Co-Founder and Director of Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), an artist-run archive and non-circulating library in which contemporary creative processes are recorded and preserved. She sits on the Advisory Council for Actual Size Gallery and Bar-Fund. Loman is currently a Master of Fine Arts degree candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA) is an artist-run non-profit archive. LACA is a non-circulating library, which collects, preserves, and protects underexposed artistic modes of expression happening now. Challenging established concepts of the archive and art space, LACA sustains a unique experimental environment for critical inquiry, artistic research, and public dialogue. We hold a variety of interdisciplinary events and public programming, which includes exhibitions, performances, lectures, and readings that emphasize the archiving of materials.
Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz is a zinester, archivist, writer, and black-dyke-participant of community spaces from Brooklyn, NY, living in the Bronx, and trying to figure out where to move next. Personal projects include archiving black lesbian herstorical narratives, memoir writing, and efficiently changing her daughter’s diapers. She is a volunteer coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA), Chair of the Archive Committee for CLAGS: the Center for LGBTQ Studies at the Graduate Center, and an Assistant Professor and Head of Reference at the Graduate Center Library. She helped to coordinate the inception of the Salsa Soul Sisters collection to LHA and the traveling exhibition with LHA and the Salsa Soul Zine with the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Shawn had the honor of co-editingSinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Women's Music Festival and is featured in additional Sinister Wisdom issues, including the most recent release, Sinister Wisdom 107: Black Lesbians, We are the Revolution!, where she published, “Black Lesbians in the 70s: How a Zine Marked Herstory.” Shawn has an MFA in Fiction and an MLS with a focus in Archives from Queens College. You can find more about Shawn’s zines at https://lambeypress.com/publications/ and Shawn in general at https://shawntasmith.commons.gc.cuny.edu/. -
Women in Art Publishing: Collaborative Networks
Organized in collaboration with Sonel Breslav (Blonde Art Books)
Thursday, May 31, 7pm
A discussion highlighting innovative and inclusive approaches to collaborative practice among female-identifying leaders in contemporary art publishing. Featuring Corina Reynolds (Small Editions), Karen Kelly and Barbara Schroeder (Dancing Foxes Press), and Tammy Nguyen (Passenger Pigeon Press). A conversation moderated by Sonel Breslav (Blonde Art Books) and Rachel Valinsky (Wendy’s Subway), will follow.
Blonde Art Books, founded in 2012 by Sonel Breslav, is a New York-based publisher and organization dedicated to promoting self-published and small press art and poetry books through exhibitions, book fairs, symposia, and online exposure. -
Language Weavers
Thursday, June 28, 7pm
Language Weavers gathers writers and artists working at the intersection of fiber-based forms and language to read from recent work.The event is organized on the occasion of the release of Francesca Capone’s Weaving Language III: Language is Image, Paper, Code, & Cloth, the third in a series of publications examining the poetics of weaving traditions through historical research and contemporary artists’ practices. Readings by Francesca Capone, Martha Tuttle, and Sarah Zapata, with conversation to follow, moderated by Jill Magi.
Francesca Capone is a visual artist, poet, and textile designer. Her books Text means Tissue (2017) and Writing in Threads (2015) focus on textile poetics, and are both in the collection at the MoMA library. She has exhibited at Whitechapel Gallery in London, LUMA/Westbau in Switzerland, Textile Arts Center in NYC, and 99¢ Plus Gallery in Brooklyn. She has been an artist in residence at the Anni and Josef Albers Foundation, Andrea Zittel's A-Z West, and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. More of her published work can be found at Gauss PDF, Tunica Magazine, and in The New Concrete from Hayward Press. Her academic work includes lectures and workshops at Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, and Reed College, among others.
Martha Tuttle (b. Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1989) works between painting and textile. She graduated from Bard College in 2011, and received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in Painting and Printmaking in 2015. Her work has been shown throughout the U.S. and internationally. She has received residencies from the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming in 2016, A-Z West in Joshua Tree, California, and is a current resident at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in Brooklyn, New York. Fellowships include the Josef Albers Foundation Traveling Fellowship and the Donald C. Gallup Research Fellowship from The Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library in 2014. Her work has been written about in Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Artnet News, and Blouin ArtInfo, among others. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Sarah Zapata is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. She has participated in exhibitions at el Museo del Barrio, the Museum of Arts and Design, LAXart, Arsenal Contemporary, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, amongst others. Zapata has read at Signal Gallery, Printed Matter, the AC Institute, and MoMA PS1.
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