The NY Art Book Fair Preview - you should go

This Thursday 9/27 begins the amazing NY Art Book Fair with a Preview. It – and the rest of the Fair – is a free event, held at MOMA PS1, and is “the world’s premier event for artists books, catalogs, monographs, periodicals, and zines presented by more than 270 international presses, booksellers, antiquarians, artists, and independent publishers from twenty-five countries.” Over 15,000 people – collectors, dealers, independent publishers, among others – attended this event in Long Island City last year. The Fair is now in its seventh year.

Keynote speakers during the concurrent Contemporary Artists Books Conference will be Lucy Lippard and Paul Chan. A series of artist-led workshops, called The Classroom, will “engage visitors in lively conversation all weekend long.” Also all weekend long will be special project rooms, screenings, book signings, and performances.

Three memorials are also planned for the Fair. Printed Matter, the producers of this event, will present a collection of sales catalogues by book collector and dealer Steven Leiber. There will be a tribute – in the form of all the books he published during his lifetime – to book dealer John McWhinnie, who passed away last January. “An Homage to Mike Kelley” is the third, and will be “a portrait in the form of a library” – a selection of books that are perceived as defining the artist; he also passed away at the beginning of this year.

The Preview schedule is:

6 pm – Musical performance by Sun Foot and Malcolm Mooney (original vocalist with German krautrock band Can)

7pm – Classroom discussion with Matt Wolf, filmmaker of I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard and Book signing by AA Bronson, Liquid Assets

8pm – Book signing by Matthias Herrmann for his new book 69

The full schedule for the NY Art Book Fair can be found here. It goes from September 28 to 30, 2012.