Communist Guide to New York City

An archival photographic guide documenting the hidden topography of American communist history in New York City, published by common books in 2008 in an edition of 500 copies with support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

The 180-page book comprises 76 photographs of buildings, public places, and sites throughout New York that are connected to the history of the Communist Party USA: former party headquarters, residences of communist leaders, sites of strikes and demonstrations, and courthouses where communist figures stood trial. Each location is accompanied by explanatory captions and neighborhood maps that situate the sites within the city's geography, creating a parallel history of New York legible only through Fiks's lens. Designed by Geoffrey Han and edited by common room, the book includes essays by Olga Kopenkina, Kim Förster, and Fiks himself, examining the relationship between place, political memory, and the erasure of radical history from public consciousness. The monochrome offset-printed guide, glue and sewn bound with a green cover emblazoned with hammer-and-sickle dollar signs, functions both as artist's book and activist cartography.

Yevgeniy Fiks is a New York-based artist whose work explores intersections of Soviet history, American communist movements, LGBTQ+ politics, and Jewish identity through archival investigation, institutional critique, and photographic documentation. His practice examines how ideological histories are encoded in urban space and cultural memory, often focusing on suppressed or marginalized political narratives. Other projects include Lenin for Your Library! (2012–ongoing), which placed Lenin's writings in public libraries, and Dictionary of the Queer International (2021), documenting LGBTQ+ terms across communist and post-communist contexts.