The Quick and the Dead: Publishing Histories
The Quick and the Dead is an interdisciplinary program that mobilizes the creative and pedagogical potential of focused engagement with artistic lineages. Through collective research, reading and discussion groups, and public seminars, the program draws connections between these lineages and the work of contemporary practitioners.
In its fourth edition, Q&D turns to histories of independent and artist publishing practices. Eight artists, writers, and researchers take part in a tuition-free, research residency to pursue self-guided study on publishing as an infrastructure of discourse, collaboration, and solidarity. The program unfolds through sustained dialogue with four Q&D advisors—Jenna Hamed, Gerardo Ismael Madera, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Sukhdev Sandhu—whose distinct methodologies offer insight and guidance for developing research.
Wendy’s Subway ascribes to the idea that publishing is a practice of social assembly with the capacity to advance significant change. From artists’ books and zines to radical periodicals and even mass-market paperbacks, publishing indexes political and artistic movements while materializing the central role of aesthetics in cultural production. Publications articulate, translate, and disseminate knowledge across contexts and temporalities; they circulate dissent across contested borders and build the shared means by which struggles recognize one another.
Amid a global landscape marked by shrinking resources, conglomerate publishing, consolidated distribution, and escalating pressures on free speech, we want to contend, together, with the stakes of independent publishing. Its histories demonstrate how people have built durable cultural infrastructures for making, producing, and circulating art and ideas. A study of publishing histories is therefore inseparable from a study of the various forms of collective life and labor that make a given publication possible. We ask: What forms of collectivity have existed in and through publishing, and what can be learned from them to meet the current political juncture? This season of Q&D brings attention to the lasting imprint of these historical gestures as resources for the present.
About the Q&D advisors
Jenna Hamed is an artist and art worker based in Queens, New York, with roots in metro Detroit and Jerusalem, Palestine. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Fashion and Fine Art from Eastern Michigan University and a master’s degree in Arts Politics from New York University. Her practice brings together curation, editorial work, and bookmaking through visual, material, and archival research. In 2024, she founded Jay Seven Inc., a collaboration studio-gallery in Brooklyn dedicated to producing installations and publishing initiatives. She has organized exhibitions and public programs with the Blackburn Study Center, Baxter Street at the Camera Club of New York, Subtitled NYC, the Center for Book Arts, and Jay Seven Inc., among others, each of which was accompanied by a collaboratively produced artist's book.
Gerardo Ismael Madera is a New York City–based artist and educator whose work explores the relationships between communications media, infrastructure, and urban ecology by examining the cumulative processes, technological relics, and ecological phenomena that shape contemporary life.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner and a death doula in training. She explores the poetics and politics of non-compliance and disobedience across written, spoken, and visual systems of communication. In doing so, she considers the radical possibilities of noise, unintelligibility, discrepancy, and the refusal of frictionless perception. Across her practice at KJR Studios—an ecosystem spanning installation, publishing, pedagogy, performance, archival practice, and play—she studies the forms of life that manage to exceed systems designed for certainty, extraction, and linearity. Recent solos include High Line Art (2026), Henry Art Gallery (2025), REDCAT (2024), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). She has participated in group exhibitions at the MoMA PS1, Studio Museum, the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Palais de Tokyo, MASS MoCA, The Kitchen, and the ICA Philadelphia, among others. Rasheed is the recipient of several honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021) and a Creative Capital Award (2022).
Sukhdev Sandhu’s books include London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (Harper Perennial, 2004), Night Haunts: A Journey Through the London Night (Verso, 2007), Other Musics (MoMA PS1, 2016), and Geological Listening (UnionDocs, 2024). He runs the Texte und Töne publishing imprint and directs the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University.