These mixed media paintings by Cary Loren were made for Destroy All Monsters Magazine, which we released in 2011. Each copy of the original book included a unique work, and Loren had 50 left over once the book was completed. These signed, 50 copies were made available to Primary Information as a fundraising edition.
8.5 x 11 inches
Painting
Edition of 50
October 2011
These mixed media paintings by Cary Loren were made for Destroy All Monsters Magazine, which we released in 2011. Each copy of the original book included a unique work, and Loren had 50 left over once the book was completed. These signed, 50 copies were made available to Primary Information as a fundraising edition.
8.5 x 11 inches
Painting
Edition of 50
October 2011
“Portrait of Kathy Acker” (1978) is a limited edition print by Jimmy DeSana. Printed posthumously and signed by the artist’s estate, this work was selected from a series of portraits the artist took of famed writer and friend Kathy Acker. “Portrait of Kathy Acker” is part of a larger series of commercial photographs of Downtown celebrities that DeSana carried out in the late 1970s alongside his work for artists’ magazines and periodicals like FILE, X Magazine, and SoHo Weekly News, as well as for musicians such as the Talking Heads and James Chance. This body of work also appeared in the artist’s first exhibition at Steffanoti Gallery (1979) and in P.S.1’s legendary New York/New Wave (1981).
Printed in an edition of 75, this 5 x 7” pigment print comes with a copy of Salvation, DeSana’s posthumous artist book, which was published by Primary Information in spring 2024.
Jimmy DeSana (1949-1990) grew up in Atlanta, GA, and earned his bachelor’s degree from the Georgia State University in 1972 before relocating to New York’s East Village in the early 1970s. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Jimmy DeSana & Paul P.—Ruins of Rooms, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany, 2024 and The Sodomite Invasion: Experimentation, Politics and Sexuality in the work of Jimmy DeSana and Marlon T. Riggs, Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver, Canada, 2020. DeSana’s work can be found in numerous public collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. A major retrospective of DeSana’s work was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 2022, accompanied by a catalogue co-published by the Brooklyn Museum and DelMonico Books.
5 x 7 inches
Pigment print
Edition of 75 + 5 APs
Stamped by the Artist’s Estate
August 2024
Each edition comes with a copy of Jimmy DeSana’s Salvation.
Theatre is an artist book that documents seven early performances by Dan Graham taking place from 1969 to 1977 with notes, transcripts, or photographs for each work. Originally published in 1978, and produced here in facsimile form, the publication focuses on several key works that interrogate or undermine the psychological and social space created by, or between, individuals inside the performance venue.
Like most of Graham’s work, they also serve as a critique of cultural norms, with many of the performances utilizing quotidian, social acts that are amplified over time. For example, in Lax/Relax (1969), Graham’s subversion of West Coast new ageism, the artist chants “relax” in sync with a recording of a woman saying “lax” in a meditative manner, which implicates the audience into a group breathing exercise or hypnosis over the course of 30 minutes.
Throughout the ’70s, the artist engaged in a series of works that subverted the prescribed roles of the audience and performer by creating conditions in which each simultaneously functions as both (creating a type of feedback loop). Remarking on another work form this period, Graham once stated, “It begins with Minimal Art, but it’s about spectators observing themselves as they’re observed by other people.”* This paradigm is extended even further in Performer/Audience Sequence (1975) and Performer/Audience Mirror (1977), in which the artist performs by describing the audience as well as himself, creating conditions whereby the audience is performing for the artist as well as themselves.
Like (1971), Past Future Split Attention (1972), and Identification Projection (1977) are also featured in the publication.
Dan Graham is an artist based in New York. Since the 1960s, he has produced a wide range of work and writing that engages in a highly analytical discourse on the historical, social, and ideological functions of contemporary cultural systems. Architecture, popular music, video, and television are among the focuses of his investigations, which he articulates through essays, performances, installations, videotapes, and architectural/sculptural designs.
