Fugitive Materials is proud to present our third shortlist, dedicated to the Spanish-Mexican artist, printer, and designer Vicente Rojo (1932-2021) and his famed studio, Imprenta Madero. Rojo was one of the most influential Mexican printers and designers of the 20th century, and collaborated with many of the most celebrated writers of the period, including Octavio Paz, José Emilio Pacheco, and Carlos Monsiváis, all of which are represented in this shortlist. He is perhaps best known internationally for designing the cover of the first edition of Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien Años de Soledad.

Rojo migrated to Mexico from his native Spain as a teenager in 1949. In 1954, through connections in the exiled Spanish anti-fascist movement in Mexico City, Madero began working at Imprenta Madero, the new publishing operation of the famed antiquarian bookstore Librería Madero. Rojo rose quickly in the shop, and under his direction, Imprenta Madero became a celebrated printing and design studio, producing many of the most iconic Mexican artists’ books and prints of the period. Through this work, Rojo stewarded an entire generation of Mexican graphic design and, beginning with the Rupture Generation of the 1950s that sought to break with the hegemonic force of orthodox muralism, collaborated with several generations of the Mexican avant-garde.

This catalog gathers fliers, handbills, and original manuscripts tracing the intersections of early queer activism and performance in New York’s undergound through the 1970s and ‘80s and into the 1990s, with special attention to Black and Latine trans artists such as Marsha P. Johnson, Sir Lady Java, Alexis del Lago, Sister Tui, Vaginal Davis, and Willhelmina Ross (item nos. 1, 7, 8, 25, 26, 41), and to the early activism, publishing, and performance of Queens Liberation Front founders Lee Brewster and Inez Eisenhower (item nos. 3-5, 31-32, 35-41). The catalog records ephemera from the Hot Peaches, Ridiculous Theatrical Company, Jack Smith, ACT UP, and more. Notably the catalog also includes various states of rare fliers, showing the evolving graphic styles within the queer performance set.

Fugitive Materials is proud to present our first antiquarian catalog. We are committed to the preservation of radical, lesser-known, and alternative histories, and to the disruption of informational privilege through publishing and bookselling. We specialize in the material cultures of resistance: the detritus of radical social movements, histories of labor, counterculture, pedagogy, urbanism, uprisings, and art - with a specific concentration on opposition to the carceral state. We trace the trajectories of materials in flight.