Browse Exhibits (2 total)
Pics, Jokes and Rock&Roll: Music and Subculture in Skater Zines
This exhibit centers on three skateboarding zines. In order of appearance they are "Thing Bad #8", "Slee*Stak Issue II" and "Self Inflicted #4". Zines are home made publications, released in small runs and by virtue of their independence give an invaluable insight into raw subculture they represent. There is no regulation of its content, no corporate oversight, a zine is simply assembled, photocopied and distributed to members of the community.
Over the past decade or so skater culture has been absorbed into the mainstream and heavily commercialized. These zines give a rare look into the raw, dissident and underrepresented side of the culture, giving a voice to ordinary citizens to express their passions, grievances, joys and humor through art.
This exhibit is organized into five sections. The first focuses on zines, their history and what they are. The second focuses on the history of Skateboarding and skating culture, which is absolutely necessary to understanding the zines on display. Finally, the third, fourth and fifth sections focus on the zines themselves. Each is described in detail and selections of them have been digitalized for your viewing pleasure.
Although separated by location and time (the three zines were published in Washington State, California and Texas from 1996-2016) the three works on display are unified by a common subculture. This can be seen through their similar content, aesthetics and ethos. Collage, jokes, drawings, personal stories, music and photographs of skaters in action are big parts of all three zines and show how people can be brought together across decades and thousands of miles by a common passion and culture.
I hope you enjoy exploring this exhibit as much as I enjoyed assembling it. I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Elon Lang and Elise Nacca for their patient guidance throughout the semester, and to all my classmates for answering my questions and providing help when I needed it.
Sumi Ink Club Zines
In this exhibit, we will examine the ephemerality of zines and how the ideas of the Sumi Ink Club connect to it in addition to the necessity of their preservation and collection.
Zines are significant because they are created outside of the mainstream, including the idea of what makes an item "valuable." Zines often take on a form of ephemera and disappear only a few years after their inception. Like zines, Sumi Ink Club embodies the ephemeral because the club only survives so long as people continue to organize meetings. With this in mind, the addition of zines into Sumi Ink Club's distribution medium allows for existence of the club to be more widely disseminated, becoming more than just something fleeting. Therefore, collecting and preserving zines is important.
Zines are published with low budgets and self or small publishing houses to prevent run ins with censorship and copyright, allowing for them to be printed as is. Although, Sumi Ink Club reworks all their drawings, the idea is still the same. By creating collections of zines such as those by Sumi Ink Club, we can teach future generations how society has challenged and transformed the walls of censorship and the control of information by mainstream mass media. Zines can be used as educational tools to draw students into libraries. Doors of creative opportunies open as students come to libraries to work with zines,
This exhibit illustrates ephemerality of zines and the necessity of preserving and collecting them, but we also need to examine the problems with collecting zines and why there are so few zine collections. There are only two items in the exhibit because they are the only two items catalogged in the Fine Arts Library Zine Collection by Sumi Ink Club. Although there are likely a multitude of zines by Sumi Ink Club available, they are probably not catalogged into an academic library. This is because it is quite difficult to serialize zines, deterring librarians from collecting them. Because zines are mostly self-published, or published by small publishing houses, they lack the serials that regular publications have. Collecting and organizing them is arduous, but if we understand that they do not quite fit into the library definition of serials, we can adapt procedures to accommodate zines.