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Artists' books, as well as other visual and literary forms of art, can be a powerful medium for imagining, informing, and advancing social change. Artists’ books can inspire, connect, inform, persuade, and give shape to diverse perspectives and experiences that prompt us to image a better and more just world.

Artists’ books and zines can be created and experienced outside of the traditional publishing and distribution channels, and can be displayed outside of the traditional art venues such as galleries and museums. The “democratic” forms of the artists’ book such as zines are especially relevant as they can be produced on a photocopier and distributed widely, inexpensively, or even given away for free.

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The Artists' Book Collection at Buley Library is a special collection of approximately 125 unique and limited edition books, utilizing a wide range of binding formats, materials and processes, representing the range of contemporary practice in the field of artists' books today. Students, faculty, staff, individuals, and community groups are all welcome to visit the collection. The collection is shown by appointment.

To find Artists’ Books in the collection, search SouthernSearch or click here to browse a list of Artists' Books at Buley Library.

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Artists' Books may take many different forms, from the traditional codex, scroll, or fold book, to newer forms such as flip books, flag books, and uniquely engineered structures. Artists' Books push the boundaries of the physical and conceptual aspects of the book. In artists' books, t he concept of the book is embedded in the physical form of the book so that we engage and experience reading in new ways.

Often made in collaboration, artists' books may require the combined expertise of bookbinders, printers, papermakers, photographers, illustrators, calligraphers, etc. Traditional materials (such as wood, paper and cloth) or non-traditional materials (plexiglass, mylar, etc.) may be utilized. As technology advances, all methods of printing--from photocopier to letterpress to digital, are being explored as new forms of the book continue to evolve.

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Research Guides: Artists' Books at Buley Library: Home

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Artists' Books may take many different forms, from the traditional codex, scroll, or fold book, to newer forms such as flip books, flag books, and uniquely engineered structures. Artists' Books push the boundaries of the physical and conceptual aspects of the book.

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Artists' Books may take many different forms, from the traditional codex, scroll, or fold book, to newer forms such as flip books, flag books, and uniquely engineered structures. Artists’ Books push the boundaries of the physical and conceptual aspects of the book. In artists' books, the concept of the book is embedded in the physical form of the book so that we engage and experience reading in new ways.

Often made in collaboration, artists' books may require the combined expertise of bookbinders, printers, papermakers, photographers, illustrators, calligraphers, etc. Traditional materials (such as wood, paper and cloth) or non-traditional materials (plexiglass, mylar, etc.) may be utilized.  As technology advances, all methods of printing--from photocopier to letterpress to digital, are being explored as new forms of the book continue to evolve.

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Surviving Genocide: The 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi

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Surviving Genocide: The 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi

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Shandy Press/Barefoot Artists, 2017 Susan Viguers and Lily Yeh

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In a new book, artist and coauthor Lily Yeh brings the transformational power of art to a very dark place.
Lily Yeh FA'66 may be best known for cofounding the Village of Arts and Humanities [ "Lily Yeh's Art of Transformation," Jul|Aug 2000], which since 1986 has renewed dozens of abandoned lots in North Philadelphia through an enterprising mix of neighborhood activism and public art. Trained in classical Chinese landscape painting, the Taiwanese-born Yeh spent nearly two decades at the Village transforming blight into beauty, a stint that brought her into the realm of large-scale place-making. Today she laughingly refers to that project as her "postdoc." Since leaving her position as executive director in 2004, she's found herself on a much more ambitious global stage.

"The Village taught me that forgotten ground can provide the nutrients for projects to unfold just as a tree of life does," she says. More so than ever, her current work has a social and humanitarian bent, one that in accordance with Taoist tenets seeks to nurture into existence a "dustless" world, free of such pollutants as greed, selfishness, and violence, in areas that have been poisoned by them, emotionally, mentally, or physically. In 2002, driven by a belief that the "darkest places are most ready for transformation," Yeh established Barefoot Artists, which has used the arts as a community-building and economic development tool in such troubled spots as Haiti, parts of India, and, most extensively, Rwanda.

