a contemporary view - Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts

The Book
a contemporary view
Carole Bieber and Marc Ham Gallery
Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts
December 22, 2010—April 17, 2011
Center for the Arts Gallery · Towson University
September 8—November 5, 2011
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200 South Madison Street
Wilmington, DE 19801
T 302 656 6466
F 302 656 6944
www.thedcca.org
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8000 York Road
Towson, MD 21252
T 410 704 2808
www.towson.edu/artscalendar
Photographs above and right:
The Book: A Contemporary View
Installation view
by Carson Zullinger

Contents
Page 4
Acknowledgements, Maxine Gaiber
Page 5
An Ambitious Collaboration, Christopher Bartlett
Page 6
John Latham and The Book: Toward an Open Art, Maiza Hixson
Page 7
The Book: A Contemporary View, J. Susan Isaacs
Page 11
Artist Biographies and Works in Exhibition, J. Susan Isaacs
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Acknowledgements
Ms. Isaacs approaches life with gusto and consumes new books and new art with equal enthusiasm and delight. It is
therefore completely appropriate, and perhaps even inevitable, that Dr. J. Susan Isaacs, Curator of Special Projects at the
DCCA, has organized work from many of the finest book artists from around the world into the ambitious and provocative
exhibition, The Book: A Contemporary View. Exploring contemporary book art in its seemingly infinite permutations, the
exhibition stretches the definition of “book” beyond its usual confines in a dazzling display that will take many repeat visits to
totally digest. We thank her for this exhibition and for her tireless commitment to the DCCA. We also thank each member of
our talented curatorial staff, Steve Ruszkowski for his beautiful installation, Watsuki Harrington for managing the behind-thescenes
paperwork, and Maiza Hixson for her insightful catalogue introduction.
We also thank all of the generous individuals and institutions who have made this exhibition and its subsequent installation at
Towson possible:
Phyllis and Norman Aerenson
Laetitia and Preston Ayars
Jay and Maret Headley
Alice B. Hupfel
Jan Jessup
Berta and Arnold Kerr
Mark Samuels Lasner
Tim D. Lobach and Watsuki Harrington
Ron and Rebecca Meick
Jeff and Christy Mitchell
Marla and Thomas Norton
Oak Knoll Books
Louis B. Rosenberg and Lynda Schmid
Annette Seidenglanz and Chuck Bowes
Lynn and Rodney Sharp
University of Delaware, Department of English
Maxine Gaiber
Executive Director
Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts
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The Book: A Contemporary View
Installation view
Photo by Carson Zullinger

An Ambitious Collaboration
An ambitious addition to the many exciting collaborations between Towson University Art Gallery and the Delaware Center
for the Contemporary Arts is the exhibition, The Book: A Contemporary View. As Director of the Art Galleries at Towson and
Head of the Department of Art + Design’s Illustration program, this exhibition has particular personal resonance for me.
There is a long, rich history of bookmaking providing a fertile ground for artists to mine contemporary interpretations. All
kinds of materials have been used to make books—bone, bronze, pottery, shell, wood, papyrus, dried palm tree leaves,
and wax-coated wood tablets (that were erasable). Writing to transmit or preserve information began with picture writing,
systems of pictographs such as Egyptian hieroglyphics. Another system in use in third millennium BC was Mesopotamian
cuneiform script employed by Sumerian scribes writing on clay tablets. Today there are dozens of alphabets in use, the most
common being Roman derived from Greek, the first true alphabet.
The first bookbinding originated in India around 100 AD and manuscript books shifted from the scroll format to the codex,
which were wood or leather bound. Over the next few centuries laboriously hand-produced illuminated manuscripts were
made, commissioned by the wealthy and written in gold and silver on purple vellum and covered in gold, ivories, enamel
work, and even repoussé silver. The Middle Ages saw book production concentrated primarily in monasteries, since the
highest demand was for ecclesiastic texts.
The earliest example of the mass-produced book may be the Diamond Sutra printed in China around 860 AD, but the most
famous is Gutenberg’s Bible (c.1455) printed with moveable type. With this new technology came printed Illustrations and
typographic design, the spread of ideas and knowledge and the broader need for literacy. Also with the spread of ideas
came religious and political censorship and book burning.
Dictionary, encyclopedia, atlas, comic, bible, poetry, texts, children’s books, etc. are all found in the personal or public
library, non-fiction and fiction available for edification or pleasure. One of the earliest pop-up books was Sir Henry
Billingsley’s 1570 translation of Euclid’s Elements into English that included several three-dimensional fold-up diagrams
illustrating solid geometry. Some books become expensive rarities; in 1994, Bill Gates purchased a Leonardo Da Vinci
sketchbook for $30.8 million, the most expensive book ever sold.
One conservative estimate has Google digitizing at least 10 million books a year. The total number of titles in existence is
estimated to be about 65 million. Amazon has sold 12 million Kindles, and there were over 10 million paid Kindle eBook
sales in December, 2010, surpassing its book sales by nearly double. The future of the physical book is in question, but its
uniqueness is the physical experience, the smell of ink on the page, the feel of the paper, the craftsmanship in the binding,
none of which can be reproduced digitally.
The appreciation of the qualities inherent in the traditional book is evidenced by the artists in this exhibition who take it as
their springboard for broad interpretations and imaginative reconstructions.
Christopher Bartlett
Director, University Art Galleries
Director, Illustration Program
Professor of Art
Department of Art +Design, Art History, Art Education
Towson University
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John Latham and The Book:
Toward an Open Art
In 1961, one of the most famous conceptual artists to use books, John Latham (b. England 1921-2006) produced a work
of art entitled Painting Is An Open Book. Part of the collection of the Walker Art Center, it features a conspicuous absence
of paint, consisting of open books whose spines are mounted and plastered to a burlap-covered board. A tongue-in-cheek
philosophical statement, seen today, the work offers a compelling corollary to the DCCA’s exhibition devoted to artists’
books. The Book: A Contemporary View would seem to suggest that not only books but the definition of art itself can also be
seen as equally “open” to creative interpretation.
In 1966, Latham famously borrowed a copy of the late Modern art critic Clement Greenberg’s formal treatise Art and Culture
from the library of Saint Martin’s School of Art, where Latham taught part-time. Ultimately known for destroying books in
order to achieve a process-oriented rather than object-based art, Latham invited students to literally chew pages from
Greenberg’s book, which was by then a known relic of the critic’s hold on the art world. He distilled the resulting pulp into
liquid. Latham was subsequently fired from his teaching post over this incident.
From a “contemporary view,” The Book exhibition, like Latham’s transgressive act, challenges us to keep a fresh perspective
on not only the question of art but also the themes generated by it. This is the job of any contemporary arts center—to
ask the question of what is art, letting us decide for ourselves, even when some of the works present us with difficult or
uncomfortable subject matter. In an era when G. Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian, can order the removal of
David Wojnarowicz’s short silent film A Fire in My Belly (depicting ants crawling over a crucifix) from the National Portrait
Gallery, the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts (DCCA) stands in contrast by encouraging visitors to discern
whether or not an altered book is objectionable, if it is or isn’t Art.
DCCA visitors are further invited to view and form their own opinion on controversial works in The Book show, such as Doug
Beube’s Blast: If You See Something, Say Something, (2008). An ersatz pipe bomb made from the altered pages of sixteen
Encyclopedia Britannicas, Beube’s sculptural “weapon” deploys knowledge as a powerful combatant against ignorance,
would-be violence, and terror. His work dovetails with Latham’s earlier use of Enclopedia Britannicas in the 1960s, when
Latham began to publicly stack and burn volumes of the books, letting viewers observe for themselves his critique of
universal knowledge.
While The Book exhibition asks us to consider the political issues affecting us today, it also invites us to marvel at the myriad
processes and techniques employed by artists in interpreting artists’ books as “fine” art and craft. The exhibition presents
viewers with a copious array of materials and strategies devised to create both unique and serially reproduced book art
forms. Numerous binding styles, types of paper, printing processes, and designs (from French to Accordian to Pop-Up) are
but a few examples of the approaches you will find in the show.
The Book: A Contemporary View ultimately queries how we view art—as aesthetic object, agent of political change, or as
historical record of evolving social values and extremes. One might think of the show as a metaphorical library from which
we are encouraged to “check out” new material. However, unlike a traditional library, the works are not easily categorized,
nor do they present uniform narratives. Rather, they vary wildly in scope and remain closer to the larger message of
Latham’s work: If life is an open book, then by extension art must be, too.
Maiza Hixson
Gretchen Hupfel Curator of Contemporary Art
Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts
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The Book: A Contemporary View
Mounting an exhibition devoted to the topic of the book makes perfect sense for two institutions with direct links to the
field of illustration. Yet, surprisingly, this is the first time that the DCCA or Towson University has installed an exhibition
around this theme. The DCCA’s physical location within the Brandywine Valley connects it to the historical golden age of
American illustration. In fact, one of the reasons for the founding of the DCCA in 1979 was the need for a response to the
more traditional art of the Brandywine School which was dominated by representational illustration. Additionally, the nearby
Delaware Art Museum has one of the most important collections of American illustration in the United States, especially
strong in early twentieth-century narrative work by N.C. Wyeth, Frank Schoonover, and Howard Pyle, artists from the
Brandywine Valley. Towson University has an active illustration program in its Department of Art + Design, in addition to
an important Department of Education that has produced many public school teachers well-versed in instructing reading
and strongly committed to the illustrated text. While respecting these histories, this exhibition emerges more out of the
modern studio-craft tradition of creating one-of-a-kind hand-made objects. The book is such an object. This contemporary
interpretation of the book will also appeal to those devoted to traditional presentations of text and image, and while the
studio-craft tradition predominates, there are examples of more standard book designs in the exhibition as well as sculptural
interpretations utilizing actual books.
In an age when the printed book may soon be an anachronism, artists remain fascinated by the subject and materials of the
book. There are graduate programs devoted to the art of making books, bookmaking guilds and organizations, both national
and regional, that support the activities of small presses, artist-made books, and collectors of limited edition and one-ofa-kind
books. Additionally, there are increasing numbers of artists who use books as a medium. They carve books into
sculptures or deconstruct them, turning their spines and pages into works of art. Still others produce installations and works
that suggest book forms. Finally, there are books produced by painters and printmakers—boxed collections of paintings—a
tradition used by artists for making books with removable pages, and compilations of prints. The Book: A Contemporary
View takes all of these approaches into account, addressing the themes of the book as object, subject, and concept—
stretching the definition of “book.”
This broad approach to the subject, as opposed to an exhibition of technical specificity—such as pop-up books— or
subject matter—such as nature—represents not only the two institutions’ desire to introduce their viewership to the many
contemporary approaches to the theme and subject of the book, but also to provide an opportunity to review book practice
at the end of the first decade of the century. With over 50 works in the show, including installations as well as individual
books, the state of contemporary bookmaking appears expansive. Viewers will undoubtedly come to two important
conclusions: the book as a topic or medium occupies the creative energies of many artists working today both nationally
and internationally, and artistic approaches to the book are hugely varied in scale, media, and concept.
Three overarching divisions define the exhibition. The first division, books as modernist objects, emerges out of the post-
1960 studio craft movement. The second, that of small editions of illustrated books, has a history that can be traced back
through such modern art movements as the Bauhaus, the Russian Avant-Garde, and Arts and Crafts—and further back in
history as well. Finally, the last segment includes sculptural installations and deconstructed books. The idea of installation
connects to the postmodernist notion of removal of boundaries between disciplines and media and transcends functional
objects and traditional sculpture, entering the realm of conceptual art.
Today we see an increasing percentage of the book market devoted to electronic book purchases. Several artists in the
exhibition address the growing dominance of digital media. For instance, Marie Kelzer specifically utilizes as her subject the
change from paper book to eBook, presenting a paper book, CD, and eBook as a grouping, thus demonstrating through
her choice of subject the shift from paper to electronic media. Long-Bin Chen too looks at the move from book to computer
in his sculptures. In many of his early works he utilized computer printouts and discarded phone books. More recently, he
has carved old books, signifying that they are no longer of use in their original format. He melds the individual volumes
together into one sculpture, each book no longer able to open, repurposed into a flying figure that spans part of the ceiling.
Others utilize digital technology to make their works. Leah Oates, Louise Levergneux, Susan Maguire, and Collette Fu all
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include digital photographic images in their books, and Levergneux creates related digital movies as well. Tara O’Brien
also produced a movie to complement her more traditionally constructed book on the theme of the Wissahickon Creek. Her
handmade book and digital film are part of the same work. Others use digital technology too. Cristina de Almeida’s and Jan
Estep’s works demonstrate a sophisticated knowledge of graphic design and each artist presents her ideas conceptually,
re-interpreting specific historical events and figures but utilizing modern design technologies and media.
The re-interpretation of history in these last examples depends upon a conceptual approach to the topic as well as the
employment of computer media. Although Buzz Spector does not use new media, in one of his works he utilizes once
revolutionary and recently outdated media—Polaroid photographs. He alters a book of found Polaroid photographs, a
technology invented after World War II, but largely gone from the market now. Through cutting and tearing of pages, he
explores history and memory, leaving a residue of image and word. In Marcel Broodthaers #2, he makes reference to a
historical figure, the artist Marcel Broodthaers, who was an experimenter, both conceptually and materially. Similarly, Claire
Owen subverts old media by creating a work that addresses the historical cabinet of curiosities which were the collections
of natural objects and art assembled by wealthy private collectors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These
collections eventually evolved into the public museums of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here Owen utilizes as
her subject a group of objects from the past, now presented as facsimile. She casts natural objects in leather and converts
original drawings into printed computer scans. However, she also includes more traditionally printed works—monotypes
and etchings—resulting in a small collection that explores the past by destabilizing our assumptions about familiar objects
and images.
Still other artists in the exhibition address the role of the book by suggesting the impact of time and a sense of the past.
Jody Alexander creates sculpture out of the spines and bindings of old books. The deconstructed elements allude to books’
structural role in the spread of information and ideas in western civilization but also suggest age and deterioration. Cui Fei
creates text/images with Chinese-like characters made out of natural materials (twigs and vines). She digitally photographs
them and prints her images onto a papyrus substrate. This body of work implies ancient civilizations and materials, created
through the functions of a computer and printer. Ula Einstein contributes an accordion book created with fire. The result is an
ephemeral object that suggests age and primal ceremonies. Like Einstein, Michelle Wilson also utilizes fire, but she employs
it here in order to present the viewer with a meditation upon the history of book burnings.
Real events are a topic of interest to many artists in the exhibition. Doug Beube presents two works on the topic of terrorism,
especially its connections to conflicts in the Middle East, and one that addresses the political speech of a recent United
States president. In her flag book, Rose Reeder reminds us of the Middle Passage and the horrendous toll of slavery. Carole
P. Kunstadt, Miriam Schaer, and Brian Dettmer, like Beube, alter books by cutting them up to sever pages or by cutting
away sections, thus revealing hidden elements. Manipulating and changing older texts that have attached histories is a
recurrent theme in the exhibition. Schaer addresses the very issue of how history is recorded by repurposing an older book
that recounts an even older period of history. Dettmer essentially performs a book autopsy, cutting down through a set of
vintage encyclopedias, revealing black-and-white illustrations and text from the past. Siona Benjamin paints a scroll using
antique manuscript illumination methods and materials, concentrating on an ancient story. History informs in other ways
too. Jill Dalton’s and Crystal Cawley’s inspirations can be found in department store catalogs from the nineteenth century as
well as a 1944 Sears catalogue and The History of Underclothes from the 1950s. Marylyn Stablein’s contribution is a cloth
book created from vintage fabrics and illustrations through which she hopes to honor and celebrate the historical tools and
handiwork of women.
The themes of identity and gender occupy a fairly large number of the artists in the exhibition, ranging from body identity
to feminist empowerment to outsider status. Clarissa Sligh sheds light on the relationship between skin color and gender,
connecting two real individuals, one contemporary and one from the nineteenth century, who in different ways changed
their gender identities. Beth Uzwiak and Elysa Voshell investigate a related issue, society marginalizing people due to their
sexual orientation. Blanka Amezkua and Nova Atlas look at heroes and heroines in regard to the social construction of
gender identities. Amezkua appropriates the pages of Mexican adult comic books in order to re-contextualize the images of
women contained in their pages. She does this by substantially altering the drawings of women that depict them as objects
of the male gaze, transforming them from victim to heroines with real power. Atlas explores the female experience in western
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culture, past and present, demonstrating how language and images reinforce gender roles and cultural expectations. She
does this by utilizing vintage pictures of male movie stars juxtaposed with Hollywood pin-up girls, contrasting the numerous
complementary terms for men with accompanying negative terms for sexually-active women. Alicia Bailey explores gender
through the legend of the Mandrake plant, its roots believed to be in the form of the human body, sometimes male and
sometimes female. In ancient times it was believed to have magical powers, and it was often used in love potions. Some
believed that the fruits of the plant, called love apples, increased fertility.
Land and topography inform the work of many of the artists in this exhibition. Leah Oates presents close-up images of
Vermont land and vegetation as examples of her desire to respond to what she perceives as overlooked spaces. Amy
Pirkle’s book is a first-person account of a tubing trip that she made one recent summer with her father down the Broad River
in North Carolina. Renbeck makes artist books focused on nature, often inspired by the wetlands near her home in New York
State. Amy Borezo depicts aerial views of an oasis in Libya that was designed in the twentieth century using hexagons as
its underlying design format. Sarah Bryant created ab[landmass] through which she indicates topographical change by the
deepening chasm of the ever-enlarging holes in the book. O’Brien’s Wissahickon Creek is a book whose paper has been
washed in Wissahickon Creek in Philadelphia. De Almeida’s book is a re-reading and mapping of a well-known travel volume
from the sixteenth century, while Estep’s map documents the site of a small fjord-side hut built in Norway by the philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein. She includes a topographical map of the region’s trails. Melissa Jay Craig’s installation is comprised of
hand-made “mushroom books.” She sees these fungi as agents of change and is excited when discovering beautiful fungal
growth. Tobi Kahn’s paintings are small abstractions that suggest land, water, and sky.
Not surprisingly for a book exhibition, a number of the artists explore language. Libby Barrett creates a book with transparent
overlays adorned with type that allow the viewer to “hear” snippets of conversations and the resulting cacophony. Susan
Weinz enjoys finding odd words that have unique sounds or that evoke narratives that go beyond the literal. The visuals for
her book are based on collections of old wooden type and the letters become the subject of the work. Susan White creates
her installation from book pages that have been torn up and then reassembled to form long strips. Text, images, and writing
are visible, and she adds to them small, clear rubber bumpers through which words lifted from the pages of books appear
as if under water. The arrangement of these small word-filled dots sometimes forms phrases, at other times, sentences.
Some artists explore the tradition of image in relationship to text. Andrew Huot illustrates a humorous guide book for the
purchasing of pet dogs, constructing it through traditional processes and with handmade paper. Turner Hillaker prints
images in bright colors that complement a poem. Both his images and text have a sense of whimsy. Lauren Faulkenberry
explores themes of heartache, longing, obsession, and redemption. She blends mythological figures with contemporary text
to illustrate the persistence of archetypes and how certain human emotions and experiences remain the same throughout
time. Finally, Dennis Yuen’s more conceptual approach is sculptural in form and presents a visual image of a well-known
fairytale. He seeks to create a narrative through an object’s physical form and structure.
Three of the artists work in the pop-up medium—Colette Fu, Amee J. Pollack, and Laurie Spitz. Historically, pop-up and flap
books most often illustrated ideas related to science including astronomy, navigation, and anatomy. Fu uses it to explore
various topics from architecture to sociological and cultural issues, here producing an interpretation of the DCCA building.
Pollack and Spitz work together to create a pop-up that is a three-room carousel through which the viewer enters a world of
living history.
A somewhat different grouping links a number of artists together under the heading of the big idea. Big ideas include
spirituality, issues of power and control, and psychology and memory. Many of the artists showing in this exhibition overlap
categories and certainly could be discussed in the context of the big idea, but for the sake of this art historical ordering,
four artists in the show seem most especially focused in this direction. These are Tobi Kahn, Steven Daiber, Chika Ito, and
Anne Gilman. Kahn’s 28 abstract landscape paintings suggest transcendental and spiritual content, a subject that has
occupied the artist throughout his career. Daiber collaborated with fifteen Cuban artists to produce Poder or Power, the first
in a series of three books based on major themes that Cuban artists feel describe their social and political relationships.
Ito often creates installations by bringing together hundreds of hand-made books into one work. The piece in this show is
comprised of one hundred hand-bound accordion books with covers that depict the sky and clouds, resulting in an ethereal
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image that appears endless. Finally, Gilman explores the tension between what can be controlled and what is beyond our
control. She considers the idea of containment from a psychological perspective, addressing the roles of memory, doubt,
and displacement. This last group of works represents broad, powerful themes, explored in each case by artists bringing
together small, individual elements to make a larger work. While other themes can also be observed in the Contemporary
Book show, from the role of religion to architectonic structures, the taxonomy outlined in this essay provides a means of entry
into this vast exhibition.
J. Susan Isaacs, PhD
Professor and Coordinator of Art History
Curator of the Departmental Galleries
Department of Art + Design, Art History, Art Education, Towson University
Curator of Special Projects, Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts
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Artist Biographies and Works in Exhibition
Jody Alexander
Eleven Exposed Spines, No. 7-17, 2010
Discarded books, fabric, and thread
Variable sizes
Courtesy of the Artist
Photo by r.r. jones
Jody Alexander makes paper in an Eastern-style (Chinese/
Japanese) and uses her papers to bind books with exposed
sewing on the spine in a number of historical and modern binding
styles. She combines these books with found objects, wooden
boxes and drawers, metal, bones, etc. to create sculptural works.
Her pieces celebrate collecting, storytelling, and odd characters.
She also likes to rescue books in distress and give them new
life as rebound books, scrolls, and sculptural pieces. The work
in this exhibition is a sculpture created out of books in which
the exposed spines form the central idea and provide a visual
link between forms. The artist suggests the ephemeral nature of
paper while simultaneously alluding to the power and significance
that books hold in human cultural history.
Jody Alexander is an artist, bookbinder, papermaker, librarian,
and teacher who lives and works in Santa Cruz, California. She
received a BA in Art History from University of California, Los
Angeles, and an MLS from Simmons College in Boston, MA. Her
work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including
at The Center for Book Arts, NY; the San Francisco Center for
the Book, CA; the San Francisco Public Library, CA; and the San
Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, CA. Her work is included in
the library collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, NY; The
University of Utah; The University of Washington; The University
of Oregon; and Oberlin College. Alexander teaches book arts at
University of California, Santa Cruz; Foothill College; and the San
Francisco Center for the Book, CA. She is represented by Donna
Seager Gallery in San Rafael, California.
Cristina de Almeida
Containing the Navigation, 2006
10” x 10”
Digital prints, French fold, hand bound
46 pages, edition of 5
Courtesy of the Artist
De Almeida’s experimental books explore visual language
through various printed media. This particular book is a rereading
and mapping of aspects of the 1578 publication of
the memoir History of the Voyage to the Land of Brazil by the
Huguenot Jean de Lery. This work is considered a milestone of
travel literature, simultaneously ethnographic study, adventure
story, and religious discourse. It is the single book that the
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss had in his pocket upon his
arrival in Rio de Janeiro. According to de Almeida, Brazil was for
Lery, “above all a rhetorical figure, the trope of a lost paradise
nostalgically, yet systematically, invoked to define his own
disenchantment with European civilization.” Each double spread
in de Almeida’s version corresponds to a specific chapter of the
original text, and the maps were developed using at least one of
four interpretive criteria: the physical, based on Lery’s detailed
descriptions of places and creatures; the linguistic, based on the
discursive patterns found in his prose; the sequential, based on
the temporal dimension of the plot; and the referential, based on
the relationship between the author and his subject.
Cristina de Almeida was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,
where she earned a BFA in Industrial Design from the University
of the State of Rio de Janeiro. She later earned an MFA in Visual
Design from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. She is
currently a professor of graphic design at Western Washington
University. Her work has been shown in many national and
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international exhibitions including those at the Tuggeranong
Art Centre, Greenway, Australia; the Minnesota Center for
Book Arts, Minneapolis, MN; the Wexford Art Centre, Wexford,
Ireland; the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, Brandon,
Canada; BookWorks Gallery, Asheville, NC; Purdue University;
The University of California, San Diego, CA; and Idaho State
University, among many others.
Blanka Amezkua
Hera, 2010
5” x 5.5” (10” x 10” framed)
Intervened recycled comic book, acetone, nail markings, and nail
polish
Courtesy of the Artist
Popular and traditional Mexican culture, primarily through
the appropriation of female imagery from Mexican recycled
adult comic books, informs Amezkua’s body of work. She is
particularly interested in the comic’s reductive representation
of women’s bodies and identities. She re-contextualizes these
images by modifying their initial intention through the use of such
things as identified domestic techniques like embroidery and
crochet, or, in the case of the works in this exhibition, by using
invasive techniques and materials on the comic book pages
themselves to isolate the images and separate them from their
original context. Amezkua explores and reveals the codes and
language of Mexican pop culture, purposefully creating intensely
disembodied figures and a cacophony of dialogue. This work
celebrates the vernacular language and slang of pulp fiction
and popular culture prevalent in Mexico as well as demolishes
the sexist clichés and stereotypes in a transgressive act of
reclamation. Hera was the ancient Greek queen of all the deities;
the artist turns a pornographic image of a woman into a powerful
goddess and heroine. Astarte is the Greek name for a Goddess
found throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. She was the
goddess of sexuality, fertility, and war.
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Blanka Amezkua
Astarte, 2010
5 x 5.5” (10” x 10” framed)
Intervened recycled comic book, acetone, nail markings and nail
polish.
Courtesy of the Artist
Blanka Amezkua trained originally as a painter, studied in
Florence, Italy, and received a BFA from California State
University, Fresno. In 2007, with the help of artist friends, the
Bronx Council on the Arts, and the local Bronx community,
Amezkua began an artist-run project in her bedroom called
the Bronx Blue Bedroom Project. She has received grants
from The Department of Cultural Affairs Greater New York Arts
Development Fund, the Bronx Council on the Arts, and The
Mexican Cultural Institute in New York. Amezkua has shown
her work and projects at MoMA-P.S.1; Exit Art; The Bronx
Museum of the Arts; El Museo del Barrio; Taller Boricua; and
Queens Museum of Art, NY; MACLA, San Jose, CA; and Towson
University, in MD, among others. She recently began 3///3 ...three
walls on wednesdays... an open invitation for artists from around
the world to exhibit their work on three mobile walls that she
places in public spaces throughout the city of Athens. Her work
and projects have been discussed in the pages of The New York
Times, TimeOut, Daily News, Art21:blog, Queens Chronicle, as
well as other publications. She currently lives and works between
Athens, Greece, and New York City.

