Wendy's Subway / Residency / Gato Negro Ediciones

Publisher-in-Residence: Gato Negro Ediciones
Logophagy
October 21-November 3, 2019

Wendy’s Subway is pleased to announce Gato Negro Ediciones as our Publisher-in-Residence from October 21 to November 3, 2019. Logophagy is the third and final phase of Gato Negro Ediciones’s latest project, Logocide, Logotomy, Logophagy (Logocidio, Logotomía, and Logofagia), which seeks to revive and experiment with nonsense as a means of subversion.

Visualize the nonsense, the absurd, the illegible, and the cryptic. Seek to understand the contrasts, symmetries, asymmetries, volumes, and colors of the policy that governs our construction.

Over the course of the residency, Gato Negro Ediciones will reflect and build upon the first two phases of the project, undertaken at Frans Masereel Centrum (Kasterlee, Belgium) and PrintRoom (Rotterdam, the Netherlands) through a series of conversations and workshops exploring the possibilities of nonsense in visual, textual, and printed exercises. A selection of their publications will be on view at Wendy’s Subway. Through March 1, 2020, Gato Negro Ediciones also presents a curated selection of publications, alongside their own titles at the Museum of Modern Art’s Store, adjacent to the lobby of the Museum, at 11 W 53rd Street.

About Gato Negro Ediciones

Since 2013, Gato Negro Ediciones has acted as a recognizably-urgent voice in independent publishing across the cultural realm. Advocating the liberty of thought, the Mexico City-based press intentionally prints titles that challenge the so-often sequestered view of contemporary society. From political manifestos to art theory and prose, Gato Negro’s books do not wish to deconstruct reality through ornamental distractions that lately seem to have become an inevitable requisite within the modern history of publishing. Instead, Gato Negro embraces the deliberately-chosen content in its most primal form: straightforward and entire. And therefore, ever growing in context. The outcome of each publication is a dialogue between reader and creator—an ecological construction of selfhood that distills collective contemplation while all we do is live.
More information here: https://www.gatonegro.ninja/

Upcoming Programming

Publishing Talks: Gato Negro Ediciones and GenderFail
Thursday, Otober 24 - 7pm

Please join us for a conversation with Gato Negro Ediciones publisher, León Muñoz Santini and GenderFail publisher Be Oakley, highlighting innovative and inclusive approaches to independent art publishing. Muñoz Santini and Oakley present recent projects and initiatives and discuss, among other topics, the critical role of the Risograph machine in their work. Moderated by Rachel Valinsky, Artistic Director at Wendy's Subway.

Books by both presses will be on view and available for sale for the evening.

Publishers

León Muñoz Santini is the publisher of Gato Negro Ediciones, our current Publisher-in-Residence at Wendy’s Subway.

Be Oakley is a writer, facilitator, and publisher based in Brooklyn, NY. They received their MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2018. Oakley's projects look to what Fred Moten calls “the politics of the mess” by framing their identity as a white non-binary queer person in its intersections with failure and internationality.

GenderFail is a publishing and programming initiative that seeks to encourage projects that foster an intersectional queer subjectivity. It was started in 2015 by Be Oakley and is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. For GenderFail, a queer subjectivity is one that pushes against a capitalist, racist, ableist, xenophobic, transphobic, homophobic, misogynistic, and anti-environmental ideology. Their projects look at various forms of failure—from personal, public, and political perspectives—as a boundless form of creative potential. GenderFail embraces failure as a site of cultural production. GenderFail has been a part of exhibitions, programs, and events at MoMA PS1, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Williams College Museum of Art, The International Center of Photography, Wendy's Subway, Sediment Arts, Vox Populi, EFA Project Space, Washington Center for the Arts, Ulises Books, Anderson Gallery, and After School Special. GenderFail publications can be found in the library collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Center for Book Arts, Tate Museum Zine Library and many others.

The Wendy’s Subway Residency Program is made possible through a Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation Art and Social Justice Grant, and through public funds from the Decentralization Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, administered in Kings County by the Brooklyn Arts Council.