Volunteering at Interference Archive: Mobile Print Power

We're always trying to share the experiences of people working at Interference Archive, and one of the ways is through a series of blog posts written by Interference volunteers. We've been working a lot lately with Mobile Print Power, and thought it would be great to invite them to share some thoughts. They decided to reflect on their history and the development of their eight principles.

MPP started as a weekly workshop at Immigrant Movement International in Corona, Queens (IMI Corona) in March, 2013. In the early workshops there would be over 30 people, children to adults, crammed into the long, narrow, windowless but vibrant space that is IMI Corona.

The early workshops were chaotic, messy, and unpredictable, but people enjoyed them and many continued to come each week. We learned screen printing together and we looked at art made by print collectives from all over the world. We experimented with printing outdoors and after a little while we were willing to move into the public realm with our mobile printing cart.

Like the early workshops, the early public projects were unsystematic and spontaneous. But these early experiments in public engagement strengthened us as a group. We had to collaborate and cooperate as a group in order to engage the public in a meaningful way. Young children, teens and adults who had been coming to the weekly workshops and participating in the public projects for over a year began to make up a core group of MPP members. Later we would refer to ourselves as a collective. . . .

Read the rest of their post here. If you’re interested in volunteering at Interference Archive, check out our website for info on how to get involved, or email info@interferencearchive.org. You can also support the amazing work of all our volunteers by making a financial donation.

“We were subject to an FBI sting. We were placed under surveillance, and we were able to discover the surveillance and get rid of it, but then for the next nine years we were living underground.” –Diana Block

In this episode, Lani Hanna speaks to Diana Block about her life as an activist, organizer, and writer. Block was a founding member of San Francisco Women Against Rape and the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee. When her activism in support of the Puerto Rican Independence Movement attracted the attention of the FBI, she spent thirteen years living “underground” under a different identity.

Amplifier Foundation and Interference Archive host the first of what hopefully will become many propaganda parties. What is a propaganda party? It’s where we invite dozens of organizations, activists, designers, and artists producing materials around a political issue together to hang out, meet each other, and distribute their flyers, stickers, posters, buttons, and more. All propaganda is free, and we encourage all to come by, grab a drink, and load up on as many posters and stickers you can carry!

Are you an artist or activist organizing or making art around issues of mass incarceration, the failures of the criminal justice system, or police brutality? Please bring your work (in multiples) to distribute and get out into the city. Also come meet like minded people with similar intersecting commitments to art and politics.

A new volunteer, Arlen Austin, has been busy scanning a nice, wide collection of some of the great publications we have at Interference. It’s going to take us a little time to get these PDFs into our catalog, so in the meantime we thought it would be nice to share a sampling on our blog, including this first issue of the Female Liberation Newsletter from Cambridge, MA!

Our Comics, Ourselves opens to the University of Connecticut
June 14–August 22, 2016

The Archives & Special Collections at the University of Connecticut will host the first traveling installment of the exhibition Our Comics, Ourselves co-curated by Jan Descartes and Monica McKelvey Johnson. The exhibition premiered at Interference Archive in January, and we're really excited to see it move on to new locations. Our Comics, Ourselves features comics from the Interference Archive collection as well as private collections on loan. The exhibition includes comic books, graphic novels, DIY comics, and various comics paraphernalia primarily from the United States, 1945 to present. The works range from autobiographical to sheer fantasy, and explore feminism, abortion, racism, cultural identity, social activism, veterans of war, sexual abuse, immigration, public health, civil rights, gender and sexual identity, and more.