Nava Atlas
Sluts & Studs, 2008
Archival inkjet printed, flag binding with clothbound hard covers
14” x 30“ fully opened
(14” x 6.5” closed)
Edition of five
Courtesy of the Artist
Atlas states: “My most recent work explores the female
experience in western culture, past and present, examining
how language and image are used to reinforce gender roles
and cultural expectations.” Found material is incorporated into
these works, including pinup photos, advice columns, vintage
food and home advertisements, and romance comics. Many of
these items speak to the ingrained stereotypes of housewives,
1950s ‘cheesecake’ girls, victims of circumstance, or womenas-ultimate-consumers.
Atlas recontextualizes images in order
to expose assumptions about gender, employing computer
processes to manipulate historic material. Sluts & Studs is a
sculptural flag book that demonstrates how language is used
to reinforce double standards of sexual behavior. Atlas writes,
“Vintage images of male movie stars juxtaposed with pin-up
girls, labeled with common sexual terms, highlight the numerous
complimentary terms for men considered to have sexual prowess.
The accompanying terms for sexually active women, on the other
hand, are synonymous with prostitution and promiscuity; any
positive terms were as nonexistent historically as they are today.”
Nava Atlas is a multidisciplinary artist and author. Her work
focuses on artist’s books, readable objects, and installations.
She has a special interest in the segue of artist’s book to
conventionally published book, something she has done twice
in the past two years and hopes to continue. Her career has
followed parallel paths in both art and publishing. Atlas lives and
works in the Hudson Valley area of New York State. She holds a
BFA from the University of Michigan and an MA in Studio Art from
SUNY, New Paltz. Her work has been exhibited at the Wichita
Art Museum, Wichita, KS; Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, Silver
Spring, MD; the New York Public Library; Purdue University, and
the Brooklyn Museum, and many more. It is in the collections of
the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art and SUNY in New Paltz, NY;
the Washington Pavilion of Arts and Science, Sioux Falls, SD;
the Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, KS; the University of North
Carolina Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC; and a
host of library collections including those of Amherst College;
the Brooklyn Museum Library; Carnegie Mellon University; Duke
University; Indiana University; the National Museum of Women in
the Arts; Rhode Island School of Design; the Victoria and Albert
Museum; and Yale University to name just a few.
Alicia Bailey
Atropa Mandragora, 2003
box dimensions 10” x 4” x 3”
Glass book with box, pages etched, painted and fired glass,
coptic binding
edition of 5
Courtesy of the Artist
The text and images for this book are based on the legend of the
Mandrake plant. In the nightshade family, it has a long, fleshy,
often forked root that resembles the human body, and it also has
medicinal properties. The root can be very toxic, but was used in
the ancient world to relieve and soothe pain and to induce sleep.
Mandrake is also an emetic, causing the stomach to contract
and induce vomiting. Its human shape resulted in the superstition
that it shrieked when it was uprooted and that its scream brought
about death or insanity to those who heard it. In ancient times
it was used as a narcotic and an aphrodisiac, and it was also
believed to have certain magical powers. According to legend,
no doubt due to its root form, it was created out of the same clay
as that from which God created Adam. In folklore there are male
and female mandrakes. The female form has forked roots that
appear like a pair of human legs. The male, in contrast, has a
single root. In the Middle Ages, the female form was carved into
manikins that were used as amulets as it was believed that they
brought good luck and wealth. The mandrake root was often used
in love potions. Some believed that the fruits of the plant, called
love apples, increased fertility.
Alicia Bailey is a studio artist working across multiple disciplines.
She holds a BFA in Studio Arts, Photography, and Printmaking
from the University of Colorado in Boulder. For the past fourteen
years, Bailey has focused on book arts and assemblage: artists’
books, sculptural books, and limited-edition books. Her work
embraces a wide variety of methods and materials, with emphasis
on treating the book as interactive sculpture. Her work has
been featured in dozens of solo and group exhibits throughout
the world and is held in numerous public, private, and special
13

