Louis
Place
Publishing is ours!
A keynote
with Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Saturday, March 22 - 1pm ET
What you’ll learn
In this keynote, learner Kameelah Janan Rasheed shares the role writing and publishing can play for a lifelong learner.
With Kameelah, you’ll learn how writing and publishing can play a critical role in artistic practice—to keep us humble, to reconnect us to our ongoing love affair with research and discovery, to remind us of the possibilities of experimentation with material and form (from substance to monograph to zine), to help us remember not to wait for opportunities but instead to create them.
You’ll also learn about the importance of owning your own means of production and how to build ethical collaborations with institutions—while building your own to take care of you and yours.
About Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Image description: A black and white, slightly hazy headshot of Kameelah gazing serenely into the camera. She wears a dark hijab along with dark, impeccably lined, lipstick, a septum piercing, and nose stud.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed (كاميلا جنان رشيد) “complete(K-M-L) – hidden/obscured (J-N-N) – rightly guided(R-SH-D)” is a learner from East Palo Alto, CA. A language and text-based artist, she is most curious about lifecycles – the life, death, afterlives, and hauntings – of Black knowledge production as expressed through physical spaces, spiritual beliefs, and written materials. She creates sprawling, “architecturally-scaled” installations; public installations; publications; prints; performances; performance scores; poems; video; learning environments, and other forms yet to be determined.
Her most recent solo exhibitions include REDCAT (2024, i want to climb inside every word and lick the salty neck of each letter; Los Angeles, CA); KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023, in the coherence we weep; Berlin, DE), Art Institute of Chicago (2023, Unsewn Time; Chicago, IL), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022, I am not done yet; Hannover, DE). Most recently, she is a recipient of the 2024 High Desert Test Sites Fellowship; a 2023 Working Artist Fellowship; the 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research; a 2022 Creative Capital Award; a 2022 Betty Parsons Fellow – Artists2Artists Art Matters Award; a 2022 Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants - Experiments with Google; and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Rasheed is the author of seven artists' books: rub, lick, drink, eat (REDCAT and Rasheed’s publishing project, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language or an invitation to be feral hypertext(Emerson College and Rasheed’s publishing project, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); in the coherence, we weep (KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2023); i am not done yet (Mousse Publishing, 2022); An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019); No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019); and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). Her writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, The New Inquiry, Shift Space, Active Cultures, and The Believer. Before her adult publishing, she authored half a dozen books as a six and seven-year-old at James B. Flood School.
She is a full-time instructor at the Yale School of Art in the Sculpture Department and seasonally teaches courses at the School for Poetic Computation. She has taught undergraduate and graduate students at Barnard College - Columbia University, Cooper Union, and the School of Visual Arts. Since 2022, Rasheed co-teaches a writing and publishing intensive to Bennington College (formally affiliated with the University of the Arts) MFA dance students at the Institut Chorégraphique International (International Choreographic Institute) summer conference in Montpellier, France. She has delivered visiting artist lectures at various institutions, such as Yale University, Rhode Island School of Design, Rutgers University, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Rice University, University of California at San Diego, University of Maryland, Northwestern University and more. She has delivered a series of keynotes including the Information+ Conference (2021) Contemporary Artists’ Book Conference, as part of Printed Matter Art Book Fair (2022); and CODEX Foundation (2024). In 2021, she was invited to present at the Xerography. Women Artists 1965-1990 Symposium with the Getty Foundation and Institut National d’histoire de l’art in Paris, France.
Alongside her work within existing institutions, she experiments with institutional design and community building through the many projects she stewards through KJR Studios. She founded The Little Octopus School (est. 2024), a roaming learning laboratory and publishing imprint (Scratch Disks Full) rooted in play, curiosity, and collaboration. She is also the founder of Orange Tangent Study (est. 2020), a consultancy reimagining the design of learning experiences and dispersing over $10,000 in unrestricted microgrants for artists on the cusp of new ideas. In 2016, with the support of the Magnum Foundation, she founded Mapping the Spirit, a digital archive exploring Black spiritual practice in North America —not as fixed destinations but as dynamic movements, iterative revisions, and emergent ways of knowing. By 2022, with funding from Creative Capitol, Mapping the Spirit was absorbed into a larger project, BLACK GATHERINGS, a hub that hosts four Black North American archival projects
Artist publishing 101: choose your own adventure
with Rachel Valinsky and Steffani Jemison
Saturday, March 22 - 2pm ET
What you’ll learn
Editor and publisher Rachel Valinsky and aLP co-founder Steffani Jemison provide a comprehensive introduction to publishing for beginners.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- common publishing timelines for visual artists, from drafting to post-publication
- an introduction to key collaborators in most publishing projects
- publishing vocabulary for newbies, so you can sound like a pro as you head to print
The goal of this session? To boost your confidence as you navigate the next steps in your journey to publication.
