Recess is located at 46 Washington Avenue in Clinton Hill near the Brooklyn Navy Yard and is most closely accessible by the G train at Clinton-Washington or the B57 / B62 bus lines. It is also accessible via ferry at the Navy Yard.

Sept. 20th

6-9pm Opening Party

11am-1pm Accessible Hours
1pm-7pm  General Admission

11am-6pm General Admission

We will only offer free pre-registration tickets for Saturday, 9/21 from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM for our immunocompromised, disabled, elderly, and high-risk community members. We are holding these Accessible Hours so that they can enjoy the fair with limited crowds and reduced entry lines.

To pre-register, simply fill out the form below! If you have additional accessibility questions, please reach out to brooklynartbookfair@gmail.com.

Register

The gallery at Recess is fully accessible for wheelchair users and their restroom is gender neutral and ADA compliant. The Assembly Room, where some programs will be held, is located up one flight of stairs. 6 Waverly Ave will hold alternative programming and all day activities and is fully accessible for wheelchair users. There will be an additional ADA accessible portable bathroom Flushing Avenue Lot between Recess and 6 Waverly.  

This non-circulating library is a culmination of five BASN (Book Arts Solidarity Network) members’ books, prints, ephemera, zines, brochures, and other printed reference material sourced from their personal collections. The selection is based on the collective’s mission to activate book arts as a tool for mobilizing solidarity-based movements, in particular the liberation struggle in Palestine and anti-imperialist movements across the SWANA (South West Asian, North African) region. Each book is hand-picked for fair attendees to read, photograph, and take inspiration from as they weave in and out of the fair exhibition and accompanying events.

More about BASN: bit.ly/aboutbasn

Temperature check: How are we feeling today? is a project exploring dimensions of narrating experience.

It starts with a story about a day in R’s life as a web knitter. The repetitive labor of production causes R to spiral into a hysterical introspection. From feeling suffocated by her belongings to being permeated by random encounters, the persistence of a self flows out of her. This mind shift materializes into a bodily reformation. R becomes a giant Chinese salamander breathing through rain-dampened skin. 

The web metaphor bridges the story’s physics and metaphysics in the story, with the narrative diverging through artifacts, poetry, creative writing, interactive illustration, and creative coding. For the program, I invite you to source one thing that you are willing to give away. Using whatever knotting methods you prefer, we will weave them into a big net together. Each of us will receive a segment from this net as a return on our time together.

Through the last year of the Zionist-led and US-funded genocide in Gaza, the Palestinian Youth Movement has upheld of five demands: an immediate and permanent ceasefire; a lift of the siege on Gaza; release of all Palestinian prisoners; an end to the Zionist occupation of Palestine; and an end to Western complicity in Zionism. The demand for release of all Palestinian prisoners is often overlooked, but is at the heart of our struggle. Palestinian prisoners are held without trial or charge, for many months or years, and face routine torture and denial of medical care and family visits. Without the release of all our prisoners, a lasting ceasefire is untenable.

In the face of Zionist oppression, Palestinian prisoners have always been the compass of our struggle: they teach us about resistance even as their tools are few, and they teach us about unity, leading our people by their example.

Join the Palestinian Youth Movement for a teach-in on the history of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement, how Palestinian prisoners made the occupation prison a site of revolutionary struggle, and how cultural production has played a pivotal role in their resistance. 

We will discuss:
What do we mean when we say “prisoners are the compass of our struggle”?
What is the function of prisons in the occupation, and what is the role of the prisoners movement in Palestinian revolution?
How has culture been used as a tactic of resistance?

We will touch on resistance songs that emerge from the prison, novels that have been smuggled out through the prisoner network, and art objects that have been made from within the prison walls.

How can art and design support social justice? How can public policies, processes, and systems be contextualized in the lived reality of communities? How can artists and designers mobilize to meaningfully affect social change? Check out our recent projects and create a button that inspires your design practice.

Join SICK magazine for an afternoon reading to celebrate the release of their sixth issue! Featuring poetry and prose from contributors Ashna Ali, Leora Fridman, Maria Gray, & Theo LeGro.

The panel delves into contemporary printmaking as a medium for political dissent within the leftist artistic landscape. Printmaking provides a tactile medium that enables artists to expand upon aesthetics as a form of political discourse. It pushes beyond traditional boundaries, becoming a vehicle for artists to express dissent, beyond the sterility that is sometimes witnessed in political and academic spaces, and provoke dialogue built upon existing political practices. The panel will examine how various printmaking techniques—from lithography to screen printing—are utilized to create works aligned with SAAG’s own ethos, transforming aesthetic experiences into acts of resistance.

The discussion will focus on the sensory dimensions of printmaking, highlighting how visual art, typography, and multimedia elements are strategically employed to evoke affective and political responses. By situating contemporary printmaking within its historical context, the panel aims to trace its evolution as a tool of dissent. We will explore how South Asian artists and writers belonging to SAAG, in particular, have adapted traditional techniques to political means, using printmaking as a means to forge unlikely but urgent solidarities.

In this two-hour workshop, participants will be led through a collective mapping exercise, tracing solidarity practices within one’s self, practice, and community. Drawing from Danika Cooper’s reflections on hybridity as a conceptual jumping point for anti-colonial mapmaking, we will employ collage as a tool to “overlay multiple ways of knowing, being, and engagement” with the publishing landscape. The workshop will culminate in a group reflection to identify the sources of strength, points of weakness, and paths of action that emerge from the exercise. 

Workshop participants will take home the inaugural issue of BASN’s biannual mailer. Findings from this workshop will be presented in the second issue of this publication, with participants credited in print.

This workshop is open to book arts publishers and practitioners.