collections including the Blagg-Huey Library at Texas Women’s
University, Denton, TX; John Hay Library at Brown University,
Providence, RI; Sloan Library at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH;
Idaho State University Fine Art Department, Pocatello, ID; The
J. Willard Marriott Library Special Collections at the University
of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT; Clarence Ward Art Library at Oberlin
College, Oberlin, OH; and the Ringling College of Art and Design,
Sarasota, FL.
Libby Barrett
Cacophony, 2007
9.5” x 8” x 9”
Cover: inkjet prints over binders’ board; inkjet transparencies;
Canson paper; Masa endpapers
Courtesy of the Artist
The structure of this book is intended to give the feeling of an
enclosed space in which a number of conversations occur
simultaneously. The transparent overlays allow the viewer to
“hear” snippets of conversations and the resulting cacophony.
Barrett comments, “Many of my book ideas are inspired by
language—a pun, a turn of phrase, something that offers
possibilities for interpretation in an unusual way.”
Libby Barrett lives and works in Maine. She received her BFA
in graphic design from the Portland School of Art (now Maine
College of Art) and worked in that field for eighteen years.
Looking for a more tactile involvement in her art-making, Barrett
began painting and exhibiting floorcloths in 2002. In 2005, she
took a six-month educational leave from her job to pursue an
independent study in book making at the University of Worcester
in England. Barrett continues to work in both mediums and
exhibits her work nationally and internationally, including at the
Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA; the Minnesota Center for
Book Arts, Minneapolis, MN; the University of Northampton,
Northampton, England; and the University of West England,
Bristol, England. Her work is in the collections of the UCLA
Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library, Los Angeles, California;
and the Special Collections, Virginia Commonwealth University,
Richmond, Virginia.
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Siona Benjamin
The Scroll of Esther, 2009
11.5” by 180” (15 feet)
Gouache on parchment (animal skin or klaf)
Courtesy of Moriah Galleries, New York
Siona Benjamin is a painter originally from Bombay, India now
living in the United States. Her works reflect her background of
growing up Jewish in a predominantly Hindu and Muslim India. In
her paintings, she combines the imagery of her past with the role
she plays in America today, making a mosaic inspired by both
Indian miniature paintings and Jewish and Christian illuminated
manuscripts. The original Book of Esther is one of the books of
the Ketuvim (Writings) of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) and of
the Historical Books of the Old Testament. The Book of Esther
or the Megillah is the basis for the Jewish celebration of the
festival of Purim, which commemorates an important victory over
oppression. Benjamin was commissioned to paint the Megillah
using influences from Indian and Mughal miniature painting. She
combined these with iconography from her own paintings to make
a unique and personal fifteen-foot long Megillah.
Siona Benjamin holds two MFA degrees, one in theater set design
from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the other
in interdisciplinary fine arts (painting, drawing, metals) from
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. She has exhibited her
work extensively in the United States and Asia, and has received
artist fellowships from the New Jersey State Arts Council and the
Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper (RCIPP), Mason
Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Her work is in the
collections of numerous museums and has been featured in many
publications, among them The New York Times, Art and Antiques,
The Boston Globe, Art in America, and The Jewish Press. She
currently has a Fulbright Fellowship to India for her project titled:
Faces: Weaving Indian Jewish Narratives.

Doug Beube
Partition, 2006
10.5” x 28” x 3.75”
Altered books and wood
Courtesy of the Artist
In this work, Beube cuts the pages of two books, The High Walls
of Jerusalem by Roland Sanders and Arab and Jew; Wounded
Spirits in a Promised Land by David K. Shipler, into one-inch
strips and places them on their ends to reveal every printed page
of text as an abstract line resembling an EEG mapping. Each
book then rests in an ‘L’- shaped wooden armature that functions
as a bookend. Here the artist makes reference to the partition
wall constructed between the Israelis and Palestinians as well as
the story of the parting of the Red Sea by Moses and the collapse
of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers on 9/11 in New York City.
Doug Beube works in collage, sculpture, and photography. He
is curator of The Allan Chasanoff Booksworks Collection: The
Book Under Pressure and holds an MFA degree in photography
from the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY. In addition to
teaching in the photography department at Parsons, The New
School, he also teaches classes in mixed-media and artistmade
books and is regularly invited to lecture at art colleges
and universities. Beube exhibits his work both nationally and
internationally and his bookworks and photographs are in
numerous private and public collections including the Library
and Archives Canada (formerly the National Library of Canada),
Ottawa, ON; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; and the
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY.
Doug Beube
W’s Twisted Meanings, 2006
15” x 14” x 6”
Altered dictionary
Courtesy of the Artist
The artist cut away selective parts of an English dictionary,
creating the shape of a “W,” whose further contortions become
symptomatic of confusing, obfuscating, and even convoluted
speech. Once detached from its place in a roster of lexical
entries and wrenched from its clean alphabetic geometry into
various pretzel-like shapes, this supposedly stable letter of the
alphabet symbolizes all the ways human vocabulary gets both
accidentally and deliberately bent out of shape. This work not
only makes reference to a letter in the alphabet and suggests
underlying meanings, but alludes to the at times fumbled phrases
of speech and grammatical slips of the 43rd president of the
United States, George W. Bush.
Doug Beube
Blast: If You See Something, Say Something, 2008
13” x 18” x 10”
altered book, wire, wax, canvas bag
Courtesy of the Artist
Beube comments, “Often while riding the subway the electronic
voice coming over the monitor warns, ‘If you see something,
say something.’ or ‘Backpacks will be inspected.’” In his work,
Blast: If You See Something, Say Something, the artist makes
reference to both of these cautionary announcements. Sixteen
altered books in the form of circular scrolls constructed from
an Encyclopedia Britannica are sealed with dark brown wax at the
top and bottom. These cylindrical forms suggest the pipe bombs
used in suicide vests. Black and red connective wires clamp onto
the metal hooks embedded in the top of each of the cylindrical
books. The connecting wires indicate a group of deadly bombs
constructed at home. However, Blast: If You See Something,
Say Something is antithetical to the proverbial bag of bombs or
suicide vest. Instead of using explosives, which destroy life when
the bombs detonate, the altered books, or tombs, metaphorically
discharge streams of knowledge that strike everyone in the
vicinity with either wisdom or propaganda. The artwork does not
actually explode, but it does appear dangerous.
15

Amy Borezo
#000000, 2010
6.5” x 7” closed, 6.5” x 112” when fully extended
Accordion fold and leporello binding, printed on Masa paper
Hand-set metal type, pressure printing, photopolymer plate, and
linoleum block printing
Edition of 5
Courtesy of the Artist
In this book, Borezo explores how humans use hexagons to order
space—both real and virtual. She depicts aerial views of an oasis
in Libya that was designed in the 20th century using hexagons
as its underlying design format. Game designers have also
used this same Al-Kurfrah Oasis to model virtual environments.
Overlapping color spectra and simplified hexagonal patterns
indicate the progression of this utopian oasis from its original
desert form (yellow/tan) to oasis (green/blue) to current oil field
(red/black) as agricultural irrigation practices continue to deplete
water in a large underground natural aquifer and oil production
expands. Hexadecimal numbers (a base-16 number system used
to define color on web pages) are employed throughout the book
to illustrate the concept of virtual space. The title of the book is
the hexadecimal representation of the color black. Because of the
accordion fold and leporello binding the book can be stretched
out to its full length, showing a rich color field in transition.
Amy Borezo received an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from
the Rhode Island School of Design. While there, she studied
Letterpress and the Art of the Book at Brown University with
Walter Feldman of Ziggurat Press. After graduating, she worked
for Master Bookbinder Daniel Kelm, focusing on the editioning of
highly-crafted artist’s books and boxes. Borezo opened Shelter
Bookworks in 2005, a full service bindery and letterpress studio.
Since then, she continues to create and exhibit her own artwork
nationally— including the John Cotton Dana Library at Rutgers
University, Oregon College of Arts and Crafts, and the Art Institute
of Houston. She also teaches a variety of book and print-related
courses, most recently at Dartmouth College.
16
Sarah Bryant
ab[landmass], 2009
8” x 4.5”
Laser and letterpress printing, hand-cut paper
Edition of 10
Courtesy of the Artist
Sarah Bryant indicates change with very simple typographic
elements, the letters ‘a’ and ‘b’, as well as by the deepening
chasm of the ever-enlarging holes in the book. The slow trajectory
of these holes and text is interrupted by a red spread, a linoleum
cut printed on graph paper. Bryant imagines this spread as the
“present,” the current moment in time. It is the only spread in
the book that prevents viewing layers of previous or upcoming
pages; the immediate position of the holes is indicated by an
inescapable red. Bryant is drawn to what she describes as the
simple visual language used to describe the complex systems
that sustain and surround us. She attempts to explore this
imagery by pairing it with text in unexpected ways, providing a
new appraisal of familiar systems of images and text. She works
with books because she believes this format allows for personal
interaction with the work that is not possible when viewing a
single surface. She states: “A book must be viewed spread by
spread, and consequently I am able to guide the viewer through
the piece in my own way, pacing his or her experience with folded
pages, layered imagery, and text. When choosing to work in
book form, an artist is making an inherent choice to make work
that is (at least in part) about the book form; about information,
its organization and interpretation, about language and its role
as a recording/reference system, about the way we encapsulate
information to present it in simplified form.”
Sarah Bryant is the proprietor of Big Jump Press in Aurora, NY.
She has shown her work across the United States at such venues
as Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY; The Everson
Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; The Center for Book Arts, New
York, NY; The International Printing Museum, Carson, CA; and the
Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia, Athens,
GA. Her work is included in the collections of Arizona State
University; Atelier Vis-à-Vis, Marseille, France; Carnegie Mellon
University; the Cleveland Institute of Art; Columbia University;
Dartmouth College; Harvard University; The New York Public
Library; Stanford University; The University of Chicago; Virginia
Commonwealth University; and Yale Arts Library to name just
a few. Bryant holds an MFA in Book Arts from the University of

Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL and a BA in Studio Art from Vassar
College, Poughkeepsie, NY.
Long-Bin Chen
Flying Angel 6, 2010
Carved books
82.5” x 13.75” x 9.75”
Courtesy of the Frederieke Taylor Gallery, NY
Long-Bin Chen is best known for using the cultural debris of
modern society such as old discarded books, newspapers,
phonebooks, and magazines as the medium for his sculptures.
Although a highly trained artist, he is a self-taught carver,
which he accomplishes using chainsaws, drills, band saws,
sanders, and scissors, along with other carpenter’s tools. He
first became interested in paper culture as a viable material for
art – phonebooks, magazines, and computer paper— when PC’s
grew popular in the early 1990s. The artist sees the advent of the
personal computer as changing the entire nature of information
documentation—a role books used to play. By creating important
sculpture with paper, Long-Bin Chen provides renewed value for
the paper. He scours the streets of Manhattan for the discarded
refuse of contemporary society such as rejected reams of paper
and discarded telephone books. The artist obtains his material
from university libraries and bookstores, publishing companies,
archaeological museums, and telephone companies. Many
of Chen’s works refer to historical types of sculptures in wood
and stone. Chen is a Buddhist, and the Buddha sculptures that
he creates contain the names of people the Buddha will look
after. He sees his flying angels as quite similar to his Buddha
sculptures.
Long-Bin Chen received a BFA from the Fine Arts Department
at Tung-Hai University in Taiwan and an MFA from the School of
Visual Arts in New York. Chen, who has won prizes in Europe,
Taipei, and Japan, has exhibited extensively at international
galleries and museums, including MassMoca, North Adams,
MA; the Museum of Art and Design, NY, NY; the Memorial Art
Museum, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY; Columbia
University, NY, NY; Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA; CODA
Museum, Apeldoorn, Holland; and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum,
Taipei, Taiwan. His work is found in numerous international public
and private collections. He has been awarded artist fellowship
grants from National Endowment for the Arts in Taiwan, the Joan
Mitchell Foundation in New York, and the Freeman Foundation in
Delaware. He is represented by the Frederieke Taylor Gallery in
NYC.
Melissa Jay Craig
(S)Edition, 2007-2009
single copy; edition of 99
variable to the site
approx 18” x 15” x 16”
cast and hand-shaped abaca with cotton rag
Courtesy of the Artist
Melissa Jay Craig writes:
Some nonlinear thoughts contributing to (S)Edition:
Why was the mushroom invited to the party?
Because he was such a fun-gi. (thanks and a toast of Lake Erie
water to Mira Bartok)
Edition: A particular form or version of a published book.
Sedition: Conduct inciting people to rebel against the authority of
a state.
17

Clive Phillpot, once in charge of book acquisitions at MOMA,
stated that artists’ books were not artists’ books unless they were
part of an edition of 100. His opinions are still embraced by
many, particularly in academic environs.
A few activities that have been defined as sedition by the United
States government: “secret machinations” (Alien and Sedition
Act, 1789); “teaching, suggesting, defending or advocating any
criticism of the government,” including to “utter, print, write or
publish” such ideas (Espionage Act, 1917). More recently, there
was “domestic terrorism,” which could easily be interpreted to
include environmental and anti-globalization activism (The Patriot
Act, 2001). While sedition can consist of overt action, it can also
be furtive, undermining from within.
Some people have uneasy, squeamish thoughts when they look
at fungus: it’s something surreptitious, uncontrollable; it lives
hidden underground in familiar locales, ready to spring to life
unexpectedly, and it often manifests itself as part of the demise of
another organism.
Fungus is an agent of change. I’m fascinated with its myriad
forms and colors, and I love to go in search of it. I can become
more excited by discovering a beautiful fungal growth than by
perusing artwork ‘discovered’ for us by curators in contemporary
museums. When I was a child, the first time I had the intriguing
feeling that the planet carried messages (texts, if you will) for
those who were curious enough to look, was when I came upon
a group of Amanita Muscaria, huddled together in a dark, secret
space under tall pines.
Amanita Muscaria, also known as Fly Agaric, is a fungus that
can be found almost worldwide. It is distinctive, clownish in
appearance, the ‘toadstool’ of familiar fairy tale illustrations (a
literary fungus, said Marcia Peck). Its image is so pervasive,
many people don’t realize that it exists in nature, is not a fictitious
creation. Amanita Muscaria is psychoactive, and is thought
by many to be the source of the ancient shamanistic drug of
knowledge, Soma. It is still in use as a ritual sacrament in certain
Siberian tribes, and its use has been mythically linked to many
ancient religions, including Christianity. Most shamanistic spiritual
beliefs embody what would today be called an environmentalist’s
viewpoint; they are also mystical, embrace and honor intuitive
acumen, the polar opposite of rigid, academic intellectualism.
As I worked on the first 27 copies of (S)Edition for a month at
the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois, the area was
inundated by continuous, copious thunderstorms, a manifestation
of global environmental change. A huge, amazing variety of fungi
appeared as a result.
Amanita Muscaria was not among them.
Melissa Jay Craig’s handmade paper book works, sculptures,
and installation works are exhibited internationally. Craig holds
both MFA and BFA degrees from the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago. She is also a curator, writer, and an award-winning
professor. Affiliated with the Chicago Center for Book and Paper
Arts at Columbia College, Chicago, from its beginning in 1994
until May, 2009, she taught in the Interdisciplinary Book and
Paper Arts MFA program there for thirteen years, eight as full-time
Artist-In-Residence. She continues to give lectures, workshops,
and classes at schools and arts centers throughout the U.S. Craig
has been awarded numerous grants and residencies, including
those at The Ragdale Foundation, recent full fellowships at the
Mary Anderson Center, the Vermont Studio Center, Catwalk,
18
Jentel and the Artists’ Enclave at I-Park. In 2009, she received the
National Endowment for the Arts studio grant and residency in
papermaking at the Women’s Studio Workshop.
Steven Daiber in collaboration with 15 Cuban
printmakers: Oscar Osmeivy Ortega, Eduardo
Hernández Santos, Orlando Montalbán
Rodríguez, Angelmaidelín Calzadilla Fernández,
Jesús Reyes Romeu (Chucho), Hanoi Pérez
Cordero, Jannette Brossard Duharte, Darexis
Valle Rodriguez, Isolina Limonta Rodríguez,
Luis Lamothe Duribe, Alejandro Sainz Ramos,
Dania Fleites Díaz, Aliosky García Sosa,
Norberto Marrero Pírez, Yamilys Brito Jorge.
Poder: Power, 2010
Lithography, silkscreen, woodcut, and etching on paper
Edition of 25 with 3 proof copies and 16 artist copies
10” x 10” x 197”
Courtesy of the Artist
Since 2001, Steven Daiber has traveled to Cuba six times. While
there, he observed the Cuban people, caught in the political
struggle between Cuba and United States, using humor and
creative ingenuity to survive and prosper. In Havana, he had
the opportunity to work with several print shops and many
different Cuban artists. Poder is the first in a series of three books
based on themes Cuban artists feel describe their social and
political relationships. These ideas developed during a number
of meetings and conversations in 2007 between Steve Daiber
and the artists. The second book Imtimidad: Privacy begins
fabrication in February 2011 and the third book Esperando:
Waiting in 2012.
Power rules. We are born and are powerful because in our
relationships and connections, communication and contacts, we
exercise that special force/energy (power) with which all of us
without exception come into this world. Force is physical, power
is intellectual.

