This Artists’ Book: Topics course investigates how publications as editorial artifacts circulate at a planetary scale that stabilize or destabilize discourses across artistic, cultural, political, and technological contexts. Through studio projects across print, digital, and networked media, students study alternative publishing practices developed by artists, designers, and small communities, and explore how form shapes meaning and how medium and context influence interpretation. Drawing from these precedents, students will conceptualize, design, and produce their own artists’ books. Students will learn to gather, analyze, and critically engage their research materials, while exploring diverse image- and text-editing strategies to construct deliberate editorial narratives. They will experiment with production methods that suit their concept, both print and hybrid media processes, alongside experimentation with diverse spatial formats for binding and presentation, and circulation strategies. Emphasis is placed on publishing as both archival and prosthetic: a system for preserving and activating knowledge, and a device that extends authorship, memory, and participation. No prior experience in book-making or editorial design is required.

In this course, New School students will work collaboratively with high school students and teachers in a NYC public high school in Washington Heights to create materials that archive and celebrate their school’s history. Undergraduate and high school students will partner to research, collect and create images, imagine, design, and make prints and small books or zines, and other possible outcomes determined by the group that serve as resources that share information and history with audiences in and outside the school. Students in the course will develop skills in ethical collaboration, research and interviewing within a school community, collaborative image-creation, and some printmaking and bookbinding methods. Please note that this course will meet on campus and at the partner school in Washington Heights in uptown Manhattan. We will meet uptown approximately five times in the semester, and will close these sessions in time for students to be back on campus by the class ending time. Email the course instructors with any questions: agids@newschool.edu and nadia.williams@newschool.edu.

In this Artists’ Book: Topics class, students will work with and from archives around New York City to make one of a kind or editioned artists’ books. Archives are organized collections of materials, ranging from personal letters and sketch books to records of government decision-making to collections of images, sounds, and social histories. What happens when we place ourselves in conversation with what is left behind, or gathered up from specific places and times? How can artists work with the ideas, day-to-day language, and questions of people and systems as they are recorded in an archive? We will visit four archives in New York City, collecting different kinds of materials, and built through different financial, organizational, and political means. We will look at examples of artists’ books and zines made by scholars, activists, and artists - for example, Ben Blount, Avery Gordon, Mariame Kaba, and Julia Weist - from archival materials and research. Students will learn how to navigate and research in an archive, shape a question or site of inquiry, access materials, and will pursue their own interests at each archive to make projects or project proposals for artists’ books, and will complete a final project using an archive of their own choosing. We will also learn basic bookbinding methods, image and text reproduction techniques, and discuss materials and forms that suit artists’ books made from and with archives. No previous experience in book-making or archival research is required, but students must have an interest in working with archival materials to make books, and in the work and ideas of others.