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My mother Aggie spent a lifetime believing that a book in the right hands could change everything. She built and shared her enormous library around that value. As banned books are pulled from shelves, when incarcerated people are systematically denied words that might carry them through, and when a library card can feel like a radical act, we're refusing to let thousands of Aggie's books sit silent in boxes.
First, in her footsteps, we wrapped, ribboned, and gifted over 2,000 books to her family, friends, and colleagues. And now we're sending thousands more where they're needed most, into prisons and jails that starve people of stories, into the hands of young people rebuilding lives after incarceration, into neighborhood streets where a Little Free Library can turn a sidewalk into a doorway. |
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Beth and Ava created the perfect stamp for all of Aggie's books. |
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This isn't a simple donation drive. It's a small, stubborn act of resistance, a refusal to let censorship, isolation, and neglect have the last word. Every book we place is a promise that no one should be cut off from imagination, from knowledge, from the chance to see themselves in a story, from the vitality of critical thinking which starts with learning about worlds you haven't been exposed to so that you can manifest a more just world for yourself and those you love.
The freedom Aggie found on her shelves is becoming someone else's freedom now, one book at a time.
- Catherine |
Thank you to Ava Benzán, who has been spearheading this book re-homing project. This summer, she has worked diligently with Aubin, NYC Parks Department, and numerous libraries and book donation organizations. |
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Be sure to check out your local Little Free Library, too! |
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If you would like to look through Aggie's available books or have any suggestions for justice-driven organizations accepting hardcover and paperback books of all genres, art books, and puzzles, please email us at info@aubinpictures.com! |
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Art for Justice Grantee Ian Manuel with Winner ofNext Verse: Voices for ChangePoetry Contest |
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Ian Manuel, poet and former grantee of Art for Justice, is working with the Mayor's Office for Criminal Justice on Next Verse: Voices for Change, a competition empowering young locals to share their poetry. FOX 5 interviewed Manuel alongside Queens-native Briana Rizzo, who won this year's competition with her poem "Down to the Big Apple’s Core".
The initiative is influenced by Manuel's experience being incarcerated at the "tender age of 15" where he found solace and power through poetry. Now he is expanding that passion to New York City's young people, encouraging his community to share their emotions with the world.
Next Verse accepts original poetry from New York residents between the ages of 13-24 and 35+! |
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Some of Our Films andWhere to Find Them |
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In 1995, artists Catherine Lord and Millie Wilson committed what they called "an act of anthropology", and they intended it to be doomed from the start. For a large mixed-media exhibition on lesbian culture at the Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts, they asked 83 individuals from around the state of New Mexico to lend one small object of personal significance to the museum for display. Not just lesbians. Women willing to be identified as lesbians. Women who were once lesbians. Women who prefer not to describe themselves as lesbians. Women who entertain the idea of being a lesbian. And men wishing to commemorate a lesbian. The objects arrived. The show opened. And the category dissolved on contact.
.......Visibility is not safety. But erasure is violence. The space between those two truths is where this film lives. |
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Originally aired on Independent Lens, and nominated for Best Documentary Emmy, A TOUCH OF GREATNESS (2004) is a bolt of lightning disguised as a documentary. Director Leslie Sullivan and producer Catherine Gund train their lens on Albert Cullum, a force-of-nature elementary school teacher who blew the roof off Rye, New York public schools by handing Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Whitman directly to seven-year-olds and compelling them to feel it.
The film's secret weapon is its ravishing, grain-soaked 16mm black-and-white film shot in 1964 by the legendary Robert Downey Sr.; images so alive and strange they feel like they were smuggled out of another dimension.
Woven through the archival material are TV broadcast fragments from the era and deeply emotional contemporary interviews with Cullum himself and the now-grown, devoted students whose lives he permanently altered. Together they make the case that one radical, wildly imaginative teacher is an act of historical consequence. |
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“This is, indeed, poetry.” - The New York Times
“A gorgeous, quietly energetic, and moving meditation..” - The New Yorker |
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Threading the Line: Sewing Session with Saskia Jorda
Taking place July 31st, 2026, Threading the Line is an evening of stitching and connecting through soils, cloth, and thread, as part of the ecoartspace Soil Shroud Room project in the Den at Swale House. |
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Gladys Books and Wine, a Black, queer bookstore and wine bar in BedStuy, is hosting a mental health letter-writing event this Thursday, July 31st.
Unsent: A Letter Release Experience is a guided mental wellness experience designed to create space for emotional release through reflection and writing inviting participants to release what they’ve been holding in a way that feels safe, grounded, and intentional particularly during author and ancestor Bebe Moore Campbell National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month. |
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Frame by Frame: 30 Years of Magicwhat you can expect |
2026 is an exciting year for Aubin as we celebrate our 30th Anniversary!
Our 30th Anniversary programming includes screenings, convenings, celebrations, and more! We are celebrating our work across our FIVE PILLARS: Studio (documentary filmmaking to transform narratives); Impact (justice-oriented campaigns to amplify urgent issues); Workshop (fiscal sponsorship, project incubation, and community events); Lab (mentorship and training); and Rewind (uncovering and activating our past work and shared history).
Over the course of this year, we are working to inspire, learn, and scale Aubin Pictures’s model for storytelling for social change in its next 30 years.
Help us launch our Aubin 30 campaign by watching this wonderful sizzle reel of the amazing work that the Aubin team has been able to accomplish since 1996! |
Aubin 30 Sizzle Reel with clips from more than 20 of our films! |
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