The Book Bazaar is back on a free Thursday night at SFMOMA. I’ll be there tabling with my press A Magic Mountain.
My suiseki work will be featured in this group exhibition curated by artist and educator Minoosh Zomorodinia that explores the complicated concept of "place" and the interplay of relationships and interactions that shape and define places.
The exhibition will feature works by: Alex Arzt, Ebti, S. Emsaki, Kiana Honarmand, Masha Kechaeva, Carolina Maki Kitagawa Frisby, Nazafarin Lotfi, Lorena Molina, yétúndé olagbaju, Kelley O’Leary, Tiare Ribeaux and Qianqian Ye, Sanaz Safanasab, Supermrin and Jessica Fertonani Cooke, and Connie Zheng.
Opening Public Reception Details
Friday, October 13, 6 – 8 p.m.
SFAC Main Gallery, War Memorial Veterans Building
401 Van Ness Avenue, Suite 126, San Francisco, CA 94102
Free and open to the public. No reservations necessary.
A Magic Mountain will be tabling at this year’s LAABF at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. For fair hours and ticketing, visit https://laabf2023.printedmatterartbookfairs.org/
I’m thrilled to share that I'll be presenting Becoming Naturalized: California’s Feral Cabbages at the 43rd annual Seed Savers Exchange conference at 11:45am PT on Saturday July 21st. The theme “Seed the Future: Grow Something Good” focuses on community building through seeds, farms, and gardens, seed stories, celebrating seeds, as well as technical aspects of growing, and seed saving. I hope you’ll be able to join me! Register today for the virtual conference July 21 & 22 https://registration.socio.events/e/2023sseconference
THE 2023 SAN FRANCISCO ART BOOK FAIR
Presented by Minnesota Street Project Foundation
July 14 – 16, 2023
Preview: Thursday, July 13
A Magic Mountain: Booth Z49
Minnesota Street Project
1201 + 1275 Minnesota Street
San Francisco, CA 94107
Public Hours - Free admission
Thursday, July 13: 6pm – 10pm
Friday, July 14: 11am – 6pm
Saturday, July 15: 11am – 6pm
Sunday, July 16: 11am – 5pm
Saturday, 3-4pm in The Lounge:
A TIME MACHINE: From personal to community archives, with Adriana Monsalve, Alex Arzt, and Marc Fisher, moderated by Lindsay Buchman
While it has been written about extensively, the archive continues to circulate in contemporary art discourse. Image-making, publishing, and the history of print coalesce into a complex, provisional space. Through this lens, A TIME MACHINE examines how archival histories inform artists’ books by asking independent publishers Adriana Monsalve (Homie House Press), Alex Arzt (A Magic Mountain), and Marc Fisher (Half Letterpress / Temporary Services) about the urgency and role of archives in their work. This conversation explores what we might learn from the suture between past, present, and future while centering on how personal and community archives continue to inspire generations of artists’ books. Presented by Seaton Street Press.
For Vol. VI of ‘The New Farmer's Almanac’ by The Greenhorns I wrote an essay about my work with feral cabbages and the history of the soil where I live in Oakland.
This newest volume, 'Adjustments & Accommodations,' seeks to recognize our collective agency in the face of sizable uncertainties. The book considers the morphing climate, an ongoing culture of land dispossession, the continuing global pandemic, shifting and intensifying weather patterns, and migrations of all species, as spurned by political and environmental upheaval. There is adaptability in each bloom of algae; tiny particles of inspiration can enliven lives and farm systems; the natural currents and connected sentience of the living earth moves genetic material. Dynamic flux and rapid change remains possible.
You can learn more or order a copy here:
chelseagreen.com/product/the-new-farmers-almanac-volume-vi
Bay Area release event info TBD!
10th Anniversary of the East Bay Print Sale at Max’s Garage Press will feature prints by A Magic Mountain. Max’s Press is where I learned to print on the Riso, so if you’ve never been and want to learn, come check out this amazing space and community.
Preview Night: December 8th 3pm-8pm
December 9-12th 10am-4pm
A Magic Mountain will table this year at SFMOMA’s Book Bazaar, featuring all local artists and organizations.
This holiday season, support the Bay Area creative community by shopping this special pop-up sale featuring local presses, zine publishers, artists, and more! From artist books and zines to posters, T-shirts, and mixtapes, you’re sure to find something unique for everyone on your list — including yourself! Photo: Attendees at the 2021 Small Press Book Bazaar. Photo: © Barak Shrama
I designed a fundraising T-Shirt for Headlands through Marine Layer’s Giving Tee program. $15 from each shirt goes back to Headlands, an organization that is close to my heart after spending 4 years there as an Affiliate Artist. Help fund future residencies and artist centered programming by buying a shirt! The design features the winding road that leads to Point Bonita looking out over the Pacific. It was inspired by the printing techniques and style of 1970s alternative publications.
