We’re excited to have just launched a new website for Interference Archive! To celebrate, we’ve got a guest post from Sean Stewart (of the amazing Babylon Falling website and author of On the Ground: An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.S.) pulling out and annotating ten covers of important 60s underground newspapers, you can read the entire thing HERE. (The one to the left is from Liberation News Service, no. 469, 1972.)
 
All this is lead up to our opening tonight:
Rebel Newsprint: Underground Press
February 21 – March 24, 2013
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 21 , 2013, 7 – 10 pm
Interference Archive, 131 8th St. #4, Bklyn, NY 11215
 

 
The Vietnam War, class inequality, black liberation, and women’s struggles—against this backdrop of social upheaval, a rebellious counterculture produced a vibrant underground newspaper scene. In four short years, from 1965 to 1969, the underground press grew from five small newspapers in as many cities in the United States to over five hundred newspapers—with millions of readers—all over the world. Completely circumventing (and subverting) establishment media by utilizing its own news service and freely sharing content among the papers, the underground press at its height became the unifying institution for the alternative culture of the 1960s and 1970s. It also allowed for all sorts of intriguing and compelling art, design, and writing on its pages.
 
Interference Archive is pleased to host the exhibition Rebel Newsprint: The Underground Press, curated by Sean Stewart, editor of On the Ground: An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.S. (PM Press, 2011). The show features original copies from Sean’s growing collection of underground newspapers, such as Berkeley Barb, Berkeley Tribe, Chicago Seed, Helix, It Ain’t Me Babe, Los Angeles Free Press, Osawatomie, Rat Subterranean News, San Francisco Express Times, San Francisco Oracle, Black Panther, East Village Other, and Realist, and related artifacts to illustrate the process, graphic sensibilities, historical context, and debates shaping these periodicals.
 
Sean Stewart grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, and is the former owner of Babylon Falling, a bookstore and gallery in San Francisco. He now lives in Brooklyn.