Ten Years of Artists’ Books
A Collection of Handmade Artists’ Books, Altered Books and Book-related Art Curated for the Brooklyn Public Library
Ten Years of Artists’ Books
A Collection of Handmade Artists’ Books, Altered Books and Book-related Art Curated for the Brooklyn Public Library by Donna Seager Guston Abright Jody Alexander James Allen Islam Aly Doug Beube Macy Chadwick Julie Chen Cathy DeForest
Marie Dern Jessica Drenk Arian Dylan Casey Gardner Alisa Golden AndrewHayes Meg Hitchcock Charles Hobson
Peter Rutledge Koch Lisa Kokin Jacqueline Rush Lee Sandi Miot Elizabeth Sher Seiko Tachibana Danielle Giudici Wallis Kazuko Watanabe
Brooklyn Public Library 10 Grand Army Plaza, Balcony Cases, 2nd Floor Brooklyn, New York 11238 October 1, 2015 - January 24, 2016 Reception: October 1, 2015
Ten Years of Artists’ Books
A Collection of Handmade Artists’ Books, Altered Books and Book-related Art Curated for the Brooklyn Public Library by Donna Seager
Guston Abright, Jody Alexander, James Allen, Islam Aly, Doug Beube, Macy Chadwick, Julie Chen, Cathy DeForest, Marie C. Dern, Jessica Drenk, Arian Dylan, Casey Gardner, Alisa Golden, Andrew Hayes, Meg Hitchcock, Charles Hobson, Peter Rutledge Koch, Lisa Kokin, Jacqueline Rush Lee, Sandi Miot, Elizabeth Sher, Seiko Tachibana, Danielle Giudici Wallis, Kazuko Watanabe Brooklyn Public Library 10 Grand Army Plaza, Balcony Cases, 2nd Floor Brooklyn, New York 11238 October 1, 2015 - January 24, 2016 Reception: October 1, 2015 Front Cover: Cathy DeForest, Ink and Blood, 2013 Back Cover: Jody Alexander, Exposed Spines, 2011 Photo Credits Jody Alexander: r.r.jones Macy Chadwick: Lindsey Beal Julie Chen: Sibila Savage Marie Dern: Martin Ledyard Casey Gardner: Luz Marina Ruiz Alisa Golden: Sibila Savage Andrew Hayes: Steve Mann Meg Hitchcock: Guenter Knop Lisa Kokin: Lia Roozendaal/Jagwire Design Jacqueline Rush Lee - photos by Paul Kodama, Hawaii Sandi Miot: Jay Daniel Photography Direct inquiries to: Seager Gray Gallery 108 Throckmorton Avenue Mill Valley, CA 94941 415-384-8288 seagergray.com All rights reserved. Catalog can be purchased through the gallery for $25 plus handling and shipping. Email us at art@seagergray.com
Ten Years of Artists’ Books Seager Gray Gallery is a contemporary fine art gallery in the town of Mill Valley, nestled in the redwoods just north of the Golden Gate Bridge in the San Francisco Bay Area. For ten years we have taken the lead in presenting art related to books. This year we celebrated the tenth anniversary of our annual “Art of the Book” exhibition. The journey has been a rich one, connecting us to fine presses, book artists, binders, printmakers, sculptors and special collections libraries throughout the world. It began with a visit to collector and book artist, Charles Hobson at his home in San Francisco in 2004. When he showed me his collection of book-related arts, I was struck by what I call a “museum” feeling – that wonderful sense of having seen something rich and gratifying and most definitely classifiable as “fine art.” I was determined to create an exhibition completely dedicated to the book. The goal was to explore as many approaches as possible, from unique artists’ books and altered books to even broader conceptual uses of books that explore our associations to their form, content and physical presence. A book in our hand, whether a dictionary, a volume of Shakespeare, a spiritual text, a novel or a collection of poetry is one of life’s great pleasures. Pages are uniform and straight, bindings hold the pages together over time, text is aligned and fonts dance across the pages like magical characters decoding human thoughts and experiences. I have come to believe that the form of the book is difficult to surpass as a relevant symbol and rich material available to artists. For book lovers, even spying a book out of the corner of their eye releases a mother lode of associations, both personal and universal, exquisitely layered with memory and meaning. The works selected in this Brooklyn Public Library exhibition bring back some of the highlights from the last ten years and some new works as well, hopefully expanding ideas of what a book can be and its rich potential both as content and material for amazing works of fine art. We are grateful to the Brooklyn Public Library and their exhibition committee for this wonderful opportunity.