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 22 from 4-6pm
Feral is an interdisciplinary project by Oakland artist Alex Arzt that explores human-plant relationships, deep mapping, and the physical and emotional relationship to land in a time of ongoing ecological destruction. The project stems out of Arzt's long term engagement with the feral cabbages of California’s coast both in the wild and in her rented lot in East Oakland. With the cabbage's collaboration, she is creating a hybrid feral cabbage that can potentially adapt to California's rapidly changing climate and urban soil contamination. Feral cabbages offer a model for survival through discovering their ecological niches, forming cooperative communities, and creating multispecies partnerships, including with humans. As a potential source of resilient, nutritious food and as connectors to our plant communities, the feral cabbages can both feed us and teach us.
Funding has been made possible by The Puffin Foundation.
A Magic Mountain at the SFABF
I will be giving a virtual artist talk with Richard-Jonathan Nelson on Thursday, November 18th as part of my residency at Real Time and Space in Oakland.
Zoom link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81924008136?pwd=cEg0QTJWaFg0WW43Ni92Q0RiWjVWdz09
Meeting ID: 819 2400 8136
Passcode: 765672
Since the first NY Art Book Fair in 2005, Printed Matter’s Art Book Fairs have been among the leading international gatherings for fostering the distribution, understanding, and celebration of artists’ books and art related publishing. In 2021, the NY Art Book Fair and LA Art Book Fair will be produced as a combined online event—Printed Matter’s Virtual Art Book Fair—safely bringing the artists’ book community together for a fun and experimental new Fair.
Printed Matter’s Art Book Fairs have hosted exhibitors from around the world featuring a wide variety of works—from zines and artists’ books to rare and out of print publications, and contemporary art editions. In this new iteration, the Fair will be more broadly accessible to visitors and exhibitors than ever before, and we are thrilled to serve and support artists’ book publishing without the challenge of international travel. As we embrace the possibilities of this time of social and political transformation, we feel that an online event of this kind can continue to provide an essential space rooted in connection, expression, and criticality. The Fair will feature a full schedule of the live programs that have made the event special in the past— discussions and workshops, interactive book launches, musical performances, and much more.
Join Alex Arzt and Tim Devin for a conversation about their respective artistic practices, particularly three-volume artist books they each have in the exhibition “Recruiting for Utopia: Print and the Imagination" at Fruitlands Museum. Alex Arzt is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and gardener based in Oakland, CA. Her publication, The Positions and Situations Project is a series of 100 letter correspondences between the artist and people who placed classified ads that were called “positions and situations” in 1970s back-to-the-land magazines. Tim Devin is a community maker, researcher, and librarian based in Cambridge, MA. His Mapping Utopia series provides glimpses into counterculture in 1970s the Boston area, based on his research into countercultural directories and magazines. Devin has led walking tours through Cambridge and Somerville related to this history. Each project focuses on community through studying how people in the 1970s envisioned it.
Recruiting for Utopia: Print and the Imagination considers the influence of printed matter on Utopian thought in 1840s New England. The exhibition has historical and contemporary sections that creatively observe the capacity of print and the schematic imagination to build community in the early nineteenth century and the twenty-first century. Works on view include Millerite banners that proclaim the coming apocalypse on a specific date in 1843, later Adventist banners with similar messages, a Shaker spirit drawing, pattern book, and Skeen Bible chart, and other nineteenth-century works on paper and objects from New England that foreground elements of design.
Expanding upon the historical materials shown in the Art Gallery, contemporary, serial prints in the form of booklets, broadsides, and zines by living artists displayed across the Museum campus, explore themes that resonate with the permanent collection. The artistic publications as assembled share the priorities of activism and community building. Celebrating the continued freedom of expression and speech so innate to American values, the exhibition will share diverse stories and ideas and often prompt readers to action.
Printed Matter, Inc. presents
THE LA ART BOOK FAIR
April 3–5, 2020
Opening Night: Thursday, April 2
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
Los Angeles, CA
Free entrance
Printed Matter presents the seventh LA Art Book Fair (LAABF), April 3–5 at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA.
Free and open to the public, the LAABF is among the leading international gatherings for the arts publishing community, providing a platform for artists and publishers to connect with audiences and circulate their work in a dynamic environment. The LA Art Book Fair is the companion fair to Printed Matter’s annual NY Art Book Fair.
