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Otherhow: Essays and Documents on Art and Disability 1985–2024

Otherhow brings together four decades of writings, lectures, interviews, and documentation of work by the artist Joseph Grigely. Deaf since the age of ten, his art and writing have long questioned and made use of various modes of communication—photographs, handwritten notes, lipreading, newspaper headlines, paintings, and TV captions—to examine and scrutinize the ableism embedded in cultural and media production. From his brilliant series of postcards addressed to Sophie Calle, where he began to formulate a theory on the intersection of disability and art, to his epic lecture “On Failure,” which brings together the poet Keats, “the first woman of fly tying” Helen Shaw, and the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky to the same table for a conversation on beauty, Grigely’s writing is erudite, but clear; righteous with fury, but dryly humorous.

An underlying theme throughout are modes of access and how issues of accessibility and their resolution provide a benefit to everyone, not just the disabled. Chapters devoted to art, access, and advocacy underpin the interconnected nature of these issues in a maddening, but ultimately enlightening manner. Letters of complaint, faxes and emails, unpublished op-eds, exhibition proposals, statements on equality and access; each provide a glimpse into how Grigely’s work has been shaped by—or constructed from—the “tangled process” of opening access.

Joseph Grigely, artist, educator, and activist, is currently a Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He holds a Doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford in English literature and has taught at Gallaudet University, Stanford University, and the University of Michigan. Exhibiting widely in the US and Europe, his most recent show In What Way Wham? was presented at MASS MoCA in 2023–24. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tate Modern, and the Stedelijk Museum, among others.

432 pages
7.75 x 10 inches
Paperback
February 2026
ISBN: 9798991036719

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Editor: James Hoff
Designer: Siiri Tännler

 

Black Art Notes

Black Art Notes is a collection of essays edited by artist and organizer Tom Lloyd. Originally published in 1971, the book was conceived as a critical response to the Contemporary Black Artists in America exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art but grew into a “concrete affirmation of Black Art philosophy as interpreted by eight Black artists,” as Lloyd notes in the publication’s introduction.

Black Art Notes features writings by Lloyd, Amiri Baraka, Bing Davis, Melvin Dixon, Jeff Donaldson, Ray Elkins, Babatunde Folayemi, and Francis and Val Gray Ward. “If there is one lesson the post–civil rights period has taught us, it is that those most likely to shape the destiny of Black Americans in the next decade are activists and artists, who may possess additional skills as organizers,” writes Ward in “The Black Artist—His Role in the Struggle.”

The artists featured in the publication position the Black Arts Movement outside of white, western frameworks, and articulate the movement as one created by and existing for Black people. Their essays condemn the attempts of museums and other white cultural institutions to tokenize, whitewash, and neutralize Black art, and call for immediate political and institutional reform and the self-determination of Black cultural producers. While the publication was created to respond to a particular historicized moment, the systemic problems that it addresses remain pervasive, making the artists’ potent critiques both timely and urgent.

Tom Lloyd was an artist and organizer whose electronically programmed light works were chosen for the inaugural exhibition at The Studio Museum in Harlem in 1968. In 1971, Lloyd founded the Store Front Museum in New York, a cultural center that hosted exhibitions, concerts, classes, and lectures for the predominantly Black community of Jamaica, Queens, for over a decade. The center acted in tandem with his call for the marriage of social action and aesthetics in Black Art Notes, published the same year.

48 pages
8.25 x 8.25 inches
Paperback
Second Printing
November 2025
ISBN: 9781734489750

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Managing Editor: Camille Crain Drummond
Managing Designer: Scott Ponik
Proofreaders: Allison Dubinsky and Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves

The Harlem Book of the Dead

Originally published in 1978, The Harlem Book of the Dead is a haunting and beautiful document of Black funerary traditions in Harlem, which captures the community’s mourning rituals through the lens of one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most celebrated photographers. These portraits are complimented and captioned by poems from Owen Dodson; a wide-ranging interview with Van Der Zee by the sculptor and filmmaker Camille Billops, who conceptualized and edited the publication; and a foreword by acclaimed writer Toni Morrison. Rounding out this new edition is an afterword by Karla FC Holloway, author of Passed On (2001).

The publication is the most complete record of Van Der Zee’s funerary photographs, featuring over three dozen portraits by the artist, who meticulously composed the setting and subjects before using his renowned dark room and retouching skills to superimpose celestial figures, poetry, biblical scenes, or portraits onto the images to compensate for lack of adornments, such as flowers, or to fulfill the requests of his subjects or their families. Billops recognized the singular value in these portraits and collected them for the first time here, choosing to pair them with Dodson’s words to replicate a pairing of “death’s oldest companions—the portrait artist and the poet.” Further, her introduction and interview provide a valuable service in detailing the history of Van Der Zee’s life and work, his compositional decisions in the portraits, and the lives of his subjects and the circumstances of their passing.

During his lifetime, Van Der Zee was primarily known as a studio photographer, with an active portrait practice dating from 1916 to his death in 1983. His work took off between the World Wars and he is largely responsible for providing a visual record of the emergent Black middle class in the early twentieth century, capturing weddings, funerals, parades, sports clubs, community groups, and infantrymen (such as the Harlem Hellfighters). Over the years, understanding of Van Der Zee’s work—which was imbued from the start with creative technical mastery—has evolved and he is no longer seen as a mere documentarian but rather a visionary artist who amplified the beauty of the life and community around him.