Donna Seager, 2015
--------------------Guston Abright Framing the Debate, 2010 oil, paint, wood, mylar 5 x 4.25 x 2.75 in unique book
Guston Abright San Francisco Bay Area
Born in San Francisco and raised in Marin County, California, Guston Abright comes from a family of artists and showed talent in drawing and painting from an early age. He received his BA from the Rhode Island School of Design and resides in the Bay Area after living in New York City. He is a master of oil painting and observation. When asked to create a book for our 2010 exhibition, he ingeniously devised a way to incorporate pure oil painting into a moveable book object by painting on mylar and sliding the “pages� into a highly crafted framework. The translucency of the mylar allows the light to shine through magnifying the exacting detail. Artist Statement Our hands play an integral role in the way we navigate our environment and communicate with one another. They act as visual aids in the presentation of ideas and greatly influence how we interpret and process information. Through rhythm and gesture our hands give emotional context to unfolding dialogue and allow us to empathize with our counterparts. Through tactile feedback our hands allow us to understand and manipulate our physical environment. These versatile organs are absolutely fundamental in shaping how we understand and exist in our world.
--------------------Jody Alexander Exposed Spines, 2010
altered book, cotton, thread, tea 6 x 9 x .5 (variee) unique book object
Jody Alexander San Francisco Bay Area
Jody Alexander is an artist, bookbinder, papermaker, librarian and teacher who lives and works in Santa Cruz, California. She makes paper, in the Eastern-style, 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. Exposed Spines With her characteristic reverence for all things book, Alexander “exposes” the beauty, variation and craftsmanship of book spines, carefully wrapping them in cotton batting and celebrating their natural quality. She has tea-stained the batting, matching the aged colors of the book spines. The works are exquisite and endearing. They spotlight a part of books seldom seen and taken for granted. The term “exposed spine” is one used in bookbinding to describe a book that is bound with the intention of leaving the stitching on the spine exposed. In this case, Alexander removes covers to reveal the book’s decay. The presentation of these objects in a pile in the exhibition gives the work a double edge. Because they are plentiful, the books and their usually hidden spines seem disposable, but by their tender treatment, the artist elevates their higher qualities, deeming them worthy of further consideration.
--------------------Jody Alexander Exposed Spines, 2010
altered book, cotton, thread, tea 6 x 9 x .5 (variee) unique book object
James Allen Portland, Oregon
James Allen was born in 1977 in Illinois. He earned a BFA from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee in 2000. Currently he lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Allen’s artwork is included in Art Made From Books: Altered, Sculpted, Carved, Transformed, published by Chronicle books in August 2013. His work was exhibited at the Bellevue Arts Museum in The Book Borrowers: Contemporary Artists Transforming the Book in 2009. His Book Excavations can be found in Public collections at UCLA, Johns Hopkins University, Ringling College of Art and Design, and University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. He’s also exhibited across the country in many cities including New York, Chicago and Miami. Allen describes his work as “book excavations.” A book excavation is a sculptural work of art made by transforming various types of old books using precise cuts with a scalpel or knife, carving pages one by one until an astonishing new composition reveals itself. This almost surgical focus of dissecting books results in a wholly new object infused with a graphical history that evolves as the artist exposes each layer of the book while cutting around interesting images or text. Finished book excavations often appear as cross sections of the book, carved to create an alternate universe previously hidden between the covers.
--------------------James Allen Onomatopoeia 2015 book excavation 10.25 x 7 x 1.25 in
Islam Aly
Iowa City, Iowa / Egypt Islam Aly received a BA and an MA in Art Education from Helwan University, Egypt. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the College of Education’s Art Education program at the University of Iowa. In August 2013 he finished the MFA program at the University of Iowa Center for the Book. His books explore the possibilities of historical bindings in contemporary book art practice. They have appeared in international exhibitions in the United States and abroad, and in private and public collections including the NewYork Public Library, the W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library at the University of Alabama, the National Library of Chile, the University of Iowa Special Collections and Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
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Aly’s books play with classical forms and bindings, but by Islam Aly expanding spines, carving into the upper and side edges The Square, Al Midon, 2014 of the text block and laser cutting letters and symbols into handmade artist book his well-chosen papers, he has been able to create forms 4.5 x 4.5 x 2.5 in edition of 40 that are in perfect agreement with their content. The Square, Al Midon In The Square, Al Midon, Tahrir Square in Cairo becomes the focal point and the most effective symbol of the protests in January and February 2011. For 18 days Egyptians repeated the slogan: “The People Want to Bring Down the Regime” (al-sha`b yurid isqat al-nizam) until the regime stepped down on the 11th of February 2011.This book focuses on the revolution slogan ‘al-sha`b yurid isqat al-nizam.’ Using Arabic Kufic script the words of the slogan are repeated in an ascending sequence. Section 19 contains the English translation for the slogan ‘The People Want to Bring Down the Regime.’ The last section contains the time and date when the regime stepped down along with the sentence ‘Al Saa’b Askat al Nezam’ with its English translation ‘The People have Brought Down the Regime’. Cairo’s map is laser engraved on the book covers. Three edges of the book are colored then laser engraved to show the streets of Cairo.
