Documenting a half-century of DIY publishing, “Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines” opens at the Brooklyn Museum. A tremendous undertaking, more than one thousand artists’ zines and publications emerging from the unruly 1970-2020 North American punk and queer underground are featured. Artist-publishers including Tom Jennings and Mimi Thi Nguyen present their Xerox handiwork and an online archive of selected zines opens access to the rich collection.

The link between new media art and knowledge work was writ large in Xerox Art. Kate Eichhorn’s 2016 book Adjusted Margin parsed the role the photocopier played in the 1970-90s NYC Art scene in meticulous detail. An excerpt published in the MIT Press Reader introduces the convergence of technological, economic, and aesthetic forces that shaped this under-documented niche genre (image: a spread from David Wojnarowicz’s 1988 zine In the Shadow of Forward Motion).