Books and Artists Books (and Critical Thinking about Books)
What is a book? What makes a book an artist book, and what makes a book art? The sources in this section chronicle the evolution of the book as a medium both physically and conceptually, exploring the role of the artist book throughout history and political movements while providing salient visual examples.
Tufts Resources
Artist Author by
#Catalog of a travelling exhibition held at the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Greensboro, N.C., Feb. 8-Aug. 12, 1998; and five other art museums, Aug. 31, 1998-Dec. 18, 1999.#Includes bibliographical references and index.
Call Number: SMFA: N7433.3 .L37 1998
Artists' Books by
"This anthology is the first in-depth look at artists' bookworks. A series of essays, written by longtime participants in and observers of the field, address the following questions: what are the origins, attributes, and what is the potential of artsists' books; what are their historical precedents; what issues are they addressing; who is making and publishing them? The essays are supplemented by extensive bibliographies and a list of collections. In addition to providing a much-needed resource for artists, teachers, and collectors, this book will form a bridge between book artists and their audience by providing ready access to information about a much discussed but little known art form."--Book jacket flap.
Call Number: SMFA and Tisch: N7433.3 .A75 1985
Copy Machine Manifestos by
'Excellent.' - The New Yorker The first publication dedicated to artists' zines in North America, a revelatory exploration of an unexamined but thriving aesthetic practice Copy Machine Manifestos captures the rich history of artists' zines as never before, placing them in the lineage of the visual arts and exploring their vibrant growth over the past five decades. Fully illustrated with hundreds of zine covers and interiors, alongside work in other media, such as painting, photography, film, video, and performance, the book also features brief biographies for more than 100 zine-makers including Beverly Buchanan, Mark Gonzales, G.B. Jones, Miranda July, Bruce LaBruce, Terence Koh, LTTR, Ari Marcopoulos, Mark Morrisroe, Raymond Pettibon, Brontez Purnell, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Kandis Williams. Accompanying a major exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, this expansive book, bound as a paperback with a separate jacket, focuses on zines from North America, celebrating how artists have harnessed the medium's essential role in community building and transforming material and conceptual approaches to making art across all media since 1970.
Call Number: SMFA: Z286.Z54 J67 2023
Freedom of the Presses by
The artist's book as activist tactic: a toolkit Freedom of the Presses is at once a textbook and a toolbox for using artists' books and creative publications to further community engagement and social justice projects. Far from being a staid survey of an art historical practice, Freedom of the Presses intervenes in an ongoing discussion about art and activism in the present day by considering the place of the art book in the 21st century. The publisher, Booklyn, has been involved in this conversation since 1999, when a group of six artists decided to band together to promote contemporary artists' books and publications. Booklyn's focus has always been voracious, encompassing street art, punk and activist culture alongside more conventional artists' books. This restless energy is present in Freedom of the Presses, which brings together a provocative mix of humorous, intimate and scholarly writing in order to expand how we think about the concept, content, design, production and distribution of artists' and activists' publications today. Aimed at a global community of librarians, publishers and readers, it offers models of how to reimagine contemporary artists' bookmaking as a socially engaged, political practice. With essays by Kurt Allerslev, Tia Blassingame, Sarah Kirk Hanley, FLY-O, Karen Eliot, Richard J. Lee, Florencia San Mart n, Ganzeer, Suzy Taraba, Stephen Dupont, Bridget Elmer, Janelle Rebel, Marshall Weber, Anton Wurth, Xu Bing, Deborah Ultan and Aaron Sinift, Freedom of the Presses enacts the dialogue it calls for, inviting artists and activists to weigh in on the place of artists' books in the most pressing social, political and cultural issues of our time