By making art and putting together this book we have chosen our
way to relate to power. All prints include and illustrate different
aspects of the relationships of power in its various dimensions:
the power of the mind, will power, financial, military, economic
power, the power of authority, social power, physical or mystical...
After all, power is a natural condition.” —Yamilys Brito Jorge
Steven Daiber trained in drawing and painting, received an MFA
from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from the University of
Delaware. Daiber has been making books for fifteen years and
owns the Red Trillium Press in Florence, Massachusetts. Daiber
describes himself as the son of two biologists and a perpetual
student of nature. He connects his interest in nature to the time
he spent on the Delaware seashore collecting specimens and
assisting with his father’s research. He says that he still collects,
dissects, and draws the animal and plant life around him. His
work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the
Ibero-Amerikanisches Institute Library, Germany; Stanford
University; Smith College; Yale University; the Getty Museum;
Princeton University; the University of Washington, Seattle; Vassar
College; Swarthmore College; the Cuban Heritage Collection,
University of Miami; the University of California, Santa Barbara,
Irvine, and San Diego; the Phoenix Art Museum; Columbia
College; the British Library; the Free Library of Philadelphia; the
University of Southern California; the Cerritos Public Library;
the Boston Public Library; The Banff Centre Library; Cambridge
University Library, UK; the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor;
Lafayette College; Northwestern University; Michigan State
University; the University of Delaware; Texas Tech; the University
of Minnesota; and Williams College.
Jill Dalton and Crystal Cawley
Catalog, 2010
Collaborative Artists’ Book
Found and fabricated images, letterpress, embroidery, transfer
printing, printmaking, collage, and drawing
9” x 6” x 4” (closed); 9” x 12” (open)
Courtesy of the Artists
Catalog is the first of a series of collaborative projects by artists
Jill Dalton and Crystal Cawley. Catalog combines found and
fabricated images, letterpress, embroidery, transfer printing,
printmaking, collage, and drawing. Dalton made prints of
decrepit hoop skirts (you can see the loops and hardware in the
embossed and printed backgrounds of the pages), and Cawley
tore up the prints to make sets of pages. The artists traded pages
back and forth several times, adding to each other’s ideas and
images. Among their many sources and inspirations are Dalton’s
department store catalogs from the late 19th century, full of
lovely engravings of clothing and accessories, and a copy of an
old library book, The History of Underclothes, with its unsettling
pictures of stained antique undergarments. Other information
came from Cawley’s 1944 Sears catalog (big gals in formidable
girdles and brassieres), and discarded sewing patterns. When
the pages were finished, Cawley bound the book.
Crystal Cawley makes sculpture, artists’ books, and works on
paper. Her work reflects her interests in reading, sewing, creative
re-use of materials, paper, and printing. She has exhibited her
work throughout the United States and in England, most recently
at SPACE gallery in Portland, Maine, and in Secrets, an exhibition
of prints made in an exchange by seven US and seven UK
artists, at the F Block Gallery in Bristol, England. Her work is in
many public collections, including the Bowdoin College Library;
the Portland Museum of Art; the Rhode Island School of Design
Library; and the Library of Congress. Cawley has received a
number of grants, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant
and several Good Idea Grants from the Maine Arts Commission.
She holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill, and a BFA from the Virginia Commonwealth University.
Jill Dalton is a sculptor and jewelry maker. She uses metal, glass,
and found objects in her work to explore meaning, history, and
humor. She earned her BFA in Sculpture from the Maine College
of Art and attended the Maryland Institute College of Art. She
and her husband, glassblower Ernest Paterno, co-own Filament
Gallery in Portland, Maine. Dalton’s work has been exhibited
at DUMBO Arts Center in Brooklyn, NY; the Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, OH; the Fuller Museum in
Brockton, MA; and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in
Rockland, ME.
19

Brian Dettmer
Standard American, 2008
Altered set of vintage encyclopedias
9.25” x 26” x 9.5”
Courtesy of the Artist and Kinz + Tillou Fine Art, NY
Brian Dettmer is fascinated by the mediums used to carry
communication and creative expression. His current
concentration is on altering vintage books such as dictionaries
and encyclopedias into sculptural works of art. He considers
old books, records, tapes, maps, and other media as possible
subjects and mediums for his art, saying, “The age of information
in physical form is waning. As intangible routes thrive with quicker
fluidity, material and history are being lost, slipping and eroding
into the ether. Newer media swiftly flips forms, unrestricted by
the weight of material and the responsibility of history.” Dettmer
chooses to alter these preexisting objects, thus shifting their
meaning and providing new and unexpected roles for them. He
comments, “Through meticulous excavation or concise alteration I
edit or dissect a communicative object or system such as books,
maps, tapes, and other media. The medium’s role expands.
Its content becomes re-contextualized and new meanings or
interpretations emerge.” He can begin with an existing book
whose edges he seals. This creates what he describes as “an
enclosed vessel full of unearthed potential.” He then cuts into
the surface of the book and dissects through it from the front.
He utilizes knives, tweezers, and other surgical tools to carve
one page at a time, exposing each page while cutting around
ideas and images that are of interest to him. He does not relocate
anything inside the book. He reveals images and ideas, exposing
them to the viewer.
Brian Dettmer, originally from Chicago, currently lives and works
in Atlanta, GA. He holds a BA in Art and Design / Art History
from Columbia College, Chicago, IL. Dettmer has shown his
work around the world and it has been exhibited in museums,
universities, and art centers throughout the U.S. and Europe
including: the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Centro
del Carmen, Valencia, Spain; Texas State University, San Marcos,
TX; Salt Lake Art Center, Salt Lake City, UT; Brown University,
Providence, RI; Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, WA; the Kohler
Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; Hunterdon Museum, Clinton, NJ;
Hunter College, New York, NY; and the Hyde Park Art Center,
Chicago, IL. His work has been reviewed in the pages of Modern
Painters Magazine; The Village Voice; The New York Times;
Harper’s; Time Out; Chicago Tribune; Toronto Star; and The San
Francisco Bay Guardian. He is currently represented by Kinz
+ Tillou Fine Art in New York, Packer Schopf in Chicago, MiTO
Gallery in Barcelona, Toomey Tourell in San Francisco, and
Saltworks in Atlanta.
20
Jan Estep
Searching for Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lake Eidsvatnet, Skjolden,
Sogn, Norway, 2007
Illustrated folded sheet map, four-color offset print
32” x 24” (unfolded), 3” x 8” (folded)
Courtesy of the Artist
Estep is concerned with the ways humans connect to social and
natural environments through images and words. Recently, she
has become attracted to the printed map-form as a means to
combine images and text and also as a method to represent the
natural landscape in multi-layered, complex ways. Each printed,
folded sheet map explores the local topography, found histories,
and contemporary land uses integral to a specific site and
presents the idea of a map as a key to moving through physical
and conceptual landscapes simultaneously. Searching for Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Lake Eidsvatnet, Skjolden, Sogn, Norway (2007)
documents the site of a small fjord-side hut the philosopher
Wittgenstein built in Norway, where he would go periodically
throughout his lifetime to write. It includes a topographical trail
map to the site (not formerly documented), historical information
about the philosopher’s relationship to Norway, additional
comparative hand-drawn maps to and photographs of the site,
and a long essay about Estep’s trip in search of the hut. She
visited the site while in residence at the Wittgenstein Archives at
the University of Bergen (WAB), Norway.
Jan Estep has an expanded creative practice that comprises
critical and creative writing and a range of visual media including
sculpture, photography, video, and independent publishing.
Trained as a philosopher – PhD, Washington University, St.
Louis– and an artist – MFA, University of Illinois, Chicago–Estep
is originally from West Virginia and was based for many years
in Chicago. The artist moved to Minneapolis in 2002, where she
is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the
Department of Art at the University of Minnesota. Estep has had
solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Art
in General, New York; Brooks Barrow Gallery, Milwaukee; and
Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis; and her work has been included
in numerous national and international group shows. Since 1998,
Estep has written and published over 90 essays, interviews, art
and book reviews about contemporary visual art. Her critical

writing has appeared in the magazines Bomb, Afterall, Frieze,
Modern Painters, InterReview, Rain Taxi, and New Art Examiner,
and in exhibition catalogues. From 1997-2002, she was an editor
of New Art Examiner, serving as senior editor from 2000-2002.
Her artist books and publications are available at Printed Matter,
New York. Her artist publications are also part of Kiosk: Modes
of Multiplication, an archive of independent publishing housed
at the Kunstibibliothek Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Germany.
Estep has been awarded a McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, a
Jerome Foundation NY Artist Residency, a Jerome Foundation
Travel and Research Grant, and a research commission from
Breaking Ground, Ireland. In 2008-2009 Estep was the inaugural
arts practitioner/writer fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center,
a residential fellowship co-sponsored by Stanford Institute for
Creativity and the Arts (SiCa). In December 2009, she was
awarded an Arts Writers Grant for short form writing from the
Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation.
Ula Einstein
Hard To Tell, 2006
Accordion style book
Drawing with fire on acid free paper
7” x 28.5”
Courtesy of the Artist
Photo by Mariestella Colon
Ula Einstein engages an expanded practice employing a range
of media and tools including gauze, tarlatan, Tyvek, paper,
thread, fire, wire, blade cuts, broken eggshells, balloons, human
hair, masking tape, and papier-mâché. This particular piece is
created with fire, a tool she often uses to create drawings through
burns and scorches. In working with fire, a universal element,
she investigates issues of control and uncertainty, making marks
which cannot be taken back. For Einstein, burning is a ritual
that has a palpable immediacy. The work appears delicate
and ephemeral, yet clearly shows the burn marks, alluding to
some sort of violence. It often displays dualities such as open/
closed, conceal/reveal, fragile/substantial, rupture/repair, and
invention/reinvention. The imagery is abstracted from a wide
array of sources as diverse as molecular structure, cells, texts,
pages, tracks, blueprints, spheres, hieroglyphics, webs, fossils,
impressions, sound, gestures, synthetic design, and decay.
Ula Einstein is a Swiss-born inter-disciplinary artist living and
working in New York City. She is best known for stretching
materials and tools beyond their original purpose. Her practice—
exploring intrinsic links between destruction and creation—
includes sculpture, painting, objects, ongoing installation,
and photography. Her work has been exhibited nationally
and internationally in museums, galleries and non-profit spaces,
including the Heidi Cho Gallery and the New York Center for
Architecture, both in NYC; Maloney Art Gallery, College of St.
Elizabeth, Morristown, NJ; Gallery of Contemporary Art, Sacred
Heart University, Fairfield CT; Griffin Museum of Photography,
Winchester, MA; the London Biennale; the Oakland Museum of
CA, Oakland, CA; the Tryon Center for the Arts, Charlotte, NC; the
McAllen International Art Museum, McAllen TX; the Museum
of Vancouver, BC; the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los
Angeles, CA; and the Zentralbibliothek, Zürich, Switzerland. In
September 2011, Einstein will have a solo exhibition at Galerie
d’art Adodart, Neuilly sur Seine, Paris, France. Einstein’s
work has been featured in numerous publications and online
magazines including The New York Times, the Village Voice,
and both the Easthampton and Southampton Press. She is a
featured artist in the film Artists in Conversation, directed and
produced by Jaanika Peerna and Susan English, based on the
exhibition Drawing Revealed, Garrison Art Center, Garrison, NY.
In 2007, she sang solo on the streets of NYC in German filmmaker
Dara Friedman’s collaborative Public Art Fund Project, Musical.
Einstein is the recipient of three individual NY Artists’ Fellowship
grants. Her fellowship residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute
allowed for her first collaborative work with the public. Her work is
in many private collections.
Lauren Faulkenberry
The Heart Wants What it Wants, 2010
Letterpress printed with woodcuts and photopolymer plates
18” x 24” fully opened
6” x 6” closed
Edition of 70
Courtesy of the Artist
Photo by Teresa Golson
Faulkenberry states: “Books are my way of preserving memory
and felt truths. The content invites readers to examine the
experiences that have made them who they are and consider
those things in their memory that they most want to preserve.
Many of my books revolve around themes of heartache, longing,
obsession, and redemption. They examine how love shapes us,
how it can tear us apart and make us whole. Much of my work
blends mythological figures with contemporary text in a way that
illustrates the persistence of archetypes and shared experiences.
For me, this is another way of exploring patterns in behavior that
emerge over time and recording moments that make us who we
are.”
The Heart Wants What it Wants, based on the Greek Furies,
explores the obsession and longing that builds when one person
21

