Celebrating Interference: an evening of art and reflection

In the summer of 2021, as we marked the tenth anniversary of Interference Archive’s founding, a group of us began talking about values that we feel are core to our own identity, and that have helped get us through our first decade. These values—solidarity, memory, DIY, autonomy, community, collaboration, and mutual aid—have influenced our work together and with our broader community. 

We then reflected on the amazing network of comrades who have inspired us in doing this work: artists, activists, and archivists themselves. We reached out to some of these individuals with an invitation to design a poster focused on one of our core values, and we are excited to share the result of that work as the Celebrating Interference art portfolio.

We invite you to join us on November 10th for the first viewing of this art portfolio, in the company of some of the contributing artists. Our 6 to 8pm event will include an discussion and presentation by local artist contributors at 6:30pm, followed by time to mingle, share, and view the portfolio on display. Attendees will also be able to explore Interference Archive’s current exhibition, Defend / Defund.

About this project

Since 2011, Interference Archive has existed as an all-volunteer, collectively organized archive of material produced by social movements around the world. Our work as an archive includes caring for material collections donated to us; providing access through regular open hours; and activating the archive through free exhibitions and programming. More broadly, our work as a radical social space involves thinking through new ways to organize ourselves, to care for each other, and to use history as a tool for change. As we reflected on a decade of Interference Archive, a set of core values emerged. In an effort to celebrate and explore these values, we invited artist comrades to choose one and create a poster expressing their interpretation of it, to celebrate Interference with us.

Participating artists include:

Tomie Arai is a public artist who was born and raised in New York. She is a founding member of the Chinatown Art Brigade; a cultural collective of Asian diasporic artists, activists and educators fighting gentrification and displacement. Arai is currently a staff member of CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities.

Kevin Caplicki is a farmer, artist, rabble rouser and human in the Hudson Valley of NY. He is a co-founder of Interference Archive, Visual Resistance Collective, NYC Ghost Bike project, Miss Rockaway Armada, member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and owner of Wood Thrush Farm. 

Avram Finkelstein is an artist and writer, and a founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives. His work has shown at MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the New Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, David Zwirner, the Shed, the Museum of the City of New York, Kunsthal KAdE, and the Migros Museum, and is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney, the New Museum, the Metropolitan, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. He is featured in the artist oral history project at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, and his book for UC Press, After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images was nominated for an International Center Of Photography 2018 Infinity Award in Critical Writing and Research. He has written for BOMB, frieze, Art21, and Foam, been interviewed by The New York Times, frieze, Artforum, ARTnews, NPR, Slate, and Interview, and spoken about art, social practice, activism, LGBTQ cultural production, and the American Left at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and NYU.

Josh MacPhee is a designer, artist, and archivist. He is a founding member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, the author of An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels, and co-editor of Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture. He co-founded and helps run Interference Archive, a public collection of cultural materials produced by social movements.

Keisuke Narita is a graphic designer who manages the infoshop, Irregular Rhythm Asylum (IRA), in Tokyo. He is a member of the woodblock print collective A3BC and the sewing circle Nu-Man, both based out of IRA. Also involved with CIRA-Japana, an anarchist archive.

Andrea Narno is a Mexican queer printmaker living in New Orleans, Lousiana. Andrea believes in art as a tool of transformation, contributing to social change during these uncertain times. Andrea’s work centers around the symbolism of plants as a way to express thoughts, feelings and ideas, as well as a means to explore topics like migration, absence and grief. Text plays an important role in their body or work which is primarily linocuts alongside textile, silkscreen and risograph projects.  Andrea is a member of Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and half of Birds of Paradise, a collaborative project with printmaker V Adams.

Meredith Stern (DIY) obtained a BFA in Ceramics at Tulane University in New Orleans. She has a multifaceted practice that includes printmaking, ‘zine publishing and ceramic work. Meredith is a feminist artist and curator. She is a member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the MOMA, The Library Of Congress, and in Universities and Libraries around North America.  In 2012 she organized a project called “This is an Emergency!” which combines visual art, narrative, and gender justice. She is working on a project called “Craft in Time” which portrays creative people working in their studios.  In 2016 she created a booklet project on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This project was organized by Kevin Caplicki, Sophie Glidden-Lyon, and Jen Hoyer, with design help from Stray Cat Studios. Posters were printed at Shoestring Press in Brooklyn, NY.

This project is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.