Brief Histories keep the lights on 2026 sale
Dear Friend,
This is a launch of our online shop, and an invitation to support the next season of programming as well as the continued life of Brief Histories, a curatorial project space, gallery, discursive platform, classroom, publishing label, and a place where people meet.
For the past four years, we have been in our current gallery space located on the Bowery, in New York City’s Lower East Side, and upheld by a community of friends, supporters, artists, and collaborators who believe that art and its conversations are built together and over time. Our first fundraiser, Icey Cream, during the pandemic, offered ice cream bars across N.Y.C. from a mobile cooler, and utilized those encounters to meet collaborators in order to work on a publication together, which resulted in Tame the Wilderness (2020). Four years later, our next fundraiser is once again pressing: our goal is to secure rent and keep sustaining the gallery space.
Since 2011, Brief Histories has worked with over 67 artists and culture workers to stage exhibitions, projects, and publications. Our program focuses on uncompromising, cutting-edge, experimental, artistic practices, including political, socially-engaged, unconventional, category-defying work, that generates challenging discourse and often falls outside established avenues of nonprofit and commercial trends. We are an independent organization, a model that makes us ineligible for non-profit grants. In turn, we are not dependent on them, or restrained by funding stream politics. At the same time, Brief Histories is entangled within the merciless currents of the art economy, which we approach with critical intention. Working independently allows us to practice sovereignty, center artists, the program, as well as support artists directly through acquisitions. All income created goes into funding future projects. Fundraising works alongside, helping sustain our work within a challenging landscape shaped by uneven access and resources.
This time we have on offer a recent publication, fire-starting matches, a cobblestone candle, and limited edition t-shirts.
Please consider purchasing a gift in support of future programs at Brief Histories.
We wish you a happy end of 2025.
With immense gratitude,
Brief Histories
Featuring text from Scrabble for Ideology (2025): “Nationalism is the last refuge of ideology when all else fails. Nationalism sustains the fantasy that identification is primary, war is inevitable, and history is a straight line rather than a field of potential interruptions. It is ideology’s fallback protocol. What cannot be claimed as national is made invisible. When progress fails, nationalism returns: seductive, simplistic, brutal. It offers belonging in exchange for unconditional compliance, identity in exchange for exclusion. It promises coherence where there is fracture. It glues identity to land, memory to myth, and loss to vengeance.”
Purchasing a matchbook is a way for you to give directly to Brief Histories. Purchase as many matchbooks as you would like by selecting a quantity.
Designed by Šoba for this year’s Brief Histories fundraiser, this hand-poured candle is created out of real soy wax, cast in the form of a cobblestone brick, and modeled after the stones that once lined our street, The Bowery, New York City.
100% cotton loosely sized t-shirt. Each produced upon order in partnership with a local printer in Brooklyn, New York. Delivery within the U.S. is in approximately 20 business days. For international shipments please contact us directly by email.
100% cotton loosely sized t-shirt. Each produced upon order in partnership with a local printer in Brooklyn, New York. Delivery within the U.S. is in approximately 20 business days. For international shipments please contact us directly by email.
Scrabble for Ideology is a publication by Brief Histories, produced as an alphabetical bulletin composed of 26 English-language terms. Created over the past year, the project emerged from exhibitions, conversations, and collective work with Brief Histories artists, and was presented at the Art Encounters Biennial in Timișoara in the summer of 2025. It reflects on how ideology circulates, hardens, and unravels in moments of historical uncertainty. Printed as an A1 folded bulletin, it looks like a newspaper. Fold it, frame it, argue over it, or turn it into a family board game, then refold when ideology starts acting up. Limited edition offset print. From an initial run of 250 copies distributed in Timișoara, 15 copies remain and are available for sale here in support of the Brief Histories fundraiser.
Scrabble for Ideology (2025), Brief Histories
Double sided 4/4 color offset print
23.4 x 33.1 inches (A1)
See more images on our IG handle.
100% cotton regular fit t-shirt. Each produced upon order in partnership with a local embroider in Brooklyn, New York. Delivery within the U.S. is in approximately 20 business days. For international shipments please contact us directly by email.