In Surviving Genocide: The 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi (Shandy Press/Barefoot Artists, 2017), she and coauthor Susan Viguers combine Yeh's artwork, photographs, and the words of the villagers of Rugerero in western Rwanda to document the building of a new memorial designed by Yeh. The effort was one of many in the area for Yeh, who estimates that she's made about 10 trips there. Bringing together volunteers and villagers, Barefoot Artists has embarked on initiatives ranging from art projects to infrastructure programs aimed at strengthening the country's recovery after it was torn apart by the 1994 genocide.

"I return when I can reap the most benefits and have the most impact," Yeh says. "I have ideas all of the time, but I have to wait for the tree to blossom and the seeds to be set free."

In assembling and editing the book, Viguers-a conceptual editor and book artist who has known Yeh since their teaching days at Philadelphia's University of the Arts-culled through piles of material including videotapes, photos, and artwork. "Lily gathered and kept so much from these trips," Viguers says. "We looked at many approaches, but in the end it was the stories of two people that particularly haunted her. "

Uwicyeza Nzayisenga Angel is introduced in the book as "perhaps the most withdrawn, the quietest" of the 12 young women participating in a storytelling and drawing workshop that Yeh led. Viguers' text relays how Yeh gradually comes to recognize the "terror behind Angel's silence" after someone translates the text that Angel has scrawled next to the images. "This is a friend I was running away with," Angel writes in describing one of her stick figure drawings. "They killed him and threw his body in the water."

When Yeh returns a few years later to record an oral history, a weeping Angel at last breaks down and talks about the murders of her grandfather, parents, and brother. Near the end, with the young woman determined to locate her parents' bodies so she can give them a proper burial, Viguers inserts a brilliantly hued fauvist painting by Yeh, one of three that appear in the book. It's a nighttime image of machete-wielding men, bodies sprawled on the grass, and in one corner what appears to be a caravan of refugees carrying their belongings aloft.

Angel's heart-wrenching story is followed by that of Musabyimana John Peter Sammy. "There was no one to comfort us," he writes in the bundle of scribbled notes he gives to Yeh. "Everyone wanted to kill us."

As his tale unfolds, the authors reveal that he and Angel are now married. "We met through our problems," the text reads. "Now we have two children ... After five years I got a job [and] my wife got a benefactor, Mama Lily, who helped her learn sewing. After the training, she gave her a sewing machine. She also gave us a water tank of 1,000 litres [and] started a micro-loan program. I was given a loan out of it."

The simple language and spare line drawings interspersed through the narratives-Yeh's interpretations of the stick figures drawn by the women in her workshops-might lead one to wonder if the book is intended for young readers. "This combination of text and colorful images is something that adults aren't used to," concedes Viguers. "But obviously this is very dark material, given beauty and life-it's not for children."

Angel and Sammy's stories are bracketed by two photo essays. The first offers some context for the war and explores the community's participation in building the new memorial. The second covers the dedication of that memorial, which was unveiled in April 2007 in time for the nation's national day of mourning.

Yeh's installation bears the trademarks of her Village work-mosaic art, Tree of Life imagery, and painted stucco walls-and replaces the rough-hewn concrete and timber structure that had served as an unmarked and unsatisfactory mass gravesite. "I was moved by the suffering of the people; that's all," Yeh says. "I didn't think about good and evil but about encouraging the transformation of a community."

For Yeh, art is ultimately not just for the viewer but for the doer-and that includes herself.

"I want to experience fulfillment in my own life," she says. "I'm always looking to find a place where I can go into the depths of human life and, through working together, change things. I go to places where this alchemy of turning lead into gold can happen, where there's enough sunlight for the roots to flourish and the tree to grow."
-JoAnn Greco

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In a new book, artist and coauthor Lily Yeh brings the transformational power of art to a very dark place. Lily Yeh FA'66 may be best known for cofounding the Village of Arts and Humanities [ "Lily Yeh's Art of Transformation," Jul|Aug 2000], which since 1986 has renewed dozens of abandoned lots in North Philadelphia through an enterprising mix of neighborhood activism and public art.

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Bonnie Thompson Norman

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"Mideast Kalidescope" by Louise Neaderland

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"Mideast Kalidescope" by Louise Neaderland

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Mideast Kalidescope: "35 card stock pages of the same image from the ill fated invasion of Lebanon by the Israeli army. With a drilled hole at each corner and a removable fastener which can be inserted in any one of the four Corners, the cards can be spread open (right or left) to form eight different configurations of image and text. The text is Menachim Begin's 'Happy is the nation whose warrior sons these are.'"

