Off the Shelf
Off the Shelf: Contemporary Book Arts in Colorado
Gregory Allicar Museum of Art at Colorado State University
1400 Remington Street, Fort Collins, CO 80524
August 26-December 18, 2022
Admission: free
Review by Mary Grace (MG) Bernard
Books have a long history of capturing our imaginations. From Homer’s Odyssey (c. 800 BCE) to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga (2005-2008), and everything in between, books have inspired our world, our actions, and our creativity. They are intimate objects we can interact with of our own volition. If we want to relax or find an escape from our everyday lives, we can pick up a book and immerse ourselves in another dimension. Books have a dynamism as cultural creations that defy space and time. With this in mind, curators Anna Bernhard and Johnny Plastini have organized an exhibition featuring artists that challenge our conceptual framework of the book and its contents.
An installation view of Off the Shelf: Contemporary Book Arts in Colorado at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Image by Mary Grace Bernard.
Off the Shelf: Contemporary Book Arts in Colorado, presented at Colorado State University’s Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, celebrates artists’ fascination with books as art objects and, in particular, their conception of artist books. Artist books emerge when the mediums of binding, illustrating, painting, papermaking, printing, sculpting, and writing are combined and made multiple. Unlike catalogue raisonnés, manuscripts, or sketch books, an artist book is an artwork that references a codex’s configuration through its shape or merely the use of text. The forms they take vary from zines to sculptures, all with the intention of being handled by the viewer.
A view of the Off the Shelf exhibition with Aaron Cohick’s Orpheus the stutterer: a poetics of silence in the center. Image by Mary Grace Bernard.
Off the Shelf is the first exhibition of its kind devoted to the Book Art Movement at Colorado State University. Since the 1970s, art spaces, exhibitions, and schools devoted to book arts have opened across the United States. For example, the Center for Book Arts in New York was founded in 1974 and the San Francisco Center for the Book was established in 1996. In 1994, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented an exhibition on artist books titled A Century of Artist Books; however, rather than exhibiting the books as artworks themselves, the exhibition presented them as compilations containing artworks, such as sketch books and illustrated manuscripts. [1]
An installation view of Off the Shelf: Contemporary Book Arts in Colorado. Image by Mary Grace Bernard.
In my conversation with Anna Bernhard, the curator stated that book arts have typically been left out of the “greater art world” and art history discourses due to the “craft-like” and interdisciplinary nature of artist books. She continued, “While artist books are occasionally exhibited, they are typically shown in conjunction with artists’ other works as part of a retrospective rather than the expressive form being the curatorial focus.” [2]
Artist books have a history originating in the eighteenth century with William Blake’s Song of Innocence and of Experience (1789). However, the Book Art Movement arose in the 1950s and 60s as publications that were unintended for mass reproduction and were separate from commercial publishers and printers, including conceptual works such as Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit (1964). [3]
Alicia Bailey, Lipstips, 2001, scroll type book with slit pages made of laser printed sumi paper coated with pigment and paste and bound into lipstick tube; box: fabric covered cardboard, coated with wax and pigment, with inside mirror and snap closure, 3.5 x 1 x .75 inches (closed). Image by Mary Grace Bernard.
In Off the Shelf, curators Bernhard and Plastini chose to include artist books in the form of broadsides, interactive sculptures, personal stories, and political zines made from biological specimens, collagraphs, fabric, handmade paper, letterpress, mica, photographs, poems, screen prints, writings, and the list goes on. One such work is Alicia Bailey’s Lipstips (2001), an artist book in the shape of a tube of lipstick contained in a lipstick case. To read the work, the viewer must open the lipstick case, remove the lipstick topper, and twist the lipstick open to reveal the narrative within the blooming paper petals.
