In the Fall of 2022, Printed Matter / St Marks presented we web keepers, a window exhibition by artist, activist, educator, storyteller, and curator Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo. This newsprint publication of the same name is a translation and continuation of that project; it opens with a new essay by Ayana Zaire Cotton.
In addition to a large-scale window painting, the exhibition included a series of works on paper added to a window, one by one, over the course of eight weeks. The works were double sided with painted text facing the street (including contributions from Lukaza and others noted in the bibliography below) and with various patterns facing into the bookstore. This slow accumulation of paper mimicked the ethos and life cycle of bulletin boards, themselves public sites wherein people exchange messages, share demands, ask for help, broadcast their stories. Printed Matter staff put up the works at random, creating a knot of unsequenced text that looked out onto the East Village, with phrases discernible but the entire passage obscured.
This publication untangles that knot. Here, Lukaza’s paintings are presented in their original order: unfurled, sentential, and sprawled across newsprint like the morning paper. Extending the functions of the bulletin board, a newspaper is a tool to disperse stories quickly and widely within communities.
This translation of we web keepers from bulletin board patchwork to newspaper publication rearticulates Lukaza’s commitment to cultivating practices of intentional reading and slow looking. In the window, all of the works were presented in one plane, but the paintings’ overlap rendered some letters and words out of view. As a newspaper, though each piece is reproduced unobstructed, in turning the pages the reader conceals one fragment in order to reach the next. In neither form can you see the whole thing at once; you have to take the time to look, and look carefully.
Ayana Zaire Cotton’s essay is a reflection on community entanglements, supports, spider webs, and cultivating play within enclosure. Their contribution to we web keepers is a deeply thoughtful analysis—poetic and precise—and expansion of the conceptual lattice put forth by Lukaza’s work.