Now that the artist's book is so familiar, it's startling to remember that just thirty years ago the term "artist's book" did not yet exist, and 25 years ago many viewers ques-tioned whether such works should be called books. This exhibition traces the development of the artist's book from the '50s and '60s, when the Bay Area's lively literary small press scene and strong book arts tradition nurtured the '70s emergence of the artist's book. You'll see some incunabula from the '70s and selected exemplars from among the many Bay Area artists who have made substantial bodies of work in the artist's book during its '80s maturation and its remarkable '90s expansion. Along the way, you'll see how these Bay Area guardians of the artist's book reveal its characteristic concerns: exploring a wide range of materials for their content value, expanding book structure, integrating image and text, providing a locus for the artist/writer as well as the purely visual book, reimagining reading, reaching out beyond the gallery context to disseminate editions of affordable art or pushing the envelope of the gallery to accommodate an intimate, sequential art form that needs to be touched & turned.
For reasons of space, several important areas of book-making by artists (such as fine press livres d'artiste) have been deferred for future exhibitions to address.
—Betsy Davids
The exhibit is divided into sections by decade. Click on the time
period below to see images of the books as well as more from the
curators.
1945-1980 
1980-1995
1995-present
