About

The seeds of the Vancouver Art Book Fair (VABF) were planted in 2006 when VABF Founders Tracy Stefanucci and Ken Yong created one cool word, an art and literary magazine that featured work by Vancouverites.

In 2010, one cool word relaunched as OCW Magazine and Stefanucci registered the organization as a non-profit under the name OCW Arts & Publishing Foundation. One year later, a bookshop and gallery named Project Space was opened at 222 East Georgia Street in Chinatown. From 2011 to 2013, Project Space presented many curatorial projects, including Arte Factum, an exhibition of poetry chapbooks curated by Daniel Zomparelli of Poetry Is Dead; the exhibition Party Foreverer, which was accompanied by an artist book by Jeffry Lee of Hard Drugs; Summer School, a socially-based work by the American artists Erin Jane Nelson and Ming Lin; Money Is Just Paperwork, by collage artist Randy Grskovic; and the Wandering Art Metropole Publication and Ephemera Archive, co-presented with Art Metropole, Montreal and featuring work by Julia Feyrer and leannej. Project Space also served as a community hub and venue for a variety of art and literary events, readings and workshops.

After observing the increasing interest around art publishing in Vancouver during this period, Stefanucci founded the first annual Vancouver Art/Book Fair in 2012 (the backslash was dropped from the name in 2016), held at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The immediate energy around the fair made it clear VABF would become the organization’s main activity, and in 2013 the Project Space storefront was closed to focus on the book fair. 

In addition to the main fair, VABF has continued to produce a variety of auxiliary community programming. Most notable is the Monthly Open Studio series, curated by Asia Harvey, Melanie Trojkovic, Sylvana dAngelo, Yifan Jiang and Jennifer Dickieson, which began in 2015 and was held at the organization’s 236 East Pender Street studio. After the VABF studio—affectionately remembered for its by-donation brews, a pug studiomate named Penelope and an after-hours “knock loudly” access point via an alley in Chinatown—was closed in 2018, the Open Studios moved to Dynamo Arts Association in 2018 under the initiative of dAngelo.

Unibrow Arts Festival, Vancouver’s first comedy and zine festival, was co-created under the leadership of VABF Executive Director, Lisa Curry and local comedian, Cameron Macleod. Other activities include VABF’s attendance with dAngelo of Zine Club at the Fully Booked Art Book Fair in Dubai and The Garden pt 2, an installation and workshop in collaboration with Moniker Press and Vide Press at the Toronto Art Book Fair in 2018.

In 2018, VABF moved from its original location at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2012–17) to the newly opened Emily Carr University campus to accommodate for the increase in annual attendees. At this time the Guest Curator role was created to ensure diverse and dynamic programming and new policies were introduced, such as maintaining affordable table prices, introducing subsidized tables, and centering BIPOC voices.

Today, VABF is proud to continue operating the first international art book fair in Canada while serving the local art publishing community year-round through various curatorial events and activities. The organization is run by a dedicated team of independent contractors, volunteers and board members, and seeks to establish Vancouver as an international centre for artists’ publishing.