Books on Books: The Book as Art

My Mom lives outside Washington DC, and two years ago one of my visits coincided with an exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) called The Book as Art: 20 Years of Artists’ Books From NMWA. It was a large and very well displayed show with a great deal of variety — from sculptural works to altered books to the more traditional looking offset and letterpress printed variety. We went to the museum toward the start of my visit, and the show provided conversation fodder for the rest of the week.
Trying to explain “artist’s book” to most people is difficult, and I’m always happy to have a good visual explanation to go along with my words. So when a friend sent me a copy of the very elegant catalog from the exhibition (available from Amazon here), I was really excited! The large color photographs are lovely, and each one has a short artist’s statement. On many occassions I’ve paged through the catalog, sometimes for inspiration and at others just for some eye candy.
The variety of structures — scrolls, pop-ups, accordions, and boxes — is probably what keeps me coming back to this book. On the left is a photo of one of the works from the show, Katherine Glover’s Green Salad. In her statement, she says the book uses a “triple Turkish map-fold structure (which) both conceals and reveals a poem nestled in the lettuce leaves.” (Instructions for folding a turkish mapfold are here.) And you can see some of the other books from the show on Amazon.