06/13/2024
20% off your order using code 20GENDERFAIL
at checkout
I was looking through some boxes of archival materials for GenderFail and stumbled on this old print from a workshop in 2018 at Wendy's Subway.
Pride Month is historically a really slow month for GenderFail (slightly ironically as a q***r press). If you have considered buying something now would be an amazing time. Support small businesses and presses like ours we live off sales of our work.
Use code 20GENDERFAIL at checkout to get 20% off your entire order.
Imperfect Archiving, Archiving as Practice: Q***r Bibliographic Explorations
Imperfect Archiving, Archiving as Practice: Q***r Bibliographic Explorations is a special expanded 5th edition centering on archiving as artistic practice. This manifesto talks to core of GenderFail collecting and archiving practices that looks to the softness as a metaphor for both the material and content of artist made publications. The GenderFail Archive Project is a socially engaged reading room that looks at archiving as practice. The project stems from GenderFail’s desire to share the publications from their personal library archive and give a platform to other publishers that they cherish. This publication features and highlights over a hundred artist books, art books and zines.
This edition features a new section previously never published showing bibliographies created for exhibitions and programs with the GenderFail Archive project at spaces like Wendy's Subway, The studio Museum of Harlem and Cleveland Institute of Art's Reinberger Gallery.
Additionally this this publication features the 4th edition featured section showing 7 curated GenderFail Archive Project reading lists from “Publishing Now” a class I taught from 2021-2023 at School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. For this course I wanted the students to read zines and publications being produced in real time, so I started to digitize my collection as I acquired certain titles that I felt the students would resonate with. Many of the readings for this course were scanned from my personal collection of over 2,000 zines, artist books and art books that make up the GenderFail archive. Since we were not able to meet in person (due to the pandemic) I spent hours scanning zines and artist books to be used as required readings for the course. Each of the reading lists will accompany a link and QR code to read and engage with the full scanned copies of all 31 artist books, art books and zines featured.
Imperfect Archiving, Archiving as Practice: Q***r Bibliographic Explorations
by Be Oakley
92 pages
Risograph printed (Flat Gold, Blue and Black)
GenderFail Press
Edition of 350
June 2024
ALMOST SOLD OUT EDITIONS!!!!
Manifesto, Profit for Survival: Discourses on Anti-Capitalist Publishing Practices
Manifesto, Profit for Survival: Discourses on Anti-Capitalist Publishing Practices is the 4th edition of this ongoing publication series exploring anti-capitalism through a publishers perspective.
This new edition features a new essay Notes on Anti-Capitalist Solidarity: An Essay for the Working Class Artist expanding on our Manifesto, Profit for Survival essay. This new essay explores chapters including Class Solidarity in the Art World, Against Growth Towards Sustainability, Breaking with Capitalism: Identity Politics and Working
Class Solidarity, Anti-Capitalist Pedagogy? Pedagogy for Low Wage Workers? and Anti Capitalist Art Practice? From the essay:
"Many working class and low income designers, artists, writers etc. are underpaid, overworked and constantly stuck in the loop of working one underpaid job after another. In this we must find strength, solidarity and pride in our positions as lower income people. Often, or at least in my experience, the art world was presented to me at a young age as glamorous, privileged and in close proximity with the upper class4. In moving towards an anti-capitalist art world it’s paramount for us to identify and find agency in our positions as low and middle class people. Those of us who are employed through our creative talents need to find solidarity with non-creative workers including factory workers, gig employees and other working class people. We must not think of our profession as any more important than other workers fighting for more equitable working conditions. We must replace wealth for ethics, glamor for pride, privileged access for transparency, as the aspirational goals of artists.