ARTICLE: WOMEN ARTISTS NEWS: "Artist in the Age of the Copy Machine"

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Link to Articles in Ebsco Databases

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Flying Fish Press
Interviews, video, and more:

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Quotations by Rosa Parks; Printing by Amos Paul Kennedy (from LOC)

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Scripps College Press
"...architecture, like books, is a delicate balancing act between stability and motion, interior and exterior, aesthetic values and structural practicalities. Books, like buildings, are fundamentally inhabited spaces. They are incomplete without human interaction. “I think with my hands,” states Maya Lin, noted architect, in her book Boundaries. The students developed structural imagery using only paper by thinking with their hands. The first portals were built of post and lintel construction. A curved arch is more difficult: the keystone is needed at the apex to lock the other pieces into position. Building a book is similarly difficult feat.

This book was built by ten women paper architects. Their tools were knives and bone folders, and four Vandercook printing presses."

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A Review

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Felling the Mammoth Tree of Calaveras County (2011) "During the nineteenth century, California seemed like the promised land, a place where luck and gold ran in rivers. The news that humongous trees were growing in the Sierra Nevada mountains seemed like a myth, and the story was met with skepticism - assumed to be part of the hyperbole that surrounded the Gold Rush. The insistence that they were real, and enormous beyond anyone's experience, created a flurry of interest. Skeptics in the East demanded proof - tangible evidence. So, an enterprising soul decided to cut down the biggest Sequoia he could find. It happened to be a tree that Augustus T. Dowd first saw in 1852 in the Calaveras grove. Who is surprised that the first giant tree encountered by a European settler was destroyed in order to prove that it existed?."

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Clarissa Sligh

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Letterpress Printer:
Links to articles in Ebsco Databases

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Read Journal Articles about the book artist, Clarissa Sligh

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by Cliff Meador
Clifton Meador, JAB 12: "Long Slow March weaves together multiple narratives focused on a theme: the African-Americans' struggle for civil rights. The Selma march (itself a narrative structure) forms the backbone of the book; the limbs of the book (primary source texts and photomontage of slavery and the civil rights struggle) hang on either side of it. The first section is a typographic lift of an old form, the polyglot bible. Polyglot bibles presented an original text in its original language, with commentary in translated languages surrounding it. This form seemed suitable for combing slave narratives with slave owners' rationalizations for slavery, since this typographic form preserves the autonomy of the texts while suggesting that the reader consider the texts together."

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Philip Zimmermann (2009)

"Sanctus Sonorensis is a book of border ‘beatitudes’. This work comments on the complicated attitudes of Americans on illegal immigration from Mexico. The cover shows a photograph of the area of Southern Arizona which is the most active in terms of migration across the Sonoran desert, and where thousands have lost their lives in the deadly desert heat. ..."
YouTube

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Sanctus Sonorensis is a book of border 'beatitudes'. This work comments on the complicated attitudes of Americans on illegal immigration from Mexico. The cover shows a photograph of the area of Southern Arizona which is the most active in terms of migration across the Sonoran desert, and where thousands have lost their lives in the deadly desert heat. The interior pages show the progression of a typical high-desert day from dawn to sunset, mimicking the sky above an immigrant during a day's desert passage, and accompanied by a single line of text on each two-page spread.

I had the germ of an idea for the book, and did some little preliminary sketches for it, during my sabbatical in 2003-2004. I was in a year-long residency at the Border Art Residency in La Union, New Mexico. I was taking a lot of photos of the incredible skies in New Mexico and Arizona while there, and they made their way into a lot of the work that I made during my year there. Living right on the border I was also very aware of the crossing of illegal Mexican immigrants, especially in a section of the Sonoran desert near Why and Ajo Arizona which I visited several times. In December of 2004, I was driving back into the United States from Mexico through the Lukeville border crossing. As I was traveling through the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument just inside Arizona, I was stopped for a couple of hours by several groups of uniformed men. Each group consisted of a large number of heavily armed Border Patrol agents on some sort of special operations. The agents eventually lead out of the desert scrub a large number of illegal immigrants who had been hiding in the mesquite and cactus as they attempted to head north through the park. They clearly weren't drug smugglers. They looked too poor and were unarmed. They made for a rather moving and pathetic sight, and looked disheveled and dejected. I had never seen an operation like this up close and it was rather upsetting, and got me thinking about the life these people were trying to make for themselves and the efforts that we in the United States make to prevent them from coming here. Sanctus Sonorensis was a work that eventually came out of this experience.