Doug Beube New York, New York Trained as a filmmaker and photographer, Doug Beube turned to another narrative form in the late 1970s: books. Focusing on novels, reference volumes, atlases and art monographs, He approaches each text as if it were a body or an archaeological site, as he explains: “Like a physician or an archaeologist, I am driven to examine it, to dissect it, to cut it open, to dig into it. I am compelled to unfix margins, make tomes weightless, empty volumes of their stories and twist a point of view into its opposite.� Through these processes, he turns the books into objects and sculptures, and incorporates their parts into his mixed-media works. Beube both honors and critiques authors, re-crafting their words into works through which he comments on the state of the world. Shifting Borders Shifting Borders alludes to the political and arbitrary reorganizing of property and countries due to political parties in power and tyrannical heads of state. The confusion and reliability of knowing where boundaries begin and end are in question; maps are not definitive but an approximation. Even with GPS technologies that allow us to pinpoint a location, it’s still uncertain that the traveller will find their destination with ease.
--------------------Doug Beube Shifting Borders, 2014
altered atlas, collage, gouache 12.5 x 11.75 x 11.5 in
--------------------Macy Chadwick Locus, 2015
handmade artist book 12.5 x 10.5 in edition of 40
Macy Chadwick San Francisco Bay Area
Macy Chadwick publishes artist’s books and limited-edition prints under the imprint In Cahoots Press in Oakland, California. Through her work she addresses themes of memory, personal communication and visual language systems. She is interested in the connection between people: interactions both verbal and non-verbal, shared experiences, and the urge to communicate clearly. Macy Chadwick received an MFA in Book Arts and Printmaking from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia and assisted book artist Julie Chen at Flying Fish Press for three years. Macy lives in Oakland, California, where she creates books and limited edition prints in her letterpress studio. Macy is on the faculty at the Academy of Art University, San Francisco, and her work is in prominent collections in the U.S. and abroad, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Yale University Special Collections and the Jack Ginsberg Collection in South Africa. Locus Locus, a personal geography, is about existing in the space between the known past and the unknown future. In this exploratory realm, the narrator considers her past, locates herself in the present and finally embraces her many possible futures. The book is made from relief and pressure printing on Mohawk and Gampi Shi papers wih hybrid french doors. It is an accordion book in soft cover housed in a clam shell box.
Julie Chen
San Francisco Bay Area FLYING FISH PRESS was established in 1987 by internationally known book artist and book art educator Julie Chen. The press focuses on the design and production of limited edition artists’ books with an emphasis on three-dimensional and movable book structures and fine letterpress printing. Editions range in size from 25 to 150 copies. Work from the press Is known for combining meticulous attention to craft, intricate structural design and inspired artistic vision. Chen’s approach to the artist’s book involves intensive explorations of both form and content. Her work is heavily rooted in the ideas of the book as a physical object and a time-based medium. She views reading as an intimate act in which the reader must be in close physical proximity to the book, can control the pace of reading through the self-directed turning of pages, or equivalent action, and must interact with the book through the manipulation of the book’s physical structure. Chen strives to present the reader/viewer with an object that challenges preconceived ideas of what a book is, while at the same time providing a deeply engaging and meaningful experience through the presentation of her own text and imagery in a purposefully structured format. Chrysalis Chrysalis is an interpretation of the complex and transformative nature of the process of grief. The --------------------piece consists of a sculptural book object housed Julie Chen in a box. The book object is held together by a series Chrysalis, 2014 of magnets and can be opened by the viewer until handmade artist book all the panels lie in a flat plane, revealing an inner 6.75 x 11.75 x 6.625 in (box), 7 x 11 x 7 in (closed book) edition of 50 book with circular pages that can be held in the hand and read. All content is letterpress printed on handmade paper using photopolymer plates.
--------------------Julie Chen Cat’s Cradle, 2013 handmade artist book 6 x 8 x 1 in edition of 50
Julie Chen
San Francisco Bay Area Cat’s Cradle translates thoughts about the nature of existence from idea to form by employing the book structure itself as a visual/physical model of concepts portrayed in the text. The book as object can be displayed in two distinct ways: circularly or linearly. This dual display feature contributes it’s own conceptual meaning to the book as a whole. Digitally printed on Mohawk Superfine and includes laser cut elements. Carousel structure: 5 spreads, each with 3 layers of overlapping concertina folds with sections cut out to create a 3-dimensional scene. When opened and covers are placed against each other, it forms a star-shaped structure, 11” in diameter. Tie closures. The idea for Cat’s Cradle was generated using the Artists’ Book Ideation Cards by Barbara Tetenbaum and Julie Chen. To inaugurate the publication of this card set, Barb and Julie invited a group of book artists to each make a book that was inspired by a drawing of the cards. The resulting books were shown at the Seager Gray Gallery in Mill Valley In February and March of 2013 as an exhibition entitled “Ideation by Chance”. The cards drawn for Cat’s Cradle included the following: Text: self-generated, Imagery: none, Paper: neutral, Color: least favorite, Technique: digital, Layout: across the fold Structure: Innovative binding, Adjectives: mysterious, spiritual, encyclopedic, organic, lyrical.
