Opening Night
On the roof of 950 S. Raymond Ave6-9pm
The official kick-off event of LAABF 2025 and first opportunity to visit the Fair!
The Opening Night lineup is produced in collaboration with Living Earth, TRANSA, and Red Hot.
CLARITY (DJ set)
Periphone with Green-house
Green-house
Periphone with Nina Keith
Pride Month Barbie
Opening Night tickets are $30 and include a limited-edition artwork by Mario Ayala, plus multiple re-entry throughout the Fair weekend. Purchase your ticket here!
Exhibitor Projects
Dent-De-Leone presents (PR 5) a space to sit, read, and meet with Martino Gamper’s Arnold Circus Stool. In the porous outdoor space of the Hixon Courtyard, visitors to the Fair will find light, versatile, and stackable stools intended for use both indoor and outdoor. In 2006, the original design functioned as community seating for a regeneration project of the historic East London landmark, Arnold Circus. Gamper’s responsive and flexible design animates spaces to encourage connection and conversation; a seat, a table, and–turned upside down–storage. Selected titles from Dent-De-Leone and more of Gamper’s objects will be on display.
FKA CA53776V2.gallery (PR 6) is a new iteration of Alex Lukas’s dashboard exhibition space, CA53776V2.gallery. The original project was an experimental curatorial platform housed in a 2007 Ford Ranger; programming focused on the intersection of intimacy, touch, and craft on, in, and around the American road. The "space" closed when four of the Ranger's six engine cylinders began perpetually misfiring. For LAABF 2025, Lukas has reprised the project on the roof of a 2023 Subaru Outback. FKA CA53776V2.gallery brings together a curated selection of oversized bumper stickers displayed in the dubious lineage of "World's Largest" roadside attractions. Participating artists include Will Brown, Christopher DeLoach, Mike Devine, Sky Fusco, Brendan Hanna, Jesse Malmed, and Zach Ozma. Lukas publishes under the imprint Written Names Fanzine.
Radio Frequency (PR 7) is a collaborative project by Dalé Zine and Orange Radio & Homebody. An extension of the two publishers’ broadcasting practice, Radio Frequency will pop up in a 9x9 office space in room K and feature music, reading, talks, and more. The broadcast will stream online and into the courtyard.
Three Star Books (PR 2) returns to the 2025 LA Art Book Fair with a series of new projects: STOD by John Armleder, a book of illusions and mirrors; RUG by Gerard & Kelly, a score for a musician and a dancer inspired by their film E for Eileen, composed in eleven tableaux; an intricate collaboration between BlackMass Publishing and Three Star Books— a box of printed poetic elements designed to be manipulated, reimagining the very notion of the book; and a selection of Raffaella della Olga’s latest delicate typewriter books and typed paintings.
Werkplaats Typografie (PR 1) is an alternative educational programme in graphic design. It functions as a research environment wherein participants define the content, aims, and conditions of their design practices. For the 2025 LA Art Book Fair, the Werkplaats Typografie cohort will represent the personal collection of Holly van Houten. Located in the Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography (HMCT), the project will take place in a slow auction format, addressing topics like value creation and provenance.
Reading Room
On the first floor of 870 S. Raymond Ave
The Reading Room is a new incarnation of the longstanding exhibitor section, Friendly Fire, which featured select politically-minded and social-justice oriented publishers. Friendly Fire made a commitment to highlighting the intersection of grassroots struggles and histories of print publishing, which this Reading Room also attempts to underscore.
For LAABF 2025, the Reading Room features a curated installation of multimedia artwork by artists from Los Angeles, China, Iran, and Mexico and a non-circulating collection of thematically relevant artists’ books drawn from an open call to all LAABF exhibitors. We invite visitors to slow down and spend time with the material you find here. On display are many different approaches to documenting the times we live in. In contrast to the rapid speed at which visitors move through the Fair, the Reading Room offers an alternative space to engage in close reading, critique, and reflection.
This years’ participants include:
Cráter Invertido / Taller XD (N15) presents an artwork drawing from their recent publication, Marx Esotérico. The work references the imaginary presence of the border—from the specters that inhabit our land to the social mourning of necropolitics in México. An altar accompanies this artwork and honors the possibility of migration, which connects all of our struggles and challenges neoliberal colonial processes. “We take this invitation to contribute to the LAABF Reading Room as an opportunity to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people... Palestine is near! ¡Palestina está cerca!”
Travel bans and restrictions on Iranians have been a longstanding issue, dating back to the U.S. embassy hostage crisis, which have persisted throughout periods of political tension, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11. falgoush’s (K14) installation will serve as a visual and interactive exploration of the Iranian experience at U.S. borders, using artist Shirin Fahimi’s personal experience of being barred from attending her exhibition in 2020—an incident that led to the co-creation of the artist book O Lone Traveller. The installation encourages reflection on the invisible costs of border-crossing while prompting broader considerations of the societal implications of such practices. By incorporating the book as both a reflective guide and a tool for reclaiming personal agency, the installation aims to empower visitors to engage with themes of surveillance, censorship, and resistance, while underscoring the importance of independent publishing in these urgent times of self-awareness and collective action.
Los Angeles Contemporary Archive’s (B13) Fixing Papers Collection explores how people create, enforce, and contest immigration systems. These text-based artworks and ephemera use bureaucratic materials to visualize the shrouded decision-making process and fixed categories that governments impose. In doing so, Fixing Papers hopes to disorganize and unsettle the categories our lives are made to navigate.
The installation by Squeeze sour (K1) + öö (uh uh) (L15) consists of a single large structure, made of smudged Riso-printed pages that invite readers to move through the work by hand. The reverse side of the pages remain blank, gradually collecting visitors’ fingerprints as they flip backwards. The work explores the threshold of book distribution through the lens of visa redistribution—where access, meaning, and authority are mediated by touch, delay, and silence.