In Theorem, spare images, distilled text, and the resonant space between investigate the legacy of secrets acquired in childhood and held through a life.

The edition is a very limited edition of 30. Hand-bound, letterpressed, held in a unique wrap, with original hand working of each book, Theorem  represents a subtle yet dynamic conversation between text and image. Because both image and text have their own stories to tell, the two are not often on facing pages.  Rather, the reader must turn a page to move from each to each, then turn back to consider the resonance of what came before, what follows. The book is large—12.5" x 12.5"—and each of its five sections reduces slightly in size.  The effect is a tactile and emotional winnowing.

Maren
Celest

Maren Celest, direct result of a moment of passion on February 2nd, 1987. Born October 29, night 'fore devil's night. That may or may not mean a thing. She is a storyteller that employs a broad skill set; vocal work, musical composition, all kinds of visual design, and writing. She has shown her photography and short films internationally, and collaborates with many amazing musicians in Chicago to create visuals on their behalf. She performs live digital foley (sound effects), vocals, narration and some instrumentation for Manual Cinema, a performance collective, design studio, and film/video production company that combines handmade shadow puppetry, cinematic techniques, and innovative sound and music to create immersive visual stories for stage and screen. She created and runs Law of Ice, a vintage shop focused on gender-neutral clothing. She has previously released two albums and an EP with the band Photographers; I Saw the Sun will be her first official LP and vinyl record as a solo songwriter/composer, though her tracks have had lovely collaboration added by some of her favorite musicians.

I Saw the Sun is an invitation to explore a sure-footedness that is paradoxically rooted in the recognition of the precariousness of life. It looks to distill empathy, awe, urgency and gratitude from the wild desires, fears, and limited time we share together.

This book and album are meant to perform publicly a private confrontation and catharsis of fear, sometimes powerfully, sometimes on its hands and knees—in hope of seeing seductive mystery in the unknown, and to turn fear into a tool.

The words offered have been carefully shaped like knives—sharpened by humor and tempered by the urgency of mortality, with the sharpest ones brought to you in a soft melodic sheath… tools not for violence, but to cut away disillusionment and the unnecessary.

On days one needs to cut loose, it hopes to be a book of pocket knives. And, in a more substantial moment, “A long curved blade in the hand of a sweetheart.”

...Or, at least, a good swift kick in the butt from a friend that wants to see you be true.

McKenzie
Chinn

McKenzie Chinn is a poet, actor, and teaching artist whose work has appeared in PANK, Crab Fat Magazine, The Fem, Juked, Sundog Lit, and others. She has performed her poetry and worked as an actor on stages across Chicago and in Washington, DC, as well as on film and television.

Growing Concerns Poetry Collective's Five Fifths features new poetry by the group's poets McKenzie Chinn and Mykele Deville, including the collected text from the collective's inaugural album WE HERE: Thank Your For Noticing. In this tandem collection of deeply personal work, Chinn and Deville interrogate the nature of selfhood, blackness, community, love, ritual, and vulnerability while celebrating perseverance and survival in the face of generational and systemic marginalization. 

Antonia
Contro

Antonia Contro is a multi-disciplinary artist whose site-specific exhibitions include Tempus Fugit at the American Philosophical Society Museum, Closed/Open at The Newberry Library, and Descry at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Contro’s work is in the collections of the American Philosophical Society Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Block Museum, Davis Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, and New York Public Library.

In Theorem, spare images, distilled text, and the resonant space between investigate the legacy of secrets acquired in childhood and held through a life.

The edition is a very limited edition of 30. Hand-bound, letterpressed, held in a unique wrap, with original hand working of each book, Theorem  represents a subtle yet dynamic conversation between text and image. Because both image and text have their own stories to tell, the two are not often on facing pages.  Rather, the reader must turn a page to move from each to each, then turn back to consider the resonance of what came before, what follows. The book is large—12.5" x 12.5"—and each of its five sections reduces slightly in size.  The effect is a tactile and emotional winnowing.

