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Celebrate People’s History gets 2nd Edition (2020)

“The new Celebrate People’s History poster book is printed, and it looks beautiful! There are 202 posters included in this new edition, an expanded intro, and a new foreword by the amazing Charlene Carruthers. Drew Stevens at the Feminist Press did a fabulous job on the design.” – Josh MacPhee

Support Josh MacPhee, Celebrate People’s History, and Justseeds by pre-ordering the 2nd edition copy of this great book here on the Justseeds website.

In 2010, I blogged the backstory of creating a poster for the 2010 edition of “Celebrate People’s History.” Working on the poster goes as far back as 2006, with artist Mark Cort, about a somewhat forgotten slice of South Carolina colonial history: the Stono Rebellion. I researched the event, cut the stencil, and wrote the text while Mark handled the illustration and layout. The art was in pieces which Josh kindly took and scanned and assembled into a nice CPH poster.

I got an email from Josh earlier this year with the news that the book was getting a second edition publication. He asked for autobiography blurb updates, with more news to be coming soon. Turns out the book will be released early August. I was honored to be in the first book, and glad there will be more posters to discover in this edition. And I’m still fascinated by the events that occurred at the Stono River in 1739, along with the event’s reverberations that can be felt today.

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The CELLspace now on FoundSF

Even a sliver of a photo can easily identify CELLspace’s Main Space entrance.

The unit also had a tiny window in their bathroom that looked out into the screen-printing shop. In the quieter moments, they would gaze out the bathroom window and watch the T-shirts dry. They would imagine a better world. A world with art. A world with community. One morning, the window showed the business moving out down in the warehouse. – From the CELLspace FoundSF page.

Last August, Chris Carlsson asked me to write something about the CELLspace “Blurb,” a short-lived tabloid newspaper brochure that I helped Jonathan Youtt make in the height of the Dot Com boom. Chris sent me the pdfs of the scan he had made for the FoundSF project, and I struggled to remember as much as I could about the “Blurb”. I even managed to create a draft, but never liked it and didn’t have much to say about this paper version of the cell website.

Once the Shelter In Place order hit for the COVID-19 pandemic, Chris started working on his FoundSF backlog, which included my shelved draft for the CELLspace project. He got back in touch with me, this time letting me know that CELLspace didn’t even have a proper page. With Chris being more active regarding what he needed, I spent about six weeks helping him grab photos, videos, and text for CELLspace’s FoundSF page.

Jonathan Youtt helped flesh out details, especially the end of the history, and source photos and videos. Skot Kuiper gave me advice on which episodes of cell.tv to link up there. I also incorporated text from Devin Holt’s 2013 “Obituary for CELLspace“, appreciating his doing work then for what I was trying to remember now. I’m glad I got to talk briefly about this page with one of the co-founders and three caretakers of the cell. And I even worked in a paragraph about the “Blurb”!

Any mistakes or omissions in the FoundSF post are my own. Any corrections can be sent to me via reply or DM. Chris always appreciates other voices and recollections, so here’s to this version of the new page.