Archives

David Benjamin Sherry

This postcard by David Benjamin Sherry 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
November 2017

Sanya Kantarovsky

This postcard by Sanya Kantarovsky 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
November 2017

Andrew Kuo

This postcard by Andrew Kuo 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
November 2017

Nancy Lupo

This postcard by Nancy Lupo 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
November 2017

Jacolby Satterwhite

This postcard by Jacolby Satterwhite 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
November 2017

Better Living Catalog

Pippa Garner’s Better Living Catalog, originally published in 1982, takes the form of a mail order catalog featuring clever and whimsical inventions that parody consumer goods while simultaneously critiquing America’s obsession with ingenuity, efficiency, leisure, and comfort. These works, which were made as prototypes and photographed for the publication, take the form of improbable accessories, clothing, footwear, home appliances, and office gadgets.

For example, the “Reactiononometer,” a portable wristband, instantly measures social success, while the “Digital Diet Loafers” display the wearer’s weight with every step. If the “Munch-o-Matic” reduces deskwork interruptions by flinging a snack right into the user’s mouth, other items promise financial solvency (the controlled cash flow “Autowallet”), sustainable waste management, or mess-free companionship (the “Pet-a-Vision” TV console). The artist asserts that all of the products in the book are “absolute necessities for contemporary survival.”

The Better Living Catalog was a pop hit when it was published, earning Garner spots on nighttime TV talk shows and attention from magazines like Vogue and Rolling Stone. In a meme-filled culture, the works still resonate today, finding their analog in widely-circulating consumer products, and—in the case of the “High Heel Skates”—even appearing unattributed in the runway collection of a major luxury fashion brand.

A few years after the Better Living Catalog was published, Garner began her gender transition, which she has characterized as an artistic project that draws conceptual parallels to the altered consumer goods she has continued to create since the 1970s. The artist’s practice has always been about hacking—gender hacking, she stated, was “an excellent premise for maverick conceptual art and diametrically opposed to anything I’d ever done.”

Many of the prototypes Garner created for the publication were repurposed or recycled, making this previously rare gem of an artist book one of the artist’s few works to now be widely available.

Born in 1942 in Evanston, Illinois, Pippa Garner (formerly known as Philip Garner) began her practice in the late sixties as a member of the highly regarded Transportation Design department at ArtCenter, California, with plans to become a car stylist, and was drafted to Vietnam to serve as a combat illustrator. In the mid-80s, Garner began her gender transition, which she considers a conceptual artwork, marking an extension of her practice from twenty years of altering cars, garments, and consumer products to using her own body as raw material. Garner appeared on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and other talk shows, showcasing her satirical consumer product inventions, and her artwork has been featured in Car & Driver, Rolling Stone, Arts & Architecture, and Vogue, among other publications. In the 1980s, her performance, design, and video work was exhibited in institutions including the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; since 2015, she has had exhibitions at STARS, O-Town House, Redling Fine Art, and Parker gallery in Los Angeles; Jeffrey Stark in New York; JOAN, Los Angeles; Kunstverein München; 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine, Metz; Kunsthalle Zurich; and Art Omi, Ghent, New York. She is the author of three other books: Utopia… or Bust! Products for the Perfect World (1984), Garner’s Gizmos & Gadgets (1987), and the zine Beauty 2000 (1992/2021).

100 pages
5.25 x 8.09 inches
Paperback
June 2023
ISBN: 9798987624944

—

Managing Editor (2023): Rachel Valinsky
Managing Designer (2023): Siiri Tännler

Dear Jean Pierre

Dear Jean Pierre collects David Wojnarowicz’s transatlantic correspondence to his Parisian lover Jean Pierre Delage between 1979 and 1982. Capturing a truly foundational moment for Wojnarowicz’s artistic and literary practice, these letters not only reveal his captivating personality—and its concomitant tenderness, compassion, and neuroses—but also index the development of the visual language that would go on to define him as one of the preeminent artists of his generation.

