8-Ball is an independent not-for-profit organization that — through free, open-access platforms and events — nurtures and supports a community of artists. We provide virtual and physical meeting sites for people of all ages and backgrounds. Our mission is to generate collaborative and educational exchange through our publishing house, radio station, public access television station, self publishing artists fair, public library, residency program and a series of educational workshops in art-related trades.
Events for independent and self-publishers have been a primary focus of 8-Ball since the beginning. It’s what started our community and what keeps it going. We recently produced our annual publications and events in partnership with Printed Matter for the New York Art Book Fair held at MoMa PS1. This has been an ongoing collaboration where we have co-published zine sets with artists such as Tom Sachs, Ari Marcopolous, Weirdo Dave, Mark Gonzales, Cali Dewitt, Maggie Lee, Matt Connors, Nathaniel Matthews, Will Boone, Ara Peterson and Jill Freedman.
Within NYABF we produce and run ‘Zine Zone’ where live events are featured involving artists from our community, our newest publications are released, and we run our ‘drop off’ table open to submissions from any self publishing artist.
We have our own ongoing event series catering primarily to independent art book publishers, the 8-Ball Zine Fair. We produce these events bi-annually in NYC, taking place every December and June, and annually in SF in July. All of our fairs cater to self-publishing artists by utilizing the ‘drop off’ concept.
Our publishing house offers an effective way for us to collaborate with the artists we love.
These collaborations are initiated on a rolling basis. The participants of the publishing group select artists to feature in new publications, come up with concepts for new books and packages and research new ways of printing and binding. Out of respect for DIY printing culture, we keep everything as hand-made as possible.
The most recent project is currently being exhibited in Amsterdam, as part of ‘Unseen Niche’, within the international photography fair curated by Foam Photographiemuseum. We are presenting a new set of publications put together by our publishing team. The set chronicles the work of 41 photographers from 4 continents, showing the world from their point of view with a physical publication rather than through social media.
For the 2016-17 Calendar we have several workshop projects in development, such as a series of three interdisciplinary artist workshops hosted locally by the 8-Ball team and a group of guest artists. These workshops are designed to be accessible for all ages and backgrounds, with a focus on visual media, self publishing, raw-materials and sustainability.
Following the success of our workshops with MoMA Teens, we’re developing another series of workshops with them as well as a project with MoMa teen teacher and artist Jamie Warren, who will collaborate on content for 8-Ball TV.
A future international project we're working on involves installing a TV Studio set in conjunction with ‘Feira Plana’ and the Ibirapuera Biennial in Rio de Janeiro, where locals can come and produce their own DIY TV shows.
The 8-Ball TV station is another project being launched in the near future, we are working on making it operational in 2017. The concept for 8-Ball TV is a 24-hour online public access station. It will be a fully equipped channel, finding and fostering outside talent, from preproduction through delivery. The project operates out of our homemade basement studio. From live art-making programs to 360-degree cinema, all will be broadcast on our bootleg TV website. 8-Ball TV aims to make television DIY again.
Our 8-Ball Radio project is run by a group of individuals who come together to promote musical content as well as talk-radio programs that reference a myriad of genres, histories, stories, special interests, sounds, and hidden gems that would not necessarily be broadcast on commercial radio. All radio programming is produced and broadcast from our radio studio located in SoHo. Including live shows, every show is archived on the internet so that during off- air hours people can always access and listen to past shows.
“8-Ball Merch” - 8-Ball merchandise is a special project in that it functions as a source of revenue for the 8-Ball Community. Guest Artists design commemorative shirts for our events which are produced by our team as well as custom accessories mix tapes and goodies.
Our archiving project was initiated in order to preserve the continuing accumulation of special publications and ephemera made and collected by our community. We ask for one copy of each publication submitted to our ‘drop off’ to be donated to the collection. The 8-Ball Library holds the publications we produce, donations, and publications we discover at events and bookstores around the world. The collection is open to the public by appointment.
In addition to our own library, we’ve curated library collections for the Red Bull Music Academy in Brooklyn and Gazette Bayii in Istanbul.
