It’s been quiet around here which means a lot of working has happened.

The summer informational pamphlet for 2018 is complete and is on its way to subscribers, friends, friends of friends, and acquaintances. The Liquid Fault Line addresses strategic retreat from the shoreline in an age of rising sea levels.

What are the costs? What if you don’t want to leave your home and community?

What are the various adaptation strategies and who benefits? What will happen if we don’t plan ahead?

Individual copies can be found here.

In related news, I’m also working on a new full-length artist book, title TBD, hopefully to be completed  in time for the next CODEX fair, in February of 2019. Here’s some in-progress photos:

It’s all about disappearing islands, both real and imagined. I’m hoping to have all the images and backgrounds printed before school starts up in the fall, with the text to be printed in Sept/October.

That leaves November for fall pamphleteering activities, December for mailing and binding and assorted catching up. Reasonable? Perhaps.

I think I’m excited about it for now, and have tried to structure the book so I won’t get too sick of it along the way. There’s enough improvisation in it to keep me interested; I don’t like projects which require all of the planning to happen in advance, I get bored in the middle of production when that happens.

Wish me luck.

I made an edition of pamphlets for Wave Hill last month.

The Acclimatization Society is about birds in the city, and how they adapt, and how some birds have evolved in response to the city environment. Evolution doesn’t just happen in pristine jungle ecosystems; the urban pollution that makes cities a harsh environment for animals is known for causing genetic mutations. Birds in cities have to adapt fast to their circumstances. Genetic mutations plus adaptations equals speciation in action.

Also included is information about some of the most common bird species in New York today.

This work and Flyway are on view at Wave Hill, which you should go visit as soon as you have an appropriate spring day at your disposal. It’s a beautiful place. The magnolias are getting ready to bloom soon and there’s lots of blue flowers out right now.

Avifauna: Birds + Habitat is on view through June 24. Info is here.

A bonus: I got to see one of my favorite greenhouses around when I came to drop off the work.

Don’t even think about stealing their plants.

In other news: I caught the first whiff of spring out in Jamaica Bay a couple of weeks ago with my friend Ana.

And there’s more printing on the horizon- I’m thinking about strategic retreat this year. More soon.

Now that the final pamphlet of 2017 is in the mail and out to subscribers, I am happy to announce that in January I will have the opportunity to show the work I made in the past year about Jamaica Bay, in the place that inspired it all.

Some of the things that I did last year:  made pamphlets, rode bikes, gone on walks, looked at birds, brought some friends to visit an old landfill, seen antique aircraft, tried out lithography, and told as many people as I could about it all.

I had a great time exploring the area.

Join me on Saturday, January 27 for the opening reception of Brain Washing from Phone Towers at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. This exhibit celebrates the completion during 2017 of the series of three pamphlets on the history, ecology, and communities of Jamaica Bay, and documents the methods used in creating pamphlets by hand. There’s a gallery inside the visitors center in the Wildlife Refuge, and I think it’s the perfect place to celebrate the completion of the series; I hope you can join me.

Event information is here. 
The Jamaica Bay Pamphleteering Project was sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by the Brooklyn Arts Council. as well as the Puffin Foundation.

Thanks to all who came to the artist talk last Saturday night at Shoestring Press- I had a wonderful time and I hope you did too! Here’s some photos taken by the lovely Ana Cordeiro:

I love the idea of gathering people in person to talk about things I’m fascinated by and make pamphlets about. I hope to do more of this in the future, thanks to everyone for coming, it was lovely to see you all!

Flyway is here:

I’ve sent copies to everyone on the list that I can think of, if you haven’t received one and would like to, let me know. Preferably in person! I’m giving an artist talk on :

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This past Sunday I had a wonderful time out at Floyd Bennett Field wandering around with some good friends on a walking tour of the old airfield and the beach at Dead Horse Bay. The weather was perfect and the sun was out. Here’s some photos for your enjoyment.

At Floyd Bennett Field we walked down to Hanger B, to see the collection of antique aircraft that has been refurbished by a crew of volunteers. I gave a pamphlet to the Ranger on duty as thanks.

You can even go inside some of the planes.

Thanks to all for a wonderful day!

What kind of magical place combines a sanitation training center, community garden AND a remote control airfield?

Floyd Bennett Field, of course.

Floyd Bennett Field was New York City’s first municipal airport, opening in 1931. Airports are generally built on the outskirts of cities, in remote areas so that landing planes don’t hit anything. Floyd Bennett was built on land that had been known as Barren Island, one of the many bits and pieces of land in the marshes of Jamaica Bay, in the extreme southeast corner of Brooklyn. There was already a bare dirt runway used by a commercial pilot on the island, and when city planners decided that NYC needed its own airport, they chose this spot. The marshland around Barren Island was filled in with sand dredged from the bottom of Jamaica Bay, and many small bits of land were joined together and fused with the mainland. Flatbush Avenue was extended and straightened to provide pilots and passengers direct access to the rest of the city.  A state of the art, amenities-filled airport was born, complete with new features like illuminated concrete runways and comfortable terminal facilities.

Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia wanted the new airport to be THE commercial airport for NYC. Newark International, the first area airport, had opened in 1928; he wanted the city to have its own airport. But commercial aviation was new, and the number of people who paid to take commercial flights was limited. Most airports paid the bills by freight, not by passengers. Newark had an exclusive contract with the Postal Service to provide freight transport, which in turn attracted other commercial airlines to work out of Newark. Flights that didn’t sell all their seats could make up their costs through cargo shipments for the post office. LaGuardia was only able to convince American Airlines to move their operations to the new airfield, and passengers complained that the commute all the way out to the end of Brooklyn took longer than even the trip out to Newark.

But commercial aviation was only part of the story of air travel at this point. Aviators were excited about the new facility and its modern conveniences, and the airfield hosted many record-breaking flights, time records, and air races between the two World Wars. Howard Hughes and Wiley Post both used Floyd Bennett for record breaking around-the-world flights. Female pilots like Amelia Earhart, Jackie Cochran, and Laura Ingalls made historic flights out of Floyd Bennett.

Since the commercial side of the airfield didn’t, uh, take off, the airfield became a base for the aviation units of both the Coast Guard and the NYPD. During the Second World War, the Navy used Floyd Bennett as a Naval Air Station. After the war, and up until the 1970’s the field was used as a support base for Navy, Air Force, and Marine units,  as well as for the aviation units of the Coast Guard. But when the military moved their operations elsewhere, the field was decommissioned and began to decay. Control of most of the site was transferred to the National Park Service for inclusion in Gateway National Recreation Area, the sprawling multi-location National Park that encompasses many parts of Jamaica Bay as well as sites in northern New Jersey and Staten Island.

So today when you go visit Floyd Bennett, it seems a bit forgotten. It still houses an aviation base for the NYPD; the training center for the Sanitation Department is also there. There’s a public campground, as well as a hanger devoted to the restoration of Historic Aircraft. Volunteers and park rangers give tours on the weekends.  Four hangers were renovated and taken over by a commercial tenant, the Aviator Sports and Event Center, which seems awful to me but I’m sure appeals to other people.

There’s a lot of empty space. Empty runways are a great place to fly kites, or drive remote control cars. An area of the site is a great place to hike, and offers good birding opportunities. Between the runways there’s also open grassland that people are kept out of as a wildlife habitat, and it provides cover and homes for grassland birds to live undisturbed. You can spend the afternoon completely alone wandering around what’s called the North Forty. Eventually you would end up at the Bay:

Where you can apparently kayak. Next to this bit is a Remote Control Airfield area, which apparently has a devoted community:

Spring migration is beginning; the Bay is right on the Atlantic Flyway, and I’m looking forward to going back over the next several weeks. More soon.

If you take the 2 train from the stop near my home all the way to the end of the line, to Brooklyn College, you can find the Q35 bus. That bus will take you all the way down Flatbush Avenue, through Flatlands and Marine Park, parts of Brooklyn not served by the subway system. At the end of Flatbush Avenue you find Floyd Bennett Field, the city’s first municipal airport, the pet project of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. Continue on Flatbush and you find a bridge, the Marine Parkway Bridge, home to Peregrine Falcons and the link to the Rockaway Peninsula. Right after the bridge there’s a random stop in the road next to an overpass where you can get off and start walking to the water. This sign helps show the way:

To your right is Fort Tilden, an abandoned military installation, and beyond that Breezy Point, the Irish Riviera, the private community of cops and firefighters that burned in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In front of you is Jacob Riis Park, the People’s Beach, one of the many public parks built in the middle of the twentieth century by Robert Moses. Beyond that is the Atlantic. It is a quiet place to watch the tide come in.

The body of water you just crossed is called the Rockaway Inlet, and it separates the Rockaway Peninsula from the mainland of Brooklyn. The Inlet connects the waters of Jamaica Bay, in the east, to the Atlantic Ocean.

Jamaica Bay is a marshy saltwater estuary that is home to numerous birds, fisherman, public employees, two airports (one closed, one still operating), horseshoe crabs, sewage treatment plants, coyotes, endangered turtles, and many others. It is one of the more isolated corners of New York City, and it is going to be the subject of three pamphlets this year, generously funded in part by the Brooklyn Arts Council. I’ll be looking at the history, the infrastructure, the communities and the ecology of the Bay, and I’m hoping to host a few events in the area as well. I’ll be updating myself and you on my progress here, hopefully semi-regularly. Wish me luck and watch this space.

