Shana Agid
Call a Wrecking Ball to Make a Window, 2012
$480
Call a Wrecking Ball to Make a Window is a map-fold book with original text that explores routes taken and spaces made by queer people in New York City from the 1970s through the 2000s. Drawing links between the lives of gay men in that period and my own coming out into the height of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1990s, the book proposes a fantastic landscape in which these lives overlap through the geography and infrastructure of the city. By following the writings of David Wojnarowicz, the queer writer and artist who died of AIDS in 1992, I trace his moves in and through Manhattan’s grid, attempting to link back to my own queer trajectories, first as a young lesbian, and now as a trans person. The book’s title refers to both to the changing built landscape of New York and to effects produced by the desire to find redemption and instruction through an oversimplification of personal and political histories.
Manhattan is thirteen and a half miles long and, at its widest point, just three miles wide. It can be gotten around by boat in three hours and by foot in less than a day. It is, geographically speaking, a small and navigable place; despite this, it is a monster of a city. It is a good landscape for telling impossible stories.
It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This, 2nd Edition, 2010
$10
It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This began as an installation and letterpress printed book with original text and images that tell a story of relationship to family history, national pasts, the artist’s transgender identity, and the liberal discourse on improvement. The book seeks to disrupt and question the trajectory of progress central to the mythology of the United States and to inter-generational desires for getting “better.” In 2010, Booklyn’s Another Booklyn Chapbook (ABC) Series republished It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This in a second edition with letterpress printed cover and offset printed interior.
For more information, to purchase work, or for inquiries, please go to shanaagid.com or email shana@rindpress.com