Through this collection, readers are introduced to Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud series, the band 3 Teens Kill 4, the publication of his first photographs, his early friendship with Peter Hujar, his participation in the then-emerging East Village art and music scenes, and the preparations for the publication of his first book. Included with these writings are postcards, drawings, xeroxes, photographs, collages, flyers, ephemera, and contact sheets that showcase some of the artist’s iconic images and work, such as the Burning House motif and Untitled (Genet, after Brassai).

Beyond these milestones, the book offers a striking portrayal of Wojnarowicz as a twenty-something, detailing his day-to-day life with the type of unbridled earnestness that comes with that age and the softness of love and longing. This disarming tenderness provides a picture of a young man just beginning to find his voice in the world and the love he has found in it.

Although the two exchanged letters in equal measure, Delage’s correspondences have largely been lost, leaving us with only a revelatory glimpse into the internal world of Wojnarowicz during what turned out to be his formative years.

David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. Wojnarowicz channeled a vast accumulation of raw images, sounds, memories and lived experiences into a powerful voice that was an undeniable presence in the New York City art scene of the 1970s, 80s and early 90s. Through his several volumes of fiction, poetry, memoirs, painting, photography, installation, sculpture, film and performance, Wojnarowicz left a legacy, affirming art’s vivifying power in a society he viewed as alienating and corrosive. His use of blunt semiotics and graphic illustrations exposed what he felt the mainstream repressed: poverty, abuse of power, blind nationalism, greed, homophobia and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS-related complications on July 22, 1992 at the age of 37.

616 pages
8.5 x 11 inches
Paperback
August 2023
ISBN: 9781737797951

—

Editor: James Hoff
Designer: Pacific
Copy editor: Allison Dubinsky

 

Newspaper

Published by Steve Lawrence and edited with Peter Hujar and Andrew Ullrick, Newspaper was published in New York City between 1968 and 1971.

Newspaper was a wordless, picture-only periodical that ran for fourteen issues and featured the disparate practices of over forty artists. With an editorial focus on placing appropriated material alongside new works, the periodical sought to codify a visual language of high and low culture that represented contemporary society in the late 1960s. While largely overlooked in art-historical discourse, Newspaper showcased many of the most revered artists working in the United States at the time, as well as an emerging coterie of queer artists.

The mid to late sixties was a flourishing period for artists experimenting with new media formats such as books, records, and magazines to create or distribute their work. Newspaper was one of the first artist-published tabloids of its era, preceding Andy Warhol’s Interview and Les Levine’s Culture Hero, both of which debuted in 1969. However, in contrast to other tabloids, Newspaper focused strictly on images.

At a time when photography was not being exhibited regularly in galleries, Newspaper provided an alternative exhibition space for the medium and some of the era’s greatest photographers. The publication’s large size and unbound format encouraged readers to take it apart and hang its pages, which was how Newspaper was installed at the Museum of Modern Art’s influential Information show in 1970.

This is not to say that Newspaper only existed within the narrow confines of the art world, far from it. It lived within (and shared contributors with) a robust network of underground and queer periodicals like The New York Review of Sex, Rags, and Gay Power, among others. Yet, unlike many of these tabloids, Newspaper has largely disappeared from the discourse around underground magazines, queer publishing, and artists’ periodicals.

All fourteen issues of Newspaper are compiled in this volume for the first time.

Featured artists include: Diane Arbus, Art Workers Coalition, Richard Avedon, Clyde Baines, Sheyla Baykal, Peter Beard, Brigid Berlin, Richard Bernstein, Ann Douglas, Paul Fisher, Maurice Hogenboom, Peter Hujar, Scott Hyde, Christo and Jeanne-Claude Javacheff, Ray Johnson, Edwin Klein, Yayoi Kusama, Gerald Laing, Dorothea Lange, Steve Lawrence, Jeff Lew, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Mercado, Duane Michals, Jack Mitchell, Forrest “Frosty” Myers, Billy Name, Stephen Paley, Warner Pearson, Jurgen Warner Piepke, Charles Pratt, Joseph Raffael, Mel Ramos, Lilo Raymond, Ruspoli-Rodriguez, Lucas Samaras, Alan Saret, Bill Schwedler, Leni Sinclair, Norman Snyder, Elizabeth Staal, Stanley Stellar, Terry Stevenson, Paul Thek, Andrew Ullrick, Andy Warhol, William T. Wiley, and May Wilson.