Cathy DeForest Ashland, Oregon
Cathy DeForest is a book artist inspired by found objects and nature. She works in a broad range of media integrating etchings, letterpress printing and photography into artist books. She enjoys using the age old presses and techniques of printmaking, like the artists who began this work in the fifteenth century. Her artist books integrate each of her forms of art including her original poetry. Cathy’s work is part of numerous University and Museum Collections. Ink and Blood Ink and Blood is a collection of four books within a painted portfolio. Each book is dedicated to an aspect of the Iraqi culture: the invasion by the Mongols in 1258, the culture of Mesopotamia as the cradle of civilization, the bombing of Al-Mutanabbi Street, Baghdad’s ancient bookseller street and a dedication to the “Republic of the Imagination”. Artist Statement: I felt the need to hand ink each of the thirty-eight pages for each edition to honor those who died for the love of books. Multiple background plates were made for each of the four books, and nineteen intaglio solar plates were created to contain the narrative of the book. Ink and Blood is an edition of 8 and is dedicated to the people of Iraq and their long-lived culture. This excerpt captures the essence of my gratitude to all those who stand for culture: “Like the rivers that embrace Baghdad, the flow of culture endures: it is in our blood to have ink in our hands. There will always be someone inspired to communicate through words and images. There will always be someone drawing sustenance from art and knowledge.
--------------------Cathy DeForest Ink and Blood, 2013 handmade artist books 8.25 x 5.25 x 1 in edition of 8
Marie C.Dern San Francisco Bay Area
Marie C. Dern was born and raised in Salt Lake City. She attended the University of California, Berkeley and received a Bachelor of Arts degree. After graduation she followed a course of study at the Sorbonne in Paris. Marie returned to school in the 1980s and received a Master of Arts degree in Book Arts from Mills College in 1986. In 1974 Dern began Jungle Garden Press in Berkeley in the basement of a house surrounded by a wild garden. She has since printed and published more than 40 books, including her own writing as well as others. She also makes sculptural books, one of a kind and small editions. Her books are printed letterpress and are bound by hand with attention to combining structure and content of the book to illuminate the meaning of the text. The subjects are most often humorous and ironic. Books from Jungle Garden Press are found in many collections including the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Mills College Library and the New York Public Library. Poems by Hand Kay Ryan is an American poet and educator. She has published seven volumes of poetry and an anthology of selected and new poems. From 2008 to 2010 she was the sixteenth United States Poet Laureate. In 2011 she was named a MacArthur Fellow and she won the Pulitzer Prize. She is also a good friend of Marie Dern. Poems are an intimate medium, as are books when approached as a medium for art. Dern and Ryan took that sense of intimacy a step farther by imagining a portfolio of poems written in the poet’s --------------------own hand. They incorporated silkscreen prints by artist Martha Marie C. Dern Shaw, box by Bay Area bookbinder, John DeMerritt and Polymer plates of the poet’s handwriting were created by Richard Seibert. Poems by Hand, 2014
handmade artist book with poems by Kay Ryan 6.25 x 9.25 in edition of 15
Marie C. Dern & Danielle Giudici Wallis San Francisco Bay Area
Marie C. Dern has created many books in collaboration with artists and writers she admires. Among them is artist Danielle Giudici Wallis, with whom she worked to create Crow. Danielle Giudici Wallis received her MFA from Stanford where she was recipient of the Murphy Cadogan Grant, the James Borelli Fellowship in Art, the Anita Squires Memorial Fund in Photography and a fellowship from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited widely in the Bay Area including shows at Catharine Clark Gallery, SFMOMA Artists Gallery, The Bedford Gallery, Raid Projects in Los Angeles, The San Jose Museum and The California Palace of the Legion of Honor which holds one of her artist’s books in their Achenbach collection. Crow Crow is an accordion book with tree stump binding, letterpress text on mulberry paper, knitted paper bark, piano hinge, drawing on vellum and curved paper replicating the rings of a tree. Danielle GuidiciWallis explores themes of home and place in her work. Having recently moved from the Bay Area to a small desert town in Southern California, she found a note about a pet crow - lost, sight-impaired, but willing to come when called - a found poem.
--------------------Marie C. Dern and Danielle Giudici Wallis Crow, 2014
handmade artists’ book 9.5 x 9 x 9 in edition of 3
Jessica Drenk Titusville, Florida
Jessica Drenk’s work can be found internationally in private collections, as well as corporate and university collections within the US. Drenk has been the recipient of several awards, including an Artist Project Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and the International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award. Her work has been pictured in Sculpture, Interior Design, and Curve magazines, as well as The Workshop Guide to Ceramics. Her work has recently become a part of the Fidelity art collection and the Yale University Art Gallery. Drenk has an MFA in 3D Art from the University of Arizona and a bachelor’s degree from Pomona College where she was an art major. A working artist since 2007, Drenk’s home and studio are currently in Florida. Cerebral Mapping (Study) This piece, a study for the larger wall installations in the Cerebral Mapping series, is crafted from books: cut into thin strips, entwined together and coated with wax. Organic shapes and swirling lines reflect patterns in nature, from capillaries and neurons to rivers and deltas. The sequential logic of the book is dismantled and re-ordered to resemble the beautiful chaos found in the world around us and within our own bodies.
