Various mini zines made by Karina Killjoy of Femme Filth Press. Karina is a librarian and zinester.
NOTE: This project was conducted as part of the CIS 668 (Social Justice and Inclusion Advocacy) class during fall 2023. This analysis and event planning in collaboration with Magik Press of New London, CT focuses on working class artists and zinesters. For more information, please explore the menu. On this page, I present a thorough project description supported by recurring themes and thoughts on how to approach a retrospective.
Project Description
For this project, what we are planning is a zine fair hosted in New London to support local artists and provide another space for artists to support themselves financially without nonprofit involvement. Before the event itself, this also means evaluating and improving the existing zine-related initiatives at micropress studio Magik Press, run by Aly Maderson Quinlog. These offerings include the Un*named Zine Library, a zine club, and the development of a community printing center. Private workshops and lessons are also available for multiple art forms, including zine making. To do this project, we are bringing an multidisciplinary approach through Aly’s professional art and education background, along with their many years in DIY scenes. I bring my professional and community archives background, which includes some experience utilizing the design thinking method to reimagine library services and spaces (Mortensen, 2020). Besides libraries and archives, I bring an educational background in political science. Because zines have a unique ephemeral materiality and range of written topics from people of all walks of life, we felt it vital to continue this work with a multidisciplinary approach. This also comes with an understanding that Aly’s current relationships in the local art community are both strengthened and challenged by the nonprofit funding and mainstream galleries; staying in a traditional approach for planning an art event would more than likely involve engaging with these actors in the same old way.
Because this is a participatory action research project for me based in design thinking, I am not only getting involved with logistics, but getting more involved with local zinesters in other capacities, further empathizing to think of potentialities in current zine fair planning. This includes writing or contributing to zines that take submissions, continuing to volunteer at zine events when I am able, and eventually participating as a vendor at a zine fair, which I’ve never done before. I am already a very enthusiastic zine collector and have purchased and described zines for archives, which guides me in this exploration. I also plan to do a thematic analysis/audit of the Un*named Zine Library, go to Zine Club as a participant observer, interview other local zine fair organizers, and subsequently create an outreach plan for vendors and an action plan for social media/online presence of the library/studio. These findings would ideally help us determine the best space, accessibility needs, an organization/cause to donate to through the event, and help us to either focus on a themed event (e.g. queer zines, nature zines, etc.) or a general fair.
We are doing this work to have an event in the summer if there are no significant delays. We do this work to further gather and uplift our community, especially as the local boycott against Hygienic Art continues.
Project Assessment
As this work is ongoing, I do not have a retrospective to present. However, there are some initial observations and comments as we settle into this collaboration. While having another platform for an online presence is something that Aly appreciates, we both acknowledge that this particular website, which is meant to read more like an academic essay per guidelines, does not appeal to the general audience of zinesters without academic affiliation. Their major concerns would be about the event itself and how we can support them as artists. However, these preliminary discussions give a good idea of potential workload. During my studio visit and in follow-up discussions, Aly has mentioned that success as a community organizer includes knowing that your work can continue even when you are not present.
Zine literature has also given me feedback along the way. In particular, I’ve learned about the implied but often unwritten importance of the reader-creator dynamic in the zine community. As an individual, most of my role in this world of DIY publishing is one of a reader and collector. For many people, this also includes trading zines. While zine mail networks of the 20th century are less popular now, zine distros (distributors) can still be found all over the internet. It is important to explore why it is that people read zines, especially because zines were not immune to the belief that e-books would take over. While digital zines are made and shared, they are also often an accessible version of a zine already in print. Ash Watson and Andy Bennett get into the cultural sociology of reading behaviors by conducting a thematic analysis of 73 zines gathered at an Australian zine fair and interviewing 16 zine readers. “Why Do People Read Zines? Meaning, Materiality and Cultures of Reading” presents a gap with their research question (p. 68): “We move beyond issues of production and dissemination to consider the place of reading in the co-production of the zine’s cultural significance. How and why are zines materially meaningful?”
By exploring the personal history of interviewees regarding zine culture, the zines they gravitate towards, and the content/physicalities of contemporary zines, we see how small-scale iconicity is created even from intimate and intense publications that do not reflect the personal interests of readers due to a lack of gatekeeping. On page 85, the authors elaborate, “Through their reading, zines craft a felt and embodied social sense with which we can attune ourselves to what can be shared and how we can care in and about an oftentimes mundane and meaningless world: by doing it ourselves, by resisting the mainstream or processes of mainstreaming, by valuing intimacy, and with an intensity of care, focus and feeling.” While the methodology of the authors guides me, their description of the zine reading/making process bolsters literature about their dissemination. That focus on the socio-cultural experience of care and empathy through zines supports the non-linear methodology of the design thinking process and the self-reflection needed in both participatory action research and analysis of post-structuralist thought.