is “set aflame” by another. According to Faulkenberry, the mazelike
boustrophedon structure refers to the Greek term for “as the
ox ploughs,” and mirrors the twists and turns of the heart’s search
for what it most desires. Boustrophedon is a type of bi-directional
text seen in ancient manuscripts and inscriptions; every other line
of the writing is flipped or reversed, with reversed letters.
Lauren Faulkenberry, proprietor of Firebrand Press, is a book
artist and author. Her work centers on printmaking, handmade
books, and paper sculpture. Faulkenberry is currently finishing
her MFA in Book Arts at The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
She holds a BFA in Illustration from Washington University in
St. Louis and an MFA in Fiction from Georgia College & State
University. Her work has been in exhibition at Bookworks in
Asheville, NC; the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL; and
the Litebox Gallery, Birmingham, AL, among others. Her books
are included in the library collections of California Polytechnic
University, San Luis Obispo, CA; the University of California-Santa
Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA; Washington University, St. Louis,
MO; and Duke University, Durham, NC, among others.
Cui Fei
Tracing the OriginV_III, 2008
Photo-lithograph on papyrus
35.5” x 25”
Varied Edition of 25
Courtesy of the Artist
Photo by Jan Staller
In this series, Cui Fei utilizes Chinese characters to explore the
relationship between nature and culture. She states, “Nature has
22
long supplied art with subject matter and metaphors for states of
being. With the development of technology, however, nature has
lost its preeminence in human experience and it has often been
replaced by manufactured objects and synthesized sensations.
Chinese characters originated from nature as ideograms. Parallel
with the development and evolution of culture, the characters are
simplified, abstracted, and separated from their original context,
and their origins from nature are no longer recognizable. The
connection of nature and culture has faded...In my work, I try to
emphasize the importance of nature in our culture and lives. The
found grape tendrils resemble Chinese characters which are
written in the grass style; in my work these elements are meant to
represent nature. The images of the tendrils, realized in different
art-making methods, transform the three-dimensional objects
into two-dimensional images of different colors and scales. Their
origin, the tendrils, may no longer be recognized in the finished
artwork. The different ways of art making symbolize the steps of
detaching from the origin—nature.” Cui carries out these ideas
in different media, such as painting, photographs, phototransfer,
and photo-lithography.
Cui Fei was born in Jinan, China, and received a BFA degree
from the China Academy of Fine Arts. She holds an MFA in
painting from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Cui’s work has
been exhibited nationally and internationally at such venues as
the Museum of Chinese in America, NY; the Queens Museum
of Art, Queens, NY; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum,
Ridgefield, CT; the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE;
the Warehouse Gallery, Syracuse University; the Art Complex
Museum, Duxbury, MA; the New Britain Museum of American
Art, New Britain, CT; the Chelsea Art Museum, NY; the Wave Hill
and the Bronx Museum of Arts, Bronx, NY; the Kunstgewerbe
Museum, Dresden, Germany; and the Jeju Museum of Art, Jeju,
Korea. She is a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant,
the Artist’s Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the
Excellence in Arts Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts. Her
work is included in the permanent collections of the Princeton
University Art Museum and the Tang Center for East Asian Art at
Princeton University.
Colette Fu
DCCA Pop-Up Book, 2010
Ultrachrome ink prints mounted onto cardstock, bound in iris cloth
13” x 38” x 4.5” (open)
Edition of one
For this exhibition, the DCCA invited Colette Fu to create a popup
book on the theme of its building. Fu writes, “For the past
seven years I have been making one-of-a-kind artist’s books that
combine my photography with paper engineering. Pop-up and
flap books originally illustrated ideas about astronomy, fortune

telling, navigation, anatomy of the body, and other scientific
principles. This history prompted me to construct my own books
reflecting ideas on how our selves relate to society today. Initially,
the challenge of creating pop-up books, having to construct
something that physically would fold down into a confined space,
helped limit what I could create. Experience and experimentation
have forced me to think otherwise; as I problem solve, the paper
takes over and leads beyond what I thought was physically
possible. My pop-ups are a way for me to speak and inform;
the real and implied motion in the pop-ups link to a temporal
element, and an inevitable corollary is to awe and unsettle. With
pop-up books I want to eliminate the boundaries between book,
installation, photography, craft, and sculpture.”
Colette Fu lives in Philadelphia where she works as a paper
engineering consultant for stop animation commercials, as a
freelance artist, and teaches pop-up courses and community
workshops at various art centers and institutions. She has
shown her work at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia; the Barbara
Walters Gallery at Sarah Lawrence College; Taubman Museum,
Roanoke, VA; Center for Book Arts, NY; and The Icebox and
the Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia, PA. She holds an MFA
from the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, and
a BFA from the Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond,
VA as well as a BA in French Language and Literature from the
University of Virginia, Charlotte. In 2008, she received a Fulbright
Fellowship to photograph the twenty-five ethnic minorities of her
mother’s hometown of Yunnan Province, China. She creates most
of her work at artist residencies such as the Provincetown Fine
Arts Work Center, Instituto Sacatar, Bemis Center, Visual Studies
Workshop, the Millay Colony, and the Alden B. Dow Center
for Creativity. Fu has received awards from the Independence
Foundation, the Sovereign Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council
on the Arts, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Virginia
Commission for the Arts, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation,
En Foco, the Photographer’s Forum, Nikon, the Puffin Foundation,
and the Society for Photographic Education.
Anne Gilman
Debris, 2007
Pencil, ink, wax, paper, thread, wood
21” x 26” x 11”
Courtesy of the Artist
Gilman explores the recurring theme of the tension between what
can be controlled and what remains out of control. She likes to
explore the navigation of the opposing pulls faced in day-to-day
living, “how we communicate, what we choose to reveal, and how
we edit out parts of ourselves.”
Debris was originally made for an exhibition entitled un-Contained
Vessels at the Center for Book Arts in New York. Gilman states, “I
decided to consider the idea of containment from a psychological
perspective, taking stock of things I would like to be rid of:
certain memories, doubts, and sense of displacement, all of
which remain outside their containers, unable to be dispensed
with.” The artist sorts the “debris” into three categories of loose,
stacked, and crumpled writings:
1. things to keep hidden
2. doubts
3. random floaty things
Anne Gilman is a Brooklyn-based artist who creates large
installation drawings and artist book projects. Her work has
been exhibited in solo and group shows both nationally and
internationally, including the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts
Institute, Utica, NY; the Center for Book Arts, NY, NY; Barbara
Walters Gallery, Sarah Lawrence University, Bronxville, NY;
the Pelham Arts Center, Pelham, NY; Oberlin College, OH; the
Azerbaijan Museum, Baku, Azerbaijan; Galería Raúl Martinez at
the Instituto Cubano del Libro, Havana,Cuba; Lehman College
Art Gallery, Bronx, NY; and the Provincetown Art Association
and Museum, Provincetown, MA. Publications include Gilman’s
artist book, Bordes deshilachados/Frayed Edges, released by
Ediciones Vigia, in Matanzas, Cuba, and the zines Nishtugadacht,
Contra el mal de ojo, and Don’t Lose Heart. Her work is in many
collections including the Hess Collection, NY; The National
Museum of Women in the Arts, Special Collections, Washington,
DC; the New York Public Library, Special Collections; the Library
of Congress, Washington, DC; the Instituto de Artes Gráficas de
Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico; Michigan State University: Special
Collections, East Lansing, Michigan; the University of Colorado at
Boulder, Special Collections, Boulder, Colorado; the Ruth Hughes
Collection of Artists’ Books, the Azerbaijan Museum; the Chelsea
College of Art + Design, London, UK; the Brooklyn Museum,
Special Collections, Brooklyn, NY; the Colegio de Arquitectos del
Estado de Jalisco A.C., Guadalajara, Mexico, and the Bellevue
Hospital, NY. She will be an upcoming, featured artist at the
Center for Book Arts with her project The Jolly Balance. Her work
can currently be seen at Central Booking in D.U.M.B.O. and in the
November 2010 issue of Central Booking Magazine, the gallery’s
quarterly, where she is the subject an artist interview.
23

Turner Hilliker
Velvet Vacuums, 2010
Offset lithography printed on French’s Smart White Paper
8.25” x 33” x 5.75”
Edition of 150
Courtesy of the Artist
In his work, Hilliker explores the creation of a hybrid identity. He
states, “My outward appearance is quiet and apprehensive. I
have always sought to change that. I view my recent work like
the puppet of a ventriloquist. It acts and speaks in ways I cannot
do alone. I am reminded of Frankenstein’s monster, the creature
whose life was created from pieces of others. I study others. I
make note of what I desire from other personalities, because I am
jealous of what I don’t have. I see people who demand attention,
who can hold a crowd’s interest with their stories. This is the
version of myself I want to create.” Velvet Vacuums is a book
of nonsense, both verbal and visual. The drawings, the brightly
colored ink, and the text of the poem form a personality that,
according to the artist, is both reserved and assertive.
Turner Hilliker is an artist and designer currently residing in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Originally from Virginia, he received
his BFA in Graphic Design from James Madison University. He
is currently a student in the MFA Book Arts and Printmaking
Program at The University of the Arts. He has shown his work at
The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA and at the F-Block
Gallery, Bristol, England.
24
Andrew Huot
A Guide to Dogs, 2008
Printed letterpress with handset type, linoleum cuts,
and photopolymer plates on handmade MacGregor paper
6” x 4.25”
Edition of 45
Courtesy of the Artist
Huot asks, “How do you pick the right dog and what criteria do
you use for the decision?” A Guide to Dogs was made while the
artist and his wife were searching for a dog. He did not have
experience as a dog owner but his wife wanted his opinion, so he
wrote a guide, using what knowledge he gained from movies and
TV. Huot states that his process begins with observing life around
him; gathering details, making lists, drawing diagrams, and
maps. Upon first glance, the book appears as if it might be massproduced
with spiral binding and simply drawn images, but it is
in fact a limited edition work with handset type and linoleum cut
images. Linoleum prints are a form of relief printing in which the
background is cut away and the image that remains is inked and
printed. Huot has carefully constructed his book using traditional
processes and handmade paper. He states, “My goal is to make
well-crafted artist-books and prints that tell a story in a graphic
and oblique way. I work in traditional bookbinding structures and
use methods of reproduction such as woodblock and letterpress
printing for the tactile qualities they give to the final artwork. The
history and form of the book appeals to me and I find ways to
play with that history.”
Andrew Huot is a conservator at the Milner Library, Illinois State
University, Normal, IL and the proprietor of Tank Dive Press in
Normal, IL. Huot holds an MFA in Book Arts and Printmaking
from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, and a BS in Fine Art
from the Portland State University. He has also taken numerous
workshops on bookbinding and related topics. He has shown
his work in the United States and abroad including at the
Pendleton Center for the Arts Pendleton, OR; the Irvine Fine Arts
Center, Irvine, CA; the Solihull Gallery West Midlands, UK ; the
University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE ; Foundry Art Center, St.
Charles, MO; and the University of South Carolina, Columbia,
SC. His work is in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago,
Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection; the Illinois State University,
Milner Library Normal, IL; Mills College, Olin Library, Special
Collections Oakland, CA; Queens College Library, Special

Collections, Flushing, NY; The Free Library of Philadelphia, Print
and Pictures Department, Philadelphia, PA; The University of
the Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Topeka and Shawnee County Public
Library, Topeka, KS; UC Santa Barbara, Davidson Library, Special
Collections, Santa Barbara, CA ; UCLA Arts Library, Los Angeles,
CA; the Union College Schaffer Library, Special Collections,
Schenectady, NY; the University of Nevada – Reno Library,
Special Collections, Reno, NV; the University of Oregon Knight
Library Eugene, OR; the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia,
PA; and the University of Utah, Arts Library, Salt Lake City, UT. In
2009, Huot received the Grabhorn Fellowship from Arion Press,
San Francisco, CA.
Chika Ito
We Share the Same Sky, 2010
100 individual accordion books in installation
6” x 4.75” x .5” x 100 books
Silkscreen on paper, printed with rice paste and plant pigment
Collection of the Yuko Nii Foundation
Photo by Yuko Nii Foundation
Ito is an interdisciplinary artist who creates installations working
with paper, papermaking, printmaking, and bookmaking. Her
most recent works are installations utilizing collections of small,
handmade books created with pigments from plants and simple
traditional mediums. This particular work consists of one hundred
hand-bound accordion books. The covers are printed with
pigments from the red cabbage plant and rice starch and were
produced at the Kurtface Silkscreen Atelier in The Netherlands.
She has worked with non-toxic materials for many years and
prints with paste-based ink. Ito states, “With this work, I would like
to achieve creating massive space with numerous small books,
believing substantial beauty can be attained by simple repetition.”
Ito’s work is often ethereal in both image and structure. In this
example, the individual books come together to form an image of
the sky, replete with floating clouds. The artist chose to install the
work on the floor, changing the viewer’s perspective of the sky.
Chika Ito was born in Japan, but currently lives and works in
The Netherlands. She studied printmaking, bookmaking, and
papermaking in the United States, earning undergraduate
degrees in printmaking and studio art from the Southern Illinois
University, Carbondale, IL. She also studied at the Center for
Book Arts, the Lower East Side Printshop, and The Art Students
League, all in NYC. She has shown her work at the Williamsburg
Art and Historical Center, Brooklyn, NY; the Penn State Art
Gallery, Panang, Malaysia; the Tartu Art Center, Tartu, Estonia;
the International Print Center, New York City; Kurtface Gallery,
Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands; and GardenFRESH Gallery,
Chicago. Her work is part of a number of collections including the
Yuko Nii Foundation, Brooklyn, NY; the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Chicago, IL; the University of the West of England, Bristol; the
University of Colorado Special Collections; the Proyecto’ace Print
Collection, Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Zayed University, Dubai,
UAE.
Tobi Kahn
LUNA, 2010
28 individual acrylic paintings on handmade paper
Box: acrylic on wood
Each painting: 8.5” x 6”
Box: 6.625” x 11.25” x 8.25”
Courtesy of the Artist
This work includes 28 abstract landscape paintings that are
housed in a handmade box. It is the artist’s first book and it is
based on the lunar calendar, which is usually 28 days long.
The artist says, “What fascinated me [when making this book]
was that the moon is in the sky while the sun is still shining at
the end of the day and continues to be in the sky through the
evening and for a few hours when the sun comes up again. The
light that comes from the moon is a light that does not hurt the
eyes and one can look straight into it. It is a light that illuminates
but does not saturate. I wanted to do a book about the moon
since it is almost always there but works in a quiet way.” The
individual paintings are abstract landscape images that suggest
a transcendental and spiritual content. Kahn’s belief in art’s
spiritual capacity is often at odds with the contemporary art
world’s emphasis on irony and displacement. However, Kahn
remains committed to the pursuit of a particular vision, one that
emphasizes the redemptive possibilities of art.
Tobi Kahn is a painter and sculptor whose work has been shown
in over 40 solo and more than 60 museum and group shows since
he was selected as one of nine artists to be included in the 1985
Guggenheim Museum exhibition, New Horizons in American Art.
Works by Kahn are in major museum, corporate, and private
collections. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from
Hunter College and Pratt Institute respectively. In October, 2009,
25

