Important Conversation: The Agency of Artists: Through and Beyond Books →

So proud of my SAC team for leading this important conversation on The Agency of Artists: Through and Beyond Books at CAA this February
Kelly E. Chorpening University of Nevada, Reno and Matthew L. Conboy Slippery Rock University

Saturday, February 21, 2026, 2:30 PM - 4:00 PM
Hilton Chicago - Lower Level - Salon C-4 (Hybrid)

In an era when books are being weaponized and libraries defunded, contemporary artists are re-imagining books as a forum for criticism, creative production, and as a means to expand notions of belonging through time and place.This panel will explore books through a variety of means and methods, whether this be through collective story-telling during the Egyptian revolution, a forest for Future Library in Norway, or community-building at a South Chicago archive. Presentations will reveal writing as a social medium, creating dialogue across a variety of global contexts. The book is being reinvented and redefined as new technologies and imaginaries shape its production, presentation, and consumption in print and online.

Meta-publishing: Asian Diasporic Networks and the Social Life of Railing Codex (2025)

Yu (Renee) Jin, University of Rochester
While artists’ books have long been recognized for their political potential and institutional critique (Lippard 1977; Adema and Hall 2013), their role in fostering community and belonging—particularly as collective and relational practices—has received comparatively little theoretical attention. I frame these practices as “meta-publishing”: not simply producing alternative artistic forms, but creating an infrastructure that expands the social life of books (Appadurai 1986). The first part situates Asian diasporic publishing labels within the broader history of artists’ books and the theoretical propositions that shaped the field. From Ulises Carrión’s notion of the book as object to Johanna Drucker’s framing of artists’ books as a “zone of activity,” bookworks have been understood as sites for formal and political experimentation. Independent publishing collectives extend these legacies into a social terrain, transforming what Hendricks and Moore called “the page as an alternative space” into a platform for collective visibility and cross-cultural exchange. I then examine Railing Codex, an artist-led project published by Page Bureau in 2025, which reconceptualizes the book as both curatorial device and collaborative process. Through modular design, distributed authorship, and hybrid circulation strategies, Railing Codex exemplifies how bookworks provide as an infrastructure of care within diasporic and transnational networks. Combining historical mapping with case studies, I argue that independent publishing operates as both an aesthetic practice as well as a cultural commons—a political medium that materializes belonging in ways that exceed the printed page.

A polyvocal, people's dictionary of the Egyptian revolution

Amira Hanafi, Susquehanna University
A Dictionary of the Revolution documents people’s political speech in the aftermath of the 2011 uprising in Egypt. The project, led by experimental writer and book artist Amira Hanafi, engaged participants in conversations about the evolving language of the revolution, prompted by vocabulary cards containing terms that were frequently used in conversations at the time. People talked about what the words meant to them, who they heard using them, and how their meanings had changed since the revolution. The recorded material was archived and used to produce a bilingual digital publication containing polyvocal texts woven from transcriptions of these people’s speech.

The digital publication uses interactive chord diagrams to visualize relationships between terms. Visitors to the website [http://qamosalthawra.com] use these diagrams to navigate through a constellation of vocabulary, following different narrative paths through a web of concepts, objects, places, and characters. The publication was launched in 2017 in its original colloquial Egyptian Arabic. In 2018, a version in English translation was also launched at the same domain. The website also gives access to an archive of sound clips, images, and transcriptions collected for the project.

The project was funded by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, and the digital publication was also supported by Rhizome. It won the 2019 Danish Public Library Prize for Electronic Literature, the 2018 New Media Writing Prize, and a 2017 Artraker Award for Changing the Narrative.

Being Prepared: The Absurd Publications of the Beuyscouts of Amerika

April Sheridan, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
How does a time of political upheaval impact artists' material practices?

During the Culture Wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s, a small international artist activist collective began making artists’ publications that addressed the ongoing political attacks on US government funded arts grants. Acting on the margins of the art world, the Beuyscouts of Amerika, led by “Norman Conquest,” took material inspiration from the work of Joseph Beuys.This paper will situate the works of the Beuyscouts of Amerika between contemporary and controversial publicly funded art works with the intention of revealing the demands of avant-garde histories, especially in regards to materials.

By taking a close look at the unusual art objects, mail art, and books from the collective, we can see how works like Piss Bush aimed at the lawmakers and critics of that time, but used the visual and material tropes of Beuys to further a conversation about art history in general. Approaching this through a lens of a political artists’ publications and the outsider status of artists’ books, we can start to see the impact of political life on material choices, as well as connections to other politically active artist activist groups.