Tuskegee airmen

A photocopied zine from Yusuf Hassan's BlackMass Publishing that turns the archive of the Tuskegee Airmen, the first Black aviators of the U.S. Army Air Corps, into a spare, material meditation on Black service and public memory.

Staple-bound and photocopied in monochrome on colored paper, the zine works in BlackMass's signature reductive idiom: its kraft cover carries a single archival photograph of airmen lined up beside their aircraft over a typewritten caption. The publisher's note recounts the history the images carry: civilian training programs opened to Black pilots in 1939, the segregated units of 1941, and the squadrons trained at Tuskegee, Alabama. Those were the 99th Fighter Squadron and 332nd Fighter Group, which flew combat missions from North Africa and Italy, and the 477th Bombardment Group.

Hassan (b. 1987, New York) founded BlackMass Publishing in 2019 to publish books and zines by Black artists, combining archival photographs and found print material with poetry and jazz in what he calls the collective improvisation of African diasporic culture. BlackMass took part in Greater New York at MoMA PS1 (2021), and its publications are held in the collections of the MoMA Library, the Schomburg Center, the Whitney Museum Library, and Tate.