“Tobi Kahn: Sacred Spaces for the 21st Century”, a solo traveling
exhibition of Kahn’s ceremonial and liturgical art, opened at
MOBIA in New York City. The book, Tobi Kahn, Sacred Spaces for
the 21st Century, edited by Ena Giurescu Heller and published by
the Museum of Biblical Art in New York in association with D Giles
Limited, London, accompanied the exhibition. Among the awards
that Kahn has received are the Outstanding Alumni Achievement
Award from Pratt Institute in 2000; the Cultural Achievement
Award for the Visual Arts from the National Foundation of Jewish
Culture in 2004; and an Honorary Doctorate from the Jewish
Theological Seminary in 2007 for his work as an artist and
educator. For the past twenty-eight years, he has taught fine
arts workshops at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He
also designed the art curriculum for several high schools in the
New York area and co-founded and facilitates the Artists’ Beit
Midrash at the Skirball Center of Temple Emanu-El. Kahn lectures
extensively at universities and public forums internationally on the
importance of visual language and art as healing.
Marie Kelzer
From Paper Book to e Book, 2010
Dos-à-dos binding, jewel case, cd, paste paper cover and
spine, Mohawk paper, Fabriano paper, gray board, hand-bound
and sewn with linen thread, text pages digitally designed and
inkjet printed
4.875” x 5.625” each
Courtesy of the Artist
This work is a grouping of three individual objects with separate
titles: The Paper Book 1999, The Electronic Book 2000, and The
eBook 2010. Here Kelzer addresses the shift from analogue
to digital technology, or from the bound book format that has
been around since the invention of the printing press, to today’s
shift to digital presentations. She writes, “Amazon claims it sells
more eBooks now than hardcover books. While many, including
myself, believe that books in the traditional style will be around
through eternity, less will be produced in paper format. But the
characteristics that make a traditional book easy to read and hold
are being carried over by the eReaders’ creators.” Kelzer’s paper
book is an essay, “Built-in Orderly Organized Knowledge,” which
is an adaption of an earlier version of an essay written by R. J.
Heathorn, originally published in Punch Magazine in 1962 under
26
the title, “B.O.O.K—A New Aid To Rapid Learning.” The Paper
Book 1999 is bound back-to-back with The Electronic Book 2000
to signify the transition from the hand-written or machine-printed
text to the electronic readable text in the age of the Internet. The
eBook 2010 represents the migration from paper books and
electronic books to the eBook and its recent appearance on the
market. Although there is no label on the “spine” of an eBook
reader, a label is attached here to match the look of The Paper
Book 1999 and The Electronic Book 2000.
Marie Kelzer states that her art comes from her love of making
paste papers, which originate from the ancient art of mixing
paints with paste to create designs on paper. She grew up on a
farm in Minnesota and, in 1980, moved to the San Francisco Bay
area where she worked for a small family bindery. It was there that
she developed her interest in bookbinding. She then trained as
bookbinder at the Capricornus School of Bookbinding in Berkeley,
CA, and worked as a conservation technician and bookbinder
for the University of California at Berkeley, eventually becoming
head of the Preservation Department for the San Francisco Public
Library from 1995—2004. Since 1988, she has operated her
own business, Paper Arts, and in 2004, she added Marie Kelzer
Designs. Kelzer hand paints paste papers and designs and
makes journals, notebooks, floor cloths, sketchbooks, and other
items, which she markets nationally and internationally. She has
shown her work in exhibitions around the United States and her
works are contained in many publications on artist books and
paper designs. Her handmade books, paste paper patterns, and
book bindings are in numerous private and public collections,
including that of Yale University and the Rhode Island School of
Design.
Carole P. Kunstadt
Old Testament, The Five Books of Moses, 2009
Tissue, gold leaf, paper; pages from The Old Testament dated
1904
8.5” x 11” x 4”
Courtesy of the Artist
Photo by Kevin Kunstadt
Kunstadt writes, “Each of the five books of Moses has been
cut down, stacked, and bound with strips of gampi tissue as
individual repositories. The resulting simplicity of the singular
blocks of paper and the tenuous quality of their containment
contrast sharply with the complexity of the stories recorded. The
text and illustrations remain hidden with no access to the actual

contents of the book. Yet the simple physical presence of these
varying shapes emphasizes their literal, historical, and spiritual
impact. The imprint on our consciousness, not the actual details
of the stories, is therefore emphasized. The now blunt-cut edges
of the sliced and recombined chapters often retain their gold
edging and fragments of embellishments—a hint of the volume’s
previously treasured and favored status. As a collective grouping,
the five differing shapes offer a progression and a presentation
wherein they are interrelated yet are also self-contained. The
interplay of depth, volume, surface, and structure engage and
intrigue while being non-specific. They stand as an inculcation of
their transformation.”
Carole P. Kunstadt
Sacred Poem LXII, 2010
Tissue, paper; pages form Parish Psalmody dated 1849
4.5” x 10” x 1.5”
Courtesy of the Artist
Photo by Kevin Kunstadt
Kundstadt writes, “The primary element used in this series is
paper: the pages are taken from a Parish Psalmody dated 1849.
These pages of psalms are manipulated and recombined,
resulting in a presentation that evokes an ecumenical offering—
poems of praise and gratitude. The disintegrating pages suggest
the temporal quality of our lives and the vulnerability of memory
and history. Visually, there is a consistent and measured cadence
to a page of psalms, which is echoed in the often repetitive
weaving or restructuring of the paper. Pages are cut in strips
and woven, creating an altered dense surface. Multiple pages
are stitched together and the shredded edges form new textural
references. The layering of translucent tissue over the paper
softens the effect of age and context, evoking the ephemeral
while adding a veil of alternative possibilities. Although fragile,
the paper is surprisingly resilient. In a number of pieces the use
of stitching emphasizes the repetition of the lines of text. The lines
of stitching are suggestive of the passage of time, alluding to
the age and the history of these pages. The continuing repetitive
action of sewing is similar to reciting, singing, and reading,
implying that through the repetition of a task or ritual one has the
possibility to transcend the mundane. The intended use as well
as the nature of a psalm as spiritual repository implies a tradition
of careful devotion and pious reverence. The physical text
evocatively and powerfully serves as a gateway to an experience
of the sacred and the realization of the latent power of the written
word. This process of interaction is played out visually in the
piece, mimicking the internal experience.”
Carole P. Kunstadt received her BFA from the Hartford Art
School in West Hartford, Connecticut, concentrating in twodimensional
studies, and went on to postgraduate studies at the
Akademie der Bildenen Künste in Munich, Germany. Her interest
in tapestry design and weaving led to an assistantship in the
tapestry studio of Helena Hernmarck. With Janet Kennedy, she
founded Kennedy/Kunstadt Tapestries in 1981. The artist has
participated in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United
States, including at the Museum of Art and Design, NYC; Hopper
House Art Center, Nyack, NY; Leftbank Gallery, Salt Lake City,
UT; Barbara Walters Gallery, Sarah Lawrence College; and the
Octagon Center for the Arts, Ames, IA. Her works are found in
numerous private collections and in the Montclair State University
Collection, Montclair, New Jersey.
Louise Levergneux
City Shields, DC, Vol US 1: No 1, 2006
Clear plastic jewel case, die-cut photographs, Aspen Dual Sided
Matte paper,
Generations G-Chrome Lustre paper
Edition of 25
Courtesy of the Artist
City Shields is a series of books created by Levergneux that
serve as photographic documentation of the artist’s walks
through the urban streets of various Canadian and American
cities as well as a walk through Scotland. By concentrating on
manhole covers, Levergneux presents a witty interpretation of a
city walk, in this case, Washington,D.C. Levergneux comments,
“This work collects souvenirs of travelled cities around the world
using manhole covers to depict exploration of geographical
locations along my life journey.” Levergneux’s artistic practice
is the production and distribution of artists’ books. In her work,
she employs digital photography as a device to express her
interest in the concepts of memory, identity, and her environment.
Levergneux states, “New technologies have dramatically
influenced my creative process, it makes it easier for me to
create the final results of an idea. Through using a computer,
the capability of printing my own books from software generated
images gives me the control of colors, size and format without the
cost of a commercial printer.”
27

Louise Levergneux
A Look at City Shields, 2009
DVD
Courtesy of the Artist
A Look at City Shields is a video that illustrates the artist’s
book series entitled City Shields. The book that examines
Washington, D.C. is in this exhibition. Arizona is featured in the
video. The viewer sees a series of manhole covers accompanied
by sound effects that place the viewer in the context of the
industrial environment of the Arizona locale depicted in the
video. Also represented is the reverse side of the video cover
insert, which outlines a navigational tool that locates each
manhole cover with an address. With the help of this video the
reader simulates the artist’s walking journey.
French Canadian by birth, Louise Levergneux currently lives
and works in South Jordan, Utah. She earned her associate
degree in Beaux-arts at Algonquin College in Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada. After her degree, Levergneux taught drawing and figure
drawing in the French and English Visual Arts departments at
Algonquin College and at the Cité Collégiale. She has shown her
work in the National Gallery of Canada Library; The University
of Utah Special Collections Library; the Minnesota Center
for the Book Arts, Minneapolis, MN; and in various galleries,
libraries and book centers in the UK. Her work is contained in
numerous collections, including Amherst College, Amherst, MA;
Banff Centre, Paul D. Fleck Library and Archives, Banff, AB,
Canada; Bank Street Arts, Sheffield, UK; Bibliothèque et Archives
nationales du Québec, Montréal, QC, Canada; Bilkent University,
Library, Ankara, Turkey; Bowdoin College, George J Mitchell
Department of Special Collections & Archives, Brunswick, MA;
Brooklyn Museum, Art Library, Special Collections, Brooklyn,
NY; Bucknell University, Bertrand Library, Lewisburg, PA;
California State University, John F Kennedy Memorial Library, Los
Angeles, CA; Clarke Art Institute, Williamstown, MA; Cleveland
Public Library, Cleveland, OH; Free Library of Philadelphia,
Print & Picture Collection, Philadelphia, PA; Indiana University,
Fine Arts Library, Bloomington, IN; Museum of Modern Art,
Art Library, New York, NY; National Gallery of Canada, Library,
Ottawa, ON, Canada; National Museum of Women in the Arts,
Book Arts Library, Washington, DC; New York Public Library,
New York, NY; Temple University Libraries, Special Collections
Department, Philadelphia, PA; University of California at
Berkeley, Environmental Design Library, Berkeley, CA; University
of California at Los Angeles, William Andrews Clark Memorial
Library; and the University of California at Santa Cruz Library.
28
Susan Maguire
Random Walk, 2010
Carousel-style book
Gel medium transfer on black Arches paper, board, black book
cloth, black cording
Size variable (approximately 6” x 30” x 30”)
Courtesy of the Artist
Maguire works with board, paper, box, and book forms to house
imagery created through the use of digital photography, drawing,
assemblage, painting, scanning, and photocopying. She creates
both focused and blurred light compositions, experimenting with
objects, resulting in images with spatial illusions. Negative spaces
coalesce with peculiar nuances of light, conjuring unusual shapes
and often recognizable forms. In Random Walk, she investigates
the directional probabilities of an object taking a “walk” on a
scanner and how this might translate visually. The resulting
book is a three-dimensional object that opens as opposed to a
traditional book format.
Susan Maguire holds a BFA degree from the Kansas City Art
Institute in Kansas City, Missouri. She is an artist, book artist, and
fabric designer. Maguire currently resides and has her studio in
Delaware where she is also the head book conservator for the
University of Delaware Library. Her work has been exhibited at
the Sarah Spurgeon Gallery and the Stockyard Gallery in Kansas
City, MO; the John Hancock building’s Signature Club, the Annual
Around-the-Coyote event, the Artemisia Gallery and the Space
Gallery in Chicago, IL; Pentimenti Gallery in Philadelphia, PA; and
most recently, at the Delaplaine Fine Arts Center in Emmitsburg,
MD.

Leah Oates
Paradura Vermont, 2002-03
Flat back hard cover binding; interior pages are printed on Rives
lightweight paper with archival ink
10” x 9.5” x 1”
Courtesy of the Artist
Photo by Bill Orcutt
Oates writes, “The work I create first originates as a response
to overlooked space that is in a continual state of change. In
everyone there is a sense of flux and a familiarity with this type
of space. Transitory spaces have a messy human energy that
is always in the present yet constantly changing. I find them
endlessly interesting, alive places where there is a great deal
of beauty and fragility. They are temporary monuments to the
ephemeral nature of existence.”
Leah Oates is a Brooklyn-based artist who has a BFA from the
Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from The School
of the Art Institute of Chicago. Oates has been in over one
hundred group and solo exhibitions around the world at venues
including the Center for Book Arts, NYC; the Tucson Museum of
Art, AZ; Shore Institute of Contemporary Art, Long Branch, NJ;
the Royal Scottish Academy & Open Eye Gallery in Scotland;
Open Studio Gallery in Toronto; and Galerie Joella and Turku City
Art Museum in Finland. Work by Oates was recently featured in
American publications the Daily Constitutional, Zingology Online
Arts Magazine, Studio Views Magazine and The Drain Journal of
Contemporary Arts Magazine, and in Lirvraison Rhinoceros from
Belgium and Front Magazine from Toronto. Oates’s work has been
mentioned in The Village Voice, Umbrella Magazine, NY Arts
Magazine, The Southampton Press, and the Chicago Reader. Her
work has been featured on the movie sets of Perfect Strangers,
The Forgotten, Little Children and Rabbit Hole and on the TV
sets of Law and Order and Lipstick Jungle. Her works on paper
are in many public collections including the National Museum of
Women in the Art, Washington, D.C; The Brooklyn Museum, NY;
The British Library and the Tate Museum, England; The Walker
Art Center Libraries, Minneapolis, MN; The Smithsonian Libraries,
Washington, D.C.; and Franklin Furnace at the Museum of
Modern Art, NYC.
Tara O’Brien
Wissahickon Creek, 2010
Book: letterpress, limp vellum style binding; video
10” x 9”
Edition of 5
Courtesy of the Artist
O’Brien writes, “In April, 2010, The Print Center in Philadelphia
hosted a one-afternoon event of Book Performances. Book
Artists in the community were invited to create a performance of
one of their books. For my project, I wanted to give the book the
opportunity to perform itself. Wissahickon Creek is a book whose
paper has been washed in Wissahickon Creek in Philadelphia.
What started as simply an exploration of what would happen
to the paper became another example of entelechy [that which
realizes or makes actual what is otherwise merely potential]. As I
worked, a family of geese stopped on the opposite river bank and
were attacked by a hawk. In this case the vital force was clear:
survival. The book is printed letterpress on the washed paper
and bound with a paper cover. For the performance, I returned
to the river and filmed the washing of the paper in the water and
recorded the corresponding text. The installation is the book on
a pedestal which the audience is invited to handle. The dvd is
projected onto the floor behind the book. The projection on the
floor recalls the actual orientation of the river and how the paper
was washed. A bodiless voice reads the text out loud.”
Tara O’Brien is an accomplished book artist whose work is widely
exhibited and collected. Her work is found in many collections,
most notably the Tate Modern Library, and the Art Institute of
Chicago. Pieces range from contemporary structural explorations
to traditional leather-bound volumes. She is interested in
conceptualizing the book and exploring its future. She uses
unusual materials in her work, including ice, soap, grass, hair,
shells, thread, and hand dyed papers. She believes that a
narrative within a book can be something other than text and
images. O’Brien received her MFA in Book Arts/Printmaking from
The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA. She is currently
the Director of Preservation and Conservation Services at the
Historical Society of Pennsylvania and adjunct lecturer in book
arts at Moore College of Art and Design.
29

