Image: George Schneeman and Bill Berkson: On the Offspring, 1969 or 1970; mixed media on illustration board; 12 × 12 in.
The Reading Room
January 15, 2012 - June 17, 2012
University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
The Reading Room is a temporary project dedicated to poetry and experimental fiction offering visitors the chance to take home a free book drawn from the overstock collections of several noted East Bay small presses, including Kelsey Street Press, Atelos Books, and Tuumba Press. Books and catalogs from Small Press Distribution will also be available. In turn, visitors are asked to replace that book with one from their own library. We look forward to seeing how the character of the works on the shelves evolves over the course of the project!
Stop by The Reading Room during gallery hours to enjoy a comfortable reading area, listen to recordings of selected poets published by these presses, and view silk-screen prints and original works on paper created by George Schneeman in collaboration with poets Ron Padgett, Bill Berkson, and Lewis MacAdams.
As part of selected Friday night L@TE programs throughout winter and spring, The Reading Room will be the site of literary readings (RE@DS) co-curated by poet/author David Brazil and Suzanne Stein, poet, publisher, and community producer at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Guided and inspired by arts writer and poet Ramsay Bell Breslin and poet and UC Berkeley Professor of English Lyn Hejinian, BAM/PFA’s new literary project invites visitors to look, listen, share, and read in The Reading Room.
About the RE@DS Programmers
David Brazil David Brazil was born in New York and lives in Oakland, California. With Sara Larsen, he edits the monthly xerox periodical TRY! In 2010, his groundbreaking anthology (with Kevin Killian) The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater:1945–1985 appeared to wide critical acclaim. He is active in the San Francisco Poets Theater and has co-curated a variety of local reading series, as well as the Poetic Labor Project’s annual Labor Day event, which has invited writers to talk about how they make a living as well as their involvement in political work. Forthcoming publications include Mina Loy Portal (Trafficker) and ECONOMY (Little Red Leaves).
Suzanne Stein Suzanne Stein is the author of Tout va bien (Displaced) and HOLE IN SPACE (OMG!). Poems, talk performances, and prose have appeared in War and Peace, On: Contemporary Practice, Counterpath Online; and at New Langton Arts, the San Francisco Exploratorium, The Poetry Project, and elsewhere. She is editor and publisher of the small, Oakland-based poetry press TAXT and was codirector and film curator at (f o u r w a l l s gallery in San Francisco. She works currently as community producer at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, organizing a variety of talk- and conversation-based programs, and is editor-in-chief of the museum’s blog, Open Space.
The Reading Room is supported by a generous grant from the Kadist Foundation, San Francisco. Thanks also to Ross Craig, sound engineer, and to Meyer Sound for donating the speakers.
