8 Ball Community

8 Ball Community Inc. is an independent creative collective based in New York City that promotes educational exchange and cultural collaboration through its online public access television and radio stations, zine and book publishing operations, archive and library, and events and workshops;. 8 Ball Community operates according to a D.I.Y. philosophy and is operated by volunteers, with a non-hierarchical structure. 8 Ball Community is a non-profit that is fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas. In March 2020 8 Ball Community was included on artist Jaimie Warren’s top 10 list on ArtForum.

History

8 Ball Zine Fair

In January 2012, Alfredo, owner of a billiard hall in East Williamsburg named Grand Billiards, asked Lele Saveri, Giuseppe Furcolo, and Josh Hubbard to help him attract new inhabitants of the gentrifying neighbourhood to the bar. The billiard hall, which had been open for 10 years, was losing its Latinx customer base as they were displaced by more affluent gentrifiers. Between January and July of 2012, they hosted parties, screenings, launches, and other gatherings at the billiard hall, including what became the first 8 Ball Zine Fair. They invited local publishers and artists to show and sell their products on the pool tables, offering a “drop-off” table where anyone could leave their zines to be sold. While Grand Billiards closed, the 8 Ball Zine Fair continues to take place twice each year in New York City and once a year in San Francisco.

The Newsstand

From June 2013 to February 2014 the 8 Ball Community, with help from the creative agency AlldayEveryday, took over an abandoned subway newsstand in the Lorimer Street station in Brooklyn where they organized The Newsstand project. The Newsstand was run by 8 Ball members and anyone was welcome to come and leave copies of their self-made publications to sell. While The Newsstand was operational, 8 Ball hosted over 90 events, book launches and exhibitions, and sold 1,000 different titles by more than 300 artists from around the world.

In 2015, The Newsstand was rebuilt as an interactive installation at the Museum of Modern Art by Lele Saveri for the show “Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015”. The re-installation included all of the original publications from the project and 8 Ball volunteers reproduced some events and performances from the original location. MoMA later purchased The Newsstand installation and archive for its collection, and in 2017 invited Saveri to re-create the installation as part of "Being Modern: MoMA in Paris.”

8 Ball Radio, Television and Library

Between October 2013 and November 2014, 8 Ball collaborated with tattoo artist Mark Cross to run Muddguts, an exhibition and project space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Muddguts became a notable center for a community of young artists, holding twenty exhibitions in twelve months, as well as screenings, workshops, book launches, and drawing clubs. During this period, 8 Ball Community launched its own internet radio station, originally called Radio Muddguts 41, now known as 8 Ball Radio, which has over 43,000 annual listeners as of 2019, including more than 1,000 each in the US, UK, Japan, Canada, Germany, and Russia. 8 Ball Radio was voted Listeners’ Choice Best Online Radio Station in North America for the 2018 Mixcloud Online Radio Awards.

From December 2014 to June 2018, 8 Ball Community operated out of a basement in SoHo, where its headquarters were described in the Village Voice as “a superhero’s hideout — if the superhero was some mythological lovechild of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Laurie Anderson.” During this period, the 8 Ball Library, an archive of thousands of self-made publications, was opened to the public and, on January 20th, 2017, the organization launched 8 Ball TV, a 24-hour online public access television station. In addition, 8 Ball started producing more social activism content and events including the series Underground Sessions, 15-minute musical performances with an audience broadcast live on 8 Ball TV. Between October 2018 and June 2019 8 Ball Community moved to a vacant storefront on Canal Street that had been shut down for selling counterfeit goods. In this location 8 Ball Community's radio, television, library, and merchandise operations became accessible to passersby for the first time.

Education

8 Ball Community, in keeping with their dedication to community education offers free or low-cost drop-in workshops on skills such as video editing, zine making, and silkscreening. 8 Ball Community has partnered with organizations including the Museum of Modern Art, Queens Museum, Vans Asia, YoungArts, Sculpture Center, Whitney Museum, HistoryMiami Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, Aperture Foundation, Avenues for Justice, Women's Prison Association, and The Door to offer hands-on workshops for young people.