Edward
Cushenberry

Edward Cushenberry is a multidisciplinary artist who was born and raised in Orange County, CA. He now lives and works in Los Angeles, where he splits his time between photographing those who are close to him and drawing everything else that's going on in his world.

While nothing lasts, is a collection of intimate and sometimes intrusive photographs of my very close friends and family. This project started four years ago at a party, when I made a picture of my friend crying after she told me she wanted to break up with her boyfriend. After that night, I felt compelled to document every moment of my friends' and family's lives—the good and the bad. I wanted to do this to better understand how we collectively cope with life, love, heartbreak and death. Since this project began, I have seen friendships come and go, been witness to pursuits of love, moments of intimacy, joy, and self-reflection, seen rejected inhibitions, consequences of actions, loved ones facing their own mortality while lying in hospital beds. These moments have been lessons in how nothing really lasts, helping me to embrace life as it is. Throughout these experiences, I have found life to have a tendency to be beautiful.

While nothing lasts, was published in three editions: paperback, hardcover, and a special edition box set with poster and 4x6 prints.

Mykele
Deville

Mykele Deville is a rapper, poet, curator, and actor from the west side of Chicago. His solo hip-hop and poetic recordings include Peace, Fam (2017), Each One Teach One (2016), and Super Predator (2016). He has performed on stages across Chicago and led workshops on hip-hop and identity in the midwest and Portland. His work has been profiled in the Chicago Tribune, The Reader, Consequence of Sound, Vocalo radio, and NPR radio.

Growing Concerns Poetry Collective's Five Fifths features new poetry by the group's poets McKenzie Chinn and Mykele Deville, including the collected text from the collective's inaugural album WE HERE: Thank Your For Noticing. In this tandem collection of deeply personal work, Chinn and Deville interrogate the nature of selfhood, blackness, community, love, ritual, and vulnerability while celebrating perseverance and survival in the face of generational and systemic marginalization. 

kwabena
foli

kwabena foli is a multidisciplinary artist born in Belgium but raised in South Side Chicago. He is the author of BOI BI, and the visual poetry collection learning rhythm (Flowered Concrete). He is also a Chicago poetry slam champion and national poetry slam finalist. His visual showings include Fredericks & Mae’s, Chicago Artist Coalition, University of Illinois and elsewhere. He resides in Chicago.

“Where you from? 

is a question I get often when I’m anywhere else but home while in the middle of an enthralling conversation, and there’s always a look of surprise/intrigue when I tell them...

I’m from Chicago. South Side.

Suddenly, the conversation goes from whatever cool thing we were rapping about to everything Chi-Raq: guns, murder, drill — a stigma that informs the social conversation & policy affecting our lives today. However, the Chicago I know is more than pop culture’s imagination of it.

what some refer to as gangs, i refer to as neighborhoods; 
folk i went to school with.
folk i played basketball with.
folk that protected me from bullies. 
folk i fell in love with.
folk i still love.
folk that know my mama’s name just like i know their mama’s name. folk that love being a father.
some gone. 
some still here.

on god is an auto-ethnographic archive of a nuanced Chicago. the writing here stems from moments / encounters / conversations from my everyday life here, born over a year.

things told. 
things heard.
things never forgotten. 
on god...”
—Kwabena Foli

on god was published in a handmade edition of 200. The photo on the back of the book is by Eric Payne.

LI
HAN

Li Han is a multidisciplinary graphic artist based in Beijing, China. He mainly focuses on typography, artist’s book, letterpress printing as well as paper sculpture. He believes that craftsmanship can communicate and touch the most sensitive and subtle feelings at the bottom of one’s heart. Therefore, sometimes he also tries to incorporate several of his dived fields together with an even broader variety of media such as weaving, etc. He gets inspired tremendously from his love for geometry, structure, linguistics, and bibliophilism, which can be seized from his work to some extent.

Li is currently working as a brand designer and curator in Beijing, China after graduating from the Department of Visual Communication Design in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Exploring, experimenting, and educating enriches his life and broadens his eyes. He collects these experiences and memories and combines them with his own methodology together to understand graphic art better. He wishes everyone who sees his artwork could build some connection and probably interweave with it more or less.