--------------------Jessica Drenk
Cerebral Mapping (Study), 2015 books, wax 24 x 34 in
Arián Dylan Oaxaca, Mexico
Arián Dylan (Arián Dylan Luján Pinelo), a 31-yearold native resident of Oaxaca, uses scalpels and knives to carve intricate abstract patterns and images into the surfaces of found books and magazines. A graduate of the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving in Mexico City, Dylan has shown his carved books, which he calls “Cavidades” (cavities) in solo and group shows in Chile, Spain, Japan, Canada and the U.S. He received Masters degree in Art and Combined Artistic Languages from the Instituto Universitario Nacional de las Artes in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Dylan’s work was included in Art Made from Books: Altered, Sculpted, Carved, Transformed by Chronicle Books. Order and Chaos Dylan’s Order and Chaos is a perfectly executed chess set created from carved pages of books and binding materials. It is a book object whose “story” involves kings and queens, castles and knights in endless conflict over power and territory. Dylan loves to read. His chess set, an interactive “Game of Thrones” reflects his observations about reading and what the reader brings to the text.
--------------------Arian Dylan Order and Chaos, 2014
carved books and leather binding material 20 x 11.5 x 6 in
Casey Gardner San Francisco Bay Area
Casey Gardner worked as a journalist before studying printmaking & graphic design at California College of the Arts. In making books, she approaches a subject from many directions and levels of inquiry. Her pages open to a landscape of options and layers of detail for the reader to navigate. Through analytical probing and outlandish premises, she creates a world of language and imagery, inviting the reader to travel into her books along varied routes that render new destinations with each reading. Her award-winning books are collected in university and private collections. Body of Inquiry This book is a triptych opening to a sewn codex within the subject’s torso. It is a structure of display and intimacy. The scale is large and unfolding and the details are numerous and intricate, accurate and outlandish. The instruments on the outer panels are from the 19th- and 20th-century scientific catalogs. The rest of the images are drawings the artist made and transferred into photopolymer plate for letterpress. The scientific panels explore the miracle of our physicality and are sequenced beginning with atoms, moving to cells, and to genetic structure. The interior codex tells the story of the artist’s anatomical model and investigates the permeable borderline between material and immaterial in our bodies and life.
--------------------Casey Gardner Body of Inquiry, 2011
handmade artist book 9.75 x 15.25 closed, opens to 28.5 x 15.25 in edition of 57
Alisa Golden San Francisco Bay Area
Alisa Golden works with the book as an expressive art form. She explores layered painting, printmaking, and boxmaking techniques, combining them with original poetry and short stories. In addition to her work with paper, she creates books and objects with materials such as handmade felt, beeswax, glass microscope slides, and sticks. She is the owner of never mind the press. Her books have been exhibited internationally are in the special collections of numerous universities, museums and libraries across the country. Alisa is the author of five instructional books: Creating Handmade Books, Unique Handmade Books, Expressive Handmade Books, and Making Handmade Books (Sterling Publishing 1998, 2001, 2005, Lark Crafts 2011), and Painted Paper (Sterling/Lark Books 2008). Days Made Strange Days Made Strange is a perpetual lettterpress haiku bookcalendar with fifty loose prints in a holder: seven days, twelve months, thirty-one dates. A forever calendar that is also an interactive book and a work of art that can be displayed standing. Each card is printed with a text fragment and together, the three daily cards make up one new haiku each day that will not repeat for many years. Thousands of haiku combinations are contained within. The book is a letterpress, multicolored work with handset metal type, wood type and linoleum cuts all printed by hand on a cylinder press.
--------------------Alisa Golden Days Made Strange, 2011 handmade artist book calendar 5.25 x 7.25 x 2 in edition of 40
Andrew Hayes Penland, North Carolina
Andrew Hayes grew up in Tucson, Arizona and studied sculpture at Northern Arizona University. The desert landscape inspired much of his early sculptural work and allowed him to cultivate his style in fabricated steel. After leaving school, Andrew worked in the industrial welding trade. While living in Portland, Oregon, bouncing between welding jobs and creating his own work he was invited to the EMMA collaboration. This one-week experience was liberating for Andrew and he was encouraged by his fellow collaborators to apply to the Core Fellowship at Penland School of Crafts. During his time as a Core Fellow, Andrew was able to explore a variety of materials and techniques. Surprisingly, the book became a big part of this exploration. In this work he faces the challenge of marrying the rigid qualities of metal with the delicacy of the book page. Seager Gray discovered Hayes during his 2012 exhibition at the Portland Museum of Contemporary Craft. Since that time, he has been included in exhibitions and collections at Yale University, Hartford University, the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey and the Mesa Contemporary Art Museum in Mesa, Arizona to name a few. His September exhibition in the gallery was a resounding success garnering critical review and many new collectors. His work is characterized by a combination of extreme mastery of materials and an innate understanding of form.
