Closer Reading: Three Bay Area Book Artists

Curated by Anthea Black, Closer Reading features three Bay Area book artists: Macy Chadwick, Kate Laster, and Vivian Sming. Each artist represents a different definition of “the book as art,” and a distinct approach to working with artists’ books as their primary medium. The exhibition is on view at the CCA Campus Gallery September 2–October 23, 2026.

Info here →

Forthcoming Titles

  • Johanna Hedva: My Knife Collection and Other Subjects of Desire

    My Knife Collection and Other Subjects of Desire is an orphanage for the unruly, lawless short pieces of Johanna Hedva’s oracular practice. Published between 2012 and 2026—in places such as e-flux, frieze, Tate, MASS MoCA, and the Seoul Mediacity Biennial—these works keep their cloven feet in many different worlds, spanning essays, fiction, spells, fables, devotionals, séances, and as apparitions of Hedva’s sculptures and installations.

    Across years marked by illness, acclaim, and apocalypse, Hedva arrives as a fortuneteller at the end of the world. On these pages, sculptures drip and drain, and a knife impales the wall of a museum. Hair floats in bowls of honey, while quantum mechanics bloom in the mouth of a ghost. Cockroaches inherit their duties from dead mothers. Simone Weil, Odetta, Kim Eon Hee, and Clarice Lispector drift through as psychopomps. 

    One of our most accomplished smugglers between worlds and genres, Hedva offers a cosmological field guide to contemporary ruin and enchantment.

    Available Nov. 17 →

  • Anna Martine Whitehead: FORCE! an opera in three acts

    Simply defined as a “big work,” an opera is a song cycle capacious enough to contain multitudes. Anna Martine Whitehead’s FORCE! an opera in three acts is a big work of strange sisterhoods, featuring fractaline characters with the power to disintegrate walls. A meditation on often-overlooked spaces—prison waiting rooms—FORCE! travels through silence, sound, and rhythm to dissipate borders between performers and audience members. Gathering lessons from lichens and other emergent strategies, direct actions, and mutual aid societies, the project leverages sound and movement as vectors for processing state violence and racial capitalism.

    This libretto, written by Whitehead, features the script of the performance interwoven with extensive footnotes. The publication brings together contributions by Suchi Branfman, Re’al Christian, Jenn Freeman, Maria Gaspar, and David Thomson, with essays and artistic interventions made alongside the “emergent opera.” Using the prison as a particular prism through which we can bear witness to the ways carceral systems replicate themselves, FORCE!, its notes, and the attendant collection of responses mark an attempt to abolish the Prison Industrial Complex in our heads, hearts, and houses.

    Details here →

New Releases ✨

Sming Sming Books

Formed in 2017, Sming Sming Books is a publishing studio that experiments with books as art, discourse, exhibition, and archive. Each project is created in close collaboration with artists and writers, whose works and ideas inform design, material, and printing choices.

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