Since the beginning of mark-making, artists have been documenting through narrative images their experiences, the world around them, and the cycles of life. The book is a natural form for containing these kinds of stories.
Artists’ books are their own medium. This type of work presents artists with a way of developing aesthetic ideas, telling personal stories, or making political or social commentary. The form is inherently dramatic and suspenseful. It takes time to turn the pages: images and text unfold, change happens, and the reader/viewer experiences that change in an embodied way.
Prompt: Locate a “collection” of images, texts, letters, postcards, snapshot photographs, post-it notes, anything you find interesting and evocative that connects to a certain period in your life: past, present, future. Make copies of gathered materials and experiment with how to present your collection in a book format.
Artists’ books are works of art that use the book form as a fully expressive and experimental medium, the same way that painting, drawing, or any other medium breaks tradition in service to the imagination of the artist. For example, in many of my own artist books, I work with alternative materials such as glass or metal.
Share: Share on Instagram and Facebook with #thedrawkingston. Tag us @thedrawkingston.
Maureen Cummins, TheRapist.
Learn More About Maureen cummins and artist books
Maureen’s In Edition Art Book Class
During a 4-day book workshop at The D.R.A.W., students made limited edition books that combined text and imagery in innovative ways. Maureen gave the students complete freedom to design the form and to choose the subject matter of their book. All of them chose their own life experience as inspiration for narrative arcs.
Student work from Maureen’s In Edition class: Joel Mason, “Selections from the Sketchbooks 1963–1993, With Notes by the Artist” depicts a series of sketchbooks of the artist's work that changed over time joelmasonstudio.com @jjjmason
Maureen Cummins, Ghost Diary
Maureen Cummins, Ghost Diary
Student work from Maureen’s In Edition class: MarieElena Ferrar, “This Tension Generates a Divided & Flexible ID/Entity” draws on her experience as an immigrant in the United States to describe the universal sense of being “caught between two worlds.”
Student work from Maureen’s In Edition class: Lisa B Kelley, “Agrigento, A Dream Evocation” documents her journey to Southern Italy and the subsequent performance art piece she produced and performed in 2005 @lisa.b.kelley
Artist Books and Their Meaningful History
A book often cited as the “first modern artist’s book” is Ed Rusche’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations.
A more current, and much more politically charged, example of sequential, “book-like” imagery, is Lorna Simpson’s Five Day Forecast. In this photographic work, Simpson uses repetition of imagery—the headless torso of an African-American woman—to protest the experience of objectification and “othering” of people of color. The “change” that occurs from one photo to the next is so subtle as to be almost imperceptible. What effect does this repetition of images have on you as a reader/viewer? And why did the artist choose to make each image slightly different? What emotional effect does this have?
A fantastic collection of internationally collected limited edition, handmade artists’ books has been produced at Women’s Studio Workshop, located in Rosendale,NY.
Screenshot of Womens Studio Workshop’s Books & Collections
