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Dear List, If you are in the NYC vicinity, join me at Printed Matter in Chelsea for the opening of Steven Leiber Catalogs on Thursday, 6-8pm. The show highlights the sales catalogs of the late San Francisco-based bookseller, Steven Leiber. Leiber published over 50 rigorous and zany sales catalogs over the course of his career that appropriated the formats of the books and ephemera that he was selling. I am curating a display of many of these catalogs at Printed Matter, with the original materials coming from the SFMOMA Library and a few collectors. Hope to see some of you there. Best, David Senior https://www.printedmatter.org/programs/events/939 Steven Leiber (1957–2012) was a pioneering art dealer, collector, and gallerist, focused on the dematerialized art practices of the 1960s and 1970s. As an expert in the then-nascent field of artist archives and ephemera, in 1987 he opened Steven Leiber Basement. He was an important resource for numerous librarians, scholars, curators, and other enthusiasts, with a focus on the integral role of ephemera and documentation within conceptual art and other avant-garde movements. Between 1992–2010, Leiber produced a total of 52 dealer catalogs from his cellar-level bookstore and gallery ‘Steven Leiber Basement’. The published catalogs were meticulous reference documents of Leiber’s for-sale offerings, featuring important ephemeral works documenting conceptual art and other avant-garde movements. They were also ambitious experimental art projects in their own right, each published in a unique/unconventional format—scrapbooks, scrolls, tabbed folders, portfolio sets, card catalogs—and produced in homage to a different historic publication or multiple, including Wallace Berman’s Semina, Ray Johnson’s Correspondence Catalog, and Art & Project’s Bulletin, among many others. Taken cumulatively the works invite a nuanced understanding of Leiber’s work as an archivist/dealer in personal dialog with the material he collected and sold, while positioning Steven Leiber Basement as a living, conceptual project. Leiber’s own archive-worthy output of ephemera is of interest both for its exhaustive historical record and as an intensely creative project that collapsed the space between archivist, artist and archive. David Senior Head of Library & Archives San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Tickets available at SFMOMA.org<https://www.sfmoma.org/?utm_source=signature> 415.357.4121 [log in to unmask] 151 Third Street | San Francisco, CA 94103 This message, together with any and all attachments, is intended only for the use of the recipient(s) named above. It may contain information that is privileged and confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, you may not review, copy or distribute this communication. If you have received this communication in error, please notify the original sender by email and delete the message, along with any attachments. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Mail submissions to [log in to unmask] For information about joining ARLIS/NA see: http://www.arlisna.org/membership/join-arlisna Send administrative matters (file requests, subscription requests, etc) to [log in to unmask] ARLIS-L Archives and subscription maintenance: http://lsv.arlisna.org Questions may be addressed to list owner (Judy Dyki) at: [log in to unmask] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~