Pittsburgh Art Book Fair Panel Discussion
Guests: Erin Mallea and Paper Buck of Tree News, Bekezela Mguni of the Black Unicorn Library and Archive Project, and Adriana Monsalve of Homie House Press. Host: Christopher Kardambikis Recorded on September 9, 2023 at the Carnegie Museum of Art Erin Mallea is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the past and present of particular microcosms as entry points into larger environmental, social, and political conditions. Often public and collaborative in nature, her work manifests in a range of media including installation, film, photography, and writing. She sent vibrations from a giant fungus throughout the atmosphere and currently publishes Tree News, a newsletter about trees, people and places. Erin holds a MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (2019) and is an Assistant Professor of Art at the Pennsylvania State University School of Visual Arts. Paper Buck is an interdisciplinary visual artist, printmaker, and writer. His recent work is focused on place-centered research that critically explores white settler constructions of conservation, ecology, and the "American Landscape." Paper received his MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2020 and earned a Bachelor's degree in Studio Art from Macalester College in 2008. His practice is informed by a background in community organizing that centers anti-racist education, decolonial movements, and transgender justice. He was formerly a leadership team member at the Transgender, Gender-Variant and Intersex Justice Project, Unsettling Minnesota and the Catalyst Project. He publishes a collaborative artist newsletter, Tree News, with artist Erin Mallea. Bekezela Mguni is a queer Trinidadian artist, radical librarian, and educator. She has over 15 years of community organizing experience in the Reproductive Justice movement and holds an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh. She completed her first micro-residency at the Pittsburgh creative hub Boom Concepts and was featured in the 2015 Open Engagement Conference. She launched the Black Unicorn Library and Archive Project. The Black Unicorn cultivates libraries as sites of learning, possibility, and freedom celebrating the literary and artistic contributions of Black women, queer, Trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people. Honoring the far-reaching influence their storytelling has had on the lives of generations worldwide. She was a featured artist of the 2017 Activist Print Project, a partnership between, Artist Image Resource, BOOM concepts, and the Andy Warhol Museum. Bekezela is a Boom Concepts studio member, a community space and gallery dedicated to the development of artists and creative entrepreneurs. She is currently the Artistic Director at Dreams of Hope which affirms the voices and leadership of LGBTQ youth through the arts. Adriana Monsalve is an artist, cultural worker and collaborative publisher working in the photobook medium. Along with Caterina Ragg, Monsalve is co-founder of Homie House Press, a radical cooperative platform that challenges the ever-changing forms of storytelling with image and text. Within her photographic practice, Monsalve is an archivist and visual communicator who produces in-depth stories on identity through the nuances in between race, gender, and immigrant adjacent experiences. Within her cultural work as a collaborative publisher, she holds space for and with underrepresented communities through the multidisciplinary platform of Homie House Press (HHP); a cooperative playground where fotos become books, a safe space for secret stories and an open house for honest content that meets at the intersection of personal, political, and poetic. She is rigorously pushing towards finding ways for photographers and publishers to cultivate the capacity for care and tenderness within structures that actively work against their manifestations. She defines intimacy as the experience of being genuinely seen, heard, and held by another person or group of people. --- Su
