The path to Yasmeen Siddiqui’s Pine Plains studio winds through wildflowers. On a recent afternoon, a doe watched the forest edge as her fawn tumbled through high grasses. Steady rain washed the meadow in gray.
Midway up a gentle slope, a wooden structure overlooked the wet green landscape. Chickens were once processed there. Now, from the same modest room, books take shape among artists, writers, and translators who may live thousands of miles apart.
Inside, sheltered from the rain, Siddiqui sat at a simple table with an open book before her. From this room she runs Minerva Projects, the feminist nonprofit publisher she founded in 2017.
The studio is often quiet. The books are not.
Since releasing its first publication in 2021, Minerva has built a small catalog of books and editions bringing together artists and writers from New York, Istanbul, Seoul, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Galway, and places in between.
Minerva publishes across disciplines, giving artists opportunities to engage with one another across geographic and creative boundaries. A typical edition uses a particular artist’s work as a starting point for contemplation. A translated poem on one page bleeds into an essay exploring identity, while a reflection on a painting later offers a new perspective on grief. The boundaries between art, scholarship, literature, and criticism are deliberately porous.
“The idea of individuality is a human invention, not a discovery; it might be a deed of curbing wilderness,” Israeli visual artist Tamy Ben-Tor writes in her essay “Fermented Pot,” included in a 2021 Minerva publication exploring work by Ben-Tor and Miki Carmi, another visual artist from Israel.
The philosophy binding Minerva’s authors and disciplines is grounded in feminism, in the belief that all people and all bodies are equal regardless of the social, economic, or political systems surrounding them.
The books take time. Minerva’s first title did not appear until four years after Siddiqui founded the organization. A forthcoming project recently underwent its 14th design iteration.
Siddiqui is less interested in documenting an artist’s work than in using that work as an opening into a larger inquiry.
“There’s no boilerplate,” she said.
The books give physical form to questions Siddiqui has carried since childhood.
The Questions Behind the Books
Siddiqui was raised in a mixed South Asian and Anglo household. Her father was born in India. After Partition divided British India in 1947, his family moved to Pakistan, eventually settling in Karachi. He immigrated to Canada in 1967 and met Siddiqui’s mother at the University of Toronto. Siddiqui was born four years later.
Her parents’ marriage stood out at the time, Siddiqui said. She became conscious early of the ways societies define belonging and otherness.
When she was about 5, her mother took Siddiqui and her brother to live with their paternal relatives in Pakistan for six months. Her parents were considering where they should raise their children and where the family might fit in.
Siddiqui was too young to experience the trip as the complicated cultural negotiation it was for her parents. Still, questions that would later shape Minerva were already present: What happens when cultures meet? What does the dominant culture absorb, and what does it permit to remain? Who creates the structures, artistic or societal, through which people understand one another?
Ultimately, the family returned to Toronto.
At the University of Toronto, Siddiqui completed her undergraduate degree in liberal arts in 1995, then remained for a master’s degree focused on Islamic art history, which she received in 1997.
She became interested in places where cultures had mixed, including Islamic Spain and the Mughal Empire in South Asia, and in the movement of artistic forms, languages, and systems across empires. Her studies explored what cultures “gobble up and what they let stay,” as Siddiqui put it.
Language offered one way of tracing that process.
“How is something named, and why, and what hierarchies are there?” Siddiqui asked. “These questions all took root in that early education.”
A Publishing Life in Cairo
In 1997, Siddiqui moved to Cairo to study Arabic. She needed to learn the language in order to apply to a doctoral program.
She never made it to the doctorate.
As Siddiqui sat at her desk and reflected on those years, the rain strengthened, blurring the meadow outside. Her memories moved quickly into another city.
Rooftop cafes, waiters in pressed shirts moving among crowded tables, journalists arriving after deadlines, and artists slipping into conversations already underway. Someone stayed for just one drink. Someone else remained until morning.
History was everywhere, in the architecture, the succession of dynasties and colonial occupations, and the transformations layered across the city.
For part of her five years there, Siddiqui lived on a ramshackle houseboat on the Nile. When the river rose, the floorboards sometimes lifted enough for her to see the water moving beneath her feet.
“Cairo was exactly the opposite of what Toronto felt like for me,” she said. “It was just so dynamic.”
The city also pulled Siddiqui away from academia and toward publishing.
At first, she taught English at a school in Heliopolis. Later, she began copy editing and writing for a neighborhood paper run out of a woman’s home. From there, the work widened through the city’s English-language publishing world.
Siddiqui wrote news features and art reviews for The Cairo Times. She worked on a book about Islamic architecture, checking the identification of buildings, going into archives, and writing extended captions. The assignments taught her how much could be contained in description: A caption could define an entire place for a reader.
She also worked for a lifestyle magazine, Cleo, eventually serving as editor-in-chief, a job she described with some disbelief. Cairo’s publishing scene was small enough that jobs, friendships, and assignments often overlapped. It was also porous enough to let her move among journalism, art writing, editing, and publishing.
Her last major job there was at Medina, a bilingual Arabic-English magazine devoted to art, architecture, and design. Siddiqui described it as “an amazing utopian publishing effort.”
She left Cairo in 2001, shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. She said the attacks were not the reason she left.
“I wanted to move back into a Western context,” she said. “I was ready for a little bit of structure.”
Minerva Takes Shape
Siddiqui accepted a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a content editor for ArchNet, a digital archive of Islamic architecture supported by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.
