No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake
Edited by Jamillah James
Contributions by Kathy Acker, DL Alvarez, Maurice Berger, Nayland Blake, David Evans Frantz, Carla Harryman, Richard Hawkins, and Maggie Nelson
Designed by: Content Object, Kimberly Varella
Softcover, 232 pages
Publisher: Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9986079-0-5
Dimensions: 8.25 × 10.625 in.
Managing Editor: Deirdre O’Dwyer
Editorial and Production Support: Emilia Shaffer-Del Valle and Amanda Sroka
Separations: Echelon, Los Angeles
Printing: Ofset Yapımevi, Istanbul, Turkey
No Wrong Holes serves as an illustrated catalogue accompanying Blake’s exhibition at ICA Los Angeles of the same name. Alongside documentation, the book includes essays, reprints, a reader, and a playlist.
The cover resembles a black drawing journal with a glossy black foil-stamped oversized title on front and die-cut holes along the Ota-bound spine. The holes reveal a tri-colored subterranean surface—the binding cloth— a palette echoed in a set of thee pins Blake created, each containing a word “No” “Wrong” “Holes”. Conjuring the idea of a “glory hole,” suggested by the title, the book asks what happens when the spine—the structure that holds a book together—is disrupted. Who is the content provider and who is the reader? And, even more aptly, who is the designer? By puncturing and exposing the structure of the book, this act turns a traditionally hidden element into something visible and transgressive.
Drawing is fundamental to Blake’s process, so the catalogue begins like a sketchbook. Three essays precede the exhibition plates, printed on grey-tinted uncoated paper with ghosted images suggestive of the work’s relationship to history and persistent presence. Folios alternate between the top and bottom of the page, playfully referencing role-playing.
The plates move between documentation, details, and installation views as if walking through the exhibition. A return to uncoated paper shifts the reader back into Blake’s “studio” through a playlist from Ruins of Sensibility, a zine facsimile insert, and pedagogical materials—turning the catalogue itself into an enactment of Blake’s practice
