The Born Again Labor Museum (BALM) was restarted in 2019 by Adam Turl and Tish Tish in Las Vegas, Nevada. The first BALM began in the mid-20th century. BALM artifacts, artworks, and gestures are based on epistles delivered from time-traveling representatives of the Communist Resurrection Cult. Now located in Carbondale, Illinois, BALM is open by appointment and during special events. BALM is also available to labor, community, antiracist, queer, anti-imperialist, leftist and similar grassroots organizations. For more information call 618-713-8132 or contact us below.
You can also donate to BALM using the following.
INTERVIEWS + PRESS + MEDIA COVERAGE
ADAM WROTE A BOOK
Gothic Capitalism: Art Evicted from Heaven & Earth (Revol Press, 2025) is available as paperback and ebook at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Revol Press, and certain independent bookstores in Europe and North America… And maybe other places…
“Adam Turl’s Gothic Capitalism argues against the forces of uneven and combined development of culture under capitalism. The gothic-futurist temporal displacement that Turl articulates so eloquently arises from the artist’s own experience in the entwined labors of the studio and a work history that includes janitor, dish washer, market researcher, graphic designer, typesetter, telemarketer, food service worker, gallery assistant, editor, and political organizer. The book’s vivid summary of modernist art’s avant-garde acknowledges art’s cooptation but refuses to retreat to a mournful passivity. Instead, Turl insists that it is ‘up to the working-class to regain that potential in culture,’ which can enable it to shed the strictures of a gothic capitalism.”
— Buzz Spector, artist, writer, emeritus professor.
“Gothic Capitalism reclaims art from suffocating neoliberal patronage, stale institutional capture, and a timid, hollow twenty-first-century avant-garde. Sharpened by historical urgency, Adam Turl unveils the haunted ruins of capitalist culture — where our images and ideas flicker like ghosts in the servers, where our creative flow is reduced to new blood for the vampire feed. This book is essential reading for all who refuse to surrender art’s social-spiritual power, for those who create, who reflect, and who celebrate the differentiated totality of life on this planet. Turl’s ideas are an incitement, a reckoning — and perhaps even a way forward.”
— Holly Lewis, author of The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection, and the forthcoming How to Think About Artificial Intelligence.
“Adam Turl’s Gothic Capitalism is a vital critique of the extractive machinery of the contemporary art world, dissecting its ties to capitalist realism, hollow avant-gardism, and neoliberal co-optation. With sharp philosophical and political clarity, Turl exposes the contradictions of an art system that commodifies dissent while evading its own complicities. Yet this is not just a diagnosis — it’s a call to arms. Drawing on years of artistic and activist engagement, they propose radical alternatives, urging art to reclaim its role in collective struggle. For those seeking to break from the dead ends of late capitalist aesthetics, this book is an indispensable provocation.”
— Anupam Roy, artist, recipient of the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art’s Emerging Artist Award.
BALM ARTISTS
Adam Turl is an artist and writer from southern Illinois — by way of Wisconsin, Chicago, St. Louis, upstate New York and Las Vegas. They are an artist and editor at Locust Review, a quarterly irrealist journal of art and literature, and a member of the Locust Arts and Letters Collective (LALC). They have had solo exhibitions at the Brett Wesley Gallery (Las Vegas), the Cube (Las Vegas), Project 1612 (Peoria, Illinois), and Artspace 304 (Carbondale, Illinois). In 2016 Turl was awarded a fellowship and residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, France. They received their MFA from Washington University in St. Louis at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, and a BFA from SIUC. Turl is working on the Born Again Labor Museum with their partner Tish Turl, a writer and fellow LALC member. They host the (sometimes) monthly podcast Locust Radio. They are a doctoral candidate at SIUC in media arts. You can access their CV here.
Tish Turl is a writer and poet from central Illinois living in southern Illinois by way of Las Vegas, Nevada. Growing up they had a pet cow named Bob – named after an auctioneer at the sale barn. Turl beat up homophobes in high school. They literally once owned a pair of rose-colored glasses but lost them. Tish is a former editor at Red Wedge Magazine. Tish is also a writer and editor at Locust Review, a quarterly irrealist journal of art and literature, and a member of the Locust Arts and Letters Collective (LALC). Their published work includes the serialized novella Sound, the short stories, “Space Goths,” “Memez,” and “Sewerbot,” and the serialized poems of the “Toilet Key Anthology.” They are currently working on the evolving Born Again Labor Museum project, and the Stink Ape Resurrection Primer, with their partner and fellow LALC member, Adam Turl. They are an MFA student at SIUC in creative writing and poetry.
Here is the true story of the Born Again Labor Museum as it appeared in Locust Review #1.
