PROGRAMMING
We are pleased to announce the programming for the 2022 San Francisco Art Book Fair.
All programs take place at 1275 Minnesota St. in either The Lounge, the Media Room or directly behind the building on Tennessee Street. We also have a special exhibition in our Project Room. Signings happen at the exhibitor’s tables as listed below. SFABF’s opening night celebration will take place Thursday, July 14 from 6pm-10pm and is free and open to the public. The evening will feature music from DJ Sue Problema (Chulita Vinyl Club) and Chungtech, beverages from True Laurel, Buddy and Bar Part Time, and Tacos San Buena food truck. Other food options over the weekend will include Sam’s Chowdermobile, Mozzeria and Yummi BBQ.
Our Director of Programming is David Senior. Please email info@sfartbookfair.com with any programming inquires and stay tuned for our Fundraising Editions and 2022 Publication Grant!
To download our program guide, click here.
The Lounge
Friday, July 15
12-1pm
Publishing Spaces: Chroma × Practise with Alexis Tompkins, Emily Poole, and James Goggin
Chroma and Practise are both design studios with processes rooted in research and scholarship around art, architecture, design history, and contemporary culture. For Chroma, this work results in physical (and occasionally virtual) interior spaces (like this year’s SFABF public program space). For Practise, it manifests in digital and printed spaces (like some of the books on display at SFABF). Emily Poole (Brand Manager, Chroma) will moderate a discussion between Alexis Tompkins (Creative Partner, Chroma) and James Goggin (Partner, Practise) accompanied by a presentation showing a common spatial language evident in three particular projects: a virtual apartment, a printed zine, and a new quarterly online journal.
1-2pm
Fair Enough with Izet Sheshivari
Fair Enough is an alliance of four independent art book publishers from Switzerland: Boabooks, edition fink, Jungle Books and tria publishing platform. They represent each other internationally at book fairs and jointly take care of the sales and distribution of publications. Izet Sheshivari from Boabooks and Fair Enough, will share more about how the alliance has realized alternative modes of book distribution in Japan as well as Switzerland. He will share notes of the alliance’s journey so far and share their experiences, as well as giving some insight into the ideas, relationships, and new public they have found with this model. Sponsored by Swissnex.
2-3pm
Pandemic Publics: Expansive Publishing Practices in a Time of Contagion with Josh Schaedel (Fulcrum Press), Zoë Taleporos and Sarah Hotchkiss (Premiere, Jr.) and Daniel J. Glendening (Labor is a Medium), moderated by Alex Lukas
The delineation of roles within the field of artists’ publications is slippery. The ability to morph from artist to publisher to printer, organizer, curator, editor, or audience member is a hallmark of the medium. We are resourcefully multifaceted makers, and our publications are, in short, community affairs. As COVID-19 redefined the ways we interact, artists and publishers were forced to not only reconsider what it means to “make public” but what “public” itself entails. In the midst of this isolating time, the participants in this panel discussion redefined notions of shared space, proposed radical forums for community, and created new and expansive modes of collaboration. Our conversation will focus on these efforts to push and redefine what a publishing practice can encompass during a pandemic. Presented by Written Names Fanzine.
3-4pm
What happens between the knots? BARBEDWIRE Scores performed by Phillip Greenlief
What happens between the knots? is the third book in the annual A Series of Open Questions published by CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Sternberg Press. Each book in the series includes newly commissioned writing as well a selection of perspectives, images, and references related to the Wattis’s year-long research seasons dedicated to single artists. This third volume is informed by themes found in the work of Cecilia Vicuña, including ecofeminism, indigenous forms of knowledge, poetry and politics, dissolution and extinction, exile, dematerialization, regeneration, and environmental responsibility.
For this book launch, musician Phillip Greenlief (tenor saxophone, Bb clarinet), Kyle Bruckmann (oboe, English horn), and Madalyn Merkey (live electronics) perform a selection of Greenlief’s graphic BARBEDWIRE Scores, some of which are included in What happens between the knots? When performing a score, each player improvises for a set duration, loosely following one of three lines as drawn by Greenlief. The shape of the line informs how much (or how little) the musicians change their improvisatory behavior.