Kaleido_Book is a guidebook intended to inform readers how to make unique 3D paper structures (transformative structures and kaleidocycles) to encourage exploring new and exciting forms of Artist Books.

Kaleido_Book introduces a variety of interactive paper sculpture structures alongside easy to follow instructions and templates. Readers have access to almost twenty unique projects created using elements and structures utilized in numerous artistic and scientific disciplines. Most of the pages in the book have tear-out options, allowing readers to cut up, color in, or doodle on each page’s layout. Readers can easily use the templates found on each page and make each into a one-of-a-kind 3D art object. Each form results in an exquisite geometric sculpture and is an epic crafting adventure for any age.

Kaleido_Book is the second publication by Myungah Hyon who wrote Book Book, an introductory book on intro-level bookbinding in collaboration with designer, Li Han. When Myungah Hyon and Li Han met as teacher and teaching assistant at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, they started to share their ideas about new approaches to the Artist Books and continuously sought out new mediums, surfaces, and forms to express ideas together. Discovering new methods through trial and error was an essential and rewarding process for both of them.

Tempestt
Hazel

Tempestt Hazel is a curator, writer, artist advocate, and director of Sixty Inches From Center, a Chicago-based online arts publication and archiving initiative. She is also the Arts Program Officer for the Field Foundation of Illinois. Focusing primarily on reframing cultural archives and institutional collections, her exhibitions and projects have been produced with the University of North Texas, South Side Community Art Center, Terrain Exhibitions, the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, the Smart Museum of Art, and the University of Chicago. Her writing has been published with Candor Arts, UChicago Press, Tremaine Foundation, Prospect.4, Alphawood Exhibitions, and Duke University, as well as various exhibition catalogues and artist monographs. She is also the 2019 recipient of the J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award from the Society of American Archivists.

Tempestt was born and raised in Peoria, Illinois then spent several years drifting through the San Francisco Bay area before moving to Chicago.

Tempestt Hazel is the co-creator of the 6-part zine series Something To Look Forward To—a collaboration with Sixty Inches from Center.

Additionally, she has written Adorning the Lost & Found—the foreword to Cecil McDonald, Jr.’s In the Company of Black (2017/2018/2021), The Multiplicities of Her—a chapter of Ma(s)king Her: Black Feminist Futures (2017/2018) by Honey Pot Performance, and Ireashia M. Bennett: A Testimony on Tenderness (2021) for the first issue of Something to Look Forward To.

A-lan
Holt

A-lan Holt is director at the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University. There she trains undergraduates in the areas of diversity and culture, arts leadership and social justice. A-lan is a practicing playwright and filmmaker. She is a Sundance Fellow, a SF Film Screenwriting Fellow, and a frequent contributor on-air at KQED Arts.

MYUNGAH
Hyon

Myungah Hyon is an artist and educator currently living in Chicago, IL. Through her artwork, she often attempts to connect and interact directly with the viewer. She is interested in combining incomplete, partial fragments that she encounters through everyday life. This symbolizes our society where we cooperate, relate and depend on one another despite each of us being totally unique. In her artwork, vulnerable, negligible parts become solid and significant when they are together.

Currently she is a faculty member (Associate Professor, Adj.) in the Department of Printmedia at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been teaching various traditional and innovative bookbinding techniques and has held numerous Artists’ Books workshops and lectures internationally. Hyon curates the annual Artist Books show with the students’ work.

Kaleido_Book is a guidebook intended to inform readers how to make unique 3D paper structures (transformative structures and kaleidocycles) to encourage exploring new and exciting forms of Artist Books.

Kaleido_Book introduces a variety of interactive paper sculpture structures alongside easy to follow instructions and templates. Readers have access to almost twenty unique projects created using elements and structures utilized in numerous artistic and scientific disciplines. Most of the pages in the book have tear-out options, allowing readers to cut up, color in, or doodle on each page’s layout. Readers can easily use the templates found on each page and make each into a one-of-a-kind 3D art object. Each form results in an exquisite geometric sculpture and is an epic crafting adventure for any age.

