The Classroom
Third FloorSurviving Papers: Queer Activist Archives & Material Histories, with Adam Eli and Daylon Orr
This conversation between bookseller, publisher, and archivist Daylon Orr of Fugitive Materials and activist and writer Adam Eli explores the material histories of queer art and activism and the critical work of preserving these archives. The two discuss the legacies of Sir Lady Java, Vaginal Davis, Hot Peaches, Lypsinka, ACT UP, Gay Activist Alliance, Lesbian Feminist Liberation, and other lesser-known artists and community organizers. Presented by Fugitive Materials.
Dear Mazie,: Sanctuary, Speculation, and Sky, with Emanuel Admassu and Jen Wood
Dear Mazie,: Sanctuary, Speculation, and Sky is an experimental reader that explores the life, work, and legacy of Amaza Lee Meredith (1895–1984), a trailblazing artist and educator who became the first known Black queer woman to practice as an architect in the United States. On the occasion of the publication’s launch, contributors Emanuel Admassu and Jen Wood, co-founders of the art, architecture, and urban design practice AD-WO, speak to their work translating Meredith’s archival materials and architectural interventions into the eponymous exhibition and the publication. Together, they consider how they invoked Meredith’s role as a creator of “emotional architectures”: someone who built sanctuaries (from homes to institutions to communities) for herself and other people of color to foster rigorous artistic pursuit, free of persecution. Presented by Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), with Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (ICA at VCU).
50 YEARS of ART PAPERS, 1976–2026 with Re'al Christian, Sarah Higgins, Dan R. Talley, and Emily Watlington
50 YEARS of ART PAPERS, 1976–2026 tells the story of five decades of independent, artist-centered, and often artist-produced publishing by tracing the work of the longest-running nonprofit art magazine in the US. The 440-page book anthologizes some of the most timely, timeless, and ahead-of-their-time texts from the past half-century of art criticism as viewed, locally and globally, from Southern perspectives. This event celebrates the launch of the book with co-editors Sarah Higgins (ART PAPERS Executive + Artistic Director) and Re'al Christian (writer, ART PAPERS Contributing Editor) in conversation with ART PAPERS co-founder Dan R. Talley, and moderated by Emily Watlington (Art in America). Presented by ART PAPERS.
Writing the Dead: A Study Session, with Adam HajYahia and Ruanne Abou-Rahme
This study session led by Adam HajYahia and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (Bilna’es) grapples with the contradictions, negotiations, and political commitments inherent in the practice of translation. We read texts that consider what it means to carry language and meaning across not only linguistic boundaries but also distinct cultures, struggles, and historical moments. Drawing on the multilingual publishing of Bilna’es, the session situates translation within a broader philosophical and political matrix: as an act of interpretation, mediation, and transmission that can preserve a text while also transforming it. Together, we ask what is gained, altered, rendered untranslatable, and what resists translation altogether when words move between contexts. How does translation negotiate the distance between the conditions in which a text was written and those in which it is read? What kinds of fidelity—to language, history, struggle, or the dead—does it demand? Translation is thus considered as a mode of reading and writing through which the past becomes available to the present, and through which inherited concepts and struggles might acquire new political life—sometimes against their interests. Presented by Bilna’es.
Reading Room
Carte Blanche—a discussion and workshop on the library shelf at the first Mbari Club, with TJ Benson, Ese Emmanuel, Raimi Gbadamosi, iwalewabooks (Nadine Siegert and Katharina Fink), kara lynch, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Smooth Ugochukwu Nzewi, Iheanyi Onwuegbucha, and Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún (OlongoAfrica)
The Mbari Club was a center for multidisciplinary cultural activities composed of African writers, artists, and musicians, founded in Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1961 by Ulli Beier with a group of young writers, notably Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. Its name, "Mbari," is an Igbo concept suggested by Achebe, inspired by Mbari art.
We begin this program with an act of imagination: picturing the library shelf at the first Mbari Club in Ibadan, 1962. Which books rested there, and which stories found resonance or sparked tension—carrying divergent visions of art, history, and African creativity? Which spines are worn from use, and which remain nearly untouched?
