Volume III: Work Book, 2019
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The Tool Book Project Volume III: Work Book is a risograph magazine featuring 18 artists and collaborative teams addressing and a series of online artist features whose work addresses labor, leisure and it’s cultural intersections with art production.
Work Book, the third volume of The Tool Book Project, considers the future of institutional critique, direct social action, how our daily labor and leisure intersect with the ways we relate, resist, and create, and what can we glean from revisiting past Art and Labor movements.
The summer of 2019 marked 50 years since the world changing political and cultural events of 1969. While the moon landing and Woodstock are the most touted events of 1969, this was also the year that Lorraine Hansberry's play "To Be Young, Gifted & Black," premiered in NYC, the Stonewall Uprising, led by trans women of color, galvanized what would become the “gay liberation”
movement, students gathered on college campuses across the country to protest the Viet-Nam war, demand abortion rights and demand better representation for black and latinx students and professors, and Native Americans occupied and claimed Alcatraz island.
1969 also saw a series of actions led by the Art Workers Coalition (AWC), asking for greater inclusion and a shifting of power at major museums in NYC. The AWC famously began with the artist Takis walking into the MoMA and removing his own artwork from an exhibition. It was also built on the energy of other artist-led activism during the 1960’s, including The Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) protests at The Whitney Museum in November 1968. As I write this, Warren B. Kanders, whose company manufactured tear gas canisters and smoke grenades used recently against asylum seekers in California and protesters in Puerto Rico, has just resigned as Vice Chairperson of Whitney Museum Board of Directors. This was prompted by an open letter by Whitney Staff, a series of protests and removal of artworks at the request of artists from the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
In Work Book, Asha Canalos and Jeanette Hart-Mann’s contribution: “A Censorship Timeline: Hey, It’s Another State-sponsored Obfuscation in Cultural Real-Time” outlines an ongoing series of events in which zines that address social, health and environmental crises related to fracking in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico were censored by the New Mexico Museum of Art. Gina Goico’s essay about
her publicly engaged artwork “Pelliza: Labor and Communities” and Susan Briante’s article about her poetry series “The Market Wonders: On the Impossibility of Personal Accounting,” map the social and emotional effects of global capitalism on culture, community and individual lives. Jaimes Mayhew, an artist and educator, and Lamont Stanley Bryant, a community psychology graduate student, trace the confluences of their respective practices and their personal partnership in “Interdisciplinary Work in Relationships”. The remaining thirteen contributors present a broad set of themes, ranging from domestic labor, union workers and the WPA to global textile production, cultural translation and inter-special relationships.
Created, Designed and Edited by: Sarah G. Sharp.Work Book was printed on a MZ790U 2-Color Risograph Printer by TXTbooks, an artist-run independent publishing initiative in Brooklyn, NY. http://www.txtbooks.us/
Work Book’s poster insert “Plants and People Kicking Ass Together” and it’s accompanying essay “People, Plants, and the Work That Lies Before Us”, designed and written by Asha Canalos, was printed by Nicole Ringel, an interdisciplinary artist and printmaker based in Baltimore, MD.
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