Kaleido_Book is the second publication by Myungah Hyon who wrote Book Book, an introductory book on intro-level bookbinding in collaboration with designer, Li Han. When Myungah Hyon and Li Han met as teacher and teaching assistant at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, they started to share their ideas about new approaches to the Artist Books and continuously sought out new mediums, surfaces, and forms to express ideas together. Discovering new methods through trial and error was an essential and rewarding process for both of them.

NIC
Kay

NIC Kay is from the Bronx.

They are a person who makes performances and creates/organizes performative spaces.

Their work choreographically highlights and meditates on Black life in relationship to space, social structures, and architecture through centering embodied practices. 

They are deeply invested in the act and process of moving, the change of place, production of space, position, and the clarity gained from shifting of perspective.

Their exhibitions, performances, and publications include Deep-Time Construction, CCA Wattis Institute, CA, 2018. AMERICAN REALNESS Festival, Abrons Arts Center, NY, 2018. slothish - where deos it hurt?, MoMA PS.1, 2019. you black + bluised, Abrons Arts Center, 2019. pushit!!, CAC, 2019, CD Zines, Self-published, 2014.

They were a (2018-2019) Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Workspace studio resident .

They have choreographed for and performed in the works of:

Yulan Grant, Bruce Nauman, Lauryn Hill, Lauren Baskt, Jonathan Gonzalez, Keyon Gaskin, Jimmy Robert, A.K. Burns, Rashayla Marie Brown, Elodie Pong, Amina Ross, Rashaad Newsome, Shea Coulee, Ion Lloyd, and Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz.

NIC Kay have shown work + performed, and taught workshops throughout the United States and Internationally.

COTTON DREAMS is a scrapbook, which utilizes text, collage, and photography to chronicle a series of altering, obscure, and mundane performative moments centering self making in the 21st century whilst still in the shadow of the history of slavery and object-hood. 

For 11 years, NIC Kay has researched + journeyed through cultural conflicts of material desire, sociopolitical struggles for representation in fashion, and the pursuit of a Black radical politics beyond aesthetics.

Jenny
Kendler

Jenny Kendler (b. 1980, New York City) is an interdisciplinary artist, environmental activist, naturalist & wild forager who lives in Chicago and various forests. She is currently the first Artist-in-Residence with Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Kendler helps run artist residency ACRE and art/research/activism initiative Deep Time Chicago. Alongside an interdisciplinary team, she was recently awarded a major grant for her community-engagement project Garden for a Changing Climate.

Kendler holds a MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006) and a BFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art (2002, summa cum laude).

Her work has been exhibited at museums and biennials including Storm King Art Center (New Windsor, NY), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, NY), The MSU Broad Museum (Michigan), the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis), the California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco), iMOCA (Indianapolis), the DePaul Art Museum (Chicago), the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (India), the Yeosu International Art Festival biennial (Korea), the inaugural Chicago Biennial, and the 3rd Terrain Biennial (Arizona).

GREEN ZONES: Moments of Wonder in the Forests of Nosara is a community co-created project and artist book, which aims to share and protect the unique tropical dry forests of Nosara, Costa Rica. 

As Artist in Residence with non-profit NRDC, Jenny Kendler was asked to create a project inspired by Nosara’s unique ecosystem. Generously supported by the Pacific Foundation, two research trips in the rainy season of 2015 and dry season of 2016 immersed her in this region’s globally rare tropical dry forests. Unlike the vanished jungles of nearby towns, these forests which are known colloquially as the Zonas Verdes or Green Zones, had been spared through lucky circumstance. Without the federal protection provided to the nearby Ostional Wildlife Reserve, a diligent community group called the Nosara Civic Association, has managed to defend these lands—and the old-growth trees and multitude of species they contain—from the pressures of development for 40 years.