Claire Owen
A Cabinet of Curiosa, 2009
Turtle Island Press
Two separately bound and illustrated books, folio of images that
include 16 scanned graphite drawings, 4 mono-prints, and 4 soft
ground etchings. Diorama of leather-cast natural objects.
10.25” x 8” x 4”
Edition of 3
Courtesy of the Artist
Photo by John Carlano
Owen writes, “A Cabinet of Curiosities refers to scientific/natural
history collections made by scholars, nobleman and wealthy
merchants in the 17th century that were meant to express the
collector’s erudition and wealth. The objects collected were of
diverse subjects often of the natural world: sea-shells, insects
in amber, fossils, skeletons of real (and factitious) animals, but
they also included jewelry, carved ivory, scientific instruments,
spheres, clocks, or musical instruments. I have long wanted to
develop a book on the theme of these cabinets using the Wagner
Free Institute as a resource. I was fortunate in being able to
partner with the librarian of the Wagner in 2007, and developed
this work from the research I did on site.”
Claire Owen has been producing limited edition books since
1981. After receiving degrees in illustration and printmaking from
Rochester Institute of Technology, she moved to Philadelphia
and established her own imprint. Turtle Island Press maintains
many of the traditional aspects of fine print editions using
archival materials and formal binding formats. Owen employs
hand-printing methods, including etchings and woodcuts,
for her images. She collaborates with letterpress printers for
the text, and the books are hand bound. Recently Owen has
begun to use digital imagery of her drawings and paintings
in her bookwork, combining new technologies with traditional
methods of reproduction. Turtle Island Press books are contained
in the collections of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Print and
Picture Department, PA; Getty Center for History of Arts and
Humanities, Santa Monica, CA; Harvard University, Houghton
Library, Cambridge, MA; Library of Congress, Washington,
DC; Metropolitan Museum of Art, Department of Prints and
Pictures, NY; Princeton University, Firestone Library, Princeton,
NJ; Stanford University, Green Library, CA; Swarthmore College,
McCabe Library, Swarthmore, PA; Temple University Paley Library
Special Collections, Philadelphia, PA; The German Museum
30
of Book Design, Leipzig, Germany; The National Gallery of
Art, Washington, D.C.; The New York Public Library, Special
Collections, and Spencer Collection, NY; Victoria and Albert
Museum, London, England; Wellesley College, Margaret Clapp
Library, Wellesley, MA; and Yale University, Sterling Library, New
Haven, CT.
Amy Pirkle, Perkolator Press
The River, 2010
Letterpress printed from metal types and reduction linoleum on
Nideggen paper with pamphlet case binding
Cover image: scratch negative photopolymer plate
Open: 7” x 15” Closed: 7” x 5”
Edition of 35
Courtesy of the Artist
Pirkle comments, “I printed The River during my time as master
printer in residence in letterpress at Penland School of Crafts in
February 2010. There are two narratives working side by side
throughout the book. One is a first-person account of a tubing trip
down the Broad River that my father and I took in the Summer of
2008; the other is told in second-person and instructs the reader
on how to live one’s life, following examples from my father’s life
from the ages of 18-54 years old. The images throughout are
based on photographs I took of the Broad and French Broad
rivers in North Carolina in the summer of 2008. I had been
working on the book idea for a few months before I arrived at
Penland, and I felt that there was no better place to print it than at
Penland because it is only an hour from the river.”
Perkolator Press is the imprint of Amy Pirkle, a book artist and
letterpress printer born and raised in the Deep South. Although
Pirkle considers herself a tried and true Georgian, Perkolator
Press was established in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she
received her MFA in Book Arts in 2007. She teaches at the
University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. She currently prints in
Gordo, Alabama, but still binds in her studio in Tuscaloosa. She
has shown her work at the McDuffie Museum in Thomson, GA;
The Hardman Art Gallery, Mercer University, Macon, GA; the
Creative Arts Workshop, New Haven, CT; and the Cultural Arts
Building Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Wilmington.
Her work is in contained in a number of collections, including
Brown University, John Hay Library, Special Collections,

Providence, RI; Carnegie Mellon University, Hunt Library, Special
Collections, Pittsburgh, PA; Duke University, Perkins Library,
Special Collections, Durham, NC; Emory University Library
Special Collections, Atlanta, GA; Michigan State University
Special Collections, East Lansing, MI; Oberlin College, Allen Art
Building Special Collections, Oberlin, OH; Otis College of Art
and Design, The Millard Sheets Library, Los Angeles, CA; Rhode
Island School of Design, Library Special Collections, Providence,
RI; Swarthmore College Library, Special Collections, Swarthmore,
PA; University of California, Irvine, San Diego, Santa Barbara,
and Santa Cruz Libraries’ Special Collections; Wellesley College
Library Special Collections, Wellesley, MA; and Yale University,
Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library Special Collections, Faber
Birren Collection of Books on Color, New Haven, CT.
Amee J. Pollack and Laurie Spitz
Professor Pinkerton’s Pop-Up Library, 2009
Pochoir stenciling, collage, pen and ink, and hand engineering
8.75” x 18” x 18”
Edition of 10
Courtesy of the Artists
Photo by D. James Dee
Pollack and Spitz write, “Tie back the covers of this three-room
carousel and enter a world of living history where handmade
pop-ups, movables and miniature pamphlets offer an unexpected
glimpse of the so-called progress of civilization. Professor M. J.
Pinkerton is a fictional character—although we like to think of him
as a relative of the famous Pinkerton Detectives of the American
Wild West. In other words, he is a sleuth of history with a
penchant for social commentary and a love of decorative pattern.
The Library is a three-dimensional artists’ book with Ancient,
Medieval and Modern pages. Original pop-up facades and wall
& floor designs were stenciled/painted onto Elephant Hide cover
stock paper.”
Collaborating for the past five years, artists Amee J. Pollack and
Laurie Spitz are represented by Ceres Gallery in New York City,
where they recently received a grant for a solo exhibition of their
book works (February 2012). Their artists’ books are in many
permanent collections, including the National Museum of Women
in the Arts, Washington, DC; The Brooklyn Museum, NY; The
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; The New York Public
Library, NYC; The Getty Research Institute, CA; and numerous
public libraries and universities. Pollack, an artist who works in
mixed-media, received an MFA in Book Arts and Printmaking from
The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, and a Fellowship from
Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. She teaches bookbinding, papermaking,
and printmaking in New York City. Spitz is formerly the Executive
Story Editor of 20th Century Fox Film Corporation and a freelance
writer (CBS-TV, various publications). Her handmade novel, A
Plane to Nirvana, developed from one of her essays published by
The New York Times, was the beginning of a new creative path–
combining storytelling with art.
Rosae M. Reeder
Do You?, 2002
Lithography on paper, flag book structure
13” x 36” x 7”
Courtesy of the Artist
This provocative book presents one of the iconic images of
Middle Passage, the floor plan of a typical slave ship that
crossed the ocean from Africa to the New World. Here we see an
historical diagram of the packing of a ship full of bodies for the
Atlantic slave trade. Ships embarked from Europe, where they
were loaded full of commercial goods which were then unloaded
and sold in Africa. Following this the ships were re-loaded with
human “cargo” which was taken for sale in the New World, and
the ships would then be unloaded and loaded again with more
commercial goods which would travel back to Europe, thus
creating a three-stage voyage. The term “Middle Passage” refers
to the fact that the part of the three-pronged journey that shipped
enslaved peoples was the middle section of the trade route.
The stage from Africa to the New World could take anywhere
from one to six months, depending upon weather conditions,
and the human beings who were captured or sold into slavery
in Africa were packed and chained into the bowels of the ships
in huge numbers with barely any space to turn or sit. They were
generally not well-fed and poor conditions led to an extremely
high incidence of illness and death. Reeder asks the viewer: “Do
You Remember?” Slavery is, unfortunately, not yet eliminated with
estimates as high as 24 million of the world’s population living
in some state of slavery. The artist implies that those who do not
remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Rosae Reeder received her MFA in Book Arts/Printmaking
from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and her BFA in
printmaking from the University of Buffalo, NY. Her work combines
31

various photographic processes, digital imaging techniques,
collage, and traditional printmaking media in combination with
book structure, design, and installation. Her work has been
exhibited nationally at centers for the book as well as galleries
across the country, including the National Archives and Records
Administration in Philadelphia; the Pennsylvania Academy of the
Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Center for Book Arts, NY; and the Free
Library of Philadelphia. Her work is in a number of collections
including the University at Buffalo, Buffalo N.Y; University of
Washington, Rare and Artist Book Collection; and the University of
the Arts and the Print Center, Philadelphia, PA.
Johanne Renbeck
Water is the Blood of Earth, 2010
Drafting film, cellulose vellum, linen thread, acrylic ink, stick
30” x 22” x 8”
Courtesy of the Artist
Renbeck makes artist books focused on nature, often inspired by
the wetlands near her home. Some of these books are designed
as ceremonial costumes, books that can actually be worn. These
wearable books express her fascination with the complexities of
the natural world and its capacity to enrich and transform people.
Renbeck states: “I love the expressive potential of artist books,
the permission that the medium gives for pushing beyond the
physical confines of conventional books while at the same time
maintaining the tradition of the book as a gathering of exploration
and experience.”
Johanne Renbeck lives in the Hudson Valley of New York State
where she transforms her paintings and poems into artist’s
books, installations, and performance works. She also teaches
32
workshops focused on the expressive possibilities of artist books.
Renbeck earned her BA in English Literature from the University
of Rochester and has studied painting and drawing with artists at
Rochester Institute of Technology, Bard College, and with Helen
Frankenthaler at the Santa Fe Art Institute. She has shown her
work at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill,
NY; Susan Hensel Gallery, Minneapolis MN; Cuesta College, San
Luis Obispo CA; Howland Cultural Center, Beacon NY; and the
Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, NY.
Miriam Schaer
Hands of Josephus IV, 2010
Altered text from Josephus: History of the Jews, beads, wire hand
form
10.5” x 4” x 16”
Courtesy of the Artist
Photo by Stephen DeSantis
Hands of Josephus is an altered book, created from a broken
down copy of Twenty books of The Jewish Antiquities: The Life
of Josephus and The Jewish Wars. The artist cut each page
into the shape of hands and sewed them onto multiple beaded
cords which she then attached to wire hand forms encrusted with
beads. Josephus was a 1st- century Jewish historian and author
who survived and recorded the destruction of Jerusalem in 70
AD. The artist sees Josephus as an apologist of Roman atrocities,
making reference to his lone survival from a collective suicide
pact when fighting the Romans (it is from him that we gained the
term “Roman Roulette” commonly known as Russian Roulette).
She believes that his somewhat mysterious and lone survival
and his later embracing of Roman citizenship and participation
in Roman society, which enabled him to write the history of the
Jews, raises questions about who owns history and the role of the
victor in controlling truth.
Miriam Schaer is a book artist who addresses cultural issues
through her multi-media works. She uses garments — girdles,
bustiers, brassieres, aprons, children’s clothes, and, in this
case, the form of a hand that suggests a glove — as means
of containment. Inside these stiffened, shaped, embellished
enclosures, she places books and other objects that document
her explorations of feminine, social, and spiritual issues. For the
past twenty years, she has exhibited her work in solo and group
exhibitions, including at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse,
NY; Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, PA; Museum
of Arts & Design, NY, NY; and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn,

NY. Her work has been mentioned in a long list of articles and
reviews, and is in numerous public collections including the Tate
Museum, London, UK; the Brooklyn Museum; Yale University,
New Haven, CT; Duke University, Durham, NC; Centre for Fine
Print Research, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK;
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI; Flaxman Library,
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; and Swarthmore College,
Swarthmore, PA. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees
from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, the School of Visual
Arts, New York, and Boston University, respectively. She currently
is a lecturer in the Interdisciplinary MFA Program in Book and
Paper at Columbia College, Chicago.
Clarissa Sligh
Panel of pages from Wrongly Bodied Two, 2006;
12” x 30”
Courtesy of the Artist and the Woodmere Art Museum,
Philadelphia
Clarissa Sligh
Panel of pages from Wrongly Bodied Two, 2006;
12” x 30”
Courtesy of the Artist and the Woodmere Art Museum,
Philadelphia
Clarissa Sligh, Wrongly Bodied Two, 2004
Hard-bound book: 10” x 7”;
Silkscreen, acrylic ink, and ink jet on 100% rag Rives heavyweight
paper; 112 pages;
Edition of 46; Women’s Studio Workshop, Rosendale, NY; Panel
Courtesy of the Artist,
Book Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives,
James Branch Cabell Library, Virginia Commonwealth
University Libraries
In her book, Sligh connects the stories of Deborah, a white
female as she transitions to Jake, a white male, and that of
Ellen Craft, an important Abolitionist of the 19th-century, a black
woman who escaped slavery by passing as a white man. Craft
not only had to be identified as white, but also had to pass as
male since the conventions of the time would not have accepted
a single white woman traveling alone with a male slave. Craft’s
story is told in her husband William Craft’s published account
of their escape, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom. The
entire issue of passing, of a black person pretending to be white,
seems archaic, but, in fact, until the 2000 US census, American
citizens had to identify themselves as being of only one race;
they could not be multi-racial. Many black citizens of light skin
tone continued to live double lives, to pass as white, at least until
the end of the 20th century, seeking the privileges that would
be afforded in a society that prizes the lightness of skin tone,
or, in the case of Ellen Craft, utilizing her skin tone and change
of gender to make a daring run to freedom. Sligh sees Jake’s
identity transformation as parallel to that of Craft, and in this
book Sligh explores the ways that society responds to individuals
changing their identities. Sligh raises issues about the boundaries
and definitions of race, gender, and class through the eyes of a
21st-century artist, continuing her lifelong advocating for social
justice.
Clarissa Sligh identifies herself as a visual artist, lecturer, and
writer. When Sligh was 15 years old she became the lead plaintiff
in the 1955 school desegregation case in Virginia (Clarissa
Thompson et al. vs. Arlington County School Board). This lifealtering
experience propelled her forward to work for social
justice as a student, as a scientist working for NASA, as a
business person, and, finally, as a writer and visual artist. Sligh
was born in Washington, D.C., grew up in Arlington, Virginia, lived
in Manhattan for 30 years and now resides in the mountains of
Asheville, North Carolina. She has taught at New York University,
the School of Visual Arts, and the University of Pennsylvania. She
has shown her work at many public institutions including The
Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, PA; Bowling
Green State University, Bowling Green, OH; Women’s Studio
Workshop, Rosendale, NY; Rutgers University, New Brunswick,
NJ; The Afro-American Historical & Cultural Museum,
Philadelphia, PA; Holter Museum of Art, Helena MT; National
Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; Philadelphia
Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta,
GA; and the National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, TN. Her
works are in many public collections including the Museum of
Modern Art, New York, NY; the Australian National Gallery,
Canberra; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the
International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, NY;
The Whitney Museum, New York, NY; The Victoria and Albert
Museum, London, England; the Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Philadelphia, PA; and the Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta,
Canada. Sligh holds a BS from Hampton Institute (Hampton
University); BFA and MFA from Howard University, Washington,
DC; an MA from Texas Woman’s University, Denton, Texas; and an
MBA from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
33