Manifesto, Profit for Survival: Discourses on Anti-Capitalist Publishing Practices
by Be Oakley
80 pages
Risograph printed (Flat Gold and blue)
Edition of 250
September 2022
Boredom: An Anti-Capital-ist Tool
Boredom: An Anti-Capital-ist Tool is a new essay and publication by GenderFail founder Be Oakley. This essay is broken up into fragmentsa of thoughts about boredom broadly centered around boredom as a revolutionary and anti-capitalist tool. These are divided into the following topics:
1. Shame Shame Shame Shame Shame
2. Boredom as a source of misplaced pride
3. Boredom and laziness: siblings
4. Bu****it Jobs and the power of boredom
5. The powerful connection between boredom and dreaming
6. Boredom as a state of play
7. Forced boredom: Stillness through Invisible Illness you
This essay ask the following questions including and not limited to:
Boredom as a tool for the working class?
Do working class people have time to be bored?
What does working class Boredom look like?
Boredom: An Anti-Capital-ist Tool
Essay and design by Be Oakley
Copy edited by Yvonne LeBien
Published by GenderFail September 2023
Risograph printed Black Flat Gold and Blue
On French Paper ( (Speckletone 70IB text Sand and Speckletone 80IB cover Black)
1st Edition of 325
64 pages
A Publishers Perspective on the Art Book Fair: A Critical Response
A Publishers Perspective on the Art Book Fair: A Critical Response is a 68 page critical essay examining the role of Art Book Fairs and their response to the covid-19 pandemic. This essay looks for Art Book Fairs to meet this moment of an ongoing pandemic to meet the needs of publishers and visitors alike. As a publishers who has exhibited at over 50 Art Book Fairs this essay both critiques and offers suggestions for a more publisher focused fair. This essay started in April 2020 during the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and finished over two years later.
This essay asks: How can we employ various mutual aid tactics to ensure future generations of art book publishers have the support to continue their work? If you’re reading this and are an organizer of an art book fair, ask yourself, are you doing everything to meet this moment?
Suggestions offered include but are not limited to:
Mutual Aid Fair Funds
Accessibility
Small and First Time Publisher Support
Advisory board
Land acknowledgement / Indigenous Solidarity
Gender inclusive bathroom
$0 tabling fee
Honorarium for Exhibitors and Travel Stipend
Dedicated time for low traffic viewing and crowd control
International Organizer Leadership
If you are a publishers, fair ogranizer or lover of small and self publishing, this essay is for you and I would love to fair your thoughts and ideas to make Art Book Fair live up to their radical potential..
A Publishers Perspective on the Art Book Fair: A Critical Response
by Be Oakley
68 pages
Risograph printed (Blue and Flat Gold)
September 2022
Edition of 250
GenderFail, Two Anthologies on Failure
GenderFail, Two Anthologies on Failure brings together two volumes on GenderFail exploration on the creative potential of Failure. The first volume (published in Fall 2018 )explored the work of artists, curators and writers, asking each to contribute a work surrounding failure - especially as it pertains to their own experiences - to expand upon topics of ableism, mental health, passing, whiteness, colonization, police brutality and other illustrations of failure put onto us by dominant culture. The 2nd volume (published in June 2020) subtitled, Building on our Failed States, invited institutions, collectives and communities to discuss the failures in each of their given fields. The contributors invited have organized to try and create something meaningful within the failure of dominant culture(s). Genderfail considers failure to be a catalyst from which non-dominant culture emerges; we seek to explore the failures that mark the beginnings of many radical institutions, collectives, and communities. Both volumes were published in a limited print run of 300 Risograph hand made copies that have both since sold out. This new volume seeks to continue to disseminate this powerful content to new audiences.
GenderFail, Two Anthologies on Failure includes work by Johonna Hedva, Demian Dinéyazhi, Sable Elyse Smith, Agustine Zegers, Manuel Arturo Abreu, Andrea Liu, Sasha Costanza-Chock, American Artist, Be Oakley, Anonymous, Art + Feminism, Decolonize This Place, GenderFail, The H. I. V. Howler, Lilly Hern-Fondation
of CUE Art Foundation, NYC Low - Income Artist + Freelancer Relief Fund, Quaranzine, Q***r.Archive.Work and Thank God For Abortion in 19 essays in over 200 pages.
See GenderFail + many others this Saturday (06/15) at East Village Zine Fair this Saturday
Check out GenderFail featured in an article of the fair published in Hyperallergic
Click here for a free $5.00 coupon at GenderFail!