The starkness of our immigration law in regards to undocumented workers was made evident again when I almost got my camera confiscated by the Border Patrol while I was taking photos of several busloads of undocumented Mexican workers being transported by agents back across the border into Mexico in Agua Prieta. The disparity between the unhappy apprehended Mexicans being returned back across the border and the reality of the fact that there are 460,000 undocumented Mexican workers in Arizona alone, seemed glaring. Most of them pay taxes while they are here and usually fill unpleasant and difficult jobs that most Americans will not take.

During the summer of 2006 I did a one month residency at Light Work at Syracuse University in New York State, and while there I completed two books that I had started work on earlier, Shelter and a finished inkjet version of Sanctus Sonorensis. Like some other books I have done, I planned on having two different editions, one inkjet and the other either offset or HP Indigo. After I printed about 5 or 6 copies of Sanctus on my Epson printer I realized that it was not feasible. Each book took almost $50 of archival pigmented inkjet ink and paper and had the familiar inkjet problem of fragile, easily scuffed, pages.

I was determined to raise the money to have it printed offset, which is my preferred printing medium. I had pitched the idea to Light Work since they occasionally will print a monograph of one of the artists' that do a residency there. However it was a bit too large a book project for them to take on. After my move out here to teach at the University of Arizona in 2008, I tried getting a couple of grants to help with production costs, including one from the Arizona Council on the Arts. Unlike New York's NYFA though, I found out that they do not give money to help with publication printing costs, not realizing that for artists' book makers, this is like getting money for paints or film or whatever.

I decided to fund the project myself, though it was a real financial stretch. I knew that I wanted it to be a board book, a form that has no conventional sewn gutter since the spreads are printed as one sheet, using the paper as the folding hinge. This is terrific for images that cross the pages like the skyscapes I used. It seemed like the prefect solution would have been to have it printed in either the United States or Mexico in print shops that had Mexican employees. However, only printers in Asia had the experience to make a board book of this size. My sales rep, Frances Harkness, at C&C Offset Printing in New York (an "off-shore" Chinese printing company with a branch in NYC) had been a student of mine many years ago at Purchase College, SUNY. She knows artists' books and, like many artists' book-makers, I like to push the physical structures of the book form, and she helped with some suggestions as far as production. C&C is probably one of the most experienced board-book printers in the world, a funny niche production area for printing. They printed over 100,000 copies of Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers, another large board-book.

I wanted to really try to push the missal-breviary-beatitude idea by making it look like a sort of very high tech version of those Catholic book forms. I added gilded edges, the rounded corners and the gold-foil stamped titles to have a visual association with a religious book like a breviary or missal. The text is meant to be read out loud as if by priest or an acolyte standing in front of a congregation (and maybe even repeated back by their flock), and I wanted the book to have the right kind of look (or bling) for that task. This was a big improvement I think over the pigmented inkjet version that I had completed in 2006. I grew up in a very Catholic family and although I personally rejected Catholicism in my early teens, I think it is deeply burnt into my psyche.

The use of the cloud images, which follow the progression of a day from dawn to nightfall, was meant to visually represent the sky overhead as the immigrants trudge through a typical hot desert day. The first rays of light of day continue into hot mid-morning, to an early afternoon thunder storm followed by clearing skies and sunset. The beauty of the southwestern skies belie the dangers from the ambient heat and lack of available water.

I have always liked repeated -or almost chanted- texts. I used a similar device in my 1993 book High Tension, and admired it whenever I saw it used by writers that like Vladimir Nabokov and others. It seemed perfect for this book since I did feel it was a sort of meditation. There is a long history of repetitive chants in prayer and meditative tracts, from Buddhist mantras, to Christianity to Hinduism and on and on through most spiritual practices. Ritualized language can be an effort to make slow change through repetition. They can be both an effort to change and a way to deal with the fact that change may not come. Like many others, I am personally interested in art practices and work that initiates slow, deep change in the viewers/participants. I try not to create works that are basically "one-liners."

