The Classroom
Third FloorTraces of Resistance: Graphic Activism and Publishing in Chile, with Camila Gonzalez-Simon, Daniela Josefina, and Maricruz Alarcón López
The lesbian publishing initiative HAMBRE (Chile) shares insights into contemporary graphic activism and independent publishing emerging from the 2019 Chilean social uprising. Drawing on their experience creating and circulating political posters and zines, the collective explores the challenges and possibilities of documenting protest in a context where such visual traces are constantly being removed from public space. This talk highlights HAMBRE’s experimental publishing methodologies rooted in feminist and queer collaboration, situating their work within Chile’s long tradition of graphic resistance. Coinciding with the 52nd commemoration of the Chilean military coup, the presentation reflects on the role of printed matter in resisting erasure, building memory, and circulating counter-narratives by offering publishing as an act of political resistance that confronts institutional neglect. Presented by HAMBRE HAMBRE HAMBRE.
Vanishing Points: the Language of Energy-Colonialism and Ecological Grief, with Amy Kennedy
In this program, climate writer Amy Kennedy discusses her research about the petrochemical industry along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and the ongoing energy-colonialism in the region. This type of extractivism is engineering dozens of culture-bearing communities out of existence. Kennedy will discuss her new book, Vanishing Points: Words for Disappearing, a collection of micro-essays and photographs exploring the surreal intersection of heavy industry and nature along the Gulf Coast, and the grief these spaces elicit. Through this program, Kennedy will share conceptual tools that help people recognize and process ecological grief, as well as underscore how this grief can function as a portal for more meaningful engagement with climate action. Presented by Antenna Press.
Jason Polan: The Post Office, with Jason Fulford, Starlee Kine and Richard McGuire
To mark the release of Jason Polan: The Post Office, newly published by Printed Matter, Inc., project editor and designer Jason Fulford will be joined in discussion by radio producer Starlee Kine and illustrator Richard McGuire about the correspondence practice of artist Jason Polan, and his longtime affinity for the US Postal Service. The conversation will look to the trove of drawings, letters, objects, and ephemera that Polan exchanged through the mail with friends, fans and penpals around the world, considering how these playful and often touching exchanges offered a way to forge new connections, and gave us a portrait of the artist himself. Presented by Printed Matter, Inc.
The Last Man, with Meg Onli and Image Text Ithaca students
This program presents a combination of conversation and performance centered on the launch of a radical re-issue of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s apocalyptic novel, The Last Man (1826). Edited by Meg Onli, the Whitney Museum's Nancy and Fred Poses Curator, the publication features visual and textual contributions from students in the Image Text MFA Program at Cornell University. Shelley’s incisive reflections on the vanity of power, the disappointments of political ambition, and the loneliness of living in a ruined world all resonate powerfully today. The artists’ interventions amplify and reinterpret these themes. Together, they offer a collective contemplation of our troubled present, inviting the audience to consider our engagements with each other and our world. Presented by Image Text Ithaca.
Messages in a Bottle, with Marie Warsh, Yona Backer, Julia Klein, and Jarrett Earnest
This program examines how publications can introduce, reintroduce, and unite audiences around under-recognized historical artists. The discussion will focus on publications that showcase archival materials, minor works, artist writings, and other documentation that offer alternatives to traditional monographs or catalogues raisonnés. Writer and critic Jarrett Earnest has described these projects as “messages in a bottle”—carefully crafted publications with modest commercial expectations whose portability and affordability broaden access to artists and their work in unexpected ways. Featuring Marie Warsh (Soft Network and Estate of Rosemary Mayer), Yona Backer (Alvin Baltrop Trust), Julia Klein (Soberscove Press), and Jarrett Earnest, the program explores how such publications raise awareness of overlooked artists and contribute to expanding the art historical canon. Presented by Soberscove Press.
The Gatherers
This closing program celebrates the publication of The Gatherers, a catalogue produced on the occasion of the eponymous MoMA PS1 exhibition currently on view. Designed by Alec Mapes-Frances, the publication brings together original texts relating to waste, accumulation, and excess. It also features newly commissioned texts on each of the show’s fourteen artists, including a longform essay by Chief Curator Ruba Katrib that contextualizes their practices within larger art historical trends, from Dutch still lifes to post-war assemblage. In the program, Katrib will moderate a conversation between catalogue contributors on the promises and failures of neoliberalism, the shifting constructions of East and West, and the explosion of new technologies.
