9 November 2026: 10×10 Photobooks and the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs held a salon at the New York Public Library’s Main Building with Martha Wilson and Anne Turyn, who presented two groundbreaking publications documenting New York Avant-Garde performance and bookmaking from the 1970s-1980s.
Artist and Franklin Furnace founder Martha Wilson discussed her new book, Back to the Present: 50 Years of Free Expression with Franklin Furnace, a 50th-anniversary celebration of the legendary arts institution Franklin Furnace. This visually rich volume captures five decades of boundary-breaking art and the ongoing fight to defend creative freedom. Further, it chronicles stories by individuals from arts groups across the U.S.A. who also fought in the Culture Wars of the Reagen 80s. Anne Turyn, a New York-based fine art photographer, shared Top Stories, a prose periodical that she edited and published from 1978 to 1991. Over the course of twenty-nine issues, it served as a pivotal platform for experimental fiction and art through single-artist issues and two anthologies. Primarily featuring female artists, though in Turyn’s words a few men “crept in as collaborators,” Top Stories was recently rereleased by Primary Information.
Martha Wilson is a pioneering feminist artist whose five-decade career spans photography and performance exploring female subjectivity through role-playing and impersonations of other people’s personae. In 1976, she founded Franklin Furnace, a New York artist-run space dedicated to exploring, promoting, and preserving artists’ books, installation and performance art, video, and online art. Her work is in museum collections including MoMA, the Met, Whitney, Centre Pompidou, and the Albertina.
Anne Turyn is a fine art photographer based in New York City. Turyn attended Antioch College (BFA), the University of Buffalo (MFA) and the CUNY Graduate Center (MA Linguistics). She was part of the Hallwalls community in Buffalo, NY, where she founded and edited Top Stories, a prose periodical and chapbook series featuring one artist per issue (1978-1991). Her work has been exhibited at MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Kunstverein Amsterdam, among others.
Special thanks to Jackie York, Program and Fellowship Manager, New York Public Library; Elizabeth Cronin, Robert B. Menschel Curator of Photography, New York Public Library, Deirdre Donohue and Jason Alpert-Wisnia.
Photographs by Jason Alpert-Wisnia.