I also find that the practice of making artists' books, for me, is one where production takes place best over long periods of time with little adjustments and repeated small changes in all aspects of the work, including the text and the images. I think this is why most of what I think are my best books coalesce over a long evolution where they percolate and simmer and develop. I am not a very prolific or fast book maker for that reason.

Sanctus Sonorensis is 90 pages, 10.75"x8.25"x1.5", self-covering board book. ISBN: 978-0-9841980-1-6. Four-color offset lithography printed book was created as a series of two-page board-book spreads that minimize the visual distraction of a 'gutter' on the panoramic view of each skyscape. The edges of the book are rounded and gilded in the fashion of religious breviaries or missals. There is a gold-foiled title on the cover and spine. The book was printed and bound in China in an edition of 1000. All books are signed. $50 USD, plus applicable shipping charges.

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Sanctus Sonorensis is a book of border 'beatitudes'. This work comments on the complicated attitudes of Americans on illegal immigration from Mexico. The cover shows a photograph of the area of Southern Arizona which is the most active in terms of migration across the Sonoran desert, and where thousands have lost their lives in the deadly desert heat.

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http://www.tallerlenateros.com/
See Articles and Reviews

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By DINITIA SMITH Take this sweet dew from the earth,I want him to come with flowers in his heart.Go to sleep little baby, go to sleep.Let 13 Devil Women, 13 Goddesses of Death, The Poetic Hearts of Mayan Women Writ Large

Take this honey.

With all his heart,

Your daddy's drunk

snuff out his name.

The first edition of "Incantations," Tzotzil translated into Spanish, was in 1998.

So far, 1,850 volumes of the English edition are printed. The first 200 numbered copies cost $200 each, and half have sold, Ms. Past said. Another 1,650 are being bound, and will sell for $100.

The workshop also publishes a literary magazine, La Jнcara (The Gourd), which, Ms. Past said, has been called "the most beautiful magazine in Mexico." The magazine is mainly in Spanish, but has an English section and always contains literature in Amerindian languages.

In 2002 the collective published "Mayan Hearts," two books of Tzotzil metaphors translated by Mr. Laughlin into Spanish and English. That book's thick black cover is made of agave fibers with a heart cut out to reveal red endpaper.

"I am in love/ My heart aches," one line reads.
"You perfume my heart/ you give me pleasure," says another.

Let a wind that starts in his head, in his heart,
blow his candle out.
Let him die on the road.
Let him be run over by a car.
By a bicycle.
Break his leg.
If he dies, I'm going to be laughing.
Tonik Nibak has an angry piece, "Hex to Kill the Unfaithful Man":

and if he hits me,
I'm running to the woods.
Another, by Petra Tzon Te' Vitz , is "Lullaby":

I want him to talk to my body.
I want his blood to ache for me
when he sees me on the way to the market.

One reason "Incantations" took so long to create, said Ms. Past, who became a Mexican citizen in 1985 and has published 10 books in Mexico, is that some incantations last for days. She transcribed hundreds of hours of tape, from which she culled essential verses. In fabricating "Incantations," the women soaked recycled paper with palm fronds, making a pulp in a blender, dyeing it black with soot and campeachy wood. Mayan men helped with the offset printing.

The poems in "Incantations" incorporate ancient metaphors with the harshly contemporary. One poem, by Xpetra Ernбndes, is "Witchcraft for Attracting a Man":

It will help you on your way.
It will give you strength on your path.
The Mayan women of the Chiapas highlands in southern Mexico are extremely poor, and many, especially the older women, are illiterate. The poorest own only a few blankets, articles of clothing and utensils. But what they do have is poetry, much to the surprise of Бmbar Past, an American-born Mexican poet who first encountered the Mayan women 30 years ago.

Ms. Past, 55, came to Chiapas in 1973 as a self-described hippie and renegade housewife, escaping an unhappy marriage. She stayed with some Mayan women and taught herself Tzotzil, one of the local Mayan languages.

As she listened to the women, Ms. Past said she realized that they sometimes spoke in poetry, in couplets and in gleaming metaphors.