Reading Room
The Reading Room is a new incarnation of the longstanding Friendly Fire, which featured select politically-minded and social-justice oriented publishers. This new program, which debuted earlier this year at the LA Art Book Fair, proposes a set of themes as a point of entry into a closer study of select publishers at the Fair.
The 2025 NY Art Book Fair Reading Room is inspired by an exhibition on view at Printed Matter of Archivos Desviados, an ongoing queer archive project led by Juan Queiroz. The exhibition presents publications and ephemera published by members of the radical coalitions Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the Third World Gay Revolution (TWGR), two groups that emerged in post-Stonewall New York, and Frente de Liberación Homosexual (FLH), Argentina’s first political action group for gay men, based in Buenos Aires.
Drawing from this historical material, the Reading Room traces some of the many lineages and legacies from this era in autonomous, grassroots publishing, namely the everlasting demands for self-determination and liberation. These interdisciplinary print histories—zines, flyers, movement newspapers, artists’ books—map the creative and militant infrastructures that queer organizers built in dialogue with broader movements for racial justice, anti-capitalism, and anti-imperialism. In spotlighting several publishers at the Fair whose work echo these same interwoven struggles, visitors are encouraged to make connections between different geographies and generations of artist publishing practices. In a time of mounting repression against queer life, especially here in the U.S., these contemporary projects demonstrate the ways in which independent publishing continues to be a tactic of dissent and solidarity.
The NYABF 2025 Reading Room features Allied Productions/Petit Versailles, Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina, DA HOLOGRAM, Dane Press/Crisis Editions, Pinko Magazine, and Publishing is Pleasure, among others.
We invite visitors to slow down, spend time, and engage with the material you find here—ranging from newly commissioned artworks, site-specific installation, and archival material. On display are many different approaches to documenting and resisting the times we live in. In contrast to the rapid speed at which visitors move through the Fair, the Reading Room offers an alternative space to engage in close reading, critique, and reflection.
The Stage
The courtyard of the Fair will feature a lineup of music, poetry, and performance organized in collaboration with Lydo Le of X-TRA.SERVICES. Founded in 2017 by Lydo, X-TRA.SERVICES is a label that curates a subaquatic space for extraterrestrial sound.
Madeline Stepien
Kaur Alia Ahmed
Early Shinada
8ULENTINA + NANA XOXO + ROHANA
Exhibitor Projects
4N Consulate (PR 4) is an interactive exhibition that creatively reimagines the bureaucracy of travel. Everyone is treated equally and is systematically processed to receive their 4N travel document in a consulate decorated with 4N artworks. 4N Consulate is a project by Special Special and 4N, a community magazine telling stories of creative migration and showcasing extraordinary foreign talent in America. Our consulate will get you that visa and make you feel confident and inspired for your future foreign travels.
Boo-Hooray (PR 3) presents an archival exhibition of ephemera from Les Petites Bon Bons—a group of artists whose collective artistic practice marked an important era in queer identity, activism, outrageousness, and artistic pyrotechnics! Originating in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the 1970s, Les Petites Bon Bons made glitter mail art, situationist pranks, performances, and much more, with contributions from a range of stars of the era like David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Buckminster Fuller, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, Led Zeppelin, Pet Shop Boys, among others.
Bread & Puppet Press (PR 1) presents We Who Are Not Dead Yet, an installation of protest prints that link the anguish of Mattias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-1516) to the violence of empire. At its center are Isenheim Studies—64 masonite prints carved by Bread & Puppet co-founder Peter Schumann in 1962, paired with his 2024 text written in response to the Gaza genocide. These works echo Grünewald’s depiction of bodily pain, sacred suffering, and collective grief, reframed for the age of drone warfare and state-sponsored annihilation. Surrounding them are large red, green, and black banners of poppies printed in 2025 for Bread & Puppet’s Domestic Resurrection Revolution In Progress Circus—symbols of mourning and solidarity with Palestine. Archival anti-war banners from the 1960s complete a visual liturgy of grief, protest, and resilience. A limited edition set of books from the Isenheim Studies series—eight accordion-fold volumes housed in a slipcase—will be launched at the fair and available for the first time.
