The Unexpected Artifact: A Zine Making Workshop

Join us for an afternoon of hands-on zine making facilitated by artist and photographer, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and arts programmer, curator, and veteran producer and avid collector of zines, Darin Klein. The workshop is designed to be a non-hierarchical and non-competitive platform for the exchange of creative ideas.

Bring your own working material in image and/or text form. These could include candid portraits, love letters, phone pics, family recipes, to-do lists, social media posts left in drafts, and other ephemera or imagery of your choosing. The materials – which should be imbued with personal meaning to you – will be shared with the greater group for creating your own personal zine. Collectively, we will reconfigure one another’s materials, fragmenting, collaging, obscuring, and interweaving them with our own, thereby creating new possibilities for meaning.

Using a simple template and easy-to-follow instructions, each participant will make a zine and the finished zines will be compiled into boxed sets. Titled The Unexpected Artifact, this boxed set of zines celebrates collaboration and questions both the impetus for and the process of documentation.

Contributors may pick-up their boxed set on the last day of Sepuya’s exhibition, Excerpts & Fragments, on Sunday, December 21, 2025. The zines will also be on view in the gallery on that day.

RSVP is required and limited to 30 people. Participants are asked to bring ten 8 ½” x 11” printouts of their own image/text/material(s) that can be shared with the group. Do not bring originals; we will be cutting and altering the materials and you will not get the original(s) back. Your materials may be in color or black and white; please note that LAND will photocopy the zines in black and white. Tables, seating, the zine template, paper, scissors, glue sticks, and pens will be provided. Zine making will take place outdoors, please dress accordingly.

3-3:30PM: Introduction and welcome by Sepuya and Klein

3:30-5PM: Zine making. Registered participants may plan to spend 45 to 90 minutes on your projects and are asked to be present no later than 3:30pm since you are providing communal materials.

Darin Klein is an arts programmer and curator, and the creator of over 100 solo and collaborative zines and artists’ publications. His various projects have been presented at venues including Amy Adler’s Echo Park Studio, &Pens, Bitches Rule, The Broad, Commonwealth & Council, For Your Art, Hammer Museum, Human Resources, LACE, LACMA, Luis de Jesus Los Angeles, New Image Art, Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair (Geffen Contemporary at MOCA), REDCAT, and Upstairs at Paul’s in Los Angeles; Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair (MoMA PS1, Phillips de Pury, Dia Chelsea), and White Columns in New York; 2nd floor projects, 42nd International SF Film Festival, ESP, Needles & Pens, scene/escena, Showroom, SF MOMA, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco; and Dog & Pony in Spokane, WA. Klein is a Printed Matter Awards for Artists recipient, a Printed Matter artist grant recipient, and has lectured and facilitated workshops on zines and zine making at Denison University in Granville, OH; The Hammer and Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair (Geffen Contemporary at MOCA) in Los Angeles; and California Institute for the Arts in Valencia, CA.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, San Bernardino, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography whose projects weave together histories and possibilities of portraiture, queer and homoerotic networks of production and collaboration, and the material and conceptual potential of blackness at the heart of the medium.

Sepuya has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Blaffer Art Museum, Houston; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, England; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha. He is Associate Professor in Media Arts at the University of California, San Diego.

Sepuya's work resides in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Tate, London; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Baltimore Museum of Art, among others.

Sepuya is represented by Vielmetter Los Angeles, DOCUMENT Chicago, Bortolami Gallery, New York, and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich and Paris.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Excerpts & Fragments is presented by Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) and curated by Christopher Mangum-James, LAND deputy director.

Lead support is provided by 2413 Hyperion. Major support is provided by Michael Breland and Peter Harper, Sherry and Joel McKuin, and Abby Pucker. Generous support is provided by Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi. Additional support is provided by Peter Alexander and Scott Craig, Alan Hergott and Curt Shepard, the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council, and Samuel Vasquez. In-kind support is provided by Special Offer, Inc.

Special thanks to Geraldine Chung, Heather Manzutto, Oscar Peña, Collina Strada, and Vielmetter Los Angeles.

LAND’s 2025 projects are made possible with lead support from the Offield Family Foundation, the Jerry and Terri Kohl Family Foundation, and The Perenchio Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Fran and Ray Stark Foundation, Ben Weyerhaeuser, the Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture, Brenda Potter, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and LAND’s Nomadic Council.

Commissions are supported by the LAND Artist Fund with major funding provided by Karyn Kohl. Generous funding is provided by Berry Stein and The Goodman Family Foundation.

LAND is a member of and supported by the Los Angeles Visual Arts (LAVA) Coalition.

LAND is a member-supported organization. Keep LAND programs free for all by becoming a member today.

Header image courtesy of Paul Mpagi Sepuya.