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FREEDOM OF THE PRESSES

is laboratory—like, instead of passive and reliant on typical bibliographic
hierarchy, can be effectively awakening and transformative for researchers,
especially student researchers. The Marshall Weber Culture Wars
Zine Collection, acquired for the Gorman Rare Art Book Collection,
is a collection of posters, zines, comics, and mixed media that traces
technological advances with image-making and rhetorical communication
in the United States from the 19703 to the present. By way of this collection
of personal and unmediated image and textual presentations, the zines
and alt—press publications provide an unfiltered lens to history’s social,
political, and cultural movements. Weber states in his manifesto, “My
primary motivation for collecting this miasma of paper was to document
cultural and political dissent.”3
Getting to Truths: An Exhibition
Featuring Selectionsfrom the Marshall
Weber Culture Wars Zine Collection
was the first exhibit I organized,
with the assistance of my colleagues
Lindsay Keating and Shannon Klug,
to introduce the newly acquired
collection and its bold creativity and
probing content. The exhibit revealed
the raw aesthetics of the zines,
which employ imagery, testimonial,
satire, and storytelling in ways that
explore, critique, question, and
challenge issues without concern for
censorship. We attempted to display
as many zines as possible, creating
curtains of them in clear folders
hanging from the ceiling. Titles we
displayed included Earth First, The
Coup, How to Measure Misunderstood
Genius, Against Geology, Cats Against

Zines and prints on feminism in the 2016 Protest Cops, Gaylord Phoenix, Hard Times,
Publishing and Art exhibition, Wilson Library, High Performance, and World War
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. With various 3, which showcased innovative
artists including Lmnopi, Favriana Rodriguez, and production methods and formats,

Molly Crabapple (shown: prints from the Occuprint from raw Xerox booklets to
Portfolio, 2012). Photo: Karen Carmody-Mclntosh, pamphlets, foldouts to printed and

University of Minnesota Libraries

boundjournals. The exhibit was