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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

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

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

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

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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

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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

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

The Matrix Poems: 1960-1970

The Matrix by Norman H. Pritchard (1939–1996) gathers a selection of the Concrete and Black Arts poet’s work from 1960 to 1970. The seventy-one poems collected here might be regarded, as Charles Bernstein has written, as “sound” poems, being tethered not only to the literature of the Black Arts Movement but also to jazz culture and urban life in New York. Drawing as much from the visual arts and concrete poetry as from sound-based experimentation and music, Pritchard utilized the simple tools of spacing and typography to create syncopations, vibrations, and musical rhythms. What emerges is nothing less than a self-contained system of mimetic codes that challenge modernist modes of perception and representation. Formally innovative and anticipating what Michael Riffaterre would come to call the semiotics of “ungrammaticalities,” the book is a syntactical and visual experience in repetition, stutters, and structure. 

Born and based in New York City, Pritchard was trained in visual arts and art history at New York University and Columbia University. As a member of the Umbra group (1962–65)—a collective of young Black writers that included Steve Cannon, Thomas C. Dent, David Henderson, Calvin Hernton, and Lorenzo Thomas—he met with fellow members in Manhattan’s Lower East Side to read and discuss writing and politics. They channeled their sense of urgency in developing and promoting Black culture into the literary magazine Umbra. Following the group’s dissolution, Pritchard continued to be involved in New York’s art, music, and film worlds in the late 1960s. The Matrix was published by Doubleday in 1970, marking one of only a handful of books on concrete poetry to be published by a major American publishing house. His second and final book Eecchhooeess was released by New York University Press in 1971.  

If Pritchard’s work testifies to the Black poetics of “broken witnessing,” it is also deeply philosophical and spiritual. “I feel that there’s only one reality, and that reality is God,” says Pritchard in an unpublished video from 1981. “Everything else is actual—or what I call ‘transreal.’ In other words, everything is transreal except God. Trans meaning through, across, within, into within.” In a 1969 letter to fellow Umbra member Ishmael Reed, Pritchard writes: “Transreal is a word which visited me in the fall of 1967 while making initial probes into a book which I call Origins: A Contribution to the Monophysiticy of Form. My ‘definition’ is: Transrealism = O.” 

While leaving it open to interpretation, “transrealism” was a vector through which Pritchard organized a host of collaborations—in March 1972, for instance, the poet hosted an event in New York called “The End of Intelligent Writing: A Transreal Awakening,” which featured artists such as Vito Acconci, W. Bliem Kern, and Richard Kostelanetz. Describing Pritchard’s work in terms of “ironic materiality,” Reed has remarked: “At the limit, Pritchard’s self-undermining poems ask us whether poetry needs words at all.” Indeed, his is a poetics of both anti-transcendence and revelation.

Norman Henry Pritchard was born in New York City in 1939 and studied at New York University and Columbia University. His work has been published in two collections: The Matrix Poems: 1960–1970 (1970) and Eecchhooeess (1971). His poetry was featured in the journals Umbra and The East Village Other, performed on the jazz poetry compilation New Jazz Poets (1967), and anthologized in The New Black Poetry (1969) and In a Time of Revolution: Poems from Our Third World (1969). Pritchard taught poetry at the New School for Social Research and was a poet-in-residence at Friends Seminary. He died in eastern Pennsylvania on February 8, 1996.

224 pages
5.4 x 8.2 inches
Paperback
March 2021
ISBN: 9781734489798

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Co-Published with Ugly Duckling Presse
Managing Editors: James Hoff and Matvei Yankelevich

A Documentary HerStory of Women Artists in Revolution

First published in 1971, A Documentary HerStory of Women Artists in Revolution documents the efforts of a group of women artists, filmmakers, writers, critics, and cultural workers organized around advancing women in the art world.

Women Artists in Revolution (W.A.R.) was founded as the women’s caucus of the Art Workers’ Coalition and was active from 1969 to 1971. This publication gathers manifestos, statements, and declarations by W.A.R. members; articles and reports about gendered and racialized discrimination in the arts; pro-abortion fliers and protest ephemera; and grant applications and reports detailing the founding of the Women’s Interart Center in spring 1970. Also included are documentation of key actions, including the 1970 Artists’ Strike against Racism, Sexism, Repression, and War; and correspondence with officials at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Museum of Modern Art calling for 50 percent gender equity in exhibition programming, increased grant and fellowship support for women, and structural representation at the management and curatorial level, among other demands.

A Documentary HerStory of Women Artists in Revolution was originally printed at the Women’s Media Center in 1971 by Women Artists in Revolution. A second edition, published in 1973 by Women’s Interart Center,  features a preface and addendum with retrospective reflections on the history and activities of W.A.R. and the publication itself, two years after the group’s dissolution. It is this second edition that is reproduced here in facsimile form.

Members of W.A.R. included Juliette Gordon, Sara Saporta, Therese Schwartz, Muriel Castanis, Cindy Nemser, Dolores Holmes, Betsy Jones, Silvia Goldsmith, Jan McDevitt, Lucy Lippard, Grace Glueck, Poppy Johnson, Brenda Miller, Faith Ringgold, Emily Genauer, Agnes C. Denes, Doloris O’Kane, and Jacqueline Skiles.

88 pages
8.25 x 10.8 inches
Paperback
January 2021
ISBN: 9781734489767

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Managing Editor: Rachel Valinsky
Managing Designer: Dan Bourke

 

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.

Published on the 50th anniversary of the original printing, 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 (1929–1996) 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
8.5 x 8.5 inches
Paperback
February 2021
ISBN: 9781734489750

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

Shame Space

Shame Space is an artist book that explores the possibilities of narrative and identity. The book collects a selection of journal writings by Syms from 2015-2017 in which she attempts to capture her shadow self alongside a selection of image stills from the recent video project Ugly Plymouths (2020). The diaristic commentary in Shame Space is gathered into fifteen chapters that stage narrative as a process of being in the making.

Text entries in Shame Space have formed the voiceover of Mythiccbeing (pronounced ‘my thick being’), a “black, upwardly mobile, violent, solipsistic, sociopathic, gender-neutral femme” digital avatar who has iterated across several of Syms’s recent exhibitions. In the artist’s dense, multi-channel media installations, Mythiccbeing manifests variously in video, in pre-programmed audio recordings of the artist’s voice, and as an interactive chatbot, which responds to the viewer’s communications with images, messages, and animations.

Shame Space’s design mimics the bible form, with its A5 size, embossed leather-textured cover, and gold edge painting. Translating Syms’s ongoing research and interest in new media technologies to the page, the book’s still images were coded using a programming script, such that the design, like the chatbot’s SMS responses, is an exercise in machine automation.

Martine Syms is an artist who has earned wide recognition for a practice that combines conceptual grit, humor, and social commentary. She has shown extensively including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and ICA London. She is in a band called Aunt Sister and hosts CCartalkLA, a monthly radio show on NTS. She also runs Dominica, a publishing imprint for artists’ books.

240 pages
5.5 x 8 inches
Paperback
November 2020
ISBN: 9781734489743

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Managing Editor: Rachel Valinsky
Designer: Brent David Freaney
Proofreader: Allison Dubinsky

Fia Backström

This postcard by Fia Backström 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
September 2017

Ian Cheng

This postcard by Ian Cheng 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
September 2017

Shannon Ebner

This postcard by Shannon Ebner 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
September 2017