1 Les Blank

is a prize-winning independent filmmaker, best known for a series of poetic films that led Time Magazine critic Jay Cocks to write, “I can’t believe that anyone interested in movies or America...could watch Blank’s work without feeling they’d been granted a casual, soft-spoken revelation.” John Rockwell, writing in The New York Times, adds, “Blank is a documentarian of folk cultures who transforms anthropology into art.” And Vincent Canby, also in The Times, declared that Blank “is a master of movies about the American idiom... one of our most original filmmakers.” His many films include Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (about Alice Waters and other Bay Area garlic fanatics) and Burden of Dreams (about the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo). Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers and Chulas Fronteras have been selected by the U.S. Library of Congress for inclusion in The National Film Registry, one of only three documentarians to be honored with two films.

2 Jens Hoffmann

is a writer and curator of exhibitions. He has worked as a curator since 1997 and is cur- rently the Director of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. From 2003 to 2007 he was the Director of Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. He has curated over 30 exhibitions internationally since the late 1990s.

Emerging, unusually, from a training in theatre rather than art history or curatorial studies, Hoffmann has used his directorial knowledge in particular to articulate his unique approach to curating. Of key importance for all of his exhibitions is the actual staging of the experi- ence—ranging from the design of the space and installation, the conceptualization of the catalogue and related programming, to the attention paid to the performance of the work itself. The ‘stage-set’ or rather the exhibition space, site, or geographical location is itself an important factor in the development of his ideas which respond to both time and place. Hoffmann takes into account both the larger historical and socio-political context in which an exhibition takes place as well as the rel- evant curatorial or art historical relationships pertaining to a project. Using the ideas and strategies of artists, in particular conceptual art, and applying this approach to a curatorial idea of the author is a defining characteristic

of Hoffmann’s work and results in a highly unique practice and personalized exhibition history reflective of a creative development not dissimilar to that of an artist.

Hoffmann was trained as a theater director and studied Stage Directing, Dramaturgy and Cultural Sociology at the Ernst Busch School for Performing Arts in Berlin. He holds an MA in Performance Studies from DasArts – School for Advanced Research in Theatre and Dance Studies in Amsterdam.

3 Beth Lisick

is a writer, performer, and arts organizer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her books in- clude The New York Times best-selling comic memoir Everybody Into the Pool and the gonzo self-help manifesto Helping Me Help Myself. Lisick has toured the U.S. and Europe as a solo spoken-word performer, frontperson for the band the Beth Lisick Ordeal, and member of the groundbreaking female road show Sister Spit. Her other projects include comedic per- formances for the stage and screen with Tara Jepsen, curating the monthly Porchlight Story- telling Series with Arline Klatte, and teaching creative writing to young adults. She recently played the female lead in Frazer Bradshaw’s award-winning feature film Everything Strange and New and is currently working on a new film with the director.

4 Rick & Megan Prelinger

Rick Prelinger founded Prelinger Archives, a collection of advertising, educational, indus- trial and amateur films, in 1982. In 2002, the film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress. Rick partnered with the Internet Archive to put 2000 of his films online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. He is active around intellectual “property” and archival is- sues, sits on the National Film Preservation Board, and is a board member of the Internet Archive and San Francisco Cinematheque. He recently completed “Panorama Ephemera,” an all-archival feature film. Rick and his spouse Megan recently opened the Prelinger Library, an appropriation-friendly private research library in San Francisco.

Megan Prelinger is cofounder and architect of information design of the Prelinger Library. The library’s information design plan creates juxtapositions between artifacts to create new associations and depictions of north American regional landscape and social his- tory; its open-access and appropriation-friendly

policies reframe ideas about public access to primary source materials. Her other installation works integrate historic documents with other media, and have been exhibited at galleries and museums in Berkeley, San Francisco, and New York. She is also a writer, author of the forthcoming Another Science Fiction: Adver- tising the Space Race (Blast Books, 2010).

5 Ben Kinmont

is an artist, publisher, and antiquarian book- seller living in Sebastopol, California. His work is concerned with the value structures surrounding an art practice and what happens when that practice is displaced into a non-art space. Since 1988 his work has been project- based with an interest in archiving and blurring the boundaries between artistic production, publishing, and curatorial practices.

In the past few years he has taught courses in the Social Practices Program at the California College of Arts as well as organized various workshops with students from the École des Beaux-Arts in France (Angers, Valence, and Bourges). Exhibitions include those at Air de Paris, ICA (London), CNEAI (Chatou), the 25th International Biennial of Graphic Arts (Ljubljana), the Frac Languedoc-Roussillon (Montpellier), Documenta 11 (Kassel), and Les Abattoirs (Toulouse). He is also the founder of the Antinomian Press, a publishing enterprise which supports project art and ephemera.

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PICKPOCKET ALMANACK is curated by Joseph del Pesco and commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Design and typsetting by Scott Ponik
Web development by Chadwick Wood

Thanks to: Dominic Willsdon, Brian Conley, Anne Walsh, Renny Pritikin, and Helena Keeffe.