I promised to write something here about those two projects that kept me frantically busy through the fall. This is image side of the Fall Informational Pamphlet for 2016, The World Turned Upside Down. 

This one was originally going to be about GMO’s, and why/whether they are/are not evil, to fit into the gardening theme I’ve got going on this year. But then, you know, the World Turned Upside Down.

This one came together very quickly, partly out of rage, partly out of adrenaline from having to produce everything so quickly. Not how I would ideally do things, but the place I print at was scheduled to close for renovations, and well, things. There’s a few more typos than I would like as a result.

I like the color scheme the best, I love that purple. This is how I would describe the contents: The third pamphlet of 2016 addressed truth, fiction, the sound of type in your head, and the history of pamphleteering itself. Is the end nigh? How can one identify a witch? What is globalism? These questions are posed, but probably not answered. 

The starting point is a seventeenth century pamphlet called The World Turn’d Upside Down, produced during the English Civil War. That was the inspiration for the illustrations too. I’m pretty happy with them.

Individual copies are available here and here for $20. And if you’re in the mood, it’s time to start thinking about 2017; I’m planning to do a series on Jamaica Bay in NYC, and am thinking about infrastructure, urban nature preserves, and vulnerable costal communities. Subscriptions for next year are available here and here.

Happiest of New Years to you.

So last month I went to Chicago to print Tell the Bees, the summer Brain Washing from Phone Towers pamphlet. What a great time! It had been a few years since I visited, and I’m glad I went.

Printing went really smoothly; the studios at the Chicago Center for Book, Paper, and Print are fantastic. Great collections of wood type and stellar equipment, and plenty of light. Thanks to David Jones for being a great host.

Here’s some process shots of the book in progress:

When not printing furiously, I got to experience all that Chicago had to offer. Such as, excellent signs:

I enjoyed a local variation of a hot dog at a joint covered from head to toe with dogs of all sizes:

There was a TV in the corner that played a looped video of dog-related trivia, with more dog photos.

Speaking of dogs, there was this to greet me every morning in the gallery at the studio:

Meow. I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art, where everything I saw was great, including an AMAZING Kerry James Marshall show, which you should definitely go see if you’re in town. Also sat through this video twice from The Propellar Group, because it was beautiful.

And then of course there was the pure joy of a Smiths karaoke in Columbia video. WHY DOESN’T ALL CONTEMPORARY ART MAKE ME LAUGH. #smithsfanforlife.

Now I’m back in the sweltering heat of NYC summer, putting the pamphlets together. I aim to have them done by the end of the month, out to you soon afterwards, dear reader. Watch this space for updates.

I am happy to announce the Spring 2016 Informational Pamphlet is done and already in the mail to many of you.

Lavender and Evil Things takes a look at physic gardens – the forerunners of western botanical gardens – which provided medieval doctors and medical students their remedies. Information gathered in the physic garden was gathered in illustrated reference books called herbals. Herbals helped inform the development of botany as a science.

Also considered is the herbalism in the contemporary world, and outside the Western tradition. Included is advice on plants from Hildegarde of Bingen, German abbess and superstar polymath.

Printed in an edition of 200 from woodblocks and handset metal type. Individual copies are now available for purchase, if you so desire, here and here. And there are also still subscriptions available for the entire year’s worth of 2016 pamphlets, if you meant to subscribe but forgot. I still send pamphlets out hither and yonder to a wide variety of unsuspecting recipients, so watch your mailbox, you might get a surprise.

This year’s pamphlets will all be loosely organized around the botanical world, in order to keep my research process relatively sane. Coming up later this summer I’m happy to announce that I’ll be producing the summer pamphlet at Columbia College Chicago’s Center for Book, Paper, and Print, where I’ll be in residence for two weeks. So exciting!

As always, thank you for reading.

It took a while, but the December pamphlet is ready to go out, and will soon be arriving in a mailbox near you.

Where does money come from? Why don’t I have any of it? Is there something I can use instead of money? Should we just burn the banking system to the ground and start over?

All these questions and more answered in a convenient paper-based portable format.

Edition of 200, printed letterpress from wood and metal type and linoleum blocks. This is the last pamphlet of 2015; if you were a subscriber this year and would like to continue next year, subscriptions are available here. 

Subscriptions support the production costs of the series; each subscriber is guaranteed to receive all pamphlets produced in three mailings a year, plus a thank you, AND have the option to nominate someone in addition to themselves to also receive pamphlets for a year. The balance of each edition is mostly sent out to a variety of folks as a surprise, some people I know, some people I don’t know. The list changes. If you have received a pamphlet and have questions, they might be answered here: http://www.brainwashingfromphonetowers.com

Thank you for all of your support, I am so happy to be able to make these things.