"I was so deeply moved hearing in these mud huts these breathtakingly beautiful verses, sometimes echoing verses and phrases spoken or written 500 years ago," she said. Some words resembled ones in the Popol Vuh, the Mayan creation story.
"They live with no comfort," Ms. Past said during a visit to New York in April. "Yet poetry is an essential part of their daily life."

Now after 30 years' work, 150 Mayan women from Taller Leсateros (Woodlanders' Workshop), a paper- and book-making collective founded by Ms. Past in 1975 in the Chiapas city San Cristуbal de las Casas, have produced what may be the first book of Mayan women's poetry created almost entirely by them, and translated into English.

The book, "Incantations," is a weirdly beautiful volume made from 295 pages of recycled and handmade paper with silk-screened illustrations. The cover is a three-dimensional rendering of the face of Kaxail, Mayan goddess of the wilderness, in recycled cardboard mixed with corn silk and coffee. Her eyes are excised and she stares out with an eerie power. (It was designed by Gitte Daehlin, a Norwegian artist living in the nearby state of Oaxaca.)

"Incantations" contains spells and hymns tape-recorded by the women and by Ms. Past, who transcribed and translated them from Tzotzil into Spanish and English. As members of a collective, the women share labor and profits.

Robert M. Laughlin, a curator of Mesoamerican and Caribbean ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution who has published two Tzotzil dictionaries, said of "Incantations": "There is very little publication about Mayan women's lives in their own language, and this gives a whole view of the culture that's been unknown before."(Mayan men in Chiapas also incorporate poetry into some of their formal and religious discourse, but that group has been well studied, Mr. Laughlin said.)

The Olmec and the Maya were among the first literate societies in the Western Hemisphere. Evidence of Mayan writing goes back to the first century A.D. Murals and ceramics from the height of Mayan civilization, A.D. 600 to 900, depict male scribes holding pens and brushes, making "Incantations" even more significant. There are four surviving Mayan codices, bark-paper books that unfold like accordions, dating from the Spanish conquest in the early 16th century. Spanish bishops ordered other books burned.

Ms. Past first became interested in Mayan weaving, which is often highly symbolic, and in traditional natural dyes. She became aware of the women's poetry in 1975, when an epidemic swept through Magdalenas village, close to where she lived. She said that she went to San Cristуbal, the nearest large city, for help, but no doctors came. Many children died, she said.

In the cemetery, she said, she saw a woman carrying her dead baby lying on a board and wrapped in a shawl for burial. The mother offered her dead child a last sip of Coca-Cola and uttered a prayer, which Ms. Past still remembers:

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By DINITIA SMITH Take this sweet dew from the earth,I want him to come with flowers in his heart.Go to sleep little baby, go to sleep.Let 13 Devil Women, 13 Goddesses of Death, The Poetic Hearts of Mayan Women Writ Large Take this honey. With all his heart, Your daddy's drunk snuff out his name.

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from Printed Matter

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inc. is the world's largest non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of publications made by artists - artists' books or artists' publications. founded as a for-profit alternative arts space in 1976 by artists and artworkers

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printed matter reincorporated in 1978 to become the independent non-profit organization that it is today. originally situated in tribeca

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printed matter moved to soho in 1989 where for twelve years the book displays and artists¹ projects in the large storefront windows contributed to the artistic and intellectual vibrancy of the neighborhood. in february 2001 printed matter relocated to its current space in chelsea

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where it continues to foreground the book as an alternative venue for artists¹ projects and ideas. recognized for years as an essential voice in the increasingly diversified art world conversations and debates

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printed matter is dedicated to the examination and interrogation of the changing role of artists¹ publications in the landscape of contemporary art.

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Printed Matter, Inc. is an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in 1976 by artists and art workers with the mission to foster the appreciation, dissemination, and understanding of artists' books and other artists' publications.

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Bonnie Thompson Norman
Windowpane Press

"For me, voting is a fundamental and cherished expression of patriotism and democracy. By casting my vote, I am connected to the principals of Government of the People, by the People and for the People....Ballot BOX, a literal and symbolic representation of a right which should be available to all Americans but which is being threatened and eroded, contains a riddle and quotes from historical and literary figures on the subject of voting. Most importantly, it includes general information on voter eligibility and registering to vote. I hope Ballot BOX will both inform and inspire people to do just that."