108 pages
9 x 10.5 inches
Paperback
October 2025
ISBN: 9798991036726

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Managing Editors: Garrett Bradley and James Hoff
Designer: Bryce Wilner
Copy Editor: Allison Dubinsky

Slides of a Changing Painting

Slides of a Changing Painting is a new artist book by Robert Gober that takes as its point of departure the artist’s highly influential, yet rarely seen, early work of the same name—a slide presentation documenting a year-long evolution of a single painting. Presented at Paula Cooper Gallery in 1984 with three projectors and eighty-nine slides, the work showcased themes and subjects that would become central to Gober’s oeuvre and in hindsight, has come to be seen as a career-spanning lexicon for the artist’s practice. This artist book has been designed to replicate the experience of the original installation, with eighty-nine images dissolving into each other over the course of 368 pages, creating what Gober has referred to as the “memoir of a painting.” This is the first time that Slides of a Changing Painting has been showcased in its entirety in book form.

From 1982–83, Gober worked on Slides of a Changing Painting in his East 7th Street storefront, documenting the process as he repeatedly painted on a single Masonite board, reworking imagery or else starting over entirely. Motifs that would become important to his later sculptures and installations make their first appearances here, such as drains, pipes, flowing water, forests, lost garments, sinks, windows, and bare chests pierced with trees and waterfalls. His treatment of the human body here lays the groundwork for some of his most uncanny and surrealistic works. Made against the backdrop of cultural conservatism and an unchecked health epidemic that was rampant in the 1980s, Slides of a Changing Painting contains a bewildering mixture of dread and hope, with Gober’s queer identity and artistic sensibilities coming into remarkable focus—demonstrating a sense of vision that few artists have so early in their careers.

Robert Gober is an artist and sometime curator whose work has been exhibited since the early 1980s most notably in one person exhibitions at the Dia Art Foundation, New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Schaulager, Basel, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fondazione Prada, Milan, Glenstone, Potomac and the Serpentine, London. He represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2001. His curatorial projects have been shown at The Menil Collection, Houston, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He lives and works in New York and Maine.

368 pages
10.5 x 7 inches
Paperback
May 2025
ISBN: 9798988573623

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Editor: James Hoff
Designer: Bryce Wilner

Essex Hemphill, Hobart Street, Los Angeles, 1992

Essex Hemphill, Hobart Street, Los Angeles, 1992 is an editioned photograph by Lyle Ashton Harris printed on the occasion of Primary Information’s publication of THING magazine. Taken in 1992 and selected from the artist’s archive, the work depicts the late writer, performer, and activist Essex Hemphill, who was featured alongside Harris in the pages of THING.

Produced in an edition of 25, the pigment print is accompanied by a full-color facsimile reproduction of a postcard originally sent by Hemphill to Harris in 1992, as well as a touching remembrance of Hemphill written by the artist in March 2025 titled “Reflections on a Queer Soul Brother.”

Lyle Ashton Harris (born 1965 in Bronx, New York) has cultivated a diverse artistic practice, ranging from photography and collage to video installation and performance art, examining the impact of race, gender, and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic globally through intersections of the personal and the political. His artwork is included in numerous public and private collections internationally as well as being featured in several published monographs and widely exhibited, including by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Tate Modern, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

8 x 10 inches (paper size)
6 x 9 inches (image size)
Digital pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag
Edition of 25 + 5 APs
Signed and numbered on verso
2025

Untitled

Untitled is a limited edition photogravure print by Wade Guyton that serves as the first installment in a new series documenting the artist’s works as they are being examined, unrolled, installed, or conserved. This work marks Guyton’s first time utilizing the photogravure printing process.

Primary Information has available 25 prints from the total edition of 50. The remaining prints in the edition will eventually be included in a set of the full series of works, once completed at a later date. Untitled is printed on a heavy Somerset Satin paper by Tina Kinsbourne, Renaissance Press.

Wade Guyton (b. 1972) was born in Hammond, Indiana, and lives and works in New York. His work has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibitions including Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo (2024), Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2019), the Serpentine Gallery in London (2017), Museo Madre – museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina in Naples (2017), Museum Brandhorst in Munich (2017), Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO) in Geneva (2016), Le Consortium in Dijon (2016), Kunsthalle Zürich (2013), and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2012).

20 x 16 inches (paper size)
10 5/16 x 14 1/4 inches (image size)
Photogravure on Somerset Satin 300gsm
Edition of 50 + 10 APs
Signed and dated on verso
2025

Untitled

Untitled is a limited edition photogravure print by Wade Guyton that serves as the first installment in a new series documenting the artist’s works as they are being examined, unrolled, installed, or conserved. This work marks Guyton’s first time utilizing the photogravure printing process.

Primary Information has available 25 prints from the total edition of 50. The remaining prints in the edition will eventually be included in a set of the full series of works, once completed at a later date. Untitled is printed on a heavy Somerset Satin paper by Tina Kinsbourne, Renaissance Press.

Wade Guyton (b. 1972) was born in Hammond, Indiana, and lives and works in New York. His work has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibitions including Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo (2024), Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2019), the Serpentine Gallery in London (2017), Museo Madre – museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina in Naples (2017), Museum Brandhorst in Munich (2017), Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO) in Geneva (2016), Le Consortium in Dijon (2016), Kunsthalle Zürich (2013), and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2012).

20 x 16 inches (paper size)
10 5/16 x 14 1/4 inches (image size)
Photogravure on Somerset Satin 300gsm
Edition of 50 + 10 APs
Signed and dated on verso
2025