Bulletin #7: Incandescent Gratitude

January 26, 2021

Good morning, We wish you a courageous, healthy, and productive New Year. We thank you sincerely for the financial and moral support that Booklyn needed to get through a rough year. This solidarity made it possible for us to be here today, and to continue to bring you the work you want in your institutions.  We are more committed than ever to provide you with provocative, instructive, books, prints, and political ephemera that support social justice and arts curricula.  We continue our commitment to our archiving and publishing programs which preserve and promote social change culture from under-resourced communities. To support these endeavors we’re building a new website this year that. Here’s a peek at it in progress: https://booklyn.org/  Booklyn is honored to be working with such a high caliber of artists and organizations. We are deeply impressed and forever grateful for the successes they’ve had in mobilizing community voting in 2020. Voces de la Frontera in Wisconsin, and The Poor People’s Campaign number among those groups we are indebted to. Below are some essential collection items for 2021. Some are brand new, some you’ve seen before, and some you may already have acquired. But they all help us to move forward in both imagining and building a more just and beautiful world. Thanks again for your support, stay safe and be well! Marshall Weber [email protected]

When We Fight We Win: A Public Education Advocacy Tool Box Expanded Sponsor Edition of 3, 2020, ArtbuildWorkers, Booklyn, with various artists, 93 items, collage, inkjet, silkscreen, photo media, 6,200 USD. The Dodd Humanities Library at the University of Connecticut has acquired the first Sponsor Box Set, 2 box sets are still available. This is a comprehensive visual archive of the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), and the Oakland Education Association (OEA) teacher strikes, and the cultural organizing by artists, designers, and photographers. Contents include picket signs, placards, patches, offsets, ephemera, and photo documentation from the January 2019 Los Angeles UTLA led teachers’ strike and the February 2019 OEA-led Oakland teachers’ strike. These strikes were historic parts of numerous nationwide actions of the National Education Association’s #RedforEd campaign which catalyzed both a student and teacher rights movement and a massive youth and educator registration drive across the United States. Some impacts of this work resulted in educator Tony Evers driving Scott Walker from the Wisconsin Governor’s office in 2018 and flipping Wisconsin in the 2020 Presidential election. A full PDF description of the Box Set is available here. Selected Contributors Jeanette Arellano, Judy Baca, Jesus Barraza, Aise Born, Joe Brusky Micah Bazant,, Melanie Cervantes, Kim Cosier, Paul Kjelland, Carolyn Knight, Nicolas Lampert, Josh MacPhee, Claudio Martinez, Daniel Martinez, Josie Osborne, Favianna Rodriguez, Carlos Rogel, Nisha Sembi, David Solnit, Dewey Tafoya, Vy Vu, Ernesto Yerena, Erin Yoshi https://booklyn.org/archive/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/2297 Booklyn Bridge #1, 2020, various artists, a variant edition of 21 artists’ books, acrylic, calligraphy, collage, hand-painting, ink, inkjet, laser print, marker pen, offset print, photography, risograph, rubbing, screenprint, woodblock print, 4,200 USD. A celebration of 21 years of this nonprofit arts organization, and a fundraiser to support Booklyn into year 22. The book is an accordion-fold collage of artwork donated by a diverse all-star team of 21 Booklyn artists. It spotlights the global activist and artist network that Booklyn has built over the past two decades, with exuberant and critical artworks that evoke the turbulence of the past year while imagining a bridge into a decolonized future. Each book in the edition is designed and assembled by various Booklyn staff and board members; edition #1 is designed and fabricated by Booklyn Directing Curator Marshall Weber who finished the book with wax rubbings from various bronze plaques across the city of New York. The book features a quote from Albert Camus’ “The Plague” and a rubbing of a plaque of the Brooklyn Bridge that is set into the actual Brooklyn Bridge. With art by: Aaron Hughes, Beldan Sezen, Candice Hicks, Christopher Wilde, Courtney Bowles, CUBA, Dana Smith, Eliana Perez, Erik Ruin, Ganzeer, Jan Descartes, Josh MacPhee, María Verónica San Martín, Mark Strandquist, Marshall Weber, Monica McKelvey Johnson, People’s Paper Coop, Raoul Deal, Rigo 23, Sofia Szamosi, Sublevarte Colectivo, and Taehee Whang. https://booklyn.org/catalog/booklyn-bridge-1/ Zine and Artists’ Publication Collection, 1995-2020 295 items, various artists, fabric, inkjet, laser print, letterpress, newsprint, offset print, risograph, screenprint, 2,400 USD. This is an exuberant, diverse collection of zines and artists’ publications representing various communities and covering a variety of resonant and current issues. The collection includes ephemera such as stickers, flyers, tote bags, and even a “Bettys” fanny pack. It would be a fabulous seed collection for an institution or a collector starting to collect zines and other artists’ ephemera, but it would also be a great addition to any current artists’ publication collection. Full inventory here. https://booklyn.org/catalog/zine-and-artists-publication-collection/ Sing it. Dance it., 2019, Brian D. Tripp, unique artists’ book, collage, hand painting, ink, inkjet, offset print, marker pen, 6,800 USD.  