On the occasion of the third printing and re-re-relaunch of her book, Second Thoughts, artist and writer Angie Keefer will chew gum and juggle while conducting a poetry workshop* alongside a digressive talk on her work and other subjects. With accompanying visuals.

*The workshop channels collective energy through a painless, even delightful, daisy-chain process, ingesting, chewing, dissolving, and reconstituting visual and verbal stimuli as legitimate poetry. Modest audience participation is expected, but no one will be held publicly accountable for their efforts, so don’t let that dissuade you—prior knowledge and skills are neither necessary nor a boon. A pen or pencil would be helpful, though.

Angie Keefer (b. 1977) is an artist, writer, teacher, amateur engineer, and part-time psycheographer. Her work has been included in Greater New York (2016) and the Whitney Biennial (2014), as well as numerous, even more impressive international exhibitions in Europe and South America, plus a handful of solo things at real museums, all without the aid of commercial representation or significant social media presence. A hefty collection of her writing called Second Thoughts has just been published by Kunstverein Amsterdam and Plug In ICA, featuring a deluxe, double-signature, full-color image section, extensive rewrites, and other bonus material. (Already in its third printing, the latest edition of Second Thoughts, clocking in at well over 500 pages, is now available for worldwide distribution from Idea Books for about a nickel a page—a real bargain, if you ask us.) In 2010, she co-founded The Serving Library, a nonprofit educational and publishing organization, from which she retired in 2017. Long before that, she attended public school in Birmingham, Alabama, followed by private university in New Haven, Connecticut—always studying, studying, studying Art, her first love after reading and bathing. These days, when she is not teaching in Arnhem or Amsterdam, or presenting well-attended public talks and events in the world’s capital cities, she leads a relatively isolated existence somewhere between a pond and a highway in the woods of rural New York state, where she designs buildings and furniture for income and sport, and is lucky in love.

Second Thoughts
by Angie Keefer

Co-published by Kunstverein Amsterdam and Plug In ICA

I half hold that my life is a fine ride as long as I don’t attempt to navigate. The least critical way to describe this outlook is “bemused fatalism,” and as coping mechanisms go, there’s much to be said for keeping that faith, but so far it hasn’t proved compatible with ambitious ideas like writing a book, though this may turn out to be the first page of a first chapter, in which case I’ve changed my life and overruled fate with you as my witness.
—Angie Keefer

Second Thoughts is a selection of writing from 2008 to 2018 by artist Angie Keefer. This compilation traverses numerous disciplines from physics to philosophy, incorporating biographical elements and running parallel to Keefer’s visual practice.

Without directly addressing her own visual work, the book shadows the artist’s research, capturing her thoughts, travels, and encounters across a broad spectrum of subjects, including octopuses, protons, pictographs, poets, grammar, economy, love, loss, and politics.

At nearly 550-pages, Second Thoughts is long in scope but precisely constructed. Keefer leads readers down vividly articulated paths, documenting her thought processes in an exacting manner that reveals writing itself as a process of formulating the world. Accumulated knowledge is reconfigured through the pacing and cadence of each sentence.

Keefer worked closely with designer Scott Ponik to present this selection of writing as a unified whole while framing each individual text with its own synopsis and postscript. Though all of the pieces have been published previously, many were significantly updated, amended, and rewritten for this edition. Second Thoughts includes an introduction by Maxine Kopsa and a short text co-written with Lucy Skaer. The title is pulled in part from Keefer’s 2017 solo exhibition FIRST CLASS, SECOND THOUGHTS, INTERMINABLE SWELL at Plug In ICA.

Softback
544 pages
5.4 x 8.2 inches
ISBN: 978-94-90629-20-5

Written by Angie Keefer in various places
With a contribution by Maxine Kopsa from Amsterdam and La Tojera
Copy edited by Eugenia Bell in Brooklyn, New York
Designed and typeset by Scott Ponik in Portland, Oregon
Printed and bound by Wilco in Utrecht
Published in an edition of 1000 by Kunstverein Publishing, Amsterdam and
Plug In ICA, Winnipeg with additional support from Kunstverein Toronto

Distributed by Idea Books, Amsterdam
Copies will be available for sale at Radio Athènes

Please note that seating is limited and on a first come first served basis

Radio Athènes is supported by Outset Contemporary Art Fund (Greece)