Page 5 – Booklyn

Hey, we did a thing—Zine Camp!

We are so deeply excited to launch this zine-focused education program for kids right here in Brooklyn. During mid-winter recess—February 20-24, 2023—schools are out, so we are offering a week of hands-on zine and bookmaking activities for kids aged 7-10.

Zine Camp is at Old Stone House (at Washington Park & JJ Byrne Playground) in Park Slope. We’ll teach zine-making as a community-centered practice, one that builds social-emotional learning, and teaches skill development for the creation of self-determined storytelling.

Our signature curriculum from the Booklyn Education Manual was adapted by Emma Karin Eriksson, Young Adult Librarian at Brooklyn Public Library and longtime zine creator, known widely for the Radical Domesticity series. Educators, Jan Descartes and Monica Johnson will show kids how to transform a single piece of paper into a “magic book”, create their own sketchbooks out of recycled household materials, and explore collaborative storytelling techniques and create a class book, which we will edition together so that each child can bring home a copy.

Learn more about Zine Camp through the link below.

Questions? Email us at [email protected].

Zine Camp is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the NY City Council.

Today’s the day!

It’s #GivingTuesday 🤑 and we’re raising funds to support our education program! Your donation helps us continue to make bookmaking, zine-making, and self-publishing accessible to historically marginalized communities. All curriculum is delivered from a non-specialist approach.

ALL people deserve access to self-publishing tools and techniques. Learning binding techniques, storytelling approaches, and self-publishing tools can create a path to self-determined narratives. Booklyn is all about this.

Our goal of $3,000 provides art supplies for 150 students. To give a sense of your dollar-for-dollar impact, $20 provides art supplies for one student; $40 for two students, and so on. Can you help us reach this goal?

We know that bookmaking is a place where we can connect, learn, grow, and thrive. And so in 2023, we will be working with local, vibrant organizations like the Brooklyn Pride Center (Crown Heights), Mixteca (Sunset Park), and Old Stone House (Park Slope) to activate bookmaking in the LGBTQIA+ community, the Latinx immigrant community, and with school-aged kids. And we will continue to offer free “zine jams” in public parks when the weather is nice.

Donate today and help us build a world of self-determined narratives through book & zine-making education.

A new podcast episode: sTo Len

Brooklyn-based artist and self-proclaimed “hydro-feminist”, sTo Len, joins us to talk about his life so far as an artist, spanning his teenage years to today. From selling gas station zines and printmaking with dead fish to making collaborative artists’ books with the Organik collective and his position as the first-ever NYC Department of Sanitation artist-in-residence. A super fun episode with a lot to be covered.

Subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. You can also play all episodes right on our website here.

sTo Len is a printmaker, installation, sound, and performance artist with interests in improvisation and experimentation within a variety of media. His printmaking work updates traditional techniques such as Suminagashi (floating ink) and Gyotaku (fish impression) into an experimental collaboration with nature and a site of discourse on environmentalism and art activism. sTo Len was the first artist in residence at AlexRenew Wastewater Treatment facility in Alexandria, VA and took part in the Field R/D program at FreshKills Park, a transformed landfill in Staten Island, NY. He is a member of Works on Water, a group of artists and activists working with and about water in the face of climate change and environmental justice concerns. Len is currently the new artist in residence at the NYC Department of Sanitation as part of the PAIR program with the Department of Cultural Affairs.

Booklyn Calling is made possible in part by funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the NY City Council.

Zine-making for Personal & Community Storytelling

As part of the 2022 Brooklyn Book Festival, we partnered with Brooklyn Community Pride Center to create this free Zine-Making Workshop.

When:

Sep 29, 6:00 PM – 7:45 PM

Where:

BCPC – Crown Heights, 1561 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11225

Zines are handmade books. Typically, they are created by individuals, by hand, with basic materials–paper, scissors, pens, and ideas. Zine-making can facilitate the development of personal and community-based storytelling.

In this workshop educators from Booklyn, Inc. will teach the one-sheet bookmaking technique to develop a personal story into a handmade zine. Participants will also be invited to contribute to a collectively made book, using the flag book technique. This is a free workshop. No experience is necessary. Materials and tools will be provided.

Please complete and submit the workshop registration form.

THIS IS AN OFFICIAL 2022 BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL BOOKEND EVENT.

For more information and questions, please contact Jako Douglas-Borren at [email protected].

A perfect listen for Labor Day weekend

Jeanette Arellano and Joe Brusky from Art Build Workers (Milwaukee, WI) join Monica and Marshall to talk about the fight for public education, how everyone in a community can show up to help, and how art can amplify the voice of unions and social justice organizing.

Subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. You can also play all episodes right on our website here.