Cover of a red zine with black lettering titled "Someone Loves Me in Ohio: my labor of love; issue #2"
Exploration of themes
As non-binary people collaborating on a project largely motivated by the nature of an artist’s economy, my class leadership discussion (see the website section “Social Justice Presentations”) continues to come back to mind. The selection of readings about gender-based oppressions had a recurring theme of classism’s overlap with sexism and cissexism. While these works did not feature writers who explicitly identified as non-binary at the time of publication, writings from binary transgender and transsexual authors emphasize how allyship can often appear intersectionally from those in a similar financial position but holding other various identities.
Regarding alternative art spaces, The Annex, an artist co-operative across the street from Magik Press came up as not just an ally or potential stakeholder but as a response to local artists’ need for safe spaces to display and share their work. I wasn’t familiar with co-ops as a business model until about five years ago. While zine fairs are a temporary alternative art space, I wanted to better understand the decision to go with a co-op in response to exploitation of creators through readily available data. While most data about the arts and economic motivations I’ve found comes from Australia, I did find a report showing results of a survey for creative co-ops based in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom (Dreyer et al., 2020). The survey was sent out to 446 co-ops, 106 of which gave valid responses. While this 23.7% response rate with 30 Canadian, 42 UK, and 34 US groups cannot be called comprehensive, it does give some insight about diversity, motivation, practices/policies, and funding. Some key findings are as follows:
- The least common start-up funding sources were government grants, venture capital, and loans
- Only 9.4% of respondents owned their workspace
- 70.5% reported low racial diversity compared to reports of 29.5% and 18.9% for age and gender, respectively
- 70.5% also report “a great deal” to “a lot” of benefit from self-determination over work conditions
These statistics make me wonder about the resources these artists have as individuals already before forming as a co-op. Is it the nature of start-up conditions that hinder diversity or the way that places are run after the fact? Not all respondents reported having a business plan despite being in such an organization. This can contribute to lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion policy despite being motivated by artist equity overall. These findings are very important to consider, especially because alternative art spaces often collaborate and have the same values in writing, but that may not come across in practice or even a shared definition of the words chosen. What are the limits of a co-op or similar space for alleviating stressful work conditions when capitalism itself is not set up to function without exploitation? Exploring this helps to set our realistic limits for this project and potential future collaborations for Magik Press.
Proposed Actions
While Magik Press has an appealing website, the blog section is sparse and presents an opportunity to share thoughts and priorities as an artist and studio. This is the opposite of the studio Instagram, which is full of updates, calls for zine submissions, and personal reflections. I propose retroactively sharing a selection of these Instagram posts in blog post form for the blog. The website also has no mention of the Un*named Library, so creating a webpage about it is vital for outreach and increased event attendance. As mentioned in the project description above, proposed actions also include analyzing the zines and books already in the collection, consulting the local zine community, and arranging the logistics of the zine fair so a call for vendors can be posted in time for a summer event. While workshops have a set rate and not everyone can afford to make all services sliding scale, I propose a free demo of printing methods that can be done with common household items to bring people to the studio space, promote booking priced lessons and workshops, and give extra inspiration for creation at later zine club meetings. These actions can help low-income artists and art enthusiasts to have an idea of what to expect before visiting the space.
I project that based on work done so far and the possibility to share more information about plans via other fairs, performances, and events Magik Press will participate in throughout the year, a zine fair in New London can be a great success, bringing some attendees to interact with the studio on a regular basis due to the hands-on nature of zine community. This can continue to be a very flexible project through the iterative process of idea generation, creation, prototyping, and evaluating throughout the design thinking process (Patel, 2019). Close to the presentation of this project for the end of CIS 668 - Social Justice and Inclusion Advocacy, I was told that a change.org page highlighting the misdeeds of Hygienic Art was taken down for alleged defamation, despite references. Noting this recent escalation, I predict that combining artist advocacy in this project as intended may result in other forms of pushback, though it is hard to know who it may come from besides the gallery itself, as the complaint did not show a source. We cannot assume it was the gallery itself that wanted the page deleted. I recommend continued archiving of boycott documentation and local advice for artists navigating non-profits and galleries so all is not lost if something like an Instagram suspension occurs, which has taken away the work of many queer artists on the platform.
Dreyer, B., de Peuter, G., Sandoval Gomez, M., & Szaflarska, A. (2020). The Co-operative Alternative and the Creative Industries: A Technical Report on a Survey of Co-operatives in the cultural and technology sectors in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. [Report]. Cultural Workers Organize. https://culturalworkersorganize.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/The-Cooperative-Alternative-Technical-Report-Web.pdf
Mortensen, D. (2020, July 10). Stage 1 in the Design Thinking Process: Empathise with Your Users. Interaction Design Foundation - IxDF. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/stage-1-in-the-design-thinking-process-empathise-with-your-users
Patel, S. (2019, October 2). What Can We Learn From Libraries That Use Design Thinking? SYR-UMT. https://onlinegrad.syracuse.edu/blog/design-thinking/
Watson, A., & Bennett, A. (2022). Why Do People Read Zines? Meaning, Materiality and Cultures of Reading. In M. A. Thumala Olave (Ed.), The Cultural Sociology of Reading: The Meanings of Reading and Books Across the World (pp. 65–89). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13227-8_3