416 pages
9.75 x 13.38 Inches
Paperback
March 2023
ISBN: 9781737797944

—

Editor: Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez
Managing Editor: James Hoff
Designer: Rick Myers
Copy editor: Allison Dubinsky

A Rock, A River, A Street

In her experimental debut novella, A Rock, A River, A Street, artist Steffani Jemison moves deftly across narrative genres and styles as she interrogates the boundedness of the self, the possibilities of plurality, and the limits of performance. Titled after Maya Angelou’s poem “On the Pulse of Morning,” the book is punctuated by gestural drawings that point to questions of repetition and difference.

Where does your body end and the world begin? How do you locate the limit between yourself and others? A Rock, A River, A Street follows a young Black woman who lives at the hazy border between Brooklyn and Queens in the not-so-distant present. As she rides the subway, walks around her neighborhood, visits the doctor, watches movies, attends dance class, and tries to heal her body, she recalls formative experiences from her childhood and absorbs the world around her; in the process, we are brought into her conflicted relationship with language. Acutely conscious of the soft, responsive nature of her physical self, and pushed and pulled by forces she cannot control, the narrator is vulnerable, terrifyingly open. Everything and everyone leaves an impression.

Steffani Jemison was born in Berkeley, California and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and special projects at JOAN, Los Angeles; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Nottingham Contemporary; Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC Bordeaux; Museum of Modern Art, New York; RISD Museum, Providence; and LAXART, Los Angeles, among others. Collaborative and group presentations have taken place at the Guggenheim Museum; MoMA PS1’s 2021 Greater New York; the 2019 Whitney Biennial, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Brooklyn Museum; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the New Museum, and elsewhere. Jemison is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and an Associate Professor at Rutgers University – Mason Gross School of the Arts.

154 pages
5 x 7.25 inches
Paperback
October 2022
ISBN: 9781736534663

—
Editor: Rachel Valinsky
Designer: Pacific
Copy Editor: Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro

Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network 1990-2001

Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network 1990–2001 is a comprehensive anthology of writings, art projects, publications, correspondence, organizational documents, and other archival ephemera from the trailblazing Asian artist collective. Edited by curator Howie Chen, this publication includes full essays and contextual material detailing the critical genealogies embodied by the group as well as its wide-ranging activities.

The collective known as Godzilla: Asian American Art Network was formed in 1990 to support the production of critical discourse around Asian American art and increase the visibility of Asian American artists, curators, and writers, who were negotiating a historically exclusionary society and art world. Founded by Ken Chu, Bing Lee, and Margo Machida, Godzilla produced exhibitions, publications, and community collaborations that sought to stimulate social change through art and advocacy. For more than a decade, the diasporic group, having grown from a local organization into a nationwide network, confronted institutional racism, Western imperialism, anti-Asian violence, the AIDS crisis, and representations of Asian sexuality and gender, among other urgent issues.

Godzilla created a social space for diasporic Asian artists and art professionals, including members Tomie Arai, Karin Higa, Byron Kim, Paul Pfeiffer, Eugenie Tsai, Alice Yang, Lynne Yamamoto, among others.  Envisioning a lateral and porous network, Godzilla was independently run by successive steering committees that included Diyan Achjadi, Tomie Arai, Todd Ayoung, Monica Chau, Debi-Ray Chaudhuri, China Blue, Allan deSouza, Skowmon Hastanan, Arlan Huang, Michi Itami, Jenni Kim, Franky Kong, Jeanette Louie, Yong Soon Min, Helen Oji, Sanda Zan Oo, Athena Robles, Carol Sun, Eugenie Tsai, Lynne Yamamoto, Rubina Yeh, and Charles Yuen.