--------------------Andrew Hayes Ranger, 2015
steel and book pages 12 x 13 x 3 in from the collection of the Underwoods
Meg Hitchcock Brooklyn, New York
Meg Hitchcock is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and studied classical painting in Florence, Italy. Her work with sacred texts is a culmination of her lifelong interest in religion, literature and psychology. Hitchcock’s work has been shown in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, London and Berlin, and reviewed in Art in America, ArtCritical, The New Criterion, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic and The Daily Beast. Her work is included in “State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now” at Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas. How Great Thou Art In this amazing work, Hitchcock has formed the words to “How Great Thou Art”, the revered Christian hymn, letter by letter using the letters from a copy of The Upanishads, the sacred and ancient scriptures that are the basis of the Hindu religion. Each Upanishad, or lesson, takes up a theme ranging from the attainment of spiritual bliss to karma and rebirth, and collectively they are meditations on life, death and immortality. How Great Thou Art was written by Swedish preacher, Carl Boberg, when struck by the beauty and power of nature.
-----------------------Meg Hitchcock How Great Thou Art, 2015 letters cut from the Upanishads 11.75 x 8.25 in
-----------------------Charles Hobson Quarantine, 2011
handmade artist book 9 x 6.5 x 2.25 in
Charles Hobson San Francisco Bay Area
Charles Hobson is a Bay Area treasure, both for his own finely made artworks in the book medium and for his endless support for artists in the book world. Hobson uses pastel, monotypes and other printmaking variations (such as photogravure) to construct his images for books and works on paper. He is professor emeritus of the faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute and his work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, the Whitney Museum, the National Gallery, Stanford University, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Getty Center, among others. Hobson has operated Pacific Editions, a publisher of limited edition artist books since 1986. Quarantine Eavan Boland’s moving poem is a stark and severe depiction of the deep relationship between a man and a woman that transends the traditions of love poetry. The imagery and design of the book have been inspired by the bleak winter landscape of snow and frozen trees and by the practice of grafting. Quarantine was made as a limited edition accordion book in an edition of forty-two copies in 2011. The images are monotypes of bundled twigs that have been printed as high-resolution digital prints with additional pastel finishing. The text is 12 point Palatino and has been printed letterpress by JR Press, San Francisco, on BFK Rives. The box was cut on a Gunnar 3001 Cutter at Magnolia Editions, Oakland, California and the covers have been editioned by John DeMerritt in Emeryville, California. The book design and images are by Charles Hobson who assembled the book and the boxes with the assistance of Alice Shaw.
-----------------------Peter Rutledge Koch Printers The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, 2010 handmade artist book 15.5 x 10 x .2 in
Peter Rutledge Koch San Francisco Bay Area
Peter Rutledge Koch has been designing and printing books and ephemera since 1974. Beginning a career in Missoula, Montana Koch started with one platen press. He since settled in the San Francisco Bay area and following the San Francisco literary tradition of fine printing, has acquired an international reputation and several more presses. His clients and collectors range from major international research libraries to bibliophilic organizations and private collectors and publishers. Between commissions, he design, prints and publishes limited editions of ancient Greek philosophers, the musings of maverick poets, and the images of worldrenowned wood engravers and photographers. Editions Koch specializes in publishing limited edition artist books, broadsides, portfolios and text transmission objects. The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is based on a text by Debra Magpie Earling specially commissioned for this book. The photo-interventions by Koch were derived from historic archives in Montana and Washington and altered to suit the project according to his vision of evidence and memory. Debra is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation. She has been published in journals and anthologies and her novel Perma Red received the American Book Award, the Mountains and Plains Bookseller Association Award, and a Spur Award. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008. The typeface is a version of the historic Fell types presumed to be the work of Dutch punchcutter Dirck Voskens and interpreted by Jonathan Hoefler in a conscious attempt to reproduce the imperfect image that the Fell types left on paper when printed in the 18th Century. The text is printed on Twinrocker Da Vinci hand-made paper at Peter Koch Printers and bound at the press by Jonathan Gerken. The smoked buffalo rawhide cover paper was designed and hand-made by Amanda Degener especially for this edition at Cave Papers in Minneapolis, Minnesota.The spine is beaded with trade beads and small caliber cartridge cases.
