The Chicago Art Book Fair is an international showcase of arts publishers, independent book presses, comic artists, zinemakers, printmakers, and more. Chicago Art Book Fair has served as an affordable, accessible means to access emerging art book techniques within the publishing space.
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As the arts become increasingly targeted, The Chicago Art Book Fair provides a space for creators to form communities around their various practices. We support artists who are creating boundary-pushing printed media and provide a platform to feature their work to audiences in one of the country’s major cities.
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To celebrate Chicago Exhibition Weekend, The Chicago Art Book Fair presents Preface: a showcase of publishers, print media artists and dialogues ahead of our 2026 full scale relaunch.

The Chicago Art Book Fair takes place on the land of the Anishinaabe, or the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations. Many other Nations consider this area their traditional homeland, including the Myaamia, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac and Fox, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Wea, Kickapoo and Mascouten. We acknowledge all Native peoples who came before us and who continue to contribute to this day.

Zines have always existed at the intersection of the personal and the collective. As self-published works, they carry the urgency of individual voice—but equally, they’ve long operated as tools for building community, circulating underrepresented narratives, and creating spaces of mutual support and exchange outside traditional publishing. In Chicago, artists and organizers continue this legacy, approaching zine-making as a form of social practice rooted in co-creation and the conviction that publishing can be an act of care and radical change-making.

This conversation brings together practitioners who see print as a tool for dialogue, shared meaning-making, and collective ways of knowing. Through collaborative publishing, community archiving, and participatory workshops, these artists use zines to advocate for open access to knowledge, challenge cultural erasure, and forge spaces where publics gather and new narratives emerge, dissolving the distinctions between author, publisher, librarian, and organizer.

Oscar Arriola (Zine Mercado), Cynthia E. Hanifin (Zine Club Chicago), and Eric Von Haynes (Flatlands Press / Chicago Printer’s Guild) moderated by Miguel Limón (Matiz Press), will explore how zines function as a printed commons—a shared resource for learning, solidarity, and transformative action. How can zines operate as both personal archives and collective acts of resistance, care, and imagination?


Eric Von Haynes
Eric Von Haynes is a printmaker, designer, and community organizer with over 15 years of experience leading Flatlands Press, an imprint known for innovative and collaborative projects. He is the Chief Community Officer at Quimby’s Bookstore, President of the Chicago Printers Guild, and an active member of Zinemercado, an annual festival celebrating zines and DIY publishing. Eric teaches Graphic Design at the UIC School of Design and offset production in the Print Media Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, sharing his expertise in design, print processes, and documentation. His work is included in collections such as the Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection, the Center for Book Arts, and the Illinois State Museum, and has been exhibited at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and the Elephant Room Gallery. A community advocate, Eric co-founded Love Fridge Chicago, a mutual aid initiative supporting community fridges across the city. His practice emphasizes collaboration, skill-sharing, and creative engagement with print culture.
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A panel discussion focused on contemporary artist Kanthy Peng’s debut artist book, Ground Sea. Peng will be joined in conversation by Michael Guo, co-founder of te editions, Ellen Larson, Associate Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago, and Nicole Liu, PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, with Art Institute of Chicago Assistant Curator Yechen Zhao serving as panel moderator.

Invoking Peng’s artist book as a point of departure, they will introduce the artist’s photo-based practice, collaborative engagements with translation, and narrative strategies achieved though both content and form. Kanthy Peng’s 2025 Ground Sea weaves a visual narrative exploring depression, memory, and loss through 73 photographs. The title takes inspiration from an archaic West Indian term, which anthropologist and feminist Emily Martin used to capture her sensations when observing the Affective Disorder Clinical Rounds, “(Ground-sea is the name) for a swell of the ocean, which occurs in calm weather and without obvious cause, breaking on the shore in heavy roaring billows. A distant storm, out of sight, is often the cause of a ground-sea.”

Michael Guo
‍Michael graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Royal College of Art, London. Currently based in New York and Beijing, he is an independent curator and co-founder/editor-in-chief of te editions. His practice focuses on the intersections of contemporary art and the humanities. te editions is a curatorial, editorial, and publishing collective operating in New York and Beijing, dedicated to exploring the intersection of art and the humanities. te examines historical and contemporary social landscapes through a diversified and microscopic lens, focusing on how cultures encounter, collapse, and transform each other within global cultural flows.

Ellen Larson
‍Ellen Larson is Associate Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago, where she specializes in contemporary Asian art and its diasporas. Larson’s research is focused on Chinese video art practices from the late 1980s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. Larson holds a PhD in contemporary Chinese art from the University of Pittsburgh, as well as master’s degrees in global contemporary art history and modern Chinese history from the University of Pittsburgh and Minzu University of China, Beijing, respectively.
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Nicole Liu
‍Nicole Liu is a PhD student, translator, and writer based in Chicago. Her current research looks into the circumstances shaping contemporary literature production and circulation in China’s Pearl River Delta region. She is particularly interested in poetry, creative non-fiction, documentary filmmaking, translation/theory, small press publishing, and artist communities. She is an amateur collector of out-of-print periodicals. She serves as an editor-at-large at Mouse Magazine.

Kanthy Peng
‍Kanthy Peng is an artist specializing in lens-based mediums. Her current practice focuses on the uneven mobility of people, embodied in colonialism and globalized tourism, and caused by illness and disaster. Peng holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art and a BFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. Her works have been exhibited and screened internationally, including, most recently, at the European Media Art Festival (Germany), Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival (China), and FotoFocus Biennial (United States). She has received fellowships and residencies from the Spazju Kreattive (Malta), the Jan van Eyck Academie (Netherlands), and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (United States).

Yechen Zhao
‍Yechen Zhao is Assistant Curator of Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago. A specialist in twentieth-century American and East Asian photography during the Cold War and its aftermath, he received his PhD in art history from Stanford University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Yale University Art Gallery. His writing appears in History of Photography, Photographica, Aperture, and Trans Asia Photography. He recently curated Pixy Liao: Relationship Material.

The scrap/book 2.0 is a process of repurposeful bookmaking. It is a way of noticing what is discarded around us and caring for these materials as potential sources for creative exchange. Join us for an experimental intermedia workshop with poet Noa Micaela Fields and artist Carolina Vélez Muñiz in which we’ll transform collected waste into a collaborative library of memory. Potential topics and methods may include: lamination, fragmentation, dérive, foraging, trash art, book waste and somatic poetry.

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Noa Micaela FieldsAn echodeviant* (trans poet with hearing aids) in search of the hypervivid in her one and only captionless life. Her debut poetry collection E, a trans remix of Louis Zukofsky’s “A,” is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. She lives in Chicago, where she loves to organize poetry readings, makes zines, and goes out dancing.

Carolina Vélez Muñiz
‍Carolina Vélez Muñis is an artist who weaves and displaces the potential of interlacing to other media. She works with textiles and handmade audiovisual circuitry to delve into the relationship between body/space and its poetics. Carolina has developed projects with the Jóvenes Creadores grant from the Sistema de Apoyos a la Creación in Mexico and in Chicago with the Visual Arts Fellowship from the Luminarts Foundation. She recently presented , a public art commission and individual project at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City. Carolina writes for Sixty Inches from Center and makes zines.

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