Held over three days in downtown Los Angeles, LAABF 2020 will welcome hundreds of exhibitors from around the world, including a broad range of artists and collectives, small presses, institutions, galleries, rare and out of print booksellers, and distributors. With a commitment to diversity and representation, the event will serve as an open meeting place for an extended community of art book enthusiasts, as well as a site for dialog and exchange around all facets of arts publishing. A full calendar of free educational programming, book signings, artist-led events, performances, special exhibitor projects, and much more, will take place over the Fair weekend.
PLACE TALKS is a series of visual lectures that occurs at, and in collaboration with, the Prelinger Library in San Francisco. Bay Area artists, writers, designers, architects, archivists, librarians (and other curious people) share talks on location-related topics, illustrated by content from the library's collection.
Open House provides a once-a-season opportunity to roam the various buildings of our campus, meet current artists, view works in progress, and attend screenings, performances, and readings. See what Artists in Residence, Affiliate Artists, and Graduate Fellows are up to in their studios, and stop by the fall Project Space exhibition.
Enjoy a housemade lunch in the Mess Hall Café—Members at the Inspire ($250) level and above receive complimentary lunch for two! Not a member yet? Join today.
Parking is limited! If you can, we encourage you to carpool, bike, or take the bus. Get more info on transportation and directions.
First-floor spaces (Mess Hall, Key Room, Latrine, and some artist studios in Building 945, 960, and The Gym) are accessible to people with mobility aids. Second- and third-floor spaces are currently accessible only by stairs. Note that there is a steep hill from the MUNI 76X bus stop up to the Headlands campus; if you have accessibility requirements and are planning to attend Open House by public transportation, or if you have any questions regarding accessibility, please reach out to us in advance at commdirector@headlands.org
Join Headlands as we celebrate the start of the Fall season with a lively outdoor variety show led by Headlands Artists that includes music, performance, storytelling, cinema, and installations. Performances and screenings will take place in The Commons; limited chair seating is available, so feel free to bring floor cushions and blankets to stay cozy. Hot beverages, as well as delicious Vietnamese food prepared by Little Window, will be available for purchase in the Mess Hall.
“Doors” open at 7PM; show starts at 7:30PM.
Participating Artists
Mark Allen (AIR ’18)
Vero Majano (AIR ’19)
Alex Arzt (AFF ’19) w/ Whiz World
Stacey Steers (AIR ’19)
Joshua Short (GF ’09)
Fay Victor (AIR ’19)
Ja’Tovia Gary (AIR ’18)
PROGRAM:
PART 1 (WAXING MOON)
Welcome and Place Orientation
Kim Zitzow
Whiz World
Alex Arzt & Annie Albagli (presentation)
An Ecstatic Experience
Ja’Tovia Gary (short film)
A History of Machine Project
Mark Allen (presentation)
INTERMISSION (FULL MOON)
food & drink from Little Window available in the Mess Hall
PART 2 (WANING MOON)
Mutations for Justice (Mantras for Change)
Fay Victor (musical performance)
Phantom Canyon
Stacey Steers (short film)
Remember Los Siete (excerpt)
Vero Majano (film with live narration)
ONGOING INSTALLATIONS:
In the Westwing: The Speed Trials Arcade, Joshua Short
In the Commons: Flora, Eric Dyer
This event will primarily take place in The Commons and The Mess Hall, and is accessible to people with mobility aids. The Westwing is on the second floor and is accessible only by stairs.
Design by Helen Shewolfe Tseng
During the release, Royal NoneSuch Gallery will be open for book browsing and letter reading. Volumes 1-3 of the project will be available for purchase, with discounts available to donors to the match fundraiser earlier this year. Reading at 5pm, and drinks and snacks provided.
The Positions and Situations Project: Back-to-the-Land Letters is a series of three artist books consisting of 100 letter correspondences between artist Alex Arzt and 1970s back-to-the-landers who placed classified ads in magazines like The Mother Earth News. Letters, interviews, archival material, and photographs have been published as three Risograph printed artist books that encompass first-hand stories from the Back-to-the-Land Movement. This third and final volume covers ads placed between 1975 and 1976. At 300 Risograph-printed pages, it includes forewords by author Kate Daloz and artist Fritz Haeg, 35 letters, 4 interviews, and a collection of original 1970s letter responses saved by project participants.
The Positions and Situations Project, Volume 3: 1975-1976 by Alex Arzt was printed by A Magic Mountain and was made possible with a grant from the East Bay Community Foundation and individual donors.