52 pages
5.8 x 8.2 inches
Paperback
May 2021
ISBN: 9781736534632
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Managing Editor: James Hoff
Managing Designer: Rick Myers
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* Dan Graham and Rodney Graham, “Dan Graham Interviewed by Rodney Graham,” in Dan Graham: Beyond, ed. by Bennet Simpson and Chrissie Iles, (MIT Press, 2009), 96.
Sea Shanty is a letterpress print produced on the occasion of Primary Information’s publication of Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979. The print is produced in an edition of 50 and includes a hand-numbered certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.
Sea Shanty was written in 1971 and appeared in the book Soundsword (London: Writers Forum, 1972). It appears in Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 along with other selections from Soundsword.
Paula Claire is a English-based writer that has been active in concrete and visual poetry since the late 60s.
8.5 x 12.5 inches
Letterpress print
Edition of 50 (+5 APs)
2020
This postcard by Olaf Breuning is part of a series devoted to artists’ postcards initiated by Primary Information in the wake of the Trump Administration, as well as the social and political tumult that preceded it. Since the election, there has been a growing movement of citizens using postcards to voice their concern to their representatives. As such, the postcard is a media form that is vital to political and social engagement in the United States. It is also a form with a dedicated image space, and Primary Information feels strongly that images accompanying this civic engagement should be created by artists.
Each month, Primary Information commissions artists to produce postcards in an ongoing open edition. All postcards are priced at cost.
Postcards have long been a part of the artist book tradition, with artists engaging with the form for well over 50 years now. While Primary Information sees this project as a continuation of that very important tradition, the organization also sees the need to double down on this form as a political space embedded with the urgency, diversity, and complexity of voices that are the hallmark of our times. Who better to do this than artists?
Find your national and state representatives
4 x 6 inches
Postcard
Open edition
February 2018
This postcard by E.V. Day is part of a series devoted to artists’ postcards initiated by Primary Information in the wake of the Trump Administration, as well as the social and political tumult that preceded it. Since the election, there has been a growing movement of citizens using postcards to voice their concern to their representatives. As such, the postcard is a media form that is vital to political and social engagement in the United States. It is also a form with a dedicated image space, and Primary Information feels strongly that images accompanying this civic engagement should be created by artists.
Each month, Primary Information commissions artists to produce postcards in an ongoing open edition. All postcards are priced at cost.
Postcards have long been a part of the artist book tradition, with artists engaging with the form for well over 50 years now. While Primary Information sees this project as a continuation of that very important tradition, the organization also sees the need to double down on this form as a political space embedded with the urgency, diversity, and complexity of voices that are the hallmark of our times. Who better to do this than artists?
Find your national and state representatives
4 x 6 inches
Postcard
Open edition
February 2018
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.
The book is rounded out by a series of visual inventories; collections of images that document failures of access or, in the case of the Obituaries, highlights those who had a disability or were activists working to establish greater access for those with disabilities.
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 DPhil 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, amongst others.
400 pages
7.75 x 10 inches
Paperback
Winter 2026
ISBN: 9798991036719
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Editor: James Hoff
Designer: Siiri Tännler
SHOOT was a self-published zine produced by photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya from 2005–2008. Each of the zine’s issues was an experiment by the artist in conceiving of an extended portrait, using contact sheets, outtakes, and text. The subjects were Sepuya’s friends, muses, and collaborators. Like many zines made at the time, these were photocopied on the job and at various copying centers and the magazine retains much of the artist’s hand as well as the idiosyncratic hallmarks of the copy machine that have come to define Queer zines since the 1970s. This book brings together, for the first time, all seven issues of the magazine, which are highly sought-after due to the scarcity of the originals today.
