Mad Gleam Press was created to demonstrate the constant dialogue that exist between the visual, literary, and performance arts through the working collaborations of their contributors. With the participation of hundreds of artists in NYC, Paris, and internationally, we curate high quality print publications and live showcases which conjoin the powers of text, image, speech, and physical movement in visual/poetic pieces, performances, dialogues on arts and ideas, and excerpts of artist books. We also want to celebrate, document, and foster the physical communities that come together around small press publications in our respective cities and help connect them. We hope to offer a space for visual, literary, and performance artists, in and outside of the art institutions, to compliment each other’s work and to make new connections across mediums, genres, cultures, and demographics.

Mad Gleam Press a été créée pour montrer le dialogue constant qui existe entre les arts visuels, littéraires et performatifs, grâce aux collaborations de ses éditeurs et collaborateurs. Avec la participation de centaines d'artistes à New York, à Paris et à l'international, nous créons des imprimés de haute qualité et des évènements qui associent les pouvoirs du texte, de l'image, de la parole et du mouvement physique dans des pièces visuelles / poétiques, spectacles, dialogues sur les arts et les idées, extraits de livres d'artistes. Nous voulons également célébrer, documenter et favoriser les communautés des petites presses et les aider à se relier. Nous espérons offrir un espace pour les artistes visuels, littéraires et performatifs, à l'intérieur et à l'extérieur des institutions, pour compléter les travaux de chacun et créer de nouvelles connexions à travers médiums, genres, et cultures.

Brian Sheffield, Claire Durand Gasselin, Craig Kite

Claire (Clairette) Durand-Gasselin is a French born visual artist and writer, also working as a book designer, translator and French teacher. Since the beginning of Mad Gleam Press in NYC, she’s been taking the role of Artistic Director and Designer, creating visual and literary dialogues in POST(blank) magazine and all other MGP releases. A lot of the MGP aesthetic relates directly to her own artistic practice. It initiates a creative wandering between visual and literary arts, to create hybrid bodies of work. It revolves around the structure of coherent eclecticism. She uses books and their features, their relationship to a specific environment, and the ideas and methodologies they provide, as an artistic medium, a physical material, and a conceptual frame.

Brian Sheffield is a performance poet and co-founder & Editor in Chief of Mad Gleam Press. He studied radical philosophy, poetry, and marginalized writing, each of which has wildly informed his writing, performance, and his work with MGP. With a fierce rage against all things structural, he approaches his work and performance through an anarchistic lens, allowing mood and a general disdain for hierarchical organization to dictate his decisions. Because of this, he tends to struggle with more long term goals, opting instead to focus intently on the immediate situations at hand. This has allowed him to act as a de facto host for shows organized and/or run by Mad Gleam Press. It has also aided MGP in their selection process for POST(blank), revealing work that at once touches on immediate issues, while attempting to maintain an atmosphere of timelessness. This same anarchistic attitude and approach, however, leads his own work through a meandering world of constant flux, where a calm analysis might retreat deep into the wells of an uncompromising experiential reality, or a simple joy might suddenly blossom into uncontrolled reveries of life. He has performed and been published nationally and internationally among predominantly independent circles. He has self-released countless chapbooks, and is forever working on his first full-length collection. 

Craig Kite invented the name Mad Gleam Press in 2013 while sitting outside a cafe in Monterey, CA with Brian Sheffield, who had approached him with the idea of starting an indie press. The two friends both later moved to New York City, where the project gained momentum in 2014 after Claire Durand-Gasselin brought her skills in graphic design and visual art to the team. Craig worked tirelessly from then until 2020 as CEO of MGP, building the community, curating its events and publications, its social media presence and organizational infrastructure. He was instrumental in establishing MGP Indie Books and Records Shop, a community art and meeting space in Brooklyn. Today, Craig has stepped back from this role in order to concentrate on work in the field of permaculture, but he remains a Silent Cofounder. His creative and editorial control is now limited mostly to ensuring from a distance that MGP remains true to its original vision, ethical principles, and general artistic aesthetic. He may join the editorial team on certain projects as inspiration calls. But he gratefully leaves responsibility for the daily activities and expressions of MGP in the autonomous and talented hands of his partners, Claire and Brian, and guest editors.