About Rachel Valinsky
Image description: A black and white, grainy headshot of Rachel, looking knowingly into the camera while standing in front of what seems to be a gated city park. She wears a cozy knit jacket, hoop earrings, and her hair falls just below her shoulders.
Rachel Valinsky is a writer, editor, and translator based in New York. She is co-founder and Artistic Director of Wendy’s Subway, a nonprofit arts and literary reading room, writing space, and independent publisher, and Director of Publications at the Center for Art, Research, and Alliances. She was a Curatorial Fellow at The Kitchen, an Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Queens Museum, Friday Night Reading Series Co-Curator at the Poetry Project, art writer-in-residence at the Banff Centre, and an art critic-in-residence at CUE Art Foundation/Art 21 Magazine. Her writing on performance, dance, and moving image work has appeared in Artforum, Art in America, BOMB, frieze, e-flux criticism, and elsewhere, and her translations have appeared from Semiotext(e), Editions Lutanie, Pluto Books, and Editions 1989. Rachel holds an MPhil in Art History from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and teaches courses in art history, performance studies, art writing, and critical thinking at The New School.
About Steffani Jemison
Steffani Jemison is an interdisciplinary artist and writer in Brooklyn, New York whose work explores such questions as: How do we move? How are we moved by each other? In dialogue with interlocutors (living and ancestral), her work connects mark-making, gesture, proposal, projection, movement, and document.
Jemison has presented solo exhibitions and commissioned performances at JOAN Los Angeles, Greene Naftali, Mass MoCA, Jeu de Paume, CAPC Bordeaux, the Museum of Modern Art, LAXART, and other venues. Her work has been included in significant generational exhibitions, including Greater New York 2021 and the Whitney Biennial 2019, and is part of many public collections, including the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Jemison’s novella A Rock, A River, A Street was published by Primary Information in 2022; she has also written for Artforum and The Brooklyn Rail. Jemison is a co-founder of the writing community at Louis Place and an Associate Professor at Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts.
Art Book Publishing
with Karen Kelly of Dancing Foxes Press
Saturday, March 22 - 3:30pm ET
What you’ll learn
Karen Kelly, editor and publisher of Dancing Foxes Press, tells us how to get an “art book”—the kind you see in museum bookshops—made and distributed. Here’s what you’ll learn:
- The seed of an art book: what is the origin story for the monographs, catalogues, and project-based books you see on shelves?
- Collaboration is key: learn why so many art books are produced collaboratively by galleries, institutions, publishers, and artists working together
- Budgeting and funding for monographs and other art books: learn what budget range is typical for art books, and what percentage of a typical budget is dedicated to the biggest categories: printing and production, shipping, paying writers, and more.
By the end of this session, you’ll understand how art books move from conception to completion.
About Karen Kelly
Karen Kelly is an editor and publisher based in Brooklyn. From 1989 to 2011, she directed the publication program and organized special programs at Dia Art Foundation, New York. In addition, she has held editorial positions at the literary journal Conjunctions and at the art journal Parkett. In 2012, Kelly founded Dancing Foxes Press with Barbara Schroeder. Dancing Foxes Press is recognized for distinctive publications that are commissioned for their specificity and realized through editorial collaboration and hands-on production and craftsmanship. Books recently published/co-published by the press include: God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin, Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study, **and The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism.
Traditional literary publishing for artists and iconoclasts
with Erika Stevens
Saturday, March 22 - 3:30pm ET
What you’ll learn
In this session, literary agent and former editor Erika Stevens provides a comprehensive introduction to traditional publishing for nontraditional artists. Here’s what we’ll cover:
- An introduction to the structure of the traditional publishing industry—including the Big Five publishing houses, independent presses, and academic presses.
- Assessing your goals and finding the right home for your project: aiming for the publishing experience that's the best fit.
- A more detailed discussion of how publishers acquire new projects.
- Need an agent, or querying directly? Erika will share her querying tips.
- What happens once you sign on the dotted line? Erika will briefly review the lifecycle of a traditionally published book, from manuscript to marketing.
Bring your questions: we’ve set aside 15 minutes for Q&A.
About Erika Stevens
Image description: A pale woman in her mid-forties with wavy hair, wearing glasses and a necklace over a black top, smiles at the camera.
Erika Stevens (she/hers) has acquired, edited, and developed the work of a wide range of authors over the course of two decades in publishing. She began her career at academic presses, including Duke, UNC, and UGA Presses, before spending twelve years at independent publisher Coffee House Press, where she finished as Editorial Director. Authors whose work she has shepherded include Eloisa Amezcua, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Kyle Dargan, Latasha N. Nevada Diggs, Saeed Jones, Eugene Lim, Dawn Lundy Martin, Bao Phi, Justin Phillip Reed, Natasha Trethewey, Anne Waldman, Karen Tei Yamashita, and many others. Her authors have been awarded or named finalists for the National Book Award, the Hurston Wright Award, the Kingsley and Kate Tufts Award, the PEN/Osterweil Award, the Whiting Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Kate Tufts Award, the NBCC Award, the Lambda Awards, and others. Erika is currently an agent with Salky Literary Management.