Brian D. Tripp (BDT) is a beloved and respected Karuk Nation elder activist, artist, dancer, poet, singer, and storyteller. He is a Northern Californian cultural leader who brought back the traditional Bush and Jump Dances to the Karuk, Hoopa, and Yurok Nations. BDT is also an important Native American and International maker of unique illuminated manuscripts. His spiritually charged artists’ books are collected and exhibited globally. BDT’s art integrates traditional Karuk aesthetics, colonial hybrid forms (such as ledger and saddle book forms), and contemporary activist practice.  Curators from Booklyn, Amherst College, Humboldt State University, and San Francisco State University are currently forming a steering committee to assist in archiving BDT’s art and ephemera and to fund and produce a touring retrospective of BDT’s books and art with an accompanying catalog and anthology of BDT’s poetry. Read the preliminary exhibition proposal here.  Free BDT monograph download here. https://booklyn.org/archive/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/2272 The Poor People’s Campaign Box Set, with the Justseeds Artist Cooperative 2018, various artists, edition of 20, various media, 2,400 USD. Special client price: 2,160 USD. 50 years after Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign, Rev. Dr. William Barber and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis started the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.  In the turmoil of 2020 Rev. Dr. William Barber became an acclaimed and outspoken leader for the current voters’ and economic rights movement. This box set features historical organizing ephemera gathered during the birth of the new PPC including original press releases signed by Reverends Barber and Theoharis, and 30 evocative and educational prints addressing issues of economic inequity and racism by the members of the Justseeds Artist Cooperative. https://booklyn.org/archive/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/2132 Voces de la Frontera: Historical Box Set 2020, various artists, edition of 8 box sets, 46 items created from 2014 to 2019, various media, 3,200 USD, Special client price: 2,800 USD. The Voces de la Frontera (VDLF) Historical Box Set features art from a variety of activist-artists and Milwaukee community members. The contents include artists and community-generated picket signs on muslin and paper, screen-printed posters, organizing flyers, and other political and VDLF ephemera. A flash drive of digital images and videos related to VDLF is included.  VDLF is Wisconsin’s leading immigrant rights organization serving the Latina/o community in Milwaukee, WI, but also operating on a national level. In 2020 VDLF leader Christine Neumann-Ortiz was (and she continues to be) a crucially important organizer in mobilizing the Latina/o vote in the state of Wisconsin and the Midwest. https://booklyn.org/archive/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/2293 Occuprint Portfolio, 2012, edition of 100, 31 prints, screen-prints, letterpress prints, 10,000 USD. This historically important portfolio amply documents the protest movement that re-ignited popular grassroots awareness and resistance to the failures of global capitalism. By providing multiple liberation movements a shared and articulate critique of economic inequities the Occupy Wall Street movement helped shape both the current Decolonization movement and the urgent discussion regarding the inherent racism at the root of capitalist culture. Occuprint emerged as the visual information and education arm of the 2011 New York Occupy Wall Street action when The Occupied Wall Street Journal newspaper asked Occupy artists to curate an issue dedicated to the poster art of the global Occupy movement. At its inception, the Occuprint portfolio project was a fundraising mechanism and an educational tool-kit meant to support Occuprint and Occupy activities and to disseminate their critical discourse. The silkscreen portfolio has thirty-one 12” x 18” hand silk-screened artists’ prints on French paper in an archival silk-screened presentation folder. Crowdsourced from an international on-line community the portfolio was designed and curated by Occuprint organizer, Jesse Goldstein, various Occuprint editorial committee members (including Molly Fair, Josh MacPhee, and John Boy), and Booklyn’s Directing Curator Marshall Weber. Selected Artists Colectivo Cordyceps, Molly Crabapple, Art Hazelwood, Ronnie Goodman, Little Hamilton Collective Press, LMNOPI, Josh MacPhee, Sébastien Marchal, Gabby Miller, Roger Peet, Nguyen Minh Thanh, Favianna Rodriguez, Fahmi Reza, Serakah Itu Salah. https://booklyn.org/archive/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/1180#