Not Right Now: Publishing, Performance, and Bay Area Countercultures

Installed at Et al. Gallery, Not Right Now: Publishing, Performance, and Bay Area Countercultures showcases Small Press Traffic’s rare and singular holdings alongside newly commissioned artworks created in dialogue with the collections, including performance activations, a new publication, and visual art. The exhibition integrates archival materials across Et al.‘s physical spaces—from gallery walls up the stairwell—creating an immersive encounter with this body of countercultural work as lived practice. Borrowing its title from a rare Renee Gladman chapbook in the collection, Not Right Now opens into the queer temporalities of literatures that circulate sideways, writing and performance oriented beyond now, in spite of now.

The exhibition explores how Northern California writers built alternative literary worlds through publishing and performance, foregrounding material cultures of literary production (hand-stitched chapbooks, mimeographed broadsides, collaborative manuscripts) alongside ephemeral cultures of performance and reading. Drawing from Small Press Traffic’s eight decades of archival holdings, Not Right Now examines how mimeo presses, storefront reading series, and grassroots performances sustained communities outside commercial and academic institutions. From the Berkeley Renaissance to New Narrative’s experiments, from Third World Communications to poets theater, Bay Area writers practiced publishing and performance as convergent acts of world-making.