Community practice
Trade School/No Slack imprint
During my fall 2024 sabbatical I founded No Slack Press, inspired (enabled) by
My closest colleague Dr. Arden Stern, who during their own sabbatical one semester earlier founded Trade School
Other artists, especially Martine Syms, who publish other artists’ writing and hybrid work as part of their own practice
And by my own early-twenties dream of establishing an art book storefront with a studio space in the back to house a press and other hard-to-acquire and -store equipment that a community of writers could access to make their own books.
Stern: “You and I had discussed starting an imprint a while ago (No Slack), which would operate out of Trade School. I do want to do a yearbook and possibly other publishing projects through Trade School. But a part of me wants to keep No Slack separate, make it our thing entirely, and just run it out of the Trade School space; No Slack is the imprint, Trade School can use it if we want.”
Dalton: “I am super happy and honored to be the fourth person with a key to Trade School's front door. Otherwise I'm gonna say I'm happy to remove for you one human bundle of attributes and idiosyncrasies from TS's emotional ownership. Meaning that whatever you think is the best way to frame, both conceptually and practically, No Slack as it relates to Trade School, -is- the best way. P.S. I realized yesterday while saving the document for the first time that No Slack is the perfect title of my sabbatical project too. I hope imprint No Slack doesn't mind if book No Slack instantiates in name as well.”
Stern: “This answers all my questions in the most beautifully Daltonesque way. Thank you.”
[Note: No Slack, a 300-page academic text, will be published in January 2025. Read an excerpt by clicking on the first image in the gallery below.]
Public workshops
Now that I’m a partner at Trade School, a publicly accessible education/studio/event space, I plan to offer some kind of workshop (open studio with tools that make physical the work of making things, like tabletop printing presses and looms; or handicraft skill-building classes like bookbinding and sewing) once a month in 2025. Proof of concept: Manifestos!, held on November 9th, 2024.
I envisioned my role in this workshop as the facilitator helping each attendee find a way to literally make their words manifest, ruminating on and insisting on the words’ meaning while/by giving them form. The tools and materials I brought to prompt this work tied a manual printing history and a physical manifesto-disseminating history (broadsides, zines, typewriters and type experiments) to the exhortations people made from Danielle’s prompts.
While the group was talking, exchanging ideas and connections, as each of us said things that accidentally resonated with others, someone would write it out and tape it up to the wall (photo of the wall below). Helping “make manifest” as facilitator expanded into my work after the workshop ended. Without having planned to, I typeset a group manifesto with one of the printing tools I’d supplied on the day, designing our group’s wall notes into a poster zine and distributing to attendees. The time it took to build each letter was an investment in their meaning, the gift to everyone in the group an honoring of the agreements we reached as ad-hoc community.
click on image to view our group manifesto
Manifestos! w/ Dalton & Foushée
Decompress from the anxiety of the 2024 election by reflecting upon, recommitting to, and representing your beliefs in the form of a unique, hand-made, printed manifesto-object. Join interdisciplinary artists / designers / educators Danielle Foushee and Allison Dalton at Trade School for a range of participatory demonstrations/activities, meant to engage your most passionate ideas and give them meaning through form. Participants will have open studio time for experimentation, with ample feedback from the facilitators.
Danielle Foushée is Associate Professor and Program Head of Interdisciplinary Design at Arizona State University. Her creative work has been exhibited and/or installed in Seattle, Bellevue, Portland, Vancouver, Reno, Baltimore, and Tempe, among others. Prof. Foushée has won national and international awards for her work, most recently the Mayor’s Art Award for Community Innovation in the City of Phoenix, Arizona. She has also served as a member of the Phoenix Arts & Culture Commission.
Allison Laytin Dalton is an Associate Professor at Art Center College of Design, where she teaches creative project-writing and supports students’ writing and research practices. The book-like things she makes begin with collection, repetition, and the hand; they end as parti-diagrams of her own writing, making, and design. Her tabloid publication Repeat the Question, a reframing of century-old gendered cultural production and the verbal/visual lexicon it still perpetuates, was acquired by the Getty Research Institute in November 2023. She has a fiction MFA from Columbia University and an undergrad degree in Creative Writing from UC Santa Cruz.
Art events large and small
We live nestled in the elbow-crook of the 2 and the 134 freeways, in one of the four oldest houses in Eagle Rock, on an embarrassing amount of land (unparceled since the 1940s because of the freeway situation). Five of us live here, all artists and writers coming from different communities. We also house a “tenant” flower farm, Frogtown Flora, who pays for their water use and nothing more.
Click on the first image below to view the invite for a “workshop” series I started on our porch and will be moving, as noted above, into Trade School in 2025.
In mid-2023, the five of us decided as a group to host an art show, presenting it as an affordable holiday market. We’ve had two more since, and plan to continue the twice-a-year schedule. Participation in the event is free, to give artists a low-stakes opportunity to show and sell their work, and to meet other local makers. One of the most gratifying aspects so far has been the unearthing of connections across our networks of friends and colleagues. Another is the opportunity to frame the products of local small businesses as art. A few participants: A family-run traditional piñata-maker; an ACCD alumna who paints when she’s not working in animation; printmakers, ceramicists, a microbakery and a pizza pop-up, a deadstock fabric and sustainable fashion two-person business, an established fine-art painter, a stained glass artist, a soap maker who uses materials grown by Frogtown Flora, an experimental music press, and over 30 more.