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Transforming Hate and It Wasn't Little Rock

“It Wasn’t Little Rock” was the response that black students in Arlington, Virginia often gave when asked about their experiences in the newly racially desegregated public schools of the 1960s. It was short-hand for we might have problems but we are not being subjected to the unspeakable hatred that was showered on black students when they integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. White students spat on, beat up, yelled insults, destroyed black student lockers, threw flaming paper wads at them in the bathrooms, and even threw lighted sticks of dynamite at and sprayed acid in the eyes of a female black student. To Arlington students, Central High in Little Rock provided the standard for what they might face when integrating their county’s formerly all white schools.

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Press Release

8 x 8″; 108 pages including covers. Perfect bound softcover. Four-color offset lithography. Illustrated paper wrappers with flaps. Housed in foldout die-cut box with gold foil origami crane inserted into cover slot.

Excerpt from the foreword:
I am a black woman. I am an artist. For many years I have been creating work to bring issues of social justice into the public discourse. This book evolved from a project for which I folded origami cranes from pages of white supremacist books for the exhibition, Speaking Volumes: Transforming Hate. It was organized by the Montana Human Rights Network and the Holter Art Museum in Helena, Montana and opened in 2008.

In Transforming Hate: An Artist's Book, I was trying to look at what it was like for me to turn the hateful words of the white supremacist books into a beautiful art object. That exploration helped me understand more fully the many levels of oppression and violence at the intersections of race, gender, class and sexual orientation. Why do we keep each other from being who we really are? How can we begin to talk about what separates us?

In our roles, as voyeur and as participant, we make daily decisions about who gets to have rights and who is marginalized in our society. I ask us to question our perceptions about history, reality, identity and voice. Do we have the courage to live differently?

A few randomly selected book pages are shown below

Edition numbered signed copies of Transforming Hate: An Artist's Book may be purchased for $50.00 from:
Vicky & Bill Stewart
Vamp & Tramp, Booksellers, LLC
E-mail : mail@vampandtramp.com
Telephone : (205) 824-2300
Also available on Amazon.
View a list of institutions that include Transforming Hate: An Artist's Book in their holdings.
Asheville Art Museum Announces Artists Included in Appalachia Now! Exhibition

ASHEVILLE-The Asheville Art Museum is thrilled to announce the 50 artists whose work has been selected for the Museum's inaugural contemporary exhibition, Appalachia Now! An Interdisciplinary Survey of Contemporary Art in Southern Appalachia, to be held in its expanded and renovated facility opening in the spring of 2019. Billed as a "contemporary story of Appalachia," the exhibition is comprised of works in a variety of media including dance, film, new media, painting, poetry, and sculpture. Appalachia Now! will highlight the following artists, who are living and working in the region.

More show info can be found at ashevilleart.org

About Clarissa

Clarissa Sligh (b. 1939) makes photographic series, artists' books and text-based installations to explore constructions of history, identities, transformation and change. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues including the Museum of Modern Art New York, the George Eastman House Rochester, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. Sligh lives and works in Asheville, North Carolina. See biography for additional information.

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Press Release 8 x 8″; 108 pages including covers. Perfect bound softcover. Four-color offset lithography. Illustrated paper wrappers with flaps. Housed in foldout die-cut box with gold foil origami crane inserted into cover slot. Excerpt from the foreword: I am a black woman. I am an artist.

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10 leaves : chiefly color ill.. Paper fan in paper sleeve. Sleeve has a red tassle looped and tied from the base. Title from sleeve.

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Nava Atlas

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This proposed exhibit, titled Unwedding: Why You Can't Get Married is an outgrowth of a limited edition artist's book by Nava Atlas (similarly titled Why You Can't Get Married: An Unwedding Album). The work in this series compares the language that opposed interracial marriage in earlier generations, with the language that opposed same-sex marriage in more recent times, especially when it was being argued in congress and before the courts.

The American Congress has had a long history of legislating bias, working hand in hand with judiciaries that have upheld laws designed to discriminate. Today, there are stark reminders of just how easily individual freedoms can erode with full cooperation of the law, as we approach the 50th anniversary of Loving v Virginia in May of 2017.