Buzz Spector
Found Polaroids 9, 2010
Altered book
7.25” x 13.625” x 1” (open)
Courtesy of the Artist
Buzz Spector
Marcel Broodthaers #2, 2010
Black gesso in altered book (catalogue to the Walker Art Center’s
1989 Broodthaers retrospective)
10” x 20.625” x2” (open)
Courtesy of the Artist
The subject of Spector’s book, Marcel Broodthaers (1924—
1976), began his career as a Surrealist poet and also became
a filmmaker and artist. His approach to making art represented
a highly literate and often witty style. He regularly worked with
found objects and collage, often with written text. He founded a
fictitious museum, the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des
Aigles, through which he organized exhibitions, publications,
and films. Broodthaers, like Marcel Duchamp before him,
questioned art institutions and methods of display. He was also
very interested in how written text might impact the interpretation
and reception of artists’ works. Important retrospectives of Marcel
Broodthaers’ work which have generated critical attention for his
oeuvre have taken place at the Walker Art Center (1989); Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1989); Carnegie Museum of
Art, Pittsburgh (1989); Jeu de Paume, Paris (1991); and Palais
des Beaux Arts, Brussels (2000). Since Spector is a writer and
visual artist who has often addressed the critical interpretation of
art and he has worked with found objects, particularly books, in
34
his own practice, it is not surprising that he would be attracted
to the topic of Marcel Broodthaers. Spector here plays upon the
collage, found object, and text nature of Brookthaers’ works.
Spector comments, “He [Broodthaers] is an artistic hero of mine.
In 1977, I saw Broodthaers’ first American museum installation,
Un jardin d’hiver (A Winter Garden), at the Art Institute of Chicago
in the exhibition, “Europe in the Seventies: Aspects of Recent
Art,” organized by Anne Rorimer and A. James Speyer. It was
an epiphany for me to grasp that the installation was a kind of
museum-in-a-museum, and that its pairings of wall-mounted
components—framed engravings of extinct bird species and
framed pages from old manuals of typography—were about the
same thing; the passing away of experience, first into memory
and then out of it through forgetting. I came to the museum as
one kind of artist and left as another.”
Buzz Spector is an artist and critical writer, who has contributed
reviews and essays to a number of publications, including
American Craft, Artforum, Art Issues, Art on Paper, Exposure, and
New Art Examiner. He is a co-founder of WhiteWalls, a magazine
of writing by artists and the author of The Book Maker’s Desire,
critical essays on topics in contemporary art and artists’ books
(Umbrella Editions, 1995), and numerous exhibition catalogue
essays. He has shown his artwork in museums and galleries,
including the Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County
Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Corcoran
Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh,
PA; and Luigi Pecci Centre, Prato, Italy. Spector’s work is in
institutional and private collections worldwide, including the Art
Institute of Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Corcoran
Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of
Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, among
other institutions. His art makes frequent use of the book, both as
subject and object, and is concerned with relationships between
public history, individual memory, and perception. Spector
studied art and systems design at Southern Illinois University,
Carbondale, earning a BA degree in art. He studied art and
philosophy at the University of Chicago, receiving the MFA from
the Committee on Art and Design. Spector has been awarded
a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Louis Comfort
Tiffany Foundation Fellowship, and several National Endowment
for the Arts Fellowship Awards. He is Dean of the College and
Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual
Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Marilyn Stablein
Blue Stocking, 2008
Vintage stocking bag, lace, ribbon, collaged covers, pin-up girl
illustrations attached
7” x 6” x .5” (opens to 12”)
Courtesy of the Artist
Stablein believes that objects speak a language of history and
desire. She writes, “As an artist I’m drawn to natural artifacts,
hand-crafted creations as well as industrial cast-offs. Finding new
environments and uses for discarded objects is an obsession as
well as a quasi-spiritual endeavor. Salvage and salvation derive
from the same Latin root, salvare, ‘to save.’” This work is part of an
ongoing series of artist books she titles Notions and Accessories,
which explores the whimsical narrative of needlework, notions,
and women’s antique fashion and fabric accessories. Stablein
hopes to honor and celebrate the historical tools and handiwork
of women through her artwork.
Stablein is an award-winning book and assemblage artist whose
work explores and celebrates cultural artifacts and traditions.
She has exhibited in solo, group, and touring exhibitions in
numerous venues including the Fleet Library, Rhode Island
School of Design; the Harwood Museum, Taos, NM; the
Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, NM; Pyramid Atlantic
Art Center, MD; Abecedarian Book Arts Gallery, Denver, CO;
Canyon Gallery, Boulder Public Library, CO; the University of
Nebraska, Omaha; Los Alamos Mesa Gallery, NM; the Brannigan
Art Center, Las Cruces, NM; Wells Gallery, Aurora College,
NY; Sandy Gallery, Portland, OR; and the Giesel Library,
University of California, San Diego. Her work has been featured
in The Bonefolder: an e-journal for the Bookbinder and Book
Artist, in Bound & Lettered Magazine, in Malpais Review, in Rattle
Magazine and other journals and publications. She is an artist
member of the Center for Book Arts, NYC, and is represented by
Vamp and Tramp Booksellers. Her work is in numerous private
and public collections including the University of Washington,
University of Amherst, and the University of Boulder. She is
the award-winning author of ten books; her last book, Splitting
Hard Ground, won the New Mexico Book Award. She and her
husband own Acequia Booksellers, a used bookstore online and
in Albuquerque, NM. Stablein holds a BA from the University
of Washington, Seattle, WA, and an MA from the University of
Houston, Houston, TX.
Beth Uzwiak & Elysa Voshell
Nights at the Circus, 2010
Interior pages: offset lithography from original drawings, sewing,
and collage
Cover: letterpress, hand sewn with an inkjet print on BFK Reeves
paper
6” x 9” x .33”
120 pages; edition of 25
Courtesy of the Artists
This book is part of a collaborative multi-media installation by the
two artists that was installed at the University City Arts League,
Philadelphia, PA, in June of 2010. The exhibition was comprised
of a series of altered book pages, poster-sized screen prints,
and sculptures that incorporated maps, drawings, and stitching.
Their collaboration began with a de-accessioned copy of Djuna
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Barnes’s classic lesbian novel Nightwood (1937), considered
one of the great novels of the 20th century with the story situated
in the streets of Paris. Inspired by the dark gothic and poetic
text of Nightwood, this installation sets the early 1900s circus—
its dandies, charlatans, and coquettes—against imaginative
renderings of human cells and organs. Together these forms
celebrate the permissiveness of carnival, while questioning the
place of “the marginal” in the everyday. There is a tradition for
utilizing these types of figures in art; Picasso too employed circus
figures—harlequins, acrobats, and jugglers—to represent the
marginalized members of society.
Beth Uzwiak is an artist, researcher, and writer, and holds a Ph.D.
in visual anthropology from Temple University. She has received
numerous awards and fellowships including a recent (2009-
2010) Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson
National Fellowship Foundation. She exhibits and presents art
and research internationally and recently completed a yearlong
artist residency at the 40th Street AIR SPACE Studios in West
Philadelphia. Uzwiak writes, designs, and produces visual
work under her press name, Pierce Imprint. This work—often
collaborative and ethnographic in practice—integrates collage,
sewing, drawing, printmaking, painting, text, and installation.
Both her academic and artistic practice explore the human body
and what shapes our embodied experiences—such as violence,
memory, ritual, or migration. She is interested in the differences
between “official” or historical representations of human
experiences and how people actually process and express these
same experiences. Uzwiak teaches art history and anthropology
in the Philadelphia region and exhibits work both locally and
nationally, and as a member of A Square Deal Art in Philadelphia
and the Philadelphia Center for the Book.
Voshell is an artist, curator, and writer whose work encompasses
book arts, printmaking, photography, and installation. She holds
an MA in Book Arts from Camberwell College of Arts, University of
the Arts London, and an MLA in Visual & Curatorial Studies and a
BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University
of Pennsylvania. She exhibits internationally and has work
included in museum and library collections worldwide. Voshell is
the recipient of numerous awards and honors including a Special
Opportunity Stipend from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts,
a Window of Opportunity Award from the Leeway Foundation,
and the Stein Family Scholarship for Advanced Studies in Book
Arts from the Center for Book Arts, New York. She has published
essays and reviews in Print, The Blue Notebook, and the Dutch
magazine Stereo, and has produced several exhibitions as an
independent curator. Her work was recently featured in 500 Artists
Books. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, where she
produces artists’ books under the imprint After Nostalgia Press
and is the Gallery & Public Programs Manager at Venice Arts.
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Susan Weinz
X, 2009
Silkscreen printed book on Rives heavyweight paper and cover
stock
12” x 12”
24 pages, edition of 10
Courtesy of the Artist
Photo by Elena Bouvier
Weinz is interested in language and letter forms and claims the
dictionary as one of her most favorite books. She enjoys finding
odd words that have an interesting sound or that evoke the
unexpected as inspiration for narratives that go beyond the literal.
She also sees text as image. Weinz writes, “As an artist I am
drawn to color, clean design, geometric pattern, letterforms, and
unusual color combinations, although black and white at times
suits me too. I like order, but chaos has its place. White space
is important; I am a firm believer that what is not present is as
important as that which is, and, considering our predisposition to
fill up spaces, empty is okay.” According to the artist, the visuals
for this book are based on collections of old wood type that she
considers as characters in and of themselves.
Susan Weinz has shown her work at Georgetown College,
Georgetown, KY; The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA;
Chapman University, Orange, CA; Free Library of Philadelphia,
Philadelphia, PA; Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA; and the
Center for Book Arts, New York, NY. Her work has been published
in Reviving the Black Art of Letterpress and 500 Handmade
Books. She holds a BFA from Tufts University and diploma
certificates from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
as well as Graphic Design studies at the New England School
of Art and Design and an MFA in Book Arts/Printmaking from the
University of the Arts, Philadelphia. Her work is included in the
collections of the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence
RI; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; Yale University,
New Haven, CT; and the Free Library of Philadelphia, Print and
Pictures Department, Philadelphia, PA. Weinz currently works as a
letterpress printer in Brooklyn, NY.

Susan White
Between a Rock and a Hard Place, 2010
Deconstructed book pages, text dots
Variable sizes
Courtesy of the Artist
This installation is created from book pages that have been torn
up and then re-assembled to form long strips. Text, images, and
writing on the surface of the book pages are visible in parts while
the structure of the installation itself is based on that of a whirlpool
or a vortex. Here, White was inspired by Greek mythology. She
explains, “Charybdis was a sea creature who created large,
dangerous whirlpools in the water. In The Odyssey, Ulysses had
to pass through a strait with Charybdis on one side and Scylla, a
man-eating monster living in the cliffs, on the other. When trying
to avoid one monster, he came dangerously close to the other.
This concept of having to choose between two difficult situations
is the origin of the phrase ‘between a rock and a hard place.’”
Included in the work is text in the form of small (1/4”) rubber
bumpers that contain words lifted from the pages of books. The
arrangement of these small dots is created spontaneously and
forms phrases or sentences. The text tells about finding one’s
way, asking questions, making decisions, and finding inspiration.
White comments, “In my life, I find myself juggling many different
things. As an artist, parent, partner, teacher, and friend, I often
find myself pulled in many directions. What things are important
and what things do I edit? How much can I take on and how do I
choose? Who do I really think I am? And who are you?”
Susan White teaches at both Drexel University and the University
of the Arts, Philadelphia. She was the Assistant Director of The
Print Center in Philadelphia from 1999—2002. She has shown
her work at ARTFRONT Partnership @ Liberty Place; The Print
Center, The Crane Building, Painted Bride Art Center Café
Gallery; Abington Art Center; the Philadelphia Art Alliance; and
Nexus Gallery for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA, as well
as at the Artes Protales in Lorca Mercia, Spain. White holds a
BFA in Printmaking from Moore College of Art and Design and
an MFA in Book Arts/Printmaking from the University of the Arts,
Philadelphia, PA.
Michelle Wilson
Libros Perdidos (Lost Books), 2010
Installation of 100, 3” x 6” (open) charred, pamphlet-sewn books
Various sizes
Courtesy of the Artist
Wilson asks, “What is lost when a library burns?” She comments
that during the colonization of Mesoamerica, Spanish
conquistadors burned thousands of Mayan, Aztec, and other
indigenous codices. Only three Mayan and nineteen Zapotec
books survived. German author Heinrich Heine wrote in 1821,
“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human
beings.” The destruction of Mayan codices has been joined by
other well-known book burning events—Nazi book burnings and
the destruction of the Sarajevo National Library—in addition to
the more recent threat by Pastor Terry Jones to burn the Qu’ran.
Wilson writes, “No one destroys something that is considered
‘theirs,’ only what can be labeled as ‘Other.’ The Other is
perceived as inherently wrong and therefore its destruction
is acceptable, even encouraged by some.” Wilson explains
that Los Perdidos evokes such book burnings, both past and
contemporary. She comments that by presenting 100 handmade
burned books, she decries the loss of historical knowledge and
the lack of understanding that still pervade our world. Finally, she
hopes that this installation will encourage viewers to imagine its
blank pages as a suggestion of the visual space in which they
can contemplate these ideas and consider their own attitudes
toward difference.
Michelle Wilson a papermaker, printmaker, book, and installation
artist who was a longtime resident of Philadelphia now lives in
the San Francisco Bay area. Her work has been shown at the X
Initiative, New York, NY; the Chicago Center for Book and Paper
Arts; the International Biennial for Artists’ books, Alexandria,
Egypt, and the Joshibi Art Museum, Japan. It is in numerous
public collections including Yale University, New Haven, CT; the
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National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; and
the Jaffe Center for Book Arts, Boca Raton, FL. Wilson holds a
BFA from Moore College of Art and Design and an MFA from the
University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA.
Dennis Yuen
Rapunzel, 2009
Cotton cords, Asahi bookcloth, Davey bookboard, Canson
paper, linen threads
35” x 58” x 3.25”
Courtesy of the Artist
Yuen has created a book that presents a visual image of the
well-known fairytale, Rapunzel. Utilizing cotton cord to suggest
her long hair, Yuen presents a sophisticated interpretation of
the story. He writes, “I seek to create narratives through an
object’s physical form and structure. In my work, an object’s
form becomes an essential part of its message and existence as
art; it questions its own form. . . While my earlier work focused
on digital interactive media, my recent work involves primarily
the book form, which is seemingly familiar but continues to
challenge us with its untapped potential. Besides telling stories
with embedded texts and images, I believe that a book’s form
and structure have a lot to offer in the narrative. My recent work
attempts to expand viewers’ perspectives on this form. . . Book
art is a unique form in which the ‘book form’ is indispensable from
the theme I wish to communicate. A piece of text or image can
undoubtedly exist in another form and continues to tell its story,
but as soon as it resides inside a ‘book,’ it takes on the qualities
of that physical vessel, and the decision of using that vessel
automatically becomes part of the message.” Yuen practices
Coptic, long stitch, stab, pamphlet and flat-back binding, often
applying variations on these traditional techniques. In his works,
he combines his knowledge of graphic design and technology
with book arts.
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Dennis Yuen is an artist and award-winning designer who works
in a range of media including book arts, interactive media,
photography, and video. He has designed, developed, and
managed numerous interactive projects for clients including
American Express, Tribeca Film Festival, Dorling Kindersley,
Devilliar Donegan Enterprises, Public Affairs Television, Food
Network, Lifetime Television, PBS, United Nations and UNICEF.
Yuen has been making books since he was a child. His work has
been exhibited in galleries and museums nationwide, including
the Sebastopol Center for the Arts, CA; the Everson Museum
of Art, Syracuse, NY; the Center for Book Arts, New York, NY;
and Purdue and Ball State Universities, Indiana. His work has
been published in Re-Bound and 500 Handmade Books. Since
2004, he has been maintaining his own paper and bookmaking
blog, Cai Lun, which has gained popularity in the bookbinding
community. Yuen holds a BS in Communication, Cinema & TV
from Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong and an MFA in
Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design.

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www.towson.edu/artscalendar
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