In 2019, 8 Ball Community launched Jim's Web, a mentorship program that connects emerging creatives with established professionals who advise the young artists on a project in disciplines including architecture, fashion design, fine arts, photography, product design, and publishing. The program was created in honor of interior designer, curator, and writer Jim Walrod, who was known to forge connections between artists of all fields through his own social network, and was a fan of 8 Ball Community.

Collaborations and Exhibitions

8 Ball Community's community-oriented events and installations, held in the U.S. and globally in collaboration with other organizations, include:

• WSSF/8 Ball Tokyo Tour, a two-week tour of exhibitions and events around Tokyo in partnership with Los Angeles-based collective WSSF;
• The Gazette Bayii project, where 8 Ball Community curated a zine reading library in the center of the historic neighbourhood of Pera, Istanbul;
• The Citrus News project in San Francisco, where 8 Ball Community created a week-long installation resembling the city's fruit stands with fruit and artists' books on sale;
• The international photography fair Unseen in Amsterdam in 2016, where 8 Ball Community launched a volume of zines featuring 41 photographers from 5 continents;
• The 2017 Abierta Plana Bookfair in São Paulo, Brazil, where 8 Ball set up a temporary TV studio and invited local filmmakers to come and produce shows;
• Collectivism, a group show at Foam Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam which ran from April to June 2017, where 8 Ball created an installation and ran workshops;
• The History of Zines, an exhibition and publication presented during the 2018 Printed Matter Art Book Fair held at MoMA PS1, organized in collaboration with Boo-Hooray;
• A week-long installation in Milan in 2019 in collaboration with Nero Publications aimed at creating connections, dialogues and discussions between the Italian creative scene and activist groups and organizations that included a green screen TV studio, a radio station, and a small reading library of mostly local independent publication;
• Radical Pages: A Selection of American Zines, an installation at the 2019 Tokyo Art Book Fair in Japan, where 8 Ball curated an installation of American zines from their library and set up a public access TV studio for local artists, performers and activists to share their work
• “Second Sundays,” a popular series at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, where 8 Ball Radio has a monthly residence

8 Ball collaborated with the following institution and organizations: MoMA, NYC; Whitney Museum, NYC; Studio Museum Harlem, NYC; FOAM Museum, Amsterdam; Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Printed Matter Inc., NYC; Tokyo Art Book Fair; Feira Plana, São Paulo and more.

Artists affiliated to 8 Ball Community are: Daniel Arnold, Tauba Auerbach, Will Boone, Petra Collins, Mark Cross, Sarah Cwynar, Cali Dewitt, Leo Fitzpatrick, Jill Freedman, Mark Gonzalez, Sandy Kim, Emma Kohlmann, Maia Ruth Lee, Ari Marcopolous, Barry McGee, Jason Nocito, Glen O’Brien, Jason Polan, Lele Saveri, Nick Sethi, Peter Sutherland.

Activism

8 Ball Community's Active team is a group of 8 Ball volunteers that meets weekly to discuss projects in social activism, produces projects for all 8 Ball platforms, from video and radio content (under the name Active8) to a publication called Affinity Journal. 8 Ball also reproduces topical informative publications to sell on a sliding scale basis. They open their platforms to historically marginalized groups and have featured footage from the Dakota Access Pipeline protests on 8 Ball TV, created zines with Hong Kong Umbrella Protest activists, hosted a conference for working women of color organized by Chroma Collective, and co-organized the annual Kurdish Film and Cultural Festival with the North America Rojava Alliance to introduce New Yorkers to Kurdish culture and to call attention to the contributions the Rojava model could make to political thinking in the US.

External Links

8 Ball Community Homepage

8 Ball Television Website

8 Ball Radio Website

8 Ball Radio Mixcloud

This article "8 Ball Community" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:8 Ball Community. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

---