In the middle of a shelf in Diane Stemper's Ohio home, Umberto Eco's Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages sits bookended, on the left, by two books about Francis Bacon and, on the right, by a small monograph on Pierre Bonnard and another book Art and Culture of Japan. The books are not organized alphabetically or chronologically.... Continue Reading →
Bookmarking Book Art – “The Cutting Edge of Reading: Artists’ Books”
Renée Riese Hubert and Judd D. Hubert's The Cutting Edge of Reading: Artists' Books (Granary Books, 1999) is a signal work of appreciation and analysis of book art. Nearly twenty years on, it can be read and appreciated itself more vibrantly with a web browser open alongside it. To facilitate that for others, here follows... Continue Reading →
Bookmarking Book Art — Large-Scale Book Art Installations
Anouk Kruithof's massive wall of colored books echoes two leitmotivs in book art -- the installation and the presumed disappearance of the book in the onslaught of digital media. Reminiscent of pixels on the computer screen, the work is entitled Enclosed Content Chatting Away In The Colour Invisibility and consists of over 3,500 books rescued from the... Continue Reading →
Bookmarking Book Art – Vienna Romanée, updated 20170830
From 4 June to 29 October, Vienna Romanée's "Data Sewing Project" will be on display (and growing) in the Coda Paper Art 2017 exhibition at the Coda Museum in Apeldoorn. These snippets of data from newspapers are sewn together with human hair. Also on display will be Fingerprint 1.1, a painstakingly created sculpture of a fingerprint... Continue Reading →
Bookmark – Aldus@SFU.com
The Aldus@SFU site (Simon Fraser University) provides access to 21 of the 106 volumes in the Wosk-McDonald collection. In addition, there are background essays from rare book authority Rebecca Romney, scholar John Willinsky and novelist Robin Sloan. Taken together with the online project at the University of Glasgow Library, the John Rylands Library exhibition of Aldines... Continue Reading →
Bookmarking Book Art – Chris Ruston
Ruston's art celebrates the natural world and human spirit, inviting viewers "to follow, to unravel secrets, and to pay close attention to the world around them". Part of a series called Ocean Blue, the book She Returns uses a double concertina fold and ink on Fabriano watercolor paper to invite us to follow the image of a leatherback turtle making... Continue Reading →
Bookmarking Book Art – Jacqueline Rush Lee, updated (2017)
By its compressed and sealed form, reticulation and shifting colors, The First Cut evokes Ovid’s epic poem about “bodies which have been transformed into shapes of different kinds.” The words and stories of the three Loeb Library volumes are locked away beneath the bent covers in the penetrating and embracing furls and whorls of the pages. Much... Continue Reading →
Bookmarking Book Art — Leilei Guo
Leilei Guo is an artist from Beijing. A few years ago, I had the good fortune to meet her at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where she was standing among her works. She drew my attention to The Way, a large volume open to a double-page spread on a shelf in the corner of the stand. On... Continue Reading →
Bookmarking Book Art – Xu Bing
I count myself "magpie lucky". The Gaudier-Brzeska exhibition, the finale before Kettle's Yard would close for years, had drawn me to Cambridge. I spent hours there. Exhausted, I was walking back to the train past the Fitzwilliam Museum. I had read somewhere that Xu Bing would have a small solo exhibition at the Fitzwilliam. I own... Continue Reading →
Bookmarking Book Art – Wilber Schilling
In his Books and Vines essays, Chris T. Adamson provides fresh, personal and insightful comments on fine book productions and their content such as Henry James' "The Beast in the Jungle" from the Lewis and Dorothy Allen Press in 1963, pictured above. An oenophile, as the title of his series suggests, Adamson also occasionally offers tips... Continue Reading →
Bookmarking Book Art – Jan Fairbairn-Edwards
Family Geology by Jan Fairbairn-Edwards consists of multiple related works to create the visual narrative of her Victorian era family's emigration from the Norfolk fens to Australia. One of the central characters is her great aunt Sarah, who is the focus of the work Stratification of Sarah shown below. Symbolically, the six hanging "chapters" of Sarah's journey move from the dun colors of... Continue Reading →
Bookmarking Book Art – Large-Scale Installations, Update 20170609
In her note in BookRiot, Nikki Steele takes Brian Dettmer's TED talk remark that books are created to relate to our human scale and builds on it elegantly, if all too briefly, by bringing together the installation works "Literature versus Traffic", "Scanner", "Book Cell", "Singularity", "Biographies" and "Contemporaries". She's not the first to provide a Pinterest-... Continue Reading →
Bookmarking Book Art – Francisca Prieto (II)
London 1827 takes us back in time, unfolding the nineteenth-century city before us. In a fluttering of pages we are cast among the grand stone of new buildings, under bridges, along the paths of Regents Park, up to a long-forgotten skyline – an elegant rising of church spires. -- Francisca Prieto, Between Folds In August... Continue Reading →
Bookmarking Book Art – Helen Douglas
Helen Douglas has been kind enough to forward the notice above of her most recent work - In Mexico: in the garden of Edward James. Based on her invited residency in Mexico City, this concertina book takes the viewer through Edward James’ jungle garden Las Pozas, its buildings and staircases, James's surreal imagination and, best of all, Douglas's... Continue Reading →
Bookmarking Book Art — Sam Winston
Presented here is an ongoing exploration of Charles Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’ and Ruth Padel’s ‘Darwin, A Life In Poems’. I initially separated the text of these two books into nouns verbs, adjectives & other. I wanted to present a visual map of how a scientist and a poet use language – a... Continue Reading →
Bookmarking Book Art – A “white book report” on “The White Heat” at MARC STRAUS
Dare you see a soul at the white heat? Then crouch within the door. Red is the fire’s common tint; But when the vivid ore Has sated flame’s conditions, Its quivering substance plays Without a color but the light Of unanointed blaze. Least village boasts its blacksmith, Whose anvil’s even din Stands symbol for the... Continue Reading →
Bookmarking Book Art – Louisa Boyd
Through abstraction and symbol, Louisa Boyd's art focuses on sense of place and our intrinsic connection to nature. The titles of three of her artist's book series - Infinity, Landscape, and Mapping - and those of the book art in them - Aether (2013), A Walk (2001), and Cartography I (2014) - reflect that focus. How she manages abstract... Continue Reading →
Bookmarking Book Art – Susan E. King
Susan E. King's works held at the Corcoran Gallery and College of Art & Design in Washington, DC. RECORD Copy: 1 ARTISTS BOOKS Call Number: NE508 .K55 1976 Status: Non-Circulating Item ID: 52672010188608 Collection Type: ARTISTS BOOKS Media: ARTIST-BOOK Author: King, Susan Elizabeth, 1947- Title Statement: Lessons from the South / [text and design by Susan... Continue Reading →
