Coming up on Friday, Sept. 18 (2-3 pm) at the New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, I will be participating in a conversation with David Senior (from MoMA) about Blueprint for Counter Education, one of the defining radical pedagogical and graphic experiments of the late 1960s. Authored by the noted sociologist Maurice Stein and Larry Miller, Blueprint was a boxed ​set made up of a “shooting script” in the form of a paperback book by and three large posters​ devised as ​​the walls of a do-it-yourself, alternative classroom: a portable educational environment that would instantiate a personalized, socially engaged model of learning. This conversation will examine the genesis of Blueprint, the nature of the visual turn that it enacts, and focus in particular upon two outcomes: its adoption as one of the models for the Critical Studies program at CalArts, where Stein was appointed as the founding dean; and its display within the setting of the Information exhibition at MoMA in the fall of 1970. The session coincides with Arthur Fournier’s NYABF project in the Boiler Room at PS1, A Construction from the Blueprint for Counter Education, featuring an installation of the iconic posters alongside rare publications and printed texts drawn from Stein and Miller’s “shooting script.”

Adam Michaels (of Project Projects) and I are also excited to announce the forthcoming publication of our reprint edition of Blueprint accompanied by a full critical apparatus that includes essays by Jeffrey Schnapp (on the development of Blueprint, Paul Cronin (on Blueprint and Critical Studies at CalArts), an extensive interview with Maurice Stein and Larry Miller, and two period documents on the critical reception of Blueprint. For the Inventory Press listing of the volume, go to http://www.inventorypress.com/product/blueprint-for-counter-education

Some of the page proofs are posted below.