-----------------------Lisa Kokin
-----------------------Lisa Kokin
Das Kapital (page 98), 2013
Das Kapital (page 226), 2013
thread, lace and linen 37.5 x 21 in
thread, lace and linen 37.5 x 21 in
Lisa Kokin
San Francisco Bay Area Lisa Kokin received her BFA and MFA from the California College of the Arts in Oakland, California. The recipient of numerous awards and grants, Kokin was most recently given the Dorothy Saxe Award from the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and the Purchase Award from the Richmond Civic Center Public Art Interior Acquisitions Project in Richmond, California. Kokin’s work has been featured in many books and articles including Art Made From Books, Chronicle Press, by Laura Heyenga. Her one person exhibition, How the West Was Sewn was at the Boise Art Museum in 2013. Kokin’s work is often a critique of the socio-political status quo imbued with a healthy dose of levity and a keen sensitivity to materials and process. Sewing and fiber-related sensibilities play a key role in much of Kokin’s work, which she attributes to growing up in a family of upholsterers. Thread, which in the past she used to construct and embellish her work has, in her most recent body of work, become the primary material. Kokin explores irony and memory in her seemingly ephemeral pieces, allowing transiency itself to be immortalized in lasting works of art. Das Kapital Kokin discovered a copy of Das Kapital in Yiddish among the books handed down to her by her immigrant grandfather. Carefully enlarging, transcribing and sewing the text of various pages on found pieces of antique linen and lace, she created what appears to be a ritual cloth. Kokin says, “I began with three random pages, enlarging and reproducing them in a sewn version in my usual labor-intensive way, like a modern-day scribe in a sweatshop of her own making. Although the pieces look as though they might be sacred text, they are not, at least not in the traditional sense. Some would say they are the opposite, given Marx’s thoughts about religion. “For me,” says Kokin, “they are a way of preserving the legacy of my ancestors and affirming the continued life of the book and of a language rescued from the brink of extinction.”
Jacqueline Rush Lee Kaneohe, Hawaii
Jacqueline Rush Lee is an Anglo-Irish sculptor from Northern Ireland who lives and works in Hawaii (USA). She has worked experimentally with the book form for over seventeen years. Her artworks are featured in blogs, magazines, books and international press. Selected bibliography include: BOOK ART: Iconic Sculptures and Installations Made from Books; PAPERCRAFT: Design and Art with Paper and PLAYING WITH BOOKS: The Art of Upcycling, Deconstructing, and Re-Imagining the Book and ART MADE FROM BOOKS, Chronicle Press, 2013 by Laura Heyenga. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Distinction in Ceramics and a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art from the University of Hawaii at Manoa 2000. She exhibits her artwork nationally and internationally and her work is in private and public collections, including the Allan Chasanoff Book Under Pressure Collection, NY, now at the Yale University Museum. Rush Lee’s work focuses on the book as object, medium and archetypal form. Working to reveal or transform the nature of a book, she is interested in the aesthetic of books as cultural objects that come with their own histories of use and meaning. By using books as her canvas or building block, Lee transforms their formal and conceptual arrangement through a variety of practices in which the physicality and thus the context of the books have been altered. She is interested in creating evocative works that are cerebral with emotional depth.
-----------------------Jacqueline Rush Lee Anthologia, 2007 - 2008 reassembled, inked, folded, sanded, burnished book
9 x 9 x 6 in from the collection of Jim and Kelly Polisson
Sandi Miot
San Francisco Bay Area Originally from Washington, D.C., Sandi Miot lived in Miami, Florida, for over 25 years before moving to Northern California. She studied Renaissance Art in Italy and France with such noted artists as Jack Beal, Sondra Freckleton, and Fred Wessel. Miot is known in the Bay Area for her work in encaustics, a medium she has mastered. Her work is included in Authentic Visual Voices: Contemporary Paper and Encaustic 2013, curated by Catherine Nash and has been shown regularly at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art. It’s Coming Undone Sandi Miot’s altered book piece, It’s Coming Undone was the first place winner of the annual altered book exhibition at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art for which Donna Seager was the jurist. The work is a commentary by the artist on the disappearance of reading from books in the world of kindles and ipads. The pages cascade down with bits of thread and wax giving it a haunting quality. The title “Through a Glass Darkly” on the beginning page, is a reminder that we do not see everything clearly at any given moment. Much is revealed later. This is a kind of “Miss Havisham” of altered books, she the abandoned bride, untouched by any groom and this the unheld book, rejected and waiting while the readers embrace the shiny screen.