4-5pm
The Floating Museum by Lynn Hershman Leeson in conversation with David Senior
The Floating Museum was a temporary museum that, over its lifetime, from 1974-1978 commissioned over 350 artists to create work that existed outside the very limited boundaries of traditional museum spaces. It was intended to “recycle space” wherever it existed, from the walls of San Quentin prison to the landscapes of Fort Point and even the Bay Area Rapid Transit Artists used mediums not yet accepted by traditional museums and galleries, such as performance, photography, comic drawings, video, soundscapes and all manner of site specific locations (though that term had not been yet invented). It was designed to be temporary. Its structure became the model for Creative Time and PS1, amongst others. Though the archive is in Stanford University’s Special Collections Library, its history was unknown. This was the motivation of this book, to make accessible this influential project so that it could be added to the history of that time.
5-6pm
Keko Jackson & Lava Thomas: In Conversation
This conversation celebrates two new books, Keko Jackson: Restored/Access and Lava Thomas: Homecoming, published by Sming Sming Books. In Restored/Access, Jackson combines photography with archival materials from his uncle’s collection to share the history of Allensworth, the first town in California to be founded, financed, and governed exclusively by Black people. Homecoming brings together Thomas’s intricate drawing installations that explore personal and cultural narratives of bravery and survival, including a new body of work Decatur, about Thomas’s great-great- great-grandfather, Charles H. Arthur, and the eight-year- long legal battle to receive his army pension. Jackson and Thomas will be discussing their respective projects and the ways they draw upon Black family archives to create work, share US history, and build community. Presented by Sming Sming Books.
Saturday, July 16
11am-12pm
Bay Area Contemporary Art Archive: Building a Community Archive
The Bay Area Contemporary Art Archive (BACAA) is a public archive: a receptacle, preservation society and venue for the ephemera of Bay Area contemporary artists, venues and related projects. BACAA has been collecting and digitizing thousands of postcards, press releases, posters, zines, and more, while creating an online venue to preserve and share the work of our local art scene. BACAA founder Lexa Walsh will present an overview of the project and its vast contents, how Bay Area artists, curators and collectors can participate, and the importance of community-sourced archives.
12-1pm
The Southeast San Francisco Regional Portfolio: An Art-Based Conversation with 4 Neighborhoods
The Southeast San Francisco Artists Portfolio is composed of print reproductions of work from artists of the four neighborhoods of Southeast SF. The Portfolio is designed to find its way into the hands of local residents via Chispa, a mobile cultural hub that houses the Portfolio and acts as a base for artistic exchange. Come hear from: artist and curator Kate Connell, who co-developed Chispa along with Book & Wheel partner Oscar Melara; artist Amy Diaz-Infante, whose work was reproduced for the Portfolio; and Bayview historian Aliyah Dunn-Salahuddin, who will contextualize the project and its importance to the folx in Southeast SF. You’re invited to visit Chispa at SFABF, where you can trade for art from the Portfolio.
1-2pm
I Got Something to Say: Poster Inventory, 2013-2021 by Draw Down Books
The founders of Draw Down Books, graphic designers Christopher Sleboda and Kathleen Sleboda, will discuss their 2022 publication, I Got Something to Say — Poster Inventory, 2013–2021, with a contributor—graphic designer and educator Mary Yang; a frequent collaborator—illustrator Tim Lahan; and a colleague—graphic designer, educator and type designer Javier Viramontes. The panel will speak about poster design, participation in art books fairs as exhibitors, collectors, and designers; and collaborative publications that bring together different voices and perspectives.
2-3pm
Media Burn: Ant Farm and the Making of an Image with Chip Lord and Steve Seid
In Media Burn, Ant Farm’s legendary 1975 performance, a radically customized Cadillac is driven through a wall of burning television sets. Media Burn: Ant Farm and the Making of an Image, by Steve Seid, is a vibrant assessment of the complex set of cultural references and art-making strategies informing this collision of twentieth-century icons. Chip Lord of Ant Farm and Steve Seid will discuss Media Burn alongside a narrated slideshow of images, ephemera, and more. Co-presented by Inventory Press and RITE Editions.
3-4pm
Strikethrough: Radical Publications at Letterform Archive
Letterform Archive’s next in-house exhibition is Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest. In this sneak peek of the show, before it opens on July 23, co- curator Stephen Coles will present some highlights of special interest to Art Book Fair attendees: independent publications. From Fire!!, to The Crisis, from One to The Black Panther, activists throughout the 20th century wielded language, design, and newly accessible reproduction techniques to spread their message, empower communities, and fight oppression.
