It’s cute as a button! (sorry)

dressesandyarn:

Button-sized accordion book.

New through Half Letter Press: Lisa Anne Auerbach

Through an arrangement with our good pal Lisa Anne Auerbach, we were able to obtain a bunch of discounted copies of this great, color photo-heavy catalog from her 2009 exhibition at UMMA in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The book includes an essay by Julia Bryon-Wilson and a conversation between Auerbach and Jacob Proctor. One focus of the book is Auerbach’s knitted sweaters and skirts

Here is Where There’s Drink There’s Always Danger from 2009.

New through Half Letter Press: Lisa Anne Auerbach

Through an arrangement with our good pal Lisa Anne Auerbach, we were able to obtain a bunch of discounted copies of this great, color photo-heavy catalog from her 2009 exhibition at UMMA in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The book includes an essay by Julia Bryon-Wilson and a conversation between Auerbach and Jacob Proctor. One focus of the book is Auerbach’s knitted sweaters and skirts.

Here is Never Neverland from 2009.

New through Half Letter Press: Lisa Anne Auerbach

Through an arrangement with our good pal Lisa Anne Auerbach, we were able to obtain a bunch of discounted copies of this great, color photo-heavy catalog from her 2009 exhibition at UMMA in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The book includes an essay by Julia Bryon-Wilson and a conversation between Auerbach and Jacob Proctor.

This exhibition catalog includes two bodies of work. The first is Auerbach’s photo series “Small Business.” While riding her bike around Los Angeles, as well as parts of Florida, Auerbach stops to photograph tiny buildings that house enterprises like a BBQ joint, a key-maker, insurance office, a psychic reader, a thrift shop, and even a mini-post office. These all appear to be single-person operations.

The book’s other focus is Auerbach’s knitted sweaters and skirts which bear messages (some of which are in deliciously bad taste) on a range of topics that include 9-11 memorializing, abortion rights, the death of Michael Jackson, suicide bombing, riding a bike versus driving a car, Presidential elections, and booze. Well over a dozen of these sweaters and outfits are documented here.

laughingsquid:

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Go Wisconsin!

pantslessprogressive:

l3fan-o-rama:

*RECALL* in lights on a crosswalk over East Washington Avenue in Madison, WI.

(photo credit Jenna Pope)

I’m sending some of my holiday gift money over to United Wisconsin. Thankfully, with the January 17th deadline looming, they already have most of the signatures needed to force a recall.

Temporary Services - Public Phenomena: Even though snow has been very light in Chicago so far this Winter, that hasn’t prevented people from claiming parking spaces. Here is a combination of a broken child’s chair and a child sized mini pallet. Documentation of other urban interventions can be found in our Public Phenomena books from 2008 and 2005.

Those of you in Philadelphia and New York City have a chance to meet author, activist, and artist Mary Patten at the end of January! 

Philadelphia: Friday, Jan. 27 at 1 pm at The Print Center, 1614 Latimer St.

New York City: Saturday, Jan. 28 at 7 pm at Bluestockings Bookstore, 172 Allen St.

Mary will be reading from her book Revolution As An Eternal Dream: The Exemplary Failure of the Madame Binh Graphics Collective at both events. Books will be available for sale and Salem from Temporary Services and Half Letter Press will be present as well. 

East Coast, hope to see you soon!

A nice note from the folks at Hyperallergic about an ongoing project we are doing with Sarah Ross, Laurie Jo Reynolds, and Tamms Year Ten to get magazine subscriptions to people in permanent solitary confinement using frequent flier miles.

hyperallergic:

Tamms Year Ten’s Supermax Subscriptions may sound more like a project for political or social change than an artwork, but the project was born of several groups of people whose artistic practice informs their political work, including Temporary Services and artist Sarah Ross. Organized with the Tamms Poetry Committee of Tamms Year Ten, an organization committed to advocacy on behalf of prisoners in the Tamms supermax security prison in Illinois, the Supermax Subscriptions project works to bring a little bit of the outside world into the cells of prisoners incarcerated in permanent solitary confinement. Various human rights and mental health groups have determined permanent solitary confinement as inhumane, and many prisoners in Tamms are being held there while waiting for or in spite of other sentencing. Supermax Subscriptions asks people to use their frequent flier miles to purchase magazine subscriptions to improve the quality of life of inmates who may only leave their cell 2-5 times a week to shower and exercise, also in enclosed spaces with only a slice of sky visible.

I think of this and other Tamms Year Ten initiatives (like their Photos for prisoners project) as a way to use creative problem solving for social change that might otherwise be put towards visual arts practice. Thinking about these projects under the heading of art also encourages us to expand how and to what ends we create art for. People often speak of arts’ ability to strengthen community and bring beauty into others’ lives, and I believe Tamms Year Ten is working towards those ends, just not in terms of conventional visual practice.

All orders from Half Letter Press will include a free copy of this postcard for as long as it remains in print.

publiccollectors:

Public Collectors is a big fan of guerrilla libraries and the People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street in particular. To encourage and support this work, I’ve reprinted Mandy Henk’s excellent essay “Occupy Libraries: Guerrilla Librarianship for the People” as a big, color offset, double-sided postcard. This is the front side of the postcard. You can read the full essay here.

2,500 copies were printed and a thousand of these cards will travel with People’s Library librarians to be given away when they speak at the American Library Association Midwinter conference in Dallas on Saturday, January 21st. More details on that presentation and their work here.

If you’d like to support this project and receive a couple copies in the mail, please consider making a donation of $1.00 or more to my Paypal email address. If you donate more than a couple dollars, I’ll throw in a free Public Collectors booklet and additional ephemera. Thanks.

Temporary Services has been scanning our old publications and putting new PDFs on our Booklets page for free download. Here is:

Prisoners’ Inventions - Three Dialogues, Booklet #61, April 2004.

Prisoners’ Inventions was a collaboration with Angelo, an incarcerated artist. He illustrated many incredible inventions made by prisoners to fill needs that the restrictive environment of the prison tries to supress. The cover features a recreation of Angelo’s prison cell that is part of exhibitions of Prisoners’ Inventions.

This booklet includes several discussions about this complicated collaboration. The full length book Prisoners’ Inventions remains out of print however we do plan to get it back into print eventually. The next edition will have a lot of new drawings of inventions that Angelo has observed in recent years.

You can see which Temporary Services booklets we still have available for sale on our page at Half Letter Press.

In response to a post we made yesterday about Ghost Houses, Deborah Watson alerted us to this amazing work in Philadelphia.

Here is her letter to us:

Hi, I came across your blog about Ghost Houses.  Here is a link to my most favorite one, in Philadelphia.  It’s on two walls facing a Sunoco gas station.  The artists painted a trompe l’oeil reflection of a church, St James Episcopal, that used to be on the site.  Even the bricks in the mural are hand-painted!  It’s so subtle that you have to realize that the shadows are not real.  

Images are at the bottom of this page and you can click to enlarge
http://kimsenior.blogspot.com/2008/01/michael-webb-architectural-muralist.html

There are any number of amazing murals in Philly courtesy of the mural arts project, but this is the only one I know of that reflects a building that used to be there. The artists won a 1999 design award from Society for Environmental Graphic Design .

Enjoy
Deborah

Thanks, Deborah!!!