About this Event
Please join us at Bobst Library on Saturday morning, January 24, 2026, during Day 2 of "Locating Downtown," a three-day gathering co-hosted by New York University Special Collections and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
These two concurrent sessions will be led by NYU Special Collections staff at the Special Collections Center, 2nd floor, Bobst Library. Registration is capped at 20 participants per session, and you may reserve seating for a single session only (select from "Session 1" or "Session 2" when you reserve your ticket). For more of the Day 2 schedule, see the Locating Downtown Conference Program Guide.
Session 1 — Restricted Until Further Notice: Anonymity, Delay, and the Politics of Transmission, with Amna Abdus-Salaam
This session examines anonymity, restriction, and self-erasure as deliberate strategies of transmission within archives and special collections. Moving between medieval religious texts and contemporary activist archives, this session explores how individuals and communities have used masking, pseudonyms, redaction, and delayed access not as harm or disappearance, but as strategies of protection and endurance.
Drawing on activist ephemera from NYU Special Collections, as well as finding aids, and donor agreements, the session foregrounds how these practices are negotiated legally, ethically, and curatorially. It considers how acts of withholding challenge dominant assumptions about visibility, access, and authorship. Participants will engage directly with the Guerrilla Girls archival collection to reflect on how power, agency, and care operate within systems designed to preserve, and sometimes intentionally limit, cultural memory.
Session 2 — From the Mimeograph to 5th Avenue: 0 to 9 Street Works, with Adam Moritz and Nicholas Martin
In the short run of Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci’s 0 to 9 (1967-1969), the mimeographed pages of the magazine provided an exhibition site for works from artists like Steve Paxton, Adrian Piper, and Mayer and Acconci themselves that explored the ancillary aspects of the written word—the notational, scriptural, graphic, or procedural. These “uses” hint towards an activity that happened, or could happen, beyond the page—a distinct quality which would be foundational for the burgeoning conceptualism that would dominate downtown New York art in the following decades. Indeed, the magazine eventually culminated in a total exit of the page. For its final issue, released as a supplement in Summer 1969, contributors went out—most commonly to the block bordered by 5th and 6th Avenues, 13th and 14th Streets—to incorporate the city and its inhabitants into novel modes of intersubjective performance; the issue itself is only the documentation of these events.
During this presentation, participants will first look closely at the copy of “Issue 6 Supplement: Street Works” contained in NYU’s Special Collections, and contextualize it in relation to prior issues of the magazine, as well as to its artistic and political moment. Following this session, the group will walk the ten minutes north from Bobst Library to the exact site denoted in the issue, on the way discussing the tripartite interplay between page, performer, and place.
Image credit: Flyer, Lower Manhattan Drawing Show. Stephen Mass Papers; MSS.592; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University.
As a part of NYU's commitment to global inclusion, our events and initiatives are open to individuals of all backgrounds and identities.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Bobst Library | 2nd Floor | Special Collections Gallery, 70 Washington Square South, New York, United States
USD 0.00