An interior view of Sammy Seung-min Lee’s Mammorial, 2017, Hanji, handmade papers, CD with breast pump sound, silicone breasts, resin, and bra straps, 2 x 6.75 x 12.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Another example is Sammy Lee’s 2017 artist book Mammorial, which narrates the artist’s personal experience with breast feeding. To replicate breast tissue’s thinning process during breast feeding, Lee treated and redefined Korean-made Hanji paper to create the book’s cover so that it looks and feels like dry, cracking skin that has lost its elasticity. Within the book, the artist included images of her mammograms and a CD of “breast pump chanting”—an auditory illusion experienced by breastfeeding mothers who are exhausted. [4] According to Lee, artist books are amazing objects to produce because they are “portals” that consume viewers in an intimate embrace. In other words, unlike large-scale works, artist books are experienced on a personal level, usually by one person at a time.
Aaron Cohick’s CURB, 2019, letterpress printed text from photopolymer plates and rubbings made directly from sidewalks and curbs, 12.5 x 8 inches (closed), 12.5 inches x 13 feet (fully extended). Image courtesy of the artist.
Similarly, artist Aaron Cohick describes artist books as “spacetime structures” that generate collaboration and community. For CURB, Cohick’s 2019 book, the artist collaborated with poet Divya Victor and Colorado College students to create a book of poems and images documenting the public assaults and murders of South Asian Americans and South Asian immigrants in the United States. [5] CURB is a ninety-page, double-sided, accordion book with sewn-in sections. In addition to the poems by Victor, the book is comprised of rubbings made by hammering damp sheets of paper with a brush onto the sidewalks and curbs where the assaults occurred and then rolling them with screen printing ink. [6]
Aaron Cohick, CURB, 2019, letterpress printed text from photopolymer plates and rubbings made directly from sidewalks and curbs, 12.5 x 8 inches (closed), 12.5 x 13 inches (fully extended). Image by Mary Grace Bernard.
As the curatorial statement explains, “The diversity of works represented in [Off the Shelf] demonstrate the breadth and depth of the book as a potent artistic device.” [7] Bailey, Lee, and Cohick’s books, in addition to the rest of the complex and highly detailed works presented in the exhibition, affirm artist books to be dynamic art objects that combine and manipulate a multitude of mediums resulting in fine artworks that are relational, spatial, and structural. The Gregory Allicar Museum decided to exhibit all the artworks on pedestals protected by plexiglass bonnets. While this wasn’t the curators’ original vision for exhibiting the works, the final presentation of the artist books attests to their exceptional quality, material research, and rarity. Experience the books for yourself through December 18, 2022.
Mary Grace Bernard (MG, she/her) is a transmedia and performance artist, educator, advocate, and crip witch. Her practice finds itself at the intersection of performance art, transmedia installation art, art scholarship, art writing, curation, and activism.
[1] The Modern Museum of Art, “A Century of Artist Books (October 23, 1994-January 24, 1995),” https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/439, accessed September 23, 2022.
[2] Interview with Anna Bernhard, September 21, 2022.
[3] ARTDEX, “The World of Artist Books,” https://www.artdex.com/the-world-of-artist-books/, accessed September 23, 2022.
[4] Christine Cooper-Rompato, “The Talking Breast Pump,” Western Folklore 72, no. 2 (Spring 2013), p. 181, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24551665, accessed September 23, 2022.
[5] Divya Victor, “Curb: An Artist’s Book,” Divya Victor (personal website), https://divyavictor.com/2019/08/29/curb-an-artists-book/, accessed September 23, 2022.
[6] Aaron Cochick, “CURB,” The Press at Colorado College, https://www.thepressatcoloradocollege.org/curb, accessed September 23, 2022.
[7] Anna Bernhard and Johnny Plastini, Off the Shelf: Contemporary Book Arts in Colorado Curatorial Statement, Gregory Allicar Museum of Art at Colorado State University, https://artmuseum.colostate.edu/media-press/media-toolkits/off-the-shelf-toolkit/off-the-shelf-videos/, accessed September 23, 2022.