Through this speculative lens, we turn to the aesthetic, intellectual, and everyday archives that shaped Mbari's emergence—attending to what is missing as much as to what remains, to loosen the often solidified "Mbari story." Speculation becomes a strategy of care: a way of feeling through absences and unrecorded conversations. The Speculative Shelf imagines the Mbari archive as porous and non-linear—neither sealed in 1962 nor confined to one geography—inviting books, media, and objects born long after Mbari to join its constellation. In doing so, the project folds those 1962 moments into our own time: a living, circulating current of thought, encounter, and renewal.
Listening Session on music as a space for healing
This concluding program offers space to reflect on the significance of music and sound in healing practices.
About the Reading Room
The Pan-African Library, curated by Pascale Obolo, draws from the ten-year archive of the African Art Book Fair (AABF) to present various histories of independent publishing across Africa and its diasporas. This Reading Room traces how autonomous infrastructures of knowledge operate beyond institutional geographies that have historically organized visibility, legitimacy, and circulation.
We begin with the simple proposition: books never exist alone. Every publication carries with it conversations, oral traditions, friendships, political struggles, acts of translation, and communities of care. The Reading Room creates a map of these ecologies of social relations and argues that publishing is an infrastructure that enacts cultural repair and epistemic disobedience.
The installation features a curated selection of contemporary independent African titles, archives of important publications, listening stations, artwork, and importantly—space to read and rest. Alongside the 10th anniversary of the African Art Book Fair are histories of the magazine Peuples noirs, Peuples africains, founded by the Cameroonian thinker Mongo Beti; the 15th anniversary of the journal Mosaïques; a history of the Nigerian cultural center The Mbari Club; and the 5th anniversary of the double-dummy édition newspaper. NYABF exhibitors are also invited to contribute thematically relevant titles to a non-circulating library available for browsing throughout the weekend.
The daily program schedule in the Reading Room features collaborations with local and international writers, artists, and activists, including Station of Commons, iwalewabooks, the Fantastic Four Double Dutch, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, FLEE Project, We Make Books, and AFRIKADAA, among many others. This interdisciplinary format—with programming ranging from listening sessions, group discussions, and performances—emphasizes collaboration as a primary method uniting independent publishing practices. In doing so, The Pan-African Library refuses the silence traditionally associated with libraries, while contrasting the rapid pace of the Fair with an opportunity to engage in downtime, close reading, critique, and reflection.
As a partner of the Reading Room, Station of Commons, a transdisciplinary collective of artists, designers, and coders working on digital commons, will broadcast from the Fair on their own radio infrastructure at stationofcommons.org and on the Printed Matter website.
This Reading Room: The Pan-African Library is supported by Aalto University School of the Arts, Design and Architecture; Consulate General of Finland in New York; Consulate General of Switzerland in New York; Finnish Cultural Foundation; Frame Contemporary Art Finland; Goethe Institut; Silence Please; and is part of Villa Albertine post-residency program in partnership with Albertine Foundation.
Project Spaces
Dark Entries Editions (I8) Dark Entries presents Darian Newman's archive of matchbooks from gay bars and bathhouses, alongside the debut photo exhibition of William Howell documenting the final chapter of queer cruising on Manhattan's westside piers. Before mobile phones and indoor smoking bans, queer communities used matchbooks as marketing tools. These everyday disposable objects, often decorated with muscled Adonises and raunchy puns, were passed hand to hand with a phone number scrawled inside. Now, with so many of these bars and bathhouses closed and apps like Grindr in their place, these small objects have become treasured artifacts that tell a tale of subcultures and the utility of graphic design. Together these works by Newman and Howell capture an era of urban culture eventually upended by gentrification and demolition of the mid-1990s.
grama/naipe (PR 4) presents a multi-channel installation surveying sound poetry and voice works by Latin American writers and artists. Spanning nearly a century, the selection moves from Vicente Huidobro's works of the 1930s through the Brazilian concrete poetry movement and up to a range of contemporary artists from Central and South America, as well as the Latino diaspora in the United States. grama/naipe is a ghostly imprint created by artist David Medina that uses algorithmic, combinatorial, and generative techniques to produce strange and absurd books. At NYABF 2026, the imprint presents a selection of older works, new launches, and sound works edited by the grama/naipe label.