Publishing in community: A keynote
with Mindy Seu
Sunday, March 23 - 1pm ET
What you’ll learn
How can books be used as tools for community-building? Join Mindy Seu, author of The Cyberfeminism Index, for a keynote lecture and workshop that explores how book-making and publishing can be leveraged to cultivate meaningful networks.
In this session, you’ll learn how Seu brought together a diverse network of artists, designers, educators, students, institutions, and thinkers to present 89 lectures across 18 countries over the course of a year. An interdisciplinary artist herself, Seu will delve into the transformative role that books can play in building communities far beyond the scope of the medium. Whether you're an aspiring writer or published author, this workshop will inspire new ways to use books as catalysts for connection and collaboration.
About Mindy Seu
Image description: A headshot of Mindy standing against a white background. She looks calm and intent, her hair is wavy and lands past her shoulders, and she wears chunky earrings and a black tank top, cut at the top to create a collar around the neck.
Mindy Seu is an artist and technologist based in New York City and Los Angeles whose practice focuses on technology-driven performance and publication. In 2023, Seu published Cyberfeminism Index, a pseudo-encyclopaedic book that gathers three decades of online activism and net art. It was commissioned by Rhizome, awarded the Graham Foundation Grant, and underwent an international book tour with 89 performative readings across 18 countries with sold out events at the New Museum (NYC), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Amant Foundation (Brooklyn), Lafayette Anticipations (Paris), among others. Seu is currently developing a new lecture performance called A Sexual History of the Internet, set to tour in Fall 2025, along with an eponymous artist book published by Metalabel.
Her latest writing surveys feminist economies, historical precursors of the metaverse, and the materiality of the internet. She has lectured internationally at cultural institutions (MoMA, Barbican Centre), academic institutions (Columbia University, Central Saint Martins), and mainstream platforms (Pornhub, SSENSE, Google), and been a resident at MacDowell, Sitterwerk Foundation, Pioneer Works, and Internet Archive. Her design commissions and consultation include projects for the Serpentine Gallery, Canadian Centre for Architecture, and MIT Media Lab. Her work has been featured in Vanity Fair, Frieze, Dazed, Brooklyn Rail, i-D, and more. Mindy holds an M.Des. from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a B.A. in Design Media Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles. As an educator, Mindy was formerly an Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art. She is currently an Associate Professor at University of California, Los Angeles in the Department of Design Media Arts.
Book design and production
with Elizabeth Karp-Evans
Sunday, March 23 - 2pm ET
What you’ll learn
In this 1-hour session, designer and publisher Elizabeth Karp-Evans demystifies book production. By the end of the session, you’ll understand key factors to consider when:
- Identifying design and production collaborators for your art book or self-published book.
- Building a budget for your book.
- Building a timeline for your book, considering printing and shipping.
About Elizabeth Karp-Evans
Photo: Ned Rogers
Image description: A black and white headshot of Elizabeth with a serene expression and wearing a striped button down. Her left hand is curled and rests on her cheek and her dark hair is brushed to the same side.
Image description: A black and white headshot of Elizabeth with a serene expression and wearing a striped button down. Her left hand is curled and rests on her cheek and her dark hair is brushed to the same side.
Elizabeth Karp-Evans is a writer, editor, designer and founding partner and director of Pacific. She was born in Portland, Oregon and lived in Los Angeles before moving to New York where she has worked in the arts and culture sector for two decades creating strategy, branding and publications for global clients including BMW, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, A24, and Fondation Cartier.
Storytelling, identity and plurality are at the core of her work in both strategic thinking and graphic design. She is deeply passionate about using language as a tool for communication and as a graphic gesture. With Pacific, Elizabeth has created visual identities for several major cultural institutions including The Kitchen and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
As a publication designer and publisher, she has created books for the artists Marina Adams, Alvaro Barrington, Jordan Casteel, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Judy Chicago, Maren Hassinger, E. Jane, Rick Lowe, Servane Mary, Meleko Mokgosi, Senga Nengudi, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Tschabalala Self, Rose B. Simpson, and Kara Walker, amongst others.
Elizabeth serves on the Board of Directors of the New-York nonprofit Artists and Mothers and is the recipient of Meta’s Black Visionaries Grant and a Rauschenberg Residency Fellow. She is the former Director of Media, Communications and Content at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she worked for nearly a decade. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School for Social Research (now The New School of Public Engagement) and a BA in English Literature and minor in Screenwriting from Loyola Marymount University.