4-5pm
The Last Survivor is the First Suspect, coming of age in Amerika with Nick Haymes
A conversation with Nick Haymes about coming of age in Amerika based on his latest book. The Last Survivor is the First Suspect is at once a celebration and a requiem. The project, captured between 2005 and 2009 by photographer Nick Haymes, is a record of a drifting community of young friends based mainly between two distinct geographic points: Southern California and Tulsa, Oklahoma. The book’s narrative merges a sense of joy in documenting burgeoning friendships and bonds, and a looming sense of dread that would ultimately culminate in a series of tragedies. Haymes invites us to form a contemporary engagement with this specific historic moment, where things are both different and the same in equal measure. Presented by Kodoji Press.
5-6pm
Gravity Spells II: Bay Area New Music and Expanded Cinema Art, with John Davis and Konrad Steiner
Recently released by Bimodal Press, Gravity Spells II is a multimedia “bundle” featuring 2 LPs, 4 DVDs, a perfect bound letterpress booklet, packaged in a hand-printed sleeve designed to give form to the ineffable - a physical set of transposable time-based variables that, when combined, approximate the uncanny and unpredictable inherent in live cinema and music performance. For this event, John Davis and Konrad Steiner will perform an improvisational collaboration that unites sound and image. John performs music to complement Konrad's performance collage of original 16mm loops and samples from feature films.
Sunday, July 17
12-1pm
Rip Tales: Jay Defeo’s Estocada and Other Pieces by Jordan Stein with Dena Beard
Curator and writer Jordan Stein in conversation with Dena Beard, executive director the The Lab, about Stein’s first book, Rip Tales: Jay DeFeo’s Estocada & Other Pieces. In addition to DeFeo, Rip Tales concerns creation and destruction in the works and lives of artists Zarouhie Abdalian, April Dawn Alison, Ruth Asawa, Lutz Bacher, Bruce Conner, Dewey Crumpler, Trisha Donnelly, and Vincent Fecteau. Presented by Soberscove Press.
1-2pm
The HIV Howler in conversation with Anthea Black
The HIV Howler is a global art newspaper published by Anthea Black and Jessica Whitbread that focuses on artists living with HIV. The paper is a forum for dialogue and a guide to navigating the vibrational ambiguities between art and AIDS policy, pathology, and community. Publisher Anthea Black will present on The HIV Howler editorial and wage equity work with poz artists, and host a dialogue with featured artists from recent themed issues on movement- migration, time+money, home, and spirit-substance.
2-3pm
UBI SUNT with Blaise Agüera y Arcas and James Goggin
Are we living in reality? Is this the past, or the future? And is there a human on the other side of this screen? These questions rear up and twist back on themselves in Ubi Sunt, a solipsistic first-person loop of a life in tech during COVID lockdown by Blaise Agüera y Arcas, a Fellow at Google Research who has invented AI and privacy technologies and written widely circulated essays at the intersections of machine intelligence, art, ethics, and social science. Is this book fiction or nonfiction? Though speculative, its historical material is accurate, and its present tense is drawn from life; some of its AI dialogs, too, are generated by interaction with a real large neural language model. Blaise will discuss the concept, influences, materiality, and collaborative process behind the book with graphic designer James Goggin, who will present the project’s print and digital editions with live projection. Presented by Hat & Beard Press.
3-4pm
Salones de belleza /The Beauty Salons: Writers & poetas /Escritores & Poets at Aeromoto
Presented by Gato Negro Ediciones
Between 2017 and 2020, the Aeromoto public arts library in Mexico City organized a monthly series of bilingual readings, curated by Kit Schluter and Tatiana Lipkes. The gatherings, called Salón de belleza (Beauty Salon), brought together more than 70 poets and writers from many generations, contexts, and traditions, predominantly from Mexico and the United States, but also from various parts of Latin America and Europe. In these events, translation was used to bridge linguistic and cultural gaps between poets separated by political borders, and helped to create a space in which literatures of different origins and approaches could coexist. The result of this collective initiative was a unique cross-section of some of the most intriguing writing taking place in the Americas during the second decade of this century. Salones de belleza: Writers in Aeromoto gathers work from these writers—in a completely bilingual edition—many of whom are appearing in translation for the first time.
4-5pm
Cassandra Press Artist Zine series with a performative lecture by Christine Wang
Curated by Kandis Williams, the Cassandra Press Artist Zine series consists of contributions from a community of BIPOC artists, scholars, writers, and poets with the intention of asking such questions as: how can print formats like scripts, newspapers, and pamphlets be activated to produce new associations? And what voice or voices can we represent in simultaneity on the page? How does the virtual page act and operate in our social economies? The series includes artists manuel arturo abreu, Hannah Black, Rhea Dillon, Boz Garden, Christine Wang, and Charlotte Zhang, with future iterations to come. For this event, Christine Wang, who is featured in the 2022 Cassandra Press Artist Zine series, will be giving a performative lecture on personal art expenses in the hopes of improving artists’ financial literacy and increasing financial transparency.
