The Classroom
Third Floor50 Years, with Connie Butler and Lesley. A Martin
Printed Matter’s Executive Director, Lesley A. Martin and Connie Butler, The Agnes Gund Director of MoMA PS1, to talk through challenges, reflections, best practices, and what it means to run an arts organization that reaches this pivotal milestone. Presented by Printed Matter.
Positions, with K8 Hardy
Multimedia artist K8 Hardy uses photography in her Position Series (2007–12) to explore identity as performance. This new publication, Positions, brings together the entirety of her photographic series to mark its twentieth anniversary, cataloguing Hardy’s oeuvre in the context of the DIY fashion, art, and queer subcultures of early 2000s New York. Across the series, Hardy uses herself, her sister, and mannequins, styled in eclectic clothes, wigs, and makeup, to suggest personas outside normative categorizations of identity and gender expression, in tension with the ordinary domestic or urban spaces in which they are pictured. In the darkroom, Hardy superimposes bows, glasses, bras, and the spectral outlines of bodies over these portraits: analogue interventions that expose the photograph as a deliberate construction rather than fixed truth. Her work queers the conventions of the portraiture genre in an iconic act of rebellion. Here, self-objectification serves as a powerful riposte to the objectification of the female body and to exclusionary art institutions. Presented by MACK.
The City in Our Hands: An (Abbreviated) History of Radical Black Print Culture in NYC, with Neta Bomani and Mariame Kaba
Neta Bomani and Mariame Kaba, co-directors of Sojourners for Justice Press (SJP), tour the history of radical Black print culture in New York City, building off their co-authored essay, “The City in Our Hands.” Bomani and Kaba situate their press within this important lineage and offer the audience more insight into their community publishing initiatives, which range from educational programming, public gatherings, and their flagship Black Zine Fair. Across these different programs, SJP supports Black writers, artists, educators, and organizers to distribute their work outside traditional publishing systems. Presented by Sojourners for Justice Press (SJP).
How to Find a Book, with Camilo Otero and Eva Parra
In 1979, the Polish artist Henryk Gajewski invited artists around the world to make rigorous, open-minded, and non-indoctrinating artists’ books for children. Nearly 400 works arrived through the international mail art network and were stored in a blue metal trunk that traveled from Warsaw to Amsterdam to Buffalo, where it sat untouched for over forty years. This session, led by Camilo Otero and Eva Parra of Calipso Press, begins with that trunk and the question of how it was found: tracing a project that circulated widely, then vanished into storage. Along the way, Otero and Parra highlight work by Ulises Carrión, Rimma and Valeriy Gerlovin, Channa Horwitz, Guillermo Deisler, and Paulo Bruscky, as well as a 1983 video in which Gajewski narrates the trunk collection in his own words. Presented by Calipso Press.
Zine* Together, with Amanda Chung, Shisi Huang, Paul John, and Claire Kim
On view at Asia Art Archive in America from September 17–March 31, Zine* Together is the first exhibition of its kind to examine Asian American zines not only as objects, but as creative, collective, and relational actions. Drawing from AAAinA’s Reading Room collection, it highlights collaboratively produced zines from 2010 to the present, tracing zine-making as a mode of shared authorship where diasporic histories and collective responses to marginalization take form. For this program, AAAinA’s Director of Programs, Collections, and Exhibitions, Claire Kim, brings together several artists and publishers whose work appears in the exhibition and who are also tabling at NYABF. Together they consider zines as a living practice: how work is made, circulated, sold, and sustained. Claire is joined by Paul John, artist and co-founder of the risograph publisher and studio Endless Editions; Shisi Huang, founder of the bookshop and art space Bungee Space and publisher of Ten Books; and Amanda Chung, graphic designer and co-founder of the risograph press lucky risograph. Presented by Asia Art Archive in America.
Politics of Sound, with AFRIKADAA and Station of Commons
How do we listen to an archive? Can sound become a form of publishing? This collective reading and listening session explores Politics of Sound, an editorial research platform developed by Afrikadaa that investigates listening as both a critical methodology and a decolonial practice of knowledge production. Led by curator and AFRIKADAA editor-in-chief Pascale Obolo, together with Station of Commons (Grégoire Rousseau, Eddie Choo Wen Yi, and Juan Fortun), the conversation unfolds through readings, sound excerpts, and shared listening. Moving beyond the printed page, the session frames publishing as a multisensory format in which books, voices, radio, sound archives, and collective memory continuously inform one another. Presented in conjunction with the NYABF 2026 Reading Room: The Pan-African Library.