Josh MacPhee joins this episode of Booklyn Calling to discuss social movement culture as a third space outside of art and design with Booklyn curators Marshall Weber and Jan Descartes, and how art doesn’t make change on its own. The three talk about collective expression and how imagery takes on meaning, and MacPhee teaches how to read protest and organizing symbols as a language.
Subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. You can also play all episodes right on our website here.
Josh MacPhee is a designer, artist, and archivist. He is a founding member of both the Justseeds Artists Cooperative and Interference Archive, a public collection of cultural materials produced by social movements based in Brooklyn, NY. MacPhee is the author and editor of numerous publications, including Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now and Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture. He has organized the Celebrate People’s History poster series since 1998 and has been designing book covers for many publishers for the past decade.
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.
We’re building a world of self-determined narratives through book & zine-making education.
Booklyn, Inc. is all about making bookmaking, zine-making, and self-publishing accessible to historically marginalized communities, delivered from a non-specialist (“DIY”) approach. We support communities hit hard by the lasting impacts of the worldwide pandemic. Young people, immigrants, and the LGBTQIA+ community, among others. Our program also provides work for teaching artists who continue to rebuild their futures after the devastating financial blows of the pandemic.
Our goal: To build a world of self-determined narratives, where hands-on bookmaking skills are used to affirm communities from within and to better understand the world around us.
With your support, we brought you the free downloadable Booklyn Education Manual–six binding techniques and 20 lesson plans, available in both English & Spanish. We created a series of bookmaking video tutorials. Now, you can download a newly re-designed abridged manual, formatted as a print-ready booklet. All are free to access online.
Also in 2023 we focused our commitment to young people with Zine Camp and Zines After School programming for kids in grades 2-5, and did several onsite workshops at public elementary and middle schools. We worked with Emma Karin Eriksson and Kameelah Janan Rasheed to create an original curriculum specifically for these programs. We added Zines 101 for adults and Zines for Educators, a three-day professional development workshop for teachers wanting to integrate zine-making in the classroom.
Lastly, our beloved podcast, Booklyn Calling, brings you voices from the artist book field and explores artmaking as a tool for community engagement and social change.
An important note about how we do what we do: we support teaching artists by paying them a living wage, using the Teaching Artist Guild’s pay calculator. That means Booklyn teaching artists are paid between $50-$125 per hour. Always. We make this a priority in order to stabilize and strengthen the work teaching artists do in our community.
Kids ages 7-10 (or 2nd – 5th grade) are invited to sign up for full days of hands-on zine and bookmaking activities 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.
Sign up by December 31, 2023 and get 10% off using the code EARLYBIRD.
Educators, Jan Descartes and Monica Johnson will lead Zine Camp again, along with several visiting artists (TBD).
We’re collaborating with our friends at Public Art Fundto bring you Bodily Book Forms, an outdoor workshop in Sunset Park!
We’ll create one-page books and accordion zines inspired by Felipe Baeza’s Unruly Forms, an exhibition of eight paintings currently displayed in hundreds of bus shelters and street furniture across the United States and Mexico. In this series of free workshops visitors, Sunset Park residents, and the Mixteca community will experiment with collage, pop-up structures, and binding techniques to explore the unruly relationship between the body and the book form. Each participant will create a project that can be easily photocopied and multiplied, echoing the format of Baeza’s Public Art Fund commission.
These outdoor workshops will be conducted in English and Spanish. All materials will be provided. No registration is needed; audiences of all ages are encouraged to drop in!
Bodily Book Forms is curated by Gabriela López Dena, Associate Curator of Public Practice. Email [email protected] with questions and requests for accessibility.
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 we’ll 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 so we have a better idea on how many people will join the workshop. For more information and questions, please contact Jako Douglas-Borren at [email protected].
This workshop is made possible in part by funding from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in collaboration with the New York City Council.
Starting in September, kids ages 7-10 can explore zine and bookmaking as a community-centered practice that builds social-emotional learning and teaches skill development to create self-determined storytelling.
