Spring Updates

Sometimes a long gap between blog posts means that not much has been happening. At other times (and more often in my case), it means that the days have been just packed.

Much of my recent activity has been taking place under the guise of two collaborative projects: Book Bombs and The Soapbox Independent Publishing Center.

Book Bombs has released three zine projects since my last post in the fall -- released at the Friends of Dard Hunter Annual Meeting in the fall, at the Refugee Reading Room project at Space1026 in Philadelphia in February, and at Susan Hensel Gallery's Urban/Urbane exhibition in Minneapolis in March. All zines were made available as free giveaways, and some were distributed on the street. Additionally, Book Bombs hung prints on the street in San Francisco in December and left snow stencils around Minneapolis in March. Book Bombs also participated in the exhibition "Social Commentaries" at the Catich Gallery in Davenport, Iowa, over the winter. We also contributed a piece to PublicAdCampaign's Street Advertising Takeover in Madrid, Spain. Please see the project blog for details.

The Soapbox Independent Publishing Center opened its doors to the public in March, kicking things off with a Zine and Artist Book Reading and a Zine Library Open House. We are now holding regular Library open hours, and have been attending Philadelphia events such as Philly STAKE and the Art Star Craft Bazaar to spread the word. In the coming months we will be working to set up publicly accessible studio space to support work in printmaking and bookbinding.

In March, I moderated a panel at the Southern Graphics International Conference in St. Louis. The panel, "Counterbalancing the News: Printmaking Takes On the Mainstream Media," included speakers Kristen Bartel, whose project HotOff Press involves a mobile bicycle-based screenprinting operation printing community based broadsides and distributing them freely on the streets, and Jordan Seiler of PublicAdCampaign, who has been coordinating the voices of artists and other individuals in takeovers of street-level advertising internationally, bringing the voices of the people back to our public spaces.

Now that summer is on its way, I am looking forward to the Zine Summer we have declared at The Soapbox, as well as to working on "Spilt," an artist book project that responds to last year's oil spill in the Gulf. I am working on an artist book as part of "An Inventory Of Al-Mutanabbi Street," a book project that follows the Al-Mutanabbi Street Broadside Project, which gathered broadsides by 130 international printers and writers in response to the 2007 bombing of the booksellers' street in Baghdad and has raised money for Doctors Without Borders. My broadside can be seen alongside the others on the website of Florida Atlantic University's Special Collections. Look for updates on these activities later in year.