November 17, 2023–March 31, 2024
Brooklyn Museum
Brooklyn, NY
"Beehive", a photocopy zine collaboration with Allyson Shaw produced from 1993–1996, is included in the exhibition Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines at the Brooklyn Museum documenting zines’ relationship to subcultures and avant-garde practices, from punk to conceptual, queer, and feminist art.
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..
The exhibition is accompanied by the first comprehensive publication to explore artists’ zines, co-published with Phaidon Press, and including over 800 images of zines and works in other media alongside texts by the curators and specially commissioned essays by Gwen Allen, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Tavia Nyong’o, Alexis Salas, and Mimi Thi Nguyen, as well as an extensive section featuring biographies of all the artists represented in the project.
"Beehive", a photocopy zine collaboration with Allyson Shaw produced from 1993–1996, is included in the exhibition Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines at the Brooklyn Museum documenting zines’ relationship to subcultures and avant-garde practices, from punk to conceptual, queer, and feminist art.
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..
The exhibition is accompanied by the first comprehensive publication to explore artists’ zines, co-published with Phaidon Press, and including over 800 images of zines and works in other media alongside texts by the curators and specially commissioned essays by Gwen Allen, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Tavia Nyong’o, Alexis Salas, and Mimi Thi Nguyen, as well as an extensive section featuring biographies of all the artists represented in the project.
Organized by Branden W. Joseph, Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University, and Drew Sawyer, Phillip and Edith Leonian Curator of Photography, Brooklyn Museum, with Marcelo Yanez, Research Assistant, and Imani Williford, Curatorial Assistant, Photography, Fashion and Material Culture, Brooklyn Museum.
Leadership support for this exhibition is provided by Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip E. Aarons, and by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
Photography and scans of Beehive zine covers is courtesy of the NYU Fales Library Riot Grrrl Collection
