Shotgun Seamstress at The Brooklyn Museum

I realized I’d never mentioned that “Shotgun Seamstress” was included in the exhibition “Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines.” The show was on view at The Brooklyn Museum from November 17, 2023 to March 31, 2024. After that, it moved to Vancouver Art Gallery from May 12 to September 22, 2024.

I still think it’s interesting—the institutional fascination with zines. 

No one writes a zine thinking it may one day end up in a museum exhibition—or maybe I should just speak for myself. My only goal was to get "Shotgun" to other Black punks. For me, zines are a part of punk, which I understand to mean anti-establishment and anti-institution. Maybe this is exactly what makes these raw documents all the more compelling to museums and academies. Excerpts from "Shotgun Seamstress" have been used in multiple college courses, particularly in women, queer and gender studies. Some punk zine writers, like Mimi Thi Nguyen, have joined the academy as professors or even as archivists within academic library systems. Jenna Freedman comes to mind, heading up Barnard Zine Library for I-don’t-know-how-many years at this point. I just used this incredible resource when I was researching my newest zine, “Paradise Lost,” and unearthed some very specific, local punk zine history.

I didn't go to the Brooklyn Museum opening because I live too far away and couldn’t make the trip at the time, but a friend sent me a video panning across my zines, arranged in a case behind glass. When I finally got my zines back in the mail after crossing the continent from Florida to New York to British Columbia and back home again, they arrived in plastic slip covers with catalog cards. They were being treated as art objects to be protected and preserved.

Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines, installation view. Courtesy Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Paula Abreu Pita (ripped from 4 columns)

My favorite copy of "Shotgun" is yellowed with age. It’s wrinkled and looks like coffee was spilled on it at some point. Zines are intimate objects, meant to be lived with. If you manage to hold on to a copy for years, the plain paper cover should be worn with love. You lose them, you give them away, or if you’re like me, you donate the ones you no longer have room for to your local library and keep a small collection for yourself.

An old, worn copy of Shotgun Seamstress No. 1 (2006)

I was honored to be included in a museum exhibit featuring zines & zine writers who I’ve known and whose writing I’ve loved for many years. My zine was displayed next to, “Fag School“ by my old friend and “Shotgun” regular Brontez Purnell. "Homocore," "Bikini Kill: Girl Power", “Thing” a Black queer zine from Chicago, "Gunk," "Evolution of a Race Riot"—so many zines that were foundational for me. “Shotgun” will always feel like the kid sister to all of these amazing underground missives that came before.

The problem is that whenever you take zines out of their context something always feels lost to me. 

Photo from Vancouver Art Gallery

When I make zines with kids, I feel like I can't possibly convey how they're so much more than "magazines you make yourself". Something feels lost in translation if zines are not connected to the rest of punk/DIY culture—like finding them mixed in with records, CDs and t-shirts at the merch table during a show, trading them in the mail, or crowding in a room, spread out all over the floor, making one together as a group. I actually made arrangements for the kids to at least table their zine at a local fest after it was done so they had more context for this thing that they were making. I wanted them to see it out in the world. At the very least, I wanted them to meet other people who were doing the same thing and be in an alternative space in Florida.

So, if you happened to catch this show in New York or Vancouver, or want to know more about zines, please understand that for me, they are one aspect—one piece—of a Total Culture that includes 

bands,

shows, 

all-ages shows in alternate spaces outside of bars, 

small DIY record and tape labels, 

communal punk houses, 

touring, 

traveling, 

hitchhiking, 

train hopping, 

graffiti, 

shoplifting, 

squatting, 

scamming, 

veganism, 

vegetarianism, 

street protests 

anarchism

and more. 

Not necessarily all of these things at once, but many of these things in different combinations. 

Times have changed and zines have become art objects. I can live with that as long as it means that people are still using them to create their own culture outside of the mainstream, if it means that people are being creative on their own terms, if they still create lifelines among people who are literally being alienated to death and need these secret, underground channels to survive. Is that what zines still do? Or are they now simply a commodity like everything else?

Me and Mimi at Chicago Zine Fest in 2013

P.S. This wasn't my first time being featured by the Brooklyn Museum. I did a panel talk there in 2015 with Lydia Lunch, Johanna Fateman and others, called, "I Will Resist With Every Inch and Every Breath: Punk and the Art of Feminism."