On the occasion of the release of the book Design as Programmed Art, by David Reinfurt, Corraini Edizioni (I7) presents an exhibition that explores Bruno Munari’s work where design is conceived through the principles of programmed art—from typography to layout to the use of color. The exhibition presents a series of book covers created for publishers Einaudi and Bompiani between the 1960s and 1970s. These examples illustrate how Munari integrated systematic, often generative approaches into graphic design. Presented in collaboration with Inventory Press, Jannelli&Volpi, Esperia and Spazio Munari.
Hat & Beard Press (E8) presents an exhibition of photographic works by the artist Jun Fujita, whose first full-length monograph will launch at the Fair. Fujita was a pioneering photojournalist and poet in Chicago whose work documented major historical moments in the early part of 20th Century, including the Eastland Disaster, the 1919 Race Riots, and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Despite facing racial prejudice and language barriers, Fujita became a celebrated, somewhat swashbuckling figure in Chicago’s segregated society. His personal story—marked by resilience, artistic innovation, and cultural complexity—offers a unique window into American history.
The Detroit Printing Co-op (PR 2) was a site of creative and radical production and experimentation in printing and collective labor. This project space tells the story of this history through ephemera, installation, and archival materials. In the 1970s a group of activists anchored by Fredy and Lorraine Perlman, of Black & Red Press, set up a print shop in southwest Detroit where they produced tens of thousands of copies of books, flyers, posters, and pamphlets. For a decade, The Co-op was open to anyone willing to maintain and work with the machines. Groups ranging from students, to auto workers from the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, to poets and artists came together to produce print ephemera to sustain their movements. This presentation is organized by Danielle Aubert with support from Inventory Press.
Scores is a project space presentation by Three Star Books (PR 5) featuring BlackMass Publishing, Gerard & Kelly, and Raffaella della Olga. BlackMass Publishing arranges abstract graphic elements into a visual structure that echoes the spontaneity of free jazz. Gerard & Kelly begin with texts, photographs, and forms, crafting a score to be danced and interpreted. Raffaella della Olga shapes silent signals through light, rhythm, and repetition. Print becomes pulse, typography becomes breath, and text becomes choreography. Each score opens a space where bodies, voices, and silences echo across the paper.
Offsite Projects
Afuera! Publishing Queer Liberation — From the Collection of Archivos Desviados
Printed Matter, 231 11th Avenue, Manhattan, NY 10001
Printed Matter presents Afuera! Publishing Queer Liberation — From the Collection of Archivos Desviados, an exhibition of historical publications and print ephemera published by members of three activist coalitions: the Gay Liberation Front of New York (GLF) and the Third World Gay Revolution (TWGR), two groups that emerged in post-Stonewall New York, as well as the Frente de Liberación Homosexual of Argentina (FLH), Latin America’s first political action group for gays and lesbians, founded in Buenos Aires in 1971. Across a survey of rare magazines, newsletters, posters, flyers, mockups, and original documents, the exhibition traces underrecognized influences and connections between the groups as they energetically published their messages of queer liberation. Works on view are drawn from Archivos Desviados, an ongoing queer archive project led by Juan Queiroz, and marks the first US presentation of materials from the Buenos Aires-originated collection.
Yours 2ly: a year of correspondence and co-authorship
Printed Matter, 231 11th Avenue, Manhattan, NY 10001
The window of Printed Matter’s Chelsea store features a new installation of 2ly, a one-year-long epistolary correspondence between artist duos SM Studio (London) and Florian∞Emden (Leipzig). Initiated in February 2024, each month, one pair wrote and designed a letter that was riso-printed and distributed by Colorama (Berlin), then sent to the other duo and their cohort of mail-art subscribers. Publishing, here, is understood as a shared authorship in every sense. The letters explore a mutual love of writing, drawing, folding and borrowing. They began with this quote: “Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy.” The installation by the creators of 2ly presents the shared visual language that developed over their correspondence.