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Wesleyan University

Booklyn Bridge #7 is the first in the series of 7 Booklyn Bridges to be designed by Sophia Kramer, a brilliant and dynamic book artist, designer, and artists’ bookbinder. Sophia has been working with Booklyn for over a decade, designing and binding complex and materially challenging artists’ books for many of Booklyn’s most popular artists including, CUBA, Brian D. Tripp, Erik Ruin, and Marshall Weber.

The Booklyn Bridge is a celebration of 21 years of Booklyn (now 23!) and is a fundraiser to help carry Booklyn on into its next year. The book is an amazing, over twenty-foot-long, accordion fold collage of artwork donated by a diverse and fluid group of 21 Booklyn artists from across Booklyn’s history. The book is a dream team of activist artists who work in print and book media. The first six variant books in the edition were designed and assembled by Booklyn Directing Curator Marshall Weber. The book spotlights the global activist/artist network that Booklyn has built over the past two decades, with exuberant and critical artworks that especially evoke the turbulence of the past few years while imagining (and imaging) a bridge into a decolonized future. While following the above-described theme each book in the edition will be unique with different artists and artworks switched out over the course of the edition’s creation.

Booklyn is especially grateful to all the artists who have generously donated the fruit of their labors to this project in an expression of solidarity with Booklyn’s ongoing mission to bring activists, artists, educators, librarians, and social justice organizers together to build a bridge into a just and beautiful future.

Edition Collections:

#1 has been acquired by the Dodd Humanities Library of the University of Connecticut at Storrs.
#2 has been acquired by the Fine Arts Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
#3 is in the Bertrand Library at Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA.
#4 resides in the Buch and Schrift Museum of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Leipzig, Germany.
#5 now lives in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley
#6 resides at the University of Wisconsin’s Kohler Art Library
#7 moved to Wesleyan University

Artists:
While one sentence cannot begin to describe all the art and social justice work Booklyn artists are engaged with we wanted to provide a little background to illustrate the huge amount of creative energy and solidarity that informs the Booklyn Bridge Project.

1. CUBA, born in the USA, AKA the Graffiti Godfather of San Francisco and Clarence Robbs, has painted over 500 murals in the S.F. Bay Area.
2. Raoul Deal, born in the USA, faculty at University of Wisconsin, Madison, works in community settings and is committed to local civil rights issues.
3. Jan Descartes, born in the USA, Director, Finance & Administration at Booklyn, co-curator of “Our Comics Ourselves”, committed to working with gender justice and mutual aid groups.
4. Ganzeer, born in Egypt, founder of Concept Pop, a strong voice in the Tahir Square movement in Cairo, committed to global human rights issues.
5. Candice Hicks, born in the USA, creator of Common Threads, the epic hand-embroidered series of unique cloth artists’ books.
6. Aaron Hughes, born in the USA, artist, curator, Iraq War Veteran, Justseeds member and globally respected anti-war activist, works with Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project and About Face: Veterans Against the War
7. Monica Johnson, born in the USA, Executive Director of Booklyn, co-curator of “Our Comics Ourselves”, and “Lil’ Radicals”, committed to creative projects to further gender and economic justice.
8. Jane (Evgenia) Kim, is an artists and printmaker woriking in Philadelphia, she was a recipient of the International Print Center NYC Artist-in-Residence Award in 2019.
9. Josh MacPhee, born in the USA, co-founder of Justseeds, the Interference Archive, Booklyn Board Member, and perhaps, one of the most prolific, activist book and poster designers and historians ever.
10. Mission Mini-comix, is a beloved, yet mysterious and anarchic group of beloved mini-comic makers working in the Mission District of San Francisco.
11. Eliana Perez, born in Colombia, creates intensely emotionally evocative work illuminating the connections between political and environmental trauma. She was a founding Booklyn artist.
12. Erik Ruin, born in the USA, activist artist, musician, Justseeds member, with Cindy Milstein he wrote: “Paths Toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism” (PM Press, 2012).
13. Maria Veronica San Martin, born in Chile, a Booklyn Board Member, well known for her commitment to book and printmaking as essential forms of preserving liberatory social memory, has worked to expose and close down the former cult/torture center of Colonia Dignidad in Chile (know rebranded as Villa Baviera) and turn it into a public memorial for the many Chileans tortured there during the Pinochet regime.
14. Beldan Sezen, born in Germany, artist, currently a Curator at Booklyn and Creative Director of Front Line Defenders’ “Cypher” comic-zine, her graphic novel “Snapshots of a Girl” was on American Library Association’s Over the Rainbow List for the best LGBT books for adult readers in 2015.
15. Dana Smith, born in the USA, a creative fixture in the life of San Francisco’s Mission District, where she started squatting with anarchist writer Peter Plate in the 1980s, Smith has been diligently documenting life in the Mission since then.
16. Sofia Szamosi, born in the USA, zinester, and painter, Szamosi has recently been focused on using analog media to reflect and analyze female identity in internet culture
17. Sublevarte Colectivo, a collective of Mexican artists, was born out of the ENAP (National School of Fine Arts) of UNAM (the National Autonomous University of Mexico), during the student strike of 1999-2000, the longest student strike in history. They are adept players in interventionist culture.
18. Taehee Whang, born in South Korea, is a co-founder of Hyperlink Press, committed to preserving histories of female-identified and Queer labor culture.
19. Marshall Weber, born in the USA, co-founded of Artists Television Access in San Francisco and Booklyn, and was the editor of Freedom of the Presses. Weber has designed projects with Voces de la Frontera, Occupy Wall Street’s Occuprint Project, Iraq Veteran’s Against the War (now About Face), and numerous other social justice organizations.
20. C. K. Wilde, born in the USA, a Booklyn co-founder, is well known for his complex money collages which depict the relationship of capitalism and war and human rights crimes.
21, Scott Williams (AKA The San Francisco Stencil Pirate Godfather), is a master of stencil cutting, have produced a large body of huge stenciled murals, paintings and artists’ books.