Media Room
Ongoing - LOOP
The Abominable Freedom
by Torsten Zenas Burns and Darrin Martin
Random Man Editions
(41 mins / 2006)
Originally shot video and appropriated film weaves together a musical celebration of the flesh, an egg from the missing link holds a skeleton key to our educational future. On a parallel world, life coaches made of bone and fur activate televisual coursework including circular zooming studies, cryptid folklore, spectral-mating, and etheric birthing techniques. Manifest destiny eludes its colonial past and takes refuge deep in our pagan libidinal nature.
Psychology Today
by Extreme Animals
Random Man Editions
(30 mins / 2021)
In information theory, the repetition of messages tends towards the obliteration of meaning. This theorem is vitally demonstrated in Extreme Animals’ 2021 video Psychology Today, which traces the algorithmically accelerated decomposition of images from the post-millennial cultural imaginary: Shrek, the Joker, and other depressive icons of our interminable financial crisis inspire a legion of exhausted reenactments by children’s birthday party workers and freelance Blender artists. Interwoven with motivational programming staged at depreciating levels of conviction, the final assembly speaks not so much to the experience of overstimulation as to the unique combination of sensory hypertrophy and apathy characteristic of life post-2020.
Sarah Klein Puts Paper to Motion
Misty Quartet, Sing the Hits, Stir the Beat, Fall Girl, Misty Duet
(15 mins / 2013-2021)
For the 2022 SFABF, Sarah Klein is presenting her books, posters, calendars and prints, under her Lower Falls imprint, as well as animations in the media room. Her work draws from personal and imagined iconographies that she spans fluidly between serialized, sequenced, and book forms. She looks to images for stories whose telling might be hidden or only suggested. Lone Star is a collaboration with David Kwan. Fall Girl includes music by Synchronized Watches.
Works on Paper: Animated Films by Meghana Bisineer, Martha Colburn, Jennifer Levonian, Peter Millard, Johan Rijpma, Paloma Trecka, Selina Trepp, curated by Clark Buckner and Sarah Klein. Presented by Telematic Media Arts.
Telematic is pleased to present Works on Paper, a curated screening of animated films by artists working with paint, paper, drawing, cut-out collage, and sculpture to produce time-based, moving image works. Attending to tangible materials, the films in this screening simultaneously foreground the artistic process and the labor required for their own creation. They mark the passage of time as chronicles of physical change. And they show how – with the right degree of creative imagination, focused attention, and sustained physical effort – the world is open to re-invention.
But I Love The Zine by Fiona McDougall
(16 mins / 2019)
But I Love The Zine is a short documentary exploring the enduring love in the Bay Area for zines — self-published, accessible, often artistic publications that offer an antidote to the disconnectedness of internet culture. In this documentary, viewers are introduced to a thriving small press community through interviews with publishers in their studios and at festivals like the East Bay Alternative Book and Zine fest. It features zine makers such as: Raphael Villet, Jeffrey Cheung, Max Stadnik, Jess Wu, and OMCA curator, Carin Adams, among others. Produced and Directed by Fiona McDougall.
Zium by Most Ancient
(60 mins / 2022)
Visit the Most Ancient arcade, a collection of point and click adventure games and surreal Virtual Reality worlds. Walk through an eroded habitat with ominous messaging, visit Zium: part zine and part museum walking simulator, and move through an eerie funhouse to discover hidden stories.
Tennesee Street
Saturday, July 16
11-6pm
Southeast San Francisco Artists Portfolio with Chispa
Chispa is a roving art cart the size of a parade float. Wherever Chispa appears in Southeast San Francisco you’ll find art, music and performances by Southeast SF artists. Chispa is a cross-cultural pollinator building connections between the Bayview/Hunters Point, The Excelsior, The Portola and Visitacion Valley. Sometimes Chispa events spread out on blankets for storytelling and neighborhood games, sometimes she broadcasts poetry, music and soundscapes. Prints by Southeast San Francisco artists are displayed on board Chispa. All of them are available for trade.