The Art Build Workers (ABW) are a group of six artists, designers, photographers, and educators who are based in Milwaukee, WI. We work locally and travel around the country organizing multi-day art builds that help unions, organizations, and movements amplify their messages through visual art, media, and archiving. Our motto is that before the march and before the strike there is the art build. We primarily collaborate with the National Education Association (NEA) which is the largest union in the country with an estimated membership of over 2.7 million members. ABW designs graphics for the movement and also coordinates designs from a vast network of activist artists and designers from around the country that we know. We screenprint picket signs, paint parachutes and banners, and produce offset posters that change the way demonstrations look visually, while amplifying a movement’s social media presence, and helping create a space for movements to build community and become stronger.

Check out the Art Build Workers archival box set

Booklyn Calling is made possible in part by funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the NY City Council.

Summer Tees
to support teaching artists
& free community education

With your help in 2021, we redesigned the Booklyn Education Manual. Then in 2022–again with your help–we translated it into Spanish. And we went even further–we created a series of video tutorials in Spanish, we did a Zine Jam workshop in Sunset Park (Brooklyn, NY), and did five workshops at the Brooklyn Community Pride Center: three with Queer Detainee Empowerment Project; two with Brooklyn Ghost Project, a black, transgender-led organization. All workshops and resources were free for participants. Woohoo!

Now, want to do more.

We are all about making bookmaking, zine-making, and self-publishing accessible to historically marginalized communities, delivered from a non-specialist approach. We are focused on supporting communities hit hard by the pandemic: young people, immigrants, and those from the LGBTQIA+ community, among others. This also provides work for teaching artists who have faced devastating financial blows during the pandemic. Our goal: to build a world of self-determined narratives, where hands-on bookmaking skills are used to build communities and understand the world around us.

Can you help us do that by buying a t-shirt today?

BUY A T-SHIRT

Heck yes, another episode.

Subscribe and listen on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

Mary Tremonte and V Adams join us to talk about the Queer Ecology Hanky Project – a program and exhibition with a new book that explores the intersection of sexuality, queer theory, biology, and the environment. Tremonte and Adams expand on the project’s themes, their personal connections to hankies, and how foraging in the woods evolved into an evolving community art project.Queer Ecology Hanky Project is a traveling exhibition and project with over 100 artist bandanas from across North America–from Vancouver to Mexico City–organized by Vanessa Adams and Mary Tremonte. Recent exhibitions of the project showcase a diverse array of artist responses to Queer Ecology—an area of inquiry that unites the study of biology, environment, and sexuality with a framework of queer theory–and a wide spectrum of print mediums and methods. The Queer Ecology Hanky Project has been exhibited at Zygote Press in Cleveland, Ohio, Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY, the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine, the Irma Freeman Center for Imagination in Pittsburgh, PA, and the White Page Gallery in Minneapolis, MN in collaboration with the risograph residency at The Future.

Purchase the Queer Ecology Hanky Project book

Booklyn Calling is made possible in part by funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the NY City Council.

Hey, we made another episode.

Artist, archivist, and educator, Sauda Mitchell joins us to look at the intersections of marginalized students, archives, space engagement, and critical analysis of primary sources, and how she’s merging art, education, and archival practice into one profession.

Subscribe and listen on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

Sauda Mitchell is an American multidisciplinary artist, archivist, and educator from Winston-Salem, NC. Utilizing artists’ books as a medium, her work investigates complex issues centered around the African American experience. Her work explores the intersections of printmaking, archival research, and QR code technology as a creative non-traditional access method linking viewers to archival repositories, curated exhibitions, and aggregated data. Each work serves as a visual response to archival collection materials representative of the many stories that can be found deep within the archival landscape.

Mitchell holds an Associate of Arts in Elementary Education from the University of Phoenix, a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Art with a minor in Art History from the Savannah College of Art and Design, a Master’s in Library and Information Science with a concentration in Archival Studies from Drexel University, and is certified by the Academy of Certified Archivists.

She is currently a doctoral student at Drexel University in the Educational Leadership and Management Program. Her research centers around marginalized student access to archives-based engagement in support of primary source critical analysis as a catalyst for elevated cognitive development.

Her artists’ books and prints can be found in private and public library and museum collections around the country including Harvard University, Telfair Museums, SCAD Museum of Art, Smithsonian, and Northwestern University Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies.

Booklyn Calling is made possible in part by funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the NY City Council.

Introducing: AFTER SASS

Remember SASS + ZINES? Now there’s AFTER SASS: Reimaging Identity & Representation Within Zine Culture 🌈

This year’s program is organized by Neta Bomani with participation by Joan Zahra Dark and Jay G. of the Bluestockings Collective, as well as Aliyah Blackmore, Kameelah Rasheed, and Kathryn-kay Johnson. 💯

Neta Bomani facilitates a conversation with Joan Dark, Raquel Espasande, and Emily Warfield of the Bluestockings Collective, in which collective members are invited to pull materials from Interference Archive’s zine collection to “show-and-tell”.

Find out more about AFTER SASS here.