After two years in Cambridge, Mass., she enrolled at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. She earned a second master’s degree in 2005, living first on the Bard campus and later above the police station in Red Hook.
She did not yet know how to drive. On Amtrak trips from Manhattan to Rhinecliff, the Hudson Valley landscape came into view along the river.
“It was magical,” she said. “I fell in love with it.”
After Bard, Siddiqui worked at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City, helping organize exhibitions and public programs.
Siddiqui married Matthew Kupferberg, a health care lawyer, in 2006, and the couple raised three children as her work moved between New York, Kentucky, Colorado, and the Hudson Valley.
In Denver, the idea for Minerva Projects began to take shape.
Siddiqui became close to the writers and artists gathered around Counterpath, an experimental cultural organization with a performance space, bookstore, community garden, and artist residency program. She admired its looseness and the community surrounding it but wanted to build something smaller and more concentrated, a place where artists could pursue ideas beyond the boundaries of an exhibition or conventional catalog.
Minerva Projects began in the family’s garage in 2017 as a space for exhibitions, readings, and conversations.
The name referred to the Roman goddess Minerva, associated with wisdom and craft but also with war. Siddiqui is a pacifist, but she was interested in struggle as an intellectual and psychological act, the work involved in challenging inherited categories and systems.
“It’s a feminist press,” she said. “So it hooks in there.”
The word “Projects” was equally deliberate. Siddiqui did not envision a conventional publishing house with a uniform catalog, fixed production calendar, or recognizable house style. Each undertaking would develop through its own combination of people, forms, and ideas.
In 2018, Siddiqui brought Kupferberg to a property in Pine Plains.
“I think this is where we need to live,” she recalled saying.
The family moved to the property, and their children attended Pine Plains schools. They later returned to New York City as Kupferberg’s work and Siddiqui’s teaching at Pratt required them to be there more regularly. Siddiqui now divides her time between the city and Pine Plains, spending longer stretches there during the summer.
The Books Take Their Time
Minerva released its first book, “Broken Time Machines: Daisy Patton,” in 2021. Like the publications that followed, it was not intended as a conventional artist’s monograph or exhibition catalog. Patton, a visual artist from California, was born to a white mother from the American South and an Iranian father she never met. Rather than simply documenting her work, the book brings together essays and poetry by artists and writers responding to it from their own perspectives.
Irish novelist and poet Elaine Feeney contributed a written response to Patton’s work after first encountering the artist during a reading Feeney gave in Denver.
“Her work is so vibrant and yet painfully aware of the erasure of women’s bodies and their stories from dominant narratives, the world of art and the agreed canons of history and literature,” Feeney said. “Daisy’s work explores the many ways women are erased from public and private spaces — through the denial of reproductive care, intimate partner violence, and gender-based violence.”
Feeney said she was grateful for the opportunity to engage with Patton’s work through her own writing.
“Minerva Press gave me the freedom and scope to respond to Daisy’s work in a meaningful and self directed way,” she said.
That exchange across disciplines is central to Minerva’s books.
“SRS (Silk Road Songbook),” by Millie Chen and Arzu Ozkal, grew from seven years of travel, research, translation, and collaboration along routes stretching from Istanbul through Tehran, Tashkent, Bishkek, and Xi’an. Lyrics appear in six languages alongside musical scores, essays, archives, and translators’ discussions, leaving the negotiations of translation visible rather than smoothing them into a single authoritative voice.
The dialogue also extends beyond the page.
Elysia Solomon, chair of Minerva’s board, pointed to a 2022 New York City event centered on “The Glass Mosque,” an interdisciplinary project that reconsiders the mosque through art, architecture, literature, music, history, and translation.
“That sort of multifaceted examination of a concept or a problem or a piece of art or an artist was just so eye-opening to me,” Solomon said, “and thinking about how we can be so different, but then also have these common themes about identity, about growth, about otherness.”
At Minerva, readings, discussions, and exhibitions are part of the editorial process itself. They do not merely follow publication. They can generate connections and change how a project is understood before its final form has been settled.
“It is so artist and creator driven,” Solomon said. “It comes from a place, an idea, a concept, a discussion, and then Yasmeen and other creators really just work with it and see where it lands.”
That openness can also make Minerva slow.
“We are very open to the process driving what the end result will be and the timing of that end result,” she said.
It is an unusual approach in a publishing industry organized around seasonal lists, sales projections, production calendars, and market categories. For Siddiqui, however, the method is inseparable from the mission.
Minerva identifies itself as a feminist press, but Siddiqui does not define that identity narrowly by the gender of its contributors or the subjects of its books. Its feminism, she said, is a way of resisting rigid hierarchies and divisions and of understanding culture as something made through relationships rather than isolated categories.
“It understands the world holistically,” Siddiqui said. “All the bodies. Everybody.”
Her interest is in “understanding the whole picture,” she said, rather than dismissing communities, geographies, or social contexts outright.
That openness can become difficult in practice.
Siddiqui sometimes places writers and artists together who would not have chosen to work with one another. One contributor withdrew from a forthcoming book for political reasons.
Siddiqui respected the decision, she said, but remained committed to a press that does not begin by dividing the world into people or ideas that may and may not enter the room.
“It’s a tiny little press, and it’s a labor of love,” Siddiqui said. “It may as well sustain that worldview that I believe so deeply in.”
Wonderful, complex story of a complex life. Unique to the Herald and unlike what you would read in other newspapers. Hats off to Patrick Grego.
I love this!!