Improvisational jazz as publishing method
with Yusuf Hassan
Sunday, March 23 - 3:30pm ET
What you’ll learn
In this lecture and short workshop, Yusuf Hassan, founder of Black Mass Publishing, dives into the methods and frameworks he uses to build books.
Inspired by improvisational jazz—a model Black Mass Publishing uses to produce publications swiftly—Hassan will speak to the artistic value of urgency, and how publishing can serve as a tool for communication and discovery.
About Yusuf Hassan and BlackMass Publishing
Image description: A black and white image of Yusuf sitting behind a table with his arms crossed, wearing a dark sweatshirt and baseball hat. A small framed painting hangs behind him and a stack of books, papers, and pamphlets lie on the table.
Yusuf Hassan is the founder of BlackMass Publishing. Hassan’s work explores the idea of the book his reductive technique and meditative approach challenge the physical and poetic boundaries of his materials canceling the idea of restrictions within his work allows him to analyze it with no limitations. using printed matter as a physical way of expression. Much of Hassan’s success is attributed to his unique ability to express dramatic and emotional content through publications and printmaking.
Hassan holds publications in the permanent collection of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Langston Hughes Library, Thomas J. Watson Library, The Houghton Library, and The Whitney Museum Library.
Resources for writers
with Steffani Jemison, Naima Lowe, and Quincy Flowers
Sunday, March 23 - 4:30pm ET
What you’ll learn
Coordinators of the community at Louis Place share their favorite resources for writers: craft books and prompts, approaches to workshop and feedback, and strategies for organizing applications and submissions.
About Steffani Jemison
Steffani Jemison is an interdisciplinary artist and writer in Brooklyn, New York. In dialogue with interlocutors (living and ancestral), her work connects mark-making, gesture, proposal, projection, movement, and document.
Jemison has presented solo exhibitions and commissioned performances at the CAC Geneva, JOAN Los Angeles, Mass MoCA, Jeu de Paume, CAPC Bordeaux, the Museum of Modern Art, LAXART, and other venues. Her work has been included in significant generational exhibitions, including Greater New York (2021) and the Whitney Biennial (2019), and is part of many public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Tiffany Foundation Fellowship, a Herb Alpert Award, a NYFA Fellowship, an Anonymous Was A Woman Award, and a Radcliffe Fellowship, among others. Her novella A Rock, A River, A Street was published by Primary Information in 2022; she has also written for Artforum and The Brooklyn Rail.
Jemison’s collaborative projects include at Louis Place (a writing community co-founded with Quincy Flowers and led with Naima Lowe), Mikrokosmos (a platform for listening and performance with Justin Hicks), Future Plan and Program (a publishing project), and Alpha’s Bet Is Not Over Yet (with Jamal Cyrus). She learns with and from her students at Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts, where she is an Associate Professor.
About Quincy Flowers
Quincy Flowers received his Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston, M.A. in American Literature from New York University, where he was a New York Times Fellow, and B.A. in English from Kennesaw State University.
Flowers is a fiction writer whose research is concerned with eighteenth—and nineteenth-century social and cultural practices that emerged around tea, coffee, and wine. He is working on a novel about Duke Nelson, the Georgia okra farmer, winemaker, mechanical engineer, and inventor, as well as a collection of essays organized by wine-tasting notes.
His work has been published in Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire and Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, published in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum (Prestel, 2015). With Steffani Jemison, his performance Flight Theater was presented in 2024 at the Centre d’art contemporain Geneve and in 2025 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. He has also collaborated with composer and performer Justin Hicks. He is a co-founder of the writing community at Louis Place.
About Naima Lowe
Naima Lowe makes performances, texts, drawings, installations, and videos using transgressive and radical traditions of Black utterance. She rigorously cultivates and protects her intuitive sensibilities; fed by a deep intellectual and familial allegiance to the liberatory ethos of improvisation. She uses the specificity of her personal and family history to create works about desire and longing; amplifying and abstracting emotional states to unsettle the perceived boundary between mind, body, spirit, and one another.
Naima has a BA from Brown University and an MFA from Temple University. Her work has been shown at Anthology Film Archive, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Wing Luke Museum, MiX Experimental Film Festival, National Queer Art Festival, The Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and the Henry Art Gallery. She’s held residency fellowships at The Bemis Center, Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center, and The Lighthouse Works. Naima was a 2023-24 Mabou Mines SUITESpace Resident, and previously she was a 2021-2022 Mid America Arts Alliance Interchange ArtistFellow, recipient of the 2022-23 Mid America Arts Alliance Artistic Innovation Award, and a recipient of a 2022 Jazz Road Creative Residency. Naima resides in Tulsa, within the Muscogee Creek Nation Reservation, where she spends her time being free and talking to animals.