UNDERTOW EDITIONS is an artist-run press supporting queer artists’ printed matter and ephemera. Collaborating with emerging, mid-career, and established artists, UNDERTOW produces books, zines, editions, and other ephemera such as posters, postcards, and matchboxes. Established in the summer of 2024 by Nathan Storey, UNDERTOW is a platform for historically underrepresented visual artists who explore and cultivate queer print culture.
Gay zines, chapbooks, porn, and journals remained clandestine until the 1970s, often passed around and carried in brown bags. Nevertheless, the relationship between print and queer culture flourished, perhaps because of print’s potential for non-heteronormative self-understanding. Queer zine-making dates back to a time when queer consciousness was first evolving. Strikingly personal and raw, queer prints and zines continue to be so critical because they serve to create and foster community. An UNDERTOW is the underlying current, at odds with the water’s direction, pulling our bodies back inward to the sea as the waves break near the shore. bell hooks proposes the notion of being “queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live”. Queer artists, throughout history and in this contemporary moment, invent and create prints to ensure our survival, liberation, and legacy.
