Film still from the video poem “Truss” included in Copy Machine Manifestos at the Brookly Museum.
Working in collaboration with artist Laura Splan in the mid-90s, I created a zine called Beehive. Issues of the zine will be included in the exhibition Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines at the Brooklyn Museum, opening this month. There will also be a short video poem called “Truss,” included in the show which I created, born out of this collaboration.
Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines is the first exhibition dedicated to the rich history of five decades of artists’ zines produced in North America. Since the 1970s, zines—short for “fanzines,” magazines, or self-published booklets of texts and images, usually made with a copy machine—have given a voice and visibility to many operating outside of mainstream culture. Artists have harnessed the medium’s essential role in communication and community building and used it to transform material and conceptual approaches to art making across all media. This canon-expanding exhibition documents zines’ relationship to various subcultures and avant-garde practices, from punk and street culture to conceptual, queer, and feminist art. It also examines zines’ intersections with other mediums, including collage, craft, film, drawing, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, and video. Featuring nearly one thousand zines and artworks by nearly one hundred artists, Copy Machine Manifestos demonstrates the importance of zines to artistic production and its reception across North America.
[above text from the Brooklyn Museum]
I have my own reflections about the zine from my perspective as a disabled, queer, working class woman working outside of mainstream culture looking back on this work.
You can read it at my Substack here.
The exhibition is accompanied by the first comprehensive publication to explore artists’ zines, co-published with Phaidon Press.
Beehive is included with with Niagra’s Destroy All Monsters & Kathleen Hanna’s Bikini Kill zine in Hyperallergic in a piece by Maya Pontone.
My early zine work led circuitously to the ‘gathering of texts’ in the writing of Ashes and Stones. I have my own reflections about the zine from my perspective as a disabled, queer, working class woman working outside of mainstream culture, looking back on this work. You can read it at my Substack here.
Allyson Shaw, Author of Ashes and Stones 