Magazzino Italian Art Museum (PR 2) presents Arte Povera: Medium and Message, a bibliographic exhibition by Magazzino Italian Art that draws from the Archival and Special Collections of its Research Center. Bringing together artist books, gallery brochures, avant-garde journals, posters, and landmark exhibition catalogues, the project traces how Arte Povera—the late-1960s Italian movement that rethought the concept of “fixed artwork” through matter, energy, language, and transformation—was shaped and circulated through print. Publications by artists, gallerists, and curators reveal the movement’s engagement with typography, graphic design, and the relationship between word and image. Together, these materials offer a parallel history of Arte Povera, showing how print served not merely to document artworks and exhibitions, but as a space for artistic and critical experimentation.
Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (PR 1) In the Duplex of MoMA PS1, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation presents an installation that expands upon the artist’s seminal publication, I Don’t Think About Being Great: Selected Writings, and explores the vibrant artist communities and collaborative activism that emerged in New York from the 1960s to early 2000s. The exhibition centers on the ideals of peace and mutual support of artists, utilizing a rich array of primary source materials—including original writing manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, and printed ephemera—to trace Rauschenberg's deep-seated commitment to the support of fellow artists, artist-led networks, and advocacy. This includes his significant efforts to secure financial rights for artists, his pivotal work in AIDS advocacy, his backing of and participation in artist collaborations, and the continued fight for arts funding and freedom of speech. On view is documentation of Rauschenberg's legacy as an interdisciplinary visionary who used collaborative philanthropy to empower artist communities, with highlights from influential collaborators and peers, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jerry Brown, Trisha Brown, William Burroughs, David Byrne, John Cage, Tina Girouard, Deborah Hay, Marion Javits, Jasper Johns, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Elizabeth Taylor, Andy Warhol, and Sylvia Palacios Whitman.
Roma Publications (E8) and Martens & Martens present Cloakroom Tickets (1–250), an exhibition of printed work by Dutch graphic designer Karel Martens, marking the launch of the eponymous new publication of prints made on the pages of a booklet of numbered cloakroom tickets Martens kept in his studio for years. In 1993, Roma founder Roger Willems, then a student, began working for Martens as an assistant. Their first publishing collaboration was in 2013 with the title Full Color, and since then they have produced twenty publications, plus special editions, tote bags, T-shirts, postcards, posters, and other ephemera. Now, for the 20th anniversary of NYABF, Willems and Martens return to their archives to share a wide range of collaborations, Roma publications, and rare copies of first editions from the past 30 years of publishing.
Three Star Books (PR 5) presents four new limited-edition artists’ books by Raffaella Della Olga, Daniel Gordon, Ruby Sky Stiler, and Diego Marcon. The installation will transform the space into a meditation-like setting, with books displayed on a long table in the center and benches lining the perimeter. Visitors are invited to sit, spend time with the publications, and engage with each project in a quiet, contemplative environment.
Werkplaats Typografie (PR 3) In 1975, the art dealers Holly and Horace Solomon sent a personalized postcard to museum director and art historian Rudi Oxenaar, inviting him to the opening of their New York gallery. Fifty years later, Anniek Brattinga came across this invitation on Sanie Irsay’s desk. She shared its phrasing with Jana Sofie Liebe and Johanna Gratzer, who were looking to curate a group exhibition centered on primary source material.
In response to the increasing homogenization and anonymity of communication technologies, Werkplaats Typografie presents May I Request the Pleasure of Your Company—a return to the announcement as a site of encounter that reclaims the specificity of address in relation to a particular recipient. This invitation travels back to New York in several forms for the 20th NY Art Book Fair, all of which will be enacted and on view in this special project.
Offsite Programs
New Openings Against Old Surfaces: On Gordon Matta-Clark’s Walls Paper
Printed Matter, Inc., 231 11th Ave., New York, NY 10001
This is the first exhibition focused specifically on the publishing output of pioneering artist Gordon Matta-Clark, with a particular focus on his project Walls Paper. On view from September 9th–November 29th, the show offers an in-depth consideration of the 1973 publication, situating the work as a key experiment within the artist’s diverse and ambitious practice, and with the artists’ book medium at large.
BUILDING BOOKS
SVA Flatiron Gallery, 133/141 W. 21 Street, New York, NY 10011
Building Books. Corraini Edizioni: Children, Art, Design, and Everything Else traces over fifty years of publishing adventure through books, projects, authors, and installations that have crossed the boundaries between publishing, art, design, and illustration.