Interference Archive

The Interference Archive is a volunteer-run library available to everyone, dedicated to exploring five decades of activism history. 

Located in Gowanus, Brooklyn, the Interference Archive opened in December of 2011. It originated in the personal collections of founders Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee, who had large amounts of materials on the activism and punk rock subcultures of the 1980s and ’90s, and it has expanded into an extensive library of thousands of posters, zines, books, comics, signs, and other ephemera, as well as posters, T-shirts, and buttons from causes both national and international. 

Favoring use and accessibility over preservation, the archive allows visitors to unshelve and examine all its contents. There are 20 drawers of posters and art in flat files, and they have such social movement ephemera as posters made by students from China, prints made by the queer and feminist movements from Poland and Cuba, and signs calling for liberation from countries in the Global South.

The archive regularly hosts events and exhibitions, showcasing different kinds of activist materials, including lesser-known movement media such as music and films.