Register here: https://bit.ly/BASNBKABFWorkshop 
More about BASN: bit.ly/aboutbasn

*Olivia Elias, appears in Arablit Gaza issue (2024) and Chaos Crossing (2022)

The book launch will feature a performative reading by Wah-Ming Chang, followed by time for the audience to engage with the artist and interact with the book.

On Solitary Viewership by Rujuta Rao is an artist book composed of 93 flashcards held together by a clamp. In her book, Rao reflects on the creation of art for individual viewers, her relationship with her late mentor Aveek Sen, their conversations on queerness, and her broader art practice.

come celebrate the launch of dreaming our futures + embodying our dreams: a crip ritual dream workbook, created by crip xXgrandmacoreXx sound witch alexa dexa and risograph-printed by the endlessly lovely folks at Endless Editions, with a hybrid online and in-person dream ritual at the Brooklyn Art Book Fair (BKABF).

Together we’re going to be dreaming our futures + embodying our dreams. we’ll gain insight into the dream worlds we want to inhabit with oracle readings shared by alexa dexa using their dreaming our futures + embodying our dreams oracle//composition deck. then we’ll lull ourselves into lush and vibrant dream space to dream cozily + deeply with a live songspell alexa dexa will craft + cast for us with their beloved toychestra and live electronics. as we’re eased back into the present, we’ll pull our dreams from the ether with us and make a mapping of the waking possibilities of our dreams + our power to embody them.

rsvp for free :)

accessibility for our dream ritual includes zoom's automated captioning, open audio description, and open sound description. video documentation and a transcript of our dream ritual will be made available to all who RSVP as a form of access for those of us operating on crip time.

How can art marking, printmaking, and independent publishing practices translate into mutual aid and grassroots organizing? Through a series of prompts, we will collaboratively explore what it means to be a creative person who wants to actively engage in discussion, reflection, and action to support Palestine and work toward collective liberation. In the spirit of sounds about riso, participants will engage with these prompts by creating an avatar and traversing through “worlds.”

Children’s literature has long been recognized as a key outlet for leftists to call for progressive change through the younger generation. Books for children are so often trivialized and ignored by state censors that they offer a platform to speak openly about the problems of society to the generation that will inherit them. By integrating engaging illustrations with politically conscious messages, readers of all ages are encouraged to question authority and imagine alternative worlds. In this talk, Falgoush and Khabar Keslan will showcase examples of radical children’s books from Iran and Lebanon which find beautiful and innovative ways of addressing everything from class inequality to exploitation and the occupation of Palestine. From Samad Behrangi’s The Little Black Fish (1968), a political allegory banned in pre-revolutionary Iran, to Home (1974) by the publishing house Dar al-Fatah al-Arabi in Beirut, Lebanon, which reveals the injustice of forced displacement faced by Palestinian refugees, the panel will discuss important literary works, characters and the publishers who brought them to life in order to highlight larger themes of oppression and emancipation that embody this radical tradition.

Join us for Keychain Access: Workshop, a participatory workshop designed by Zichen Yuan (@yuan.zichen) in collaboration with Tianran Qian (@_tianran_) and Sirui Liao (@lia00__0).

Since 2022, Keychain Access has indiscriminately collected images, sounds, and stories of found keychains: be it a key unlocking a door to which one shouldn’t have access or a souvenir left unnoticed for years from a far-flung relationship. These ordinarily tiny objects, chained together, mark our subconscious relationships with the vast world, and Keychain Access sets out to uncover these not-so-obvious narratives.

This time, guests are invited to foster new meanings, new identities, and new connections by showing and telling our keychains with each other. Through a series of group activities, one-on-one conversations, and collective imagination, Keychain Access: Workshop will reintroduce keychains not only as vehicles for personal experiences but also as linkages for transpersonal understandings that nurture radical care. In this exploration of intimacy and otherness, we just may find a sense of unity in an era marked by disconnection.

In this workshop participants will think about (artist book) publishing as a capacious site for interdisciplinary artistic practice. Through a series of prompts, and by looking at examples of relevant artists’ books, participants will consider the book as a medium through which to experiment with the translation of form, time, movement, and genre.

Organized by Endless Editions, Brooklyn Art Book Fair (BKABF) is an alternative book fair that prioritizes the needs of emerging and underrepresented artists by removing financial barriers and fostering community. Our mission is to create a book fair with the deliberate intention of care towards our community.

We believe in creating spaces that are open and accessible to all. We encourage participation from artists of all backgrounds by removing financial barriers, allowing our exhibitors to better meet certain material needs. We organize with special emphasis on the experiences of emerging and underrepresented artists. We are committed to building supportive spaces for artists to create, connect and flourish. We value all members of our community inclusive of age, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, ability, socioeconomic background. To ensure that the disabled, high risk, immunocompromised, elderly and covid conscious members of our community are welcomed, we require masking indoors during all hours of the fair and hold accessible pre-registered hours with smaller crowds and shorter entry lines.

We stand against censorship and are committed to protecting our artists, educators and program facilitators and their freedom of speech. We acknowledge the profound influence of art in reflecting our socio-political context. Art books and zines have historically served as a forum for progressive political discourse. These mediums play a crucial role in amplifying voices and perspectives that challenge existing norms, fostering dialogue and driving positive social change against oppression and colonization.

In addition, we build programming around emancipatory politics, with the fair acting as a site for resistance, discussion and grief. In accordance with these values Endless Editions unquestionably stands with a free Palestine and supports artists who center liberatory struggles in their publishing practices.

6-9pm Opening Party

11am-1pm Accessible Hours
1pm-7pm  General Admission

11am-6pm General Admission