Printed Matter’s 2019 LA Art Book Fair (LAABF), takes place on April 12–April 14, 2019 (Opening Night April 11), at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Los Angeles, California.
Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair (LAABF), initiated in 2013, is the companion fair to the NY Art Book Fair. The two fairs are the leading international gatherings for the distribution of artists’ books, celebrating the full breadth of the art publishing community.
Held at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in downtown Los Angeles over three days (plus Opening Night), LAABF 2019 will welcome hundreds of exhibitors from around the world, including a broad range of artists and collectives, small presses, institutions, galleries, antiquarian booksellers, and distributors. With a commitment to diversity and representation, the event will serve as a meeting place for an extended community of publishers and book enthusiasts, as well as a site for dialog and exchange around all facets of arts publishing.
Kim Anno, Claudia Borgna, The Bureau of Linguistical Reality (Heidi Quante and Alicia Escott), Jamee Crusan, Glenna Cole Allee, Alicia Escott, Kiko Le Strange aka Marco Garcia, Stacey Goodman, Rebecca Swan, WHIZ WORLD with Queen Whiz, Ghost Whiz and Furtips, and the Dream Farm Team..
How to hold this moment of environmental precarity in which we exist? The world’s leading climate scientists have warned that only a dozen years remain for us to avoid an irreversible tipping point, yet we pitch forward with an ever expanding carbon foot print and economy. How do we hold the geologic impact of our actions, on ocean, land, atmosphere, animals? The illogic of systems tooled for short term profit? Where to hold fires, floods and fear of extinction? In this exhibition, we searched for resilient forms of response, the poetic, the oblique and the direct, for re-tooling, re-imagining in all ways, claiming both activist boldness and the subtlety of a small sparrow.
We grounded ourselves first in the visual: small drawings, bold photographs, reconfigured bodily forms, materials from the sea, mystical futuristic flowers, conceptual considerations... We bear in mind recent movements like Extinction Rebellion and the new Green Deal—what actions, poetics and possibility do they offer us? A thread of feminist magical speculative grounding in the body comes from WHIZWORLD while The Bureau of Linguistical Research provided new words for the emotional and material conditions of our changing state. Shilpi Kumar’s investigations of circular economies offer other forms of critique and consideration.
https://www.dreamfarmcommons.com/
Organized by No Coast
Chicago, USA - November 16–18, 2018
The Chicago Art Book Fair began last year as an experiment in showcasing emerging directions and diverse legacies within small press arts publishing. The fair featured an international group of 125 arts publishers, small presses, book artists, comics artists, zinemakers and printmakers, with satellite programming and after parties. To our delight, our first effort made a splash with over 6,000 guests in attendance. In 2018, we look forward to bringing even more of Chicago's people together with another fantastic roster of artist vendors. The Chicago Art Book Fair will once again convene at the historic Chicago Athletic Association, and shall remain free and open to the public.
Free and open to the public, VABF is a multi-day festival of artists’ publishing featuring over one hundred local, national and international publishers, as well as a diverse line-up of programs, performances and artists’ projects.
Featured artists travel to Vancouver from across Canada and the globe, and produce everything from books, magazines, zines and printed ephemera to digital, performative or other experimental forms of publication.
Canada’s first art book fair, VABF is the longest-running international art book fair in the country. In 2018 the event is anticipated to attract more than 5,000 visitors from across the Greater Vancouver Area and beyond.
4 sessions >> Tuesdays, June 5–26
6:30–9:30pm, Studio 16A, $195
No prerequisite. Some knowledge of photography helpful, but not necessary.
Maintaining an active archive of your work is increasingly important for online portfolios and applications. Photo documentation is often the only record of an exhibit or performance, which makes it important to do correctly. Over the course of four weeks, students will learn how to professionally document artwork for online portfolios, applications, and personal archives. Students will photograph both 2D and 3D artworks in a gallery and/or studio setting. They will learn best practices for photographing artwork accurately with an eye for even lighting, sharp focus, correct exposure, and accurate color representation using a color card. The class will conclude with retouching workflows in Photoshop and Lightroom for color correction, sharpening, compositing, batch processing, and exporting. We will cover basic file organization and back-up strategies for creating an archive that best represents students' work and practices. At the end of the class, students will have a skillset that they will utilize throughout their careers in the arts.
Sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/summer-2018-pics-or-it-didnt-happen-documenting-your-work-registration-44004645078
WHIZ WORLD will be at LA Zine Fest at the Pasadena Convention Center on May 27th. We will be at table A53. Come say hello, meet the Whizzes, and peruse our wares.