552 Pages
9 x 12 inches
Paperback
November 2021
ISBN: 9781736534625

—

Editor: Howie Chen
Designer: Ella
Managing Editor: James Hoff
Copy Editor: Allison Dubinsky

Liturgy

Liturgy is a journey into the uncanny realm of the senses that dives into histories of perception and intuition. The artist Flora Yin-Wong deploys a variety of images and texts to explore issues related to cosmic principles, conspiracies, and parallel universes. The result is a constellatory work filled with religion, dreams, and fragmented memories and knowledge that also gestures at the artist’s own history. The book’s chapters—Rituals & Fire; Omens; Hexagrams / Oracles; Curses; Gods & Creatures; Places Doors to Hell / Ghost Cities; Paradoxes; Sound Phenomena; Reality—function like a secret dossier inflected with flights of fantasy, speaking to systems of faith and language and its corruptions.

Divining inspiration from meditation, oracles, curses, hexagrams, Cantonese traditions, and superstitions, Liturgy interweaves textual and visual collage to create a multi-layered tonality. Reflected here is the multidisciplinary artist’s interest in the web between fiction, memory, rituals, and incantation, as well as her approach to sound.

Flora Yin-Wong is a London–born, Chinese-Malaysian writer, producer, and DJ who has released material on the labels Modern Love and PAN. Her sonic work uses traditional instruments, software processing, and text-based storytelling, and has been performed at venues including ISSUE Project Room (New York), the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Volksbühne Theater (Berlin), and Berghain (Berlin).

120 pages
4.31 x 7.12 inches
Paperback
June 2021
ISBN: 9781736534601

—

Co-Published with PAN
Managing Editors: James Hoff and Bill Kouligas
Designers: NMR
Copy Editor: Allison Dubinsky

Writing by Artist

Writing by Artist is the first collection to focus on William Wegman’s lengthy and deeply funny relationship to language and is filled with previously unknown and wildly entertaining texts, drawings, and early photographs spanning the early 1970s to the present.

Not your standard book of essays, the publication was meticulously edited by Andrew Lampert to feature works incorporating words in one form or another. In some instances, the text is simply a caption or a few hand-written words, but all of the selected works hinge conceptually and pictorially on writing and language.

Writing by Artist offers a wide range of entry points into the artist’s universe. There are early photographic works, which may be familiar, but from there, things delightfully unravel with absurd non-sequiturs typed on Princess Cruises stationary, imagined restaurant reviews, witty annotations to a curator’s essay, musings on ancient footwear, deliberate mistranslations, reworked greeting cards, fictional advertisements for real life products, and other surprising prose forms.

Ultimately, Writing by Artists alters the logic and pushes the boundaries of what artist writing can be—shedding new light for those only familiar with Wegman’s later work, while serving as a welcome reminder of the artist’s madcap inventiveness for the already enlightened. In short, what you do or don’t know about William Wegman now conveniently fits into this strangely beguiling collection.

William Wegman was born in 1943 in Holyoke, Massachusetts. His work has been exhibited at museums and galleries internationally including retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Centre Pompidou. Recent exhibitions include Before/On/After: William Wegman and California Conceptualism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wegman has also created film and video works for Saturday Night Live, Nickelodeon, and Sesame Street and appeared on The Tonight Show, The David Letterman Show, and The Colbert Report.

Andrew Lampert is a New York-based artist, writer, archivist, and primary in the firm Chen & Lampert. His works have been internationally exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Film Festival, Getty Museum, Toronto International Film Festival, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam, among many other venues. He has edited books on Tony Conrad, Manuel De Landa, George Kuchar, and Harry Smith. Lampert was formerly Curator of Collections at Anthology Film Archives, where he preserved hundreds of films and videos and co-programmed public screenings. His videos are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix.

352 Pages
8.5 x 11 inches
Paperback
Edition of 4500
March 2022
ISBN: 9781737797906

—

Editor: Andrew Lampert
Designer: Scott Ponik
Managing Editor: James Hoff