Just like Zine Camp, we’ll be running our after-school program at Old Stone House in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY, offering school pick-ups at four area schools (see listings for info). Class size will be kept small (5-7 students), and we’ll enjoy the playground and public garden spaces just outside for chill time when we need it. Sign up for any of four sessions between September 13, 2023 – June 12, 2024.
Over the past six months, we’ve been joyfully working with Kameelah Janan Rasheed to create Zines After School curriculum and activities. We plan to make the entire ZAS curriculum free to access after we’ve run the program and completed a full assessment. Stay tune for that!
We are also looking for another emerging arts educator to help run the program. Interested? Just send an email to [email protected] with the subject line: Arts Instructor, and include a CV and a short email about your interest.
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.
Booklyn Zine Club started in 2019, and since then we’ve hand-selected and mailed hundreds upon hundreds of zines to individuals and libraries all across the country. We’ve found all kinds of ways that we love this program, and we want to share that love with you.
Joining Zine Club means three things:
You’re getting great zines delivered each quarter, and building your personal zine collection.
You’re supporting the zine community. More members means we can purchase more zines, which pays larger sums to these creators to help them to keep creating.
We think you’re really rad.
If you need a little incentive to take part, we’re offering 10% off all annual memberships, plus a free tote bag or t-shirt for the first five sign ups.
Check out our page on the Booklyn Zine Club for more info, or if you’re ready, join here.
Are you an institution? We recommend discussing Booklyn Zine Club directly with us. Send us an email at [email protected]!
Teacher, artist, and activist Shana Agid joins Booklyn Calling for episode ten, answering questions from Monica and Booklyn curator Jan Descartes. They talk about the themes come up so often in her work, like privilege and absence, and Agid explains his way of trying to make sense of the world by coming back to the same core questions throughout his art.
Subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. You can also play all episodes right on our website here.
Shana Agid is an artist, designer, teacher, and organizer whose work focuses on relationships of power and difference in visual, social, and political cultures. Her books and prints combine image, text, and form to explore these through narratives of desire, landscape, and history. His work has been shown at The New York Center for Book Arts, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, the Hamilton Wood Type Museum, and other venues. His artist books are in the collections of the Walker Art Center, New York Public Library, and the Library of Congress, among others. She is an also a collaborative design researcher and practitioner working with organizations to create systems and infrastructures toward self-determination, and a long-time member of Critical Resistance. Shana is an Associate Professor at Parsons School of Design / The New School in New York City.
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.
Booklyn’s abridged Education Book is new and improved. The abridged version is full of instruction sheets, to introduce you to bookmaking or to complement the bookmaking you already do. As a medium and a message, bookmaking encourages the development of the voice, the ability to articulate it, and the means to make it heard. Booklyn’s education program aims to provide the basic background, skills and techniques for learners of all ages and experience levels to express their ideas and manufacture their own media.
As always, the Education Manual is free. Download a reader-friendly copy here. Want to print out and assemble your own Education Manual book? Download the book-formatted version here, and follow the instructions below.
Booklyn’s programs are 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.
Join Booklyn on July 7, 8, and 9 for a 3-part series of zine workshops created specifically for educators. Zines for Educators will be held at Old Stone House in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY, and is for educators working at any level and working with any group or institution.
This workshop will cover the history of zines, zine culture, zine design, and creation, and how to use zines in the classroom. Participants will explore how zines can facilitate project-based learning, social-emotional learning, and literacy. We will provide hands-on training to teachers on how to facilitate zine-making in their classrooms.
Participants are welcome to attend one, session or both. Each participant will produce their own zine examples to take with them and will receive a print copy of the Booklyn Education Manual to support their continued work in the classroom.
We hope to support the history and practice of zine creation in public school classrooms across New York City. If you are a public school educator, please inquire about discounted tuition.
This program was made possible in part by funding from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in collaboration with the New York City Council.
Booklyn’s programs are 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.