ALSO! On May 26th- We will be at the Sky Village Swap Meet at the High Desert Test Sites HQ discussing the Ten Tenets of Whizzing and selling Issues 1+2 and some new posters.
7028 Theater Road (just off Hwy 247, right behind Barr Lumber), Yucca Valley, CA 92286;
WHIZ WORLD is a publication founded by Queen Whiz, Furtips, and Ghost Whiz with the mission to highlight the lived experiences of women artists. The whizzes write from a speculative magical feminist perspective and invite others to adopt and write from a whiz persona that encapsulates their essential power. Based in the redwood biome of Northern California, WHIZ WORLD forms a network of readers and contributors to battle pervasive sexist oppression through the powerful mystique of the Whiz persona.
WHIZ WORLD 2 Publication Release Party: Friday April 6th, 6:00pm-9:00pm
An Evening with the Whizzes: Saturday April 7th, 7:00pm-8:30pm
Join us for an evening with the Whizzes, who have traveled across the 37th parallel to debut Whiz World Issue 2 in Richmond. Saturday at 7pm join us for a reading of Whiz World by Furtips, Queen Whiz, and Ghost Whiz followed by a meditation specially prepared for Richmond, by Wind of Whizzes. Donations to support the whiz work are suggested at $6-$18. Please contribute what you can.
Coffee with the Whizzes: Sunday, April 8th, 10am-12pm
Come by the gallery Sunday morning for free coffee with Whiz World.
Open hours are Saturday and Sunday from 1pm-6pm or by appointment. Whiz World’s storefront feature runs through April 29th, 2018.
M+B is pleased to announce the opening of ANNEX, a showroom dedicated to applied arts. The space is a joint effort between the gallery and Jay Ezra Nayssan, founder of Del Vaz Projects.
Participating artists include: Kelly Akashi, Derya Akay, Josef Albers, Ramsey Alderson, Alex Arzt, Spencer Ashby, Michael Assiff, Bjarne Bare, Andrew Berardini, Ross Caliendo, Fabien Cappello, Maurizio Cattelan & Myriam Ben Salah, Brice Chatenoud, Melisa Chhan, Courtney Coll, Alan Crocetii, Salvador Dali, Darner socks, Ludovic de Saint Sernin & Adam Iezzi, Cirilo Domine, Olivia Erlanger, Ethernet (Benjamin Boatright & Dylan Mira), Jamie Felton, Anna Fidler, James Flemons, AGF Hydra (Ana Gloria Flores), Niki Ford, Pedro Friedeberg, Lukas Geronimas, David Gilbert, Piero Golia, Sam Gordon, Grau01 (Timon & Melchior Grau), Mina Hammal, Greg Ito, Patrick Jackson, Hadrien Jacquelet, Elizabeth Jaeger, Lisa Jo, Dane Johnson, Charles Hollis Jones, Natalie Jones, Jenna Kaes, Tiziana La Melia, Cult Gaia, Cat Lauigan, Lazaros, Ann Leese, Glenn Lewis, Candice Lin, Daniel Long, Nevine Mahmoud, Marion Mailaender, Morgan Mandalay, Elana Mann, Etienne Marc, Ian Markell, Fabian Marti, Alex Miller, Simon Miller, Brittany Mojo, Carter Mull, Jill Mulleady, Dina No, Ben Wolf Noam, Alexandra Noel, Dominic Nurre, Riley O’Neil, Eugene Ong, OOIEE, Mona Palmer, Michael Parker, Morgan Peck, Alina Perkins, Cara Marie Piazza, Pablo Picasso, Oren Pinhassi, Rebecca Pinto, Matthew Porter, Cima Rahmankhah, Willy Reed, Mariah Robertson, Ry Rocklen, Scarlett Rose, Lucas Samaras, Max Hooper Schneider, Bailey Scieskza, Jesse Stecklow, Rodger Stevens, Sophie Stone, Studio 65, Naoki Sutter-Shudo, Sweetflag (Luren Jenison & Lydia Okrent), Kazuki Takizawa, Alexander Tieghi-Walker, Alison Veit, Torbjorn Vejvi, Megan Whitmarsh, Jessica Williams, Y/Project, Rosha Yaghmai, Phillip Zach, John Zappas and more.
For more information, please contact annex@mbart.com.
www.annex.la
Home/Sick is an exhibition that explores the production of different dimensions of experience through recollection of the past and speculation about the future.
The show is curated by Bre Arder of Beyond Beyond and is presented in partnership with the East Cut Community Benefit District
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/third-fridays-homesick-art-opening-tickets-41881688257
