LETTER FROM THE EDITORS Welcome to the first issue of Book Art Review magazine—published by Center for Book Arts. This new print and online magazine is part of BAR’s larger initiative, developed over the last two years, to create a platform for critical writing about artists’ books. The magazine follows on past CBA publications including… Continue reading In this Issue
Tag: Essay
How Does the Artist Book?
A book in the poetry section caught my eye because I recognized its design. The white spine of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) stood out from the shelf. I knew the book well, but I picked up this copy anyway. The cover’s smoothness felt familiar, as did the book’s heft, an effect of its pages being printed on thick, matte-coated paper. After David Hammons’s iconic sculpture In the Hood (1993) greeted me on the front, my hands flipped to pages 134 and 135. I took in a short breath. Under a stanza of verse that reads, “because white men can’t / police their imagination / black people are dying,” there is a column of victims’ names: Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks.[1] I was doubly shocked. First, to see the names of recent victims appear in this book at all. Brooks had been killed by an Atlanta police officer on June 12, 2020, and the others had perished in the months before, all during what became a year of traumatic loss. But I was also shocked to see the names on this side (the right) of the facing-page layout. Their appearance here marked a terrible turn.
Artists Books
Looking back at the history of writings about artists books is an opportunity to review the literature and the issues that have defined the genre.[1] From my perch as an art librarian and now as an independent researcher, I have watched the evolution of the field from the early 1970s to today. The writings surveyed… Continue reading Artists Books