-----------------------Sandi Miot It’s Coming Undone, 2015 altered book, wax
9 x 9.5 x 3 in from the collection of Bob and Colette Battaglia
Elizabeth Sher San Francisco Bay Area
Elizabeth Sher is a professor emeritus from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland, CA. Her prints and paintings have been shown at many university art museums and the San Francisco and San Jose Museums of Art with solo shows in San Francisco, and across the country. For more than twenty years, Sher has made more than two dozen films and videos, from four minutes long to feature length. Her films have been broadcast on PBS and cable channels and honored at more than 50 film festivals from Hong Kong to Edinburgh to New York. With an eclectic practice encompassing painting, drawing, film and printmaking, Sher takes her inspiration from figures like Bruce Conner, Lynn Hershman Leeson and William Kentridge - artist who pass freely between stataic and mving images, paint and pixels, traditional and new media. In her artist’s books, Sher attempts to examine various facets of perception: what is seen, the interaction of sight and memory, the construction of narrative, and how this process ultimately informs our understanding of the world. The design and packaging of each book is specifically connected to it’s content. Blog Blog contains a rice paper scroll written with bamboo pen and sepia ink. On the top of the box is the word BLOG in Hebrew. It is a daily record of the artist’s month long stay at Can Serrat residency in Barcelona, Spain in 2010 written in automatic writing on a daily basis. People have suggested that it looks like Chinese but it is only invented or automatic language which had begun spilling out of her. As she wrote each day she realized that she was, in fact, blogging. She was able to enhance and contextualize the content by placing the scroll in a plain wooden box with wooden handles and a dark blue velvet “floor,” referring to the traditional coverings of Torah scrolls. Traditionally Jews are buried in plain pine boxes, so she felt a plain wooden box would enhance this reference as well the aesthetic of the project. The references, mixed as they are, appeal to Sher’s desire as an artist to expand the possibilities of association and connection for viewers in all of her work.
-----------------------Elizabeth Sher Blog, 2013 handmade book object
24 x 12 x 9 in
-----------------------Seiko Tachibana Origin, Beginning, 2007 carborundum, letter press, inkjet print 16 x 8 x 1.5 in
Seiko Tachibana San Francisco Bay Area
Seiko Tachibana’s intaglio prints explore the sources of life, human experience and memory. Born in Osaka, Japan in 1964, Tachibana moved to the Bay Area and has been living there for more than ten years. She completed her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1995. Her distinctive, poetic imagery “balances Asian tradition with minimalist modernity.” In the U.S., Tachibana’s work can be found in the Los Angeles County Museum, the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and the Portland Art Museum. Tachibana’s books are exquisite and she has been a participant in The Art of the Book Show at Seager Gray Gallery since its inception. Origin-Beginning Origin-Beginning refers to the artist’s journey contemplating the nature and circumstances of the first living organisms that appeared on our planet. The elements such as circles and arcs that represent cells and other biological forms, and is designed to flow like a river of time that connects the various elements and implies a continuity that extends beyond the work itself into timeless infinity. A sympathetic resonance between our shared experiences as human beings and a realization of our common origin, kept alive in the respective memories of our RNA and DNA. This book was made in 2007, in Berkeley, California. The poem was printed on a letterpress and the seven intaglio images were printed by the artist. It is bound accordionstyle and set in a clamshell box. When opened, the book stands like a Japanese Byobu screen displaying all seven images in sequence. The artist wishes to thank Bobby Todd for his assistance with the English translation of the poem.
-----------------------Kazuko Watanabe The Diary of a Sparrow handmade artist book
9.25 x 7.25 x .75 in from the collection of Phyllis Taplitz
Kazuko Watanabe San Francisco Bay Area
The Diary of a Sparrow
Kazuko Watanabe is a graduate of the San Francisco Academy of Art University and has taught classes on printmaking at both the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley and the University of California, Berkeley. Her multiple color intaglio prints are meticulously crafted in a way most printmakers shy away from due to the inordinate amount of time and patience needed for this particular medium. She handles these stubborn metallic plates with such ease and subtlety that the viewer is generally unaware of the fantastic craftsmanship that is employed to generate the beautiful abstract compositions and delicate color gradations.
Kazuko Watanabe’s The Diary of a Sparrow is a very successful example of book as art that embraces idea, form and structure as a whole. This piece is the result of the translation of her grandfather’s journals whose life is chronicled from 1895 to 1963. Watanabe painstakingly translated the text from an archaic literary style of Japanese into modern Japanese and English. Kazuko discovered in the translation, the history of a simple people living within a small stretch of land, their gentle lives tossed by the upheavals of war and the encroachment of the modern world. She explains: “Wishing to convey the rich and thoughtful journey of The Diary of a Sparrow to a wider audience, I designed and made this book of text and images. The binding design enables the book to unfold and stand on a table like a small Japanese house.”
Ms. Watanabe was the recipient of The 1999 Library Fellows Award from The National Museum of Women in Arts Foundation in Washington D.C. for her bookmaking. This book, The Diary of a Sparrow was commissioned by the museum and remains one of our favorite artist books to date.
The structure of the book breaks the story into different ages, bringing her grandfather from a young boy seeing his first gramophone, through years of war and the loss of his son and finally sitting in the garden waiting for his friend with whom he was to listen to the broadcast of the young President Kennedy. His friend runs into the garden bearing the sad news of the assassination.
Many thanks to the staff of The Brooklyn Public Library