Book Launch: Matt Keegan’s 1996

Matt Keegan’s 1996 captures a pivotal time in American politics and society through the experience of artists who completed their undergraduate studies in that year, and others who were born in 1996 and voted for the first time in 2016. A wide-ranging set of essays and interviews focus on cultural and ideological shifts from that time, revisiting the 1994 Crime Bill, 1996 Immigration Act, the Telecommunications Act, the start of Fox News and beyond.

This event begins with a screening of My Barbarian’s Counterpublicity, based on an essay by José Esteban Muñoz reprinted in 1996, followed by readings and discussion by Keegan, Dave McKenzie, Debbie Nathan, Dale Corvino, Michael Bullock, Svetlana Kitto, and Chitra Ganesh.

1996 is published by Inventory Press and New York Consolidated and is available for purchase here.

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Michael Bullock is a New York-based writer, editor, and organizer. He is the author of Roman Catholic Jacuzzi (Karma 2012) and the editor of Peter Berlin: Artist, Icon, Photosexual (Damiani 2019). He is the associate publisher of PIN–UP magazine and a contributing editor to apartamento. He is a founding member of the political action committee Downtown for Democracy and the founder and executive director of WeeklySenator.org, a new subscription service that streamlines voter-education and crowd funding to support Senate candidates.

Dale Corvino’s essays and short fiction have appeared in various publications, including online at The Rumpus and Salon. His trio of short stories won the 2018 Gertrude Press Fiction Chapbook contest; Worker Names was published in 2019.

Chitra Ganesh is a visual artist based in Brooklyn. Her wall installations, comics, charcoal drawings, and mixed-media works on paper often take historical and mythic texts as inspiration and points of departure to complicate received ideas of iconic female forms.

Svetlana Kitto is a writer, editor, and oral historian in New York. Her writing has been featured in Art21, the Cut, Guernica, Hyperallergic, Interview, the New York Times, and Vice, among other publications. She has contributed oral histories to archives and exhibitions at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, and, in New York, the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Museum of Arts and Design, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and the gallery Gordon Robichaux, where she is in-house writer, editor, and oral historian.

In his videos, sculptures, performances, and installations, Dave McKenzie’s work explores how public space and the private self are simultaneously alienated, connected, and restricted. At the heart of this practice lies a desire for interactions that lay bare the complications of social rules and obligations with which we navigate personal relationships.

Debbie Nathan has lived on the Texas-Mexico border for decades, where she is a writer, immigration journalist and immigrants rights activist.