To encourage more people to intimately experience these special forests, as a way to create understanding and care, Kendler and her collaborators organized a series of free walks led by mindfulness professionals and conservation biologists. During these walks, community members were asked to make a photograph—using their camera to re-sensitize rather than dull their vision. Alongside a poem written for the book by Dave Snyder, the community’s photographs were compiled into this handmade artist book, co-designed and published by Matt Austin of Candor Arts.

Printed in accordance with the underlying ethos of the project, these bilingual books were printed with an eco-friendly inking process on 100% post-consumer recycled paper, include hand debossed, foil-stamped and letterpressed elements—and are hand-bound in the Candor Arts studio in Chicago. Profits from sale of the book support the Nosara Civic Association’s work to protect the Green Zones into the future for humans and non-humans alike.

Oriana
Koren

Oriana Koren is an editorial and commercial photographer based in Los Angeles. With a background in documentary photography, Oriana creates embodied, attentive, and lucid imagery on location, in the studio, and across the globe. They are a founding member of the Authority Collective and the architect behind the Lit List. For commissions, contact@orianakoren.com.

While nothing lasts, is a book of photographs by Edward Cushenberry with an essay written by Oriana Koren. The book was published in three editions: paperback, handmade hardcover, and a special edition box set.

"While nothing lasts, is a collection of intimate and sometimes intrusive photographs of my very close friends and family. This project started four years ago at a party, when I made a picture of my friend crying after she told me she wanted to break up with her boyfriend. After that night, I felt compelled to document every moment of my friends' and family's lives—the good and the bad. I wanted to do this to better understand how we collectively cope with life, love, heartbreak and death. Since this project began, I have seen friendships come and go, been witness to pursuits of love, moments of intimacy, joy, and self-reflection, seen rejected inhibitions, consequences of actions, loved ones facing their own mortality while lying in hospital beds. These moments have been lessons in how nothing really lasts, helping me to embrace life as it is. Throughout these experiences, I have found life to have a tendency to be beautiful.”
—Edward Cushenberry

emi
kuriyama

emi kuriyama (1991–2016) was a writer and poet born and raised in Redondo Beach, California. emi was a prolific writer whose vibrant curiosity led her to produce an expansive body of work that insisted on play and careful collaborations as ways to live. She built her work and world with people, plants, animals, objects, symbols, and currencies. She thought with and through these encounters, and found joy in their interdependencies and connections. Writing gave emi permission to play, to render possible what was not in her lived reality—to twist, push, pull, and tease her experiences into absurdity and magic. For emi, writing was rebellion, as it was resistance and resilience. 

She founded the small press Young Cloud, and was a co-founder of the artist book project baumtest. At UCLA, she studied art history and was the editor-in-chief of the student publication, GRAPHITE, published by the Hammer Museum. She wrote extensively and expansively on art, with an attention to photography and its processes, often for Daily Serving, Complex, Notes on Looking, among others.

emi worked at the Hammer Museum as an educator, and for the artist Matthew Brandt. She was enrolled in the Cal Arts MFA Creative Writing Class of 2017 until her death, and was mentored by Christine Wertheim, Douglas Kearney, and Jen Hofer. 

sashiko is a collection of writing by the late emi kuriyama, who passed away at the age of 24 in 2016. emi was a prolific writer whose vibrant curiosity led her to produce an expansive body of work that insisted on play and careful collaborations as ways to live. sashiko consists of the late writer’s unfinished novella, a compilation of absurd, dark, and magical vignettes loosely based on her lived reality. Also included is emi’s Cal Arts Creative Writing MFA thesis proposal, addressed to Douglas Kearney, explaining the intentions with her novella. Throughout sashiko, movement principles such as swimming, running, and ghosting help readers understand the connection and conundrum of exile, fugitivity, and belonging. emi’s tender and peculiar voice is felt in personal emails addressed to artists Jennifer Moon, Laub, and Christine Wertheim, each of whom guided her towards cosmological expansion and love, and in whom she found hope.

sashiko is organized by emi’s friend and collaborator, artist iris yirei hu, who wrote the foreword to this book.