Opening Night
7–10 PMThe official kick-off event of NYABF 2026 celebrates this milestone anniversary year and is the first opportunity to get access to the Fair! The celebratory evening features musical performances from SHYBOI and A.B.E.L.A.
In gratitude for supporting this nonprofit event, the first 500 ticketed guests receive a limited-edition artwork by Sara Yukiko. Opening Night tickets also include unlimited re-entry throughout the Fair weekend.
SHYBOI (DJ Set)
SHYBOI is a Jamaican born, New York based multidisciplinary artist, researcher, DJ and producer that seeks to find discordian harmony through sonic exploration. As a creative positioned between Caribbean and American culture, she uses sound to interrogate ideas of identity, notions of power, perceived histories and the entanglements that happen within these topics. Since 2013 they’ve been a mainstay in NYC’s ever evolving underground landscape and have contributed to both the global art and dance music scenes, with mixes for Crack Magazine, Fader, MixMag, NTS, Resident Advisor, Rinse FM, Truants and Thump. All this plays out in SHYBOI's sets heard around the world, from a 3 year residency at NYC’s Nowadays, to forward thinking festivals including Atonal, Draaimolen, Dweller, Dripping, Glastonbury, Hyperreality, Lost Music, Mona Foma, Sonic Acts, Sonar, Sustain-Release, Unsound, Nature Loves Courage and Nyege Nyege. Their innate ability to juxtapose and recontextualize electronic genres and their sonic histories has allowed them to perform throughout Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. SHYBOI has four Boiler Room sets under her ever widening belt, as well as two performances at MoMA PS1’s Warm Up and sold out shows at the Guggenheim and The Shed. Original productions have appeared on compilations via labels including Allergy Season, E-Missions and Nervous Records. Her self-released debut EP “Rave Down Babylon” was hailed for its ability to “evoke the halcyon moments of Brooklyn's Labor Day parade, pairing it with the charged-up euphoria of Brooklyn techno.”
A.B.E.L.A. (Live)
A.B.E.L.A. (Asociación de Bateristas Electrónicos de Latinoamérica), also known as “The Union,” is a collective of Latin American percussionists exploring the intersection of electronic instrumentation and ancestral rhythms from across the Global South. With more than 12 rotating members, no two performances are the same—each show features a different lineup shaped by live improvisation and collective exchange. Rooted in tradition yet forward-facing in sound, A.B.E.L.A.’s performances move fluidly between ancient rhythmic languages and contemporary electronic pulses, creating a dynamic, ever-evolving experience that brings deep rhythmic memory into the present-day NYC soundscape.
Opening Night Tickets
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.
In the Duplex of MoMA PS1, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (PR 1) 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.
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 (PR 3) 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.
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 Peuple noir, peuple 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; and is part of Villa Albertine post-residency program in partnership with Albertine Foundation.