4-5pm
Noodz Noodz Noodz
Join Mouth 2 Mouth zine creators for an outdoor social gathering to celebrate the release of their second issue, “DEATH”, featuring readings, activities, and snacks made by contributors. See and be seen. Touch and be touched. Taste and be tasted.
Ongoing
KunstCapades LIVE!
KunstCapades is an art-themed variety show/podcast hosted by Robyn Carliss, Tim Sullivan, and Josh Pieper. Guests from all points on the artist-curator-dealer-collector spectrum board a gondola up to the recording booth – Altitude, an alpine-island bar in an undisclosed, altitudinous San Francisco location – for conversation and cocktails. Listeners are treated to a rollicking agenda of absurd segments, including “Art Crimes,” “eBay Today,” “Let’s Ask Tantum,” “Bartender’s Ballyhoo,” and intel regarding local openings and calls for work. Join us for a multi-part, LIVE recording at the 2022 San Francisco Art Book Fair.
Ideomotor Drawing Sessions with Stephen Lichty
Book an appointment - July 15, 16, 17
Stephen Lichty is taking appointments with individuals for his ongoing practice of automatic collaborative drawing. Each 30 minute session results in two identical carbon-transfer drawings, produced after holding a pen to a stack of papers with another person and allowing the shared non-conscious movement of the pen to determine the work. Sessions will take place during the fair on Tennessee St.
Project Room
Boo-Hooray Presents Underground Film: Jack Smith, John Waters, Andy Warhol
Boo-Hooray is proud to present an exhibition of ephemera and unseen photography from Jack Smith and the Lobster Landlordism, Andy Warhol and His Cronies, the Wonderful World of John Waters, and Kenneth Anger’s Leather Daddy Occultism. Most of these artifacts have never before been publicly exhibited.
Centered on the work of four defining figures of American underground film and gay sensibility, the exhibition discloses these filmmakers’ working processes and the development of their singular visual vocabularies. The photography, ephemera, and artwork contextualize each figure in the larger cultural milieus they invented, worked in, and confronted: the respective vibrant cultural scenes Warhol and Waters cultivated, Smith’s bellicose relationship to the New York underground film scene, and Anger’s clique of thelemite Hollywood aesthetes.
Included in the exhibition is behind-the-scenes photography of filmmaking and partying at The Factory; ephemera from the production, publicity, and distribution of John Waters’ early films; artwork, flyers, and photography documenting Jack Smith’s filmmaking and performance practice, as well as state repression of his work; and photography and ephemera spanning nearly 20 years of Kenneth Anger’s queer, occult filmmaking. Together, these materials highlight the working and social lives of four legends of queer and underground cinema.
Boo-Hooray is dedicated to the organization, stabilization, and preservation of the 20th and 21st century cultural movements, specializing in ephemera, photography, and book arts. We place artists' and organizations' archives with universities and museums, publish and sell rare books, photography, ephemera, and art, and stage exhibitions all over the world. This exhibition includes guest curation by San Francisco’s own Chris Veltri of Groove Merchant Records.
Signings
Friday, July 15
3pm - Michael Diamond - Untitled 8 fold - at Play Press - Z3
Saturday, July 16
12pm - Eva Lipman - Restraint & Desire - at TBW Books - A40
12pm - Eva Lipman - Derby - at TBW Books - A40
12pm - Christine Atkins - Essential Celebrations - at Play Press - Z3
1pm - Ruth Laskey - Twill Series - at Ratio 3 (co-published with RITE Editions) - E10
1pm - Michael Jang - Untitled - at Park Life - A9
1pm - Phil Jung - Windscreen - at TBW Books - A40
1pm - NIAD Art Center -"Me & My Gal" NIAD Fashion Book Launch & NIAD Fashion Show invitation- at NIAD - A24
1pm - Chris Johanson - Considering Unknow Know With What Is, And - at Altman Siegel - A20
2pm - IAN BATES “MEADOWLARK” - at Deadbeat Club - A39
2pm - Catherine Sieck - Orbiting Whorl- at Play Press - Z3
3pm - Nick Haymes - The Last Survivor is the First Suspect - at Kodoji Press - A04
4pm - SHIORI IKENO “SADO” - at Deadbeat Club - A39
Sunday, July 17
12pm - Ruth van Beek - Catlogue Flyer - at New Documents - A1
1pm - Jeremy Fish - Forever Ever After - at Paragon Books - Booth A25
2pm - Andrew Schoultz - Decade 2011-2021 - at Paragon Books - Booth A25
3pm - Felicia Chao - Sketchbook 6 - at Paragon Books - Booth A25