DAY 2: SATURDAY, JANUARY 24th

AT NYU SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, BOBST LIBRARY: 10:00-11:30

NYU Special Collections Saturday events are limited to 20 attendees.

• Amna Abdus-Salaam — Restricted Until Further Notice: Anonymity, Delay, and the Politics of Transmission

This session examines anonymity, restriction, and self-erasure as deliberate strategies of transmission within archives and special collections. Moving between medieval religious texts and contemporary activist archives, this session explores how individuals and communities have used masking, pseudonyms, redaction, and delayed access not as harm or disappearance, but as strategies of protection and endurance.

Drawing on activist ephemera from NYU Special Collections, as well as finding aids, and donor agreements, the session foregrounds how these practices are negotiated legally, ethically, and curatorially. It considers how acts of withholding challenge dominant assumptions about visibility, access, and authorship. Participants will engage directly with the Guerrilla Girls archival collection to reflect on how power, agency, and care operate within systems designed to preserve, and sometimes intentionally limit, cultural memory.

• Adam Moritz — From the Mimeograph to 5th Avenue: 0 to 9 Street Works

In the short run of Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci’s 0 to 9 (1967-1969), the mimeographed pages of the magazine provided an exhibition site for works from artists like Steve Paxton, Adrian Piper, and Mayer and Acconci themselves that explored the ancillary aspects of the written word—the notational, scriptural, graphic, or procedural. These “uses” hint towards an activity that happened, or could happen, beyond the page—a distinct quality which would be foundational for the burgeoning conceptualism that would dominate downtown New York art in the following decades. Indeed, the magazine eventually culminated in a total exit of the page. For its final issue, released as a supplement in Summer 1969, contributors went out—most commonly to the block bordered by 5th and 6th Avenues, 13th and 14th Streets—to incorporate the city and its inhabitants into novel modes of intersubjective performance; the issue itself is only the documentation of these events.

During this presentation, participants will first look closely at the copy of “Issue 6 Supplement: Street Works” contained in NYU’s Special Collections, and contextualize it in relation to prior issues of the magazine, as well as to its artistic and political moment. Following this session, the group will walk the ten minutes north from Bobst Library to the exact site denoted in the issue, on the way discussing the tripartite interplay between page, performer, and place.

AT SOFT NETWORK: 12:30-2:00

• Sheyla Baykal Archive Visit

Sheyla Baykal (1944-1997) was an artist, activist, and long-time Lower East Side resident, known for her photographic portaits of friends, neighbors, and fellow artists and involvement in the experimental theatre and performance scenes. Baykal is Soft Network’s 2025-2027 Archive-in-Residence, and during this time we are working with a team to catalogue, research, and present her work and archive. Soft Network will present a selection of photographic prints, contact sheets, slides, and ephemera that highlight her involvement in the downtown scene of the 1960s-1980s, and reveal how downtown New York’s cultural history is shaped by the friends and family members which are tasked with preserving and sharing artist legacies. The presentation will also focus on Soft Network’s process and approach to working with and sharing Baykal’s archive and considering her legacy.

Limited to 15 participants. To RSVP, email info@softnetwork.art

AT THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART:

SESSION ONE: 3:00-4:00

• Eli Harrison — “We Glimpse the City in Pieces”: Tracing Downtown through the Whitney’s Collection

Taking inspiration from Douglas Crimp’s idea that we understand history and the city in glimpsed fragments, this workshop offers an opportunity to look closely at works on paper from the Whitney’s collection. The selection highlights key sites of artistic collaboration and production in downtown Manhattan from the 1970s and 1980s, drawing on the museum’s rich holdings of works related to the West Side piers, including Gordon Matta-Clark’s Days End, photographs by Alvin Baltrop and Peter Hujar, and works by Kiki Smith and David Wojnarowicz. Other selections include print portfolios published by A.I.R. Gallery and the Lower East Side Printshop, as well as drawings by Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds and G. Peter Jemison. Through close-looking at the photographs, prints, and drawings on view, Curatorial Fellow Eli Harrison will lead a focused discussion on the material legacies of downtown art in relation to the museum’s collecting history.

Register here: https://whitney.org/events/glimpse-city-pieces

SESSION TWO: 4:30-5:30

• Barbara Moore, with Farris Wahbeh — The Avant-Garde Reference Files of Barbara Moore

Part of the Whitney’s Special Collections, the Avant-Garde Reference Files of Barbara Moore is an archive of printed matter, ephemera, announcements, brochures, artists’ books, and editions collected and maintained by Barbara Moore, an art historian, writer, and former rare book dealer, who served as director of the Peter Moore Photography Archive for sixty years. This unique workshop offers participants the opportunity to study selections from the archive and to hear directly from Moore about her collecting practice as a witness and participant in the art and performance of downtown New York.

Register here: https://whitney.org/events/avant-garde-files