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The Born Again Labor Museum (BALM) is an ongoing art project by Locust editors and artists Adam Turl + Tish Markley.

Becoming Possums

Born Again Labor Museum February 10, 2021

The Space Comrades Aren't Coming so Warm Yourself by the Riot Fire

Born Again Labor Museum February 10, 2021
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Mike, the UPS Guy, Gives Birth to the New People, But Now the Moon is a Cartoon Bomb

Born Again Labor Museum February 10, 2021
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Making Protest Signs at the Born Again Labor Museum (November 3, 2020)

Born Again Labor Museum February 10, 2021

Truck Nuts, Hands Off, Why Hide Them?

Born Again Labor Museum December 10, 2020

Drawing and digital collage (2020) - product of remote viewing. Featured in Locust #3.

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Hand-O-Fate (after Emory Douglas)

Born Again Labor Museum December 10, 2020

Drawing and digital collage (2020) - product of remote viewing. Locust #3.

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Monument 4 Future Socialist Children

Born Again Labor Museum December 10, 2020

Acrylic, cotton, Sharpie, mixed-media, latex on canvas (2019). Featured in Locust #2.

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Dreams Cum Tru

Born Again Labor Museum December 10, 2020

Acrylic, Sharpie, ink, collage, stickers, mixed media, commemorative Star Trek collector’s plate, cotton and ash on thrift store painting with Burlington Northern hard hat, table, clipboard, paper (2019). Featured in Locust #1.

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Class Stelae

Born Again Labor Museum December 10, 2020

Memorial defense for passed comrades. Nails, epoxy, acrylic, collage, mixed media on wood boards. Locust #2.

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Plague Angel / Toilet Paper with Wings

Born Again Labor Museum December 10, 2020

Toilet paper, string, and costume wings. Featured in Locust #3.

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Wounded Sickles

Born Again Labor Museum December 10, 2020

Wounded Tool 32596-8-T - Sickles (Wounded Tool Library, Born Again Labor Museum): "Like most sickles, these artifacts grew tired of harvesting crops and cutting weeds long before they were replaced by electrical and motorized tools. After misunderstanding Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass – a book very popular among sickles – these artifacts aspired to become poets. The sickles, however, are only capable of harvesting words from already existing poems. Before being captured by the Wounded Tool Library these sickles harvested most of the poetry in the St. Louis public library." (2019)

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Born Again Labor Tract

Born Again Labor Museum December 10, 2020

On display at BALM in fall 2019. Materials: Photocopies and digital prints, collage, stickers, coffee, glitter, ink, Sharpie, acrylic and mixed-media, cotton and ash on paper and mounted on wood. Acquired in 2019. Featured in Locust #1.

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Wounded Harmonicas

Born Again Labor Museum December 10, 2020

Wounded Tool 32590-92-T - Harmonicas - When the last human being who remembered Leadbelly’s “We Shall Be Free” died, this group of harmonicas went into a sort of psychosis. They have been put into suspended animation in Whiskey in hopes that a cure can be found. If exposed to the air they will begin a rendition of “Gloomy Sunday,” causing mass suicides within a 3.5 mile radius.

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E-Cential Owl vs. Freedom

Born Again Labor Museum December 10, 2020

Drawing and digital collage (2020) - product of remote viewing. Featured in Locust #3.

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BALM Open House (October 13, 2019)

Born Again Labor Museum October 13, 2019
Featured
Fascist Pizza
Editorial
Feb 12, 2025
Fascist Pizza
Editorial
Feb 12, 2025

American fascism has a plastic shopping mall nostalgia. It is the fascism, not of a young empire thwarted, but an empire in decline. It is, at one level, a photograph of an abandoned Pizza Hut with the caption “This is what they took from us.”

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Editorial
Feb 12, 2025
Featured
Theses on the Theatrical Party
Irrealist Combat League
Nov 28, 2023
Theses on the Theatrical Party
Irrealist Combat League
Nov 28, 2023

The Theatrical Party embraces the organization of pessimism in contrast to the false optimism of the left. To be a revolutionary pessimist is to separate the political actor from their role. It is this separation which, in the epic theater of Brecht, invited a critical outlook on the performance from its participants and spectators — the first step in the transformation of spectators into collaborators, a task integral to both theater and the forging of a revolutionary party.

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Irrealist Combat League
Nov 28, 2023
Constructing Counter-Imaginaries
Anupam Roy, Tish Turl and Adam Turl
Oct 31, 2023
Constructing Counter-Imaginaries
Anupam Roy, Tish Turl and Adam Turl
Oct 31, 2023

We want a record of the real in the work — as in the cotton and ash — as well as reclamations of our history and imaginaries constructed against the limits of working-class imaginations by capitalist realism. So the individual pieces are sort of vignettes of class pathos and poetry, often in an irreal idiom, and all together representing, as much as we can, the limitless expansive nature of these stories in aggregate. 

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Anupam Roy, Tish Turl and Adam Turl
Oct 31, 2023
Featured
My Body's Claims, Verified
R. Faze
Apr 23, 2025
My Body's Claims, Verified
R. Faze
Apr 23, 2025

The mansion had to be more than twenty thousand square feet, with five wings; it took up two acres. In the backyard, a giant infinity pool overlooking downtown L.A., a jacuzzi big enough for a football team, an industrial-size outdoor kitchen that could feed two hundred people, thirty-two-seat table made of rough-cut red wood with an eight-inch-thick top, three brick fireplaces, eight open firepits, two pizza ovens, and more trees and flowerbeds than in a Vegas resort.

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R. Faze
Apr 23, 2025
In the Marshes
Adam Marks
May 11, 2024
In the Marshes
Adam Marks
May 11, 2024

“It snatched a dog two days ago, in Drapers Fields,” Detective Constable Habib explained back at the station to her superior, “right in front of its owner. They found its entrails wrapped around a lamppost on the High Road. It’s head was…”

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Adam Marks
May 11, 2024
Featured
Hospitality Engine
Tish Turl
Apr 29, 2025
Hospitality Engine
Tish Turl
Apr 29, 2025

Naugahyde seats crackle and groan under my knees, / sounds like taking shoes off at the end of the night, / when I remember that the first computer / was a woman named Ada Lovelace / who worked from home, mailing numbers to a Difference Engine

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Tish Turl
Apr 29, 2025
KCHUNK vs. The Bop Bags
Tish Turl
Apr 29, 2025
KCHUNK vs. The Bop Bags
Tish Turl
Apr 29, 2025

We walk in the firelight of foreclosed homes, / smoke thick as the ink of old contracts,

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Tish Turl
Apr 29, 2025

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Powered by the imagination of the noble locust.