This early publication by Sepuya showcases the photographic practice that the artist has become known for over the last two decades. Glimpses of the artist can be found throughout the portraits in SHOOT (including one issue devoted to his own self-portrait), as can the mechanics of photography, drawing a line from this early work to his renowned Dark Room series and ongoing portrait-based practice. His photographs simultaneously recall the history of the medium and challenge it. Sepuya brings a perspective that emphasizes queerness in questioning the singularity of portraits and the dialogue between artist, subject(s), and collaborator(s), as well as complicating the expectations and representations of Black authorship.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography and related zines and ephemera. He is known for his New York portrait series in the mid 2000s, and over the past decade for studio-based projects that question and complicate questions of authorship, the visualization of race and sexuality, and the structures of the photographic medium. His work is in international collections including the Getty, LACMA, Guggenheim, MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the Stedelijk, Tate Modern, and the Victoria & Albert Museum among others. He is an Associate Professor in Visual Arts at UC San Diego.
140 Pages
6.5 x 8 inches
Paperback
Winter 2026
ISBN: 9798991036771
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Managing Editor: Jules Spector
Designer: Bryce Wilner
This eponymously titled publication by fierce pussy showcases thirty-five of the legendary art collective’s posters, from works made in the urgent early days of the AIDS crisis to present-day advocacy for Queer and Trans rights. In keeping with fierce pussy’s activism in public spaces, the publication is designed to allow readers to tear out any of the posters to share, wheatpaste, scan, photocopy, and distribute or to easily open the book to any page to hang it on a wall. Combining calls for political and social action, proud reclamations of Queer slurs, and pointed questions, the posters in fierce pussy address pressing sociopolitical issues in the group’s distinctive voice.
Emerging during a decade steeped in the AIDS crisis and LGBTQ+ activism, fierce pussy brought Queer identity directly into the streets in a manner characterized by the urgency of those years. In recent years they have expanded to also present their work in galleries and museums, while continuing to intervene in the public space, always working with an economy of means and a collective ethos of inclusion and solidarity.
This publication was originally published by Printed Matter in 2008 to coincide with a retrospective exhibition of the collective’s work. This new expanded edition includes twenty-five additional posters.
fierce pussy is an art collective formed in New York City in 1991. Originally composed of a fluid and often-shifting cadre of dykes, the collective was active through 1994. In 2008, the four core founding members Nancy Brooks Brody (1962–2023), Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, and Carrie Yamaoka began working together again. Adamantly low-tech, fast, and low-budget, fierce pussy has always relied on modest resources: old typewriters, found photographs, their own baby pictures, and whatever material they could get donated. In the early days, much of the work was produced using the equipment at their day jobs. This publication exemplifies the ethos of the group—to share their work and messaging with the masses.
41 pages
11 x 17 inches
Spiral bound
Spring 2026
ISBN: 9798991036795
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Managing Editor: Jules Spector
Designers: Garrick Gott and Bryce Wilner
Ashes from a Flame was created by the photographer Alvin Baltrop and completed just before his death in 2004. Unpublished until now, the book documents the social, sexual, and creative life of New York City’s West Side Piers in the 1970s and 1980s. Ashes from a Flame contains seventy-six photographs taken between 1975 and 1986.
Overlooked in his lifetime due to his institutional marginalization as a Queer Black artist, Baltrop’s photographs are pivotal to our understanding of Queer culture in a post-Stonewall New York, providing an unfiltered and unsentimental window into a complex urban space hallmarked by sexual liberation (for some) and the poverty, drug addiction, mental illness, and violence that lay just beneath its surface. Although Baltrop has gained posthumous renown for his work through a handful of exhibitions and publications in recent years, this is the first book to provide his own vision of the culture he captured.
Compiled long after economic forces and HIV/AIDS changed the architecture and sexual politics of Queer culture and New York City as a whole, Ashes from a Flame begins by acknowledging the apparitional space it records. The first photograph shows the World Trade Center situated between an elevated railway and a building on the piers, accompanied by the caption “West Side Ghosts.” This is followed by photographs of young men convening, sunbathing, and having sex alongside images of artistic interventions in the industrial landscape—murals by Gustav “Tava” von Will on warehouse walls and Gordon Matta-Clark’s Day’s End installation on Pier 52. In other works, Baltrop focused his lens on the rusted beams, broken glass, and shredded curtains of the dilapidated architecture of the once-thriving maritime port. Images of this subculture and its architecture showcase a side of the city that was hidden from view and soon to be lost. The final photographs in the book capture the destruction of one of the piers in the 1980s, foreshadowing the end of an era.
While very few people have seen the original publication, art historian Douglas Crimp consulted it for his landmark Artforum essay on the artist, writing, “the complexity of Baltrop’s legacy resides not only in the record his photographs provide of utopian and dystopian occurrences, but also in their evidence that the moment in Manhattan’s history when we could so thoroughly reinvent ourselves was as precarious as the places where we did it.” The book commemorates the lives Baltrop captured on film, many of whom have been lost to time, as have the places they used to call home.
Alvin Baltrop (1948–2004) was a Bronx-born photographer who lived and worked in New York City. After serving in the Vietnam War (1969–72), he studied at the School of Visual Arts and later turned his lens to the city’s underground gay culture. From the mid-1970s through the 1980s, Baltrop obsessively documented the West Side piers—derelict spaces that became sites of cruising, art-making, and survival. His unflinching photographs reveal both the intimacy and danger of this hidden world, offering a stark counterpoint to the era’s glamorous nightlife. Today, his work stands as a vital record of Queer history and New York’s urban margins.
88 pages
8.5 x 11 inches
Paperback
Spring 2026
ISBN: 9798991036788
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Editor (2004): Randal Wilcox
Editor (2026): James Hoff
Managing Editor (2026): Jules Spector
Designer (2026): Rick Myers
Made in 1969 but never published, Terminal Boundaries is an artist book by Lawrence Weiner, a sculptor whose medium was language. The manuscript for the publication, which was recently brought to light, contains two related bodies of work represented as typewritten statements on paper that Weiner pasted to the pages of a small composition notebook. The book’s absence from Weiner’s oeuvre plagued him as it marked a terminus of his relationship to the physical construction of his artworks, and illustrated the principle of “specific” and “general” which he applied to his art.
Created from a standard notebook purchased in a stationery store, the manuscript is two books in one: Terminal Boundaries and A natural watercourse diverted reduced or displaced. A tête-bêche with two front covers, the book can begin from either cover by turning it upside down.
Weiner was a traveler by nature and the materials he refers to in these works are those that one can encounter on a road trip. The artist was traveling across Europe when this manuscript was composed. Struck by the tumultuous times and the critical illuminations about the climate from the Club of Rome discussions, the works in this book are in Weiner’s words, “concerned with the relationship of natural resources in relation to human beings.” Distinct from his contemporaries associated with the Land Art movement, in Terminal Boundaries and A natural water course diverted reduced or displaced, Weiner constructs his landscape interventions in language—the specific and/or general act and the location are stated—offering the reader/viewer the opportunity to consider each work’s existence, to build it in their mind’s eye. One can only wonder what Weiner did to divert, reduce, or displace a natural water course in Saltsrumen, Norway, the location of the world’s strongest maelstrom, or in nearby Bodø at the site of Svartisen glacier. A work in Terminal Boundaries titled The joining of France Germany and Switzerland by rope demonstrates the geopolitical perspective of Weiner’s land art. Requiring physical and mental borders to be transgressed in performing this work; how and where could this happen?
Terminal Boundaries finds Weiner just off the cusp of his decision to make art that lived centered in language, emphasizing the viewer’s responsibility to engage with it to make it whole. The book marks a crucial inflection point in the artist’s practice, defining his direction to make work that “attempts to present something to people that is not just about me,” but about materials and the world we find ourselves in the here and now.
160 Pages
4.25 x 6.75 inches
Hardcover
Spring 2026
ISBN: 9798991036764
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Managing Editor: James Hoff
Designer: Rick Myers
