LACY SOTO | DATE 9/27/2025

Artbook at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles presents Johanna Drucker on 'Affluvia'

Saturday, September 27, from 3–4 PM PDT, Artbook at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles presents an artist's talk and book signing with Johanna Drucker in conversation with Danny Snelson, in celebration of her new book, 'Affluvia.'

“This study exposes the connections between seemingly ordinary patterns of contemporary life and the global systems to which they are connected. Tracking the lifecycle of familiar objects creates a vivid, dramatic narrative–with shocking implications for understanding every aspect of our (generally unexamined) daily routines.” —Johanna Drucker

Please RSVP for the event and pre-order a signed copy here.

Affluvia is a neologism for the “toxic off-gassing of affluent culture.” Approximately 60,000 words, the text is focused entirely on tracking the ecological costs of the author making coffee and feeding her cats every morning. The actions take less than ten minutes, but they are connected to complex networks of industrial production, extraction industries, human rights and labor issues, pollution of air and water, and destruction of human and animal habitat. The illustrated study breaks the coffee making and pet feeding into component parts—the lifecycle of the beans, coffee grinder, coffee maker, pet food, aluminum can, label, bowls and spoon—and profiles each in turn.

Johanna Drucker is Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. She has held faculty positions at Columbia University, Yale University, the University of Virginia and been the recipient of fellowships from Harvard, the Beinecke Library, the Getty, and Fulbright.

Drucker’s artist’s books are widely represented in museum and library collections and were the subject of a traveling retrospective, Druckworks: 40 years of books and projects, in 2012-2014. Other recent work includes Inventing the Alphabet (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Visualization and Interpretation (MIT Press, 2020), and Iliazd: Meta-Biography of a Modernist (Johns Hopkins University Press 2020), Digital Humanities 101: An introduction to Digital Methods (Routledge, 2021) and Diagrammatic Writing (Onomatopée, 2014).

Danny Snelson is a writer, editor, and archivist working as an Assistant Professor in the Departments of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA, where he serves as faculty for the Digital Humanities, the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies, and the UCLA Game Lab.


ARTBOOK AT HAUSER & WIRTH LOS ANGELES BOOKSTORE
Johanna Drucker presents Affluvia: The toxic off-gassing of affluent culture
Saturday, September 27, 3–4 PM
917 East 3rd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013
Phone: 213-988-7413
Click here to RSVP and pre-order a signed copy