For the full EPK of this proposed exhibition, go to Unwedding proposal 2-22.

Above: Two interior details from Why You Can't Get Married: An Unwedding Album, the limited edition artist's book from where this proposed exhibit has emerged.

The unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision that in 1967 legalized interracial marriage in all fifty states echoes into the present, particularly in the 2013 ruling to strike down DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act), and the 2015 case that legalized same-sex marriage.

This and the other "gallery" images on this page were created digitally to approximate what this exhibit might look like. The text and imagery would be enlarged from the pages, with some changes and modifications. There will be a mix of materials in the installation - the central images will become digital tapestries; the state code comparisons would be printed on plates; and the side pieces might be printed either on canvas or paper.

The very arguments used to oppose interracial marriage in generations were blatantly, if inadvertently, recycled for use against same-sex marriage. The arguments used against both types of unions are eerily similar, drawing upon famil- iar tropes - it will lead down the slippery slope to polyga- my, the children of these unions are victims, it's unnatural, it will spread disease, and so on.

A possible add-on to the work shown in this proposal might look at the backlash that resulted from the 2015 Obergefell decision targeting LGBT individuals, especially in certain parts of the country. The tendency toward legislating bias in the name of "religious freedom" is again on the rise.

As Mildred Loving stated on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision: "Government has no business imposing some people's ... beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people's civil rights." Relatively few people today oppose interracial marriage, but by holding up an injustice of the not-so-distant past as a mirror to its present-day counterpart, this exhibit argues that legally sanctioned bias has no place in contemporary culture.

As the 50th anniversary of Loving v Virginia comes and goes, its significance continues to inform the present and comments on the role of government and the judiciary in the most intimate aspects of its citizens' lives.

To learn more or book this exhibition, contact me.

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This proposed exhibit, titled Unwedding: Why You Can't Get Married is an outgrowth of a limited edition artist's book by Nava Atlas (similarly titled Why You Can't Get Married: An Unwedding Album ).

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Foolscap Press
"The story originally written (by Ursula LeGuin) in 1974, is narrated by an oak tree. This tree, is rooted along a road and observes the human creatures as they travel on foot, and then, years later by buggies, then by automobiles, faster and faster. In the beginning, the tree can easily keep up ..."

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- Out of Print -

Printed by six students using handset metal and wood type, this fish bone book examines identity and politics in the United States during one of the most contentious presidential elections in U.S. history.

Divisive and Diverse explores identity and politics through a gender lens during one of the most contentious presidential elections in United States history. A Spotify playlist accompanies the physical copy of the book. Quotes in the book were gathered from a student-generated survey about identity and the political climate. Responses came from members of the Claremont University Consortium, the general public, and family and friends.

The book was letterpress printed with linoleum cuts on Rives lightweight paper and is housed in a container made of a Langdell handmade paper. Metal type including Erhardt, Gill Sans, Fournier, Univers, and wood type were handset to create a timeline, colophon, list of student names, a candid letter to the reader from students, and quotes from the survey responses. The size is 6.25 inches square.

Collections

A.K. Smiley Library

Athenaeum Arts & Music Library

Baylor University

Bibliotheca Librorum apud Artificem (Australia)

Brigham Young University

California Polytechnic State University

California State Library

Chapman University

Columbia University

Grand Valley State University

Maryland Institute College of Art

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Mills College

Oberlin College

Occidental College

Plymouth State University

Purdue University

Rhode Island School of Design

Rochester Institute of Technology

Scripps College

Southern Connecticut State University

St. Lawrence University

Trinity College

University of California, San Diego

University of California, Santa Barbara

University of California, Los Angeles

University of California, Riverside

University of California, Santa Cruz

University of Central Florida

University of Louisville

University of Nevada, Reno

University of Utah

University of Wisconsin, Madison

Virginia Tech

Wesleyan University

Western Michigan University

Yale University

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Divisive & Diverse: A Voting Story | Scripps College in Claremont, California

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Founded in 1926 in Claremont, California, Scripps College offers a rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum, a robust intellectual community, a commitment to diversity and inclusion, and a rich residential experience designed to shape the next generation of women leaders. Explore all that Scripps has to offer today!