Making Art in Booklyn: Each One Teach One

The family memory books after two workshops. Small murals, created by children, in the foreground and large murals, created by parents, in the background. Click here for a slideshow of images associated with this article.

Booklyn is the name of a group of artists who make books, organized into an economic cooperative headquartered in Brooklyn, N.Y. We pool our resources and split the labor required to sell artists' books to libraries and museums. The money from the sale of books is split amongst ourselves and we save some to reinvest in the cooperative. We are not unlike food or housing cooperatives.

In our experience, cooperation increases the art making and frees up time for us to examine our responsibility to other book artists and artists in general, but also to our immediate geographic community. As we see it, stronger communities are a result of recognizing what resources we all have and then spreading those resources around. In our case, we move the resources and the knowledge of book making from our studios into other communities.

In the past two years we’ve been leaving our studios to teach book making, pass on our tools and create new networks. We’ve made books with parents, students, poets, playwrights, organizers and activists.

One of our most powerful examples of community book making occurred in the spring of 2004. A Booklyn artist and an art teacher from a Brooklyn elementary school wrote a grant together to support book-making workshops for parents and children. On Friday afternoons, after school and work had let out, families came together to make books. At first we looked at murals that told stories and talked about the power of pictures to speak without words. On the following Friday, parents and children were asked to recall a memory, something they had shared together. We then created two murals on paper, one made by the child and one by the parent. On the last Friday, these two books were woven together to recreate the family memory.

Some families created books about trips to Puerto Rico or to the circus, some families recalled the birth of a sibling and some families remembered their emigration story. But the power of the books was not so much in the content, but in the act of giving memory dignity and respect. To quote the spokesperson for the EZLN in Mexico, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, "Memory is, above all, say our most first ones, a powerful antidote for death, and an indispensable food for life. That is why the one who cares for and guards memory is caring for and guarding life. And the one who does not have memory is dead."

You can find the lesson plan we used at the bottom of this story.

A note on economics: The grant that funded the parent/child book making paid a wage to both the Bookyln artist and the school’s art teacher. This source of income strengthens artists in communities by providing for our rent and our supplies and by allowing us to continue to make art, and it strengthens arts in education by supporting the teacher's collaboration with artists. The next step is to find funding to pay participants to make books, be they parents and children, interns or any other community members.

Another example of community book making took place at a junior high school in the Bronx. Young people everywhere have a lot to say and the Bronx is no exception. As part of a literacy-day event, a Booklyn artist designed and constructed a chapbook with 20 students. The chapbook is a document of their voice, it is a record of what they find worthy of their creativity. The content includes basketball, the war in Iraq, love and violence.

We talked about making and distributing our own poetry. We talked about how the power to make books is in our hands, not the hands of teachers, principals or publishers, but in our own hands. As Booklyn sees it, communities are better off when voices are not filtered by corporate or government interests. We are a stronger community when we are in charge of our own words and that means making our own media.

The teaching we do in our own Booklyn studio brings communities to us. Two summers ago Booklyn invited five artists and educators to come and learn book making and teaching techniques. At first we called the program our intern program, but it has since metamorphosed into a "labor exchange." The change in title is not superficial, and in fact it is a stronger way to create and sustain a community. In general, interns are expected to provide labor, no matter how void of learning the task may be. In exchange, interns can expect to observe the goings-on of an organization, but not really learn much. This model did not strengthen Booklyn and few people took ownership in the labor they were giving. We think a meaningful, equal labor exchange is a step in a better direction: Participants give one hour of their labor for one hour of Booklyn’s labor, which may be instruction or use of the tools in the studio.

If there is a philosophy behind Booklyn, it might best be summarized as "each one teach one." We think our responsibility is to circulate what we have learned as an arts cooperative, and a valuable lesson is that cooperation strengthens our own community, because more money is distributed amongst ourselves. But we also want to help strengthen the communities around us. One way is to share what we know about teaching with the Community Arts Network and we hope you can find some of that knowledge in this article. You can reach us on the Internet at www.booklyn.org or through the mail at:

Booklyn Artists Alliance
37 Greenpoint Avenue, 4th Floor
Brooklyn, New York 11222

Jamie Munkatchy is a book artist and a part of the Booklyn Artists Alliance.

Original CAN/API publication: March 2005