Lara Durback

Lara Durback lives and works in Oakland. She organizes with a The Bay Area Public School, a free school in Oakland that attempts to be radically composed and offer a radical space to teach and learn http://bayareapublicschool.tumblr.com/, as everyone tries to figure out together the definition of radical. Bay Area Public School is part of an international network of free schools of the same vague name http://thepublicschool.org/. Organizing is hard, sometimes it's lovely, sometimes it's cognitively impossible. She is in awe of the breadth of organizers in Oakland, how frustrated and yet adoring everyone is of one another. How people just keep doing things.

She is mostly a poet but is also in letterpress world. She published a few things with others as NoNo Press. ‪‪She especially enjoys fixing Vandercooks.‬ She also taught a letterpress course at Naropa University's Summer Writing Program, and gave a talk on printing at SFMOMA's Shop Talk series. You can see her printing and/or writing work in Drift, Mrs. Maybe, Bombay Gin, the UK journal Hi Zero, and The Artist's Book Yearbook 2012-13, and her archiving work on www.deepoakland.org. Evidence of her daily practice was exhibited in the ILSSA (Impractical Labor in Service of the Speculative Arts) exhibit Every Day Work Hammes Gallery, Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, IN, in 2012. In 2013, with designer Andrew Kenower, she produced the letterpress publication Field Work: Poems on the Occasion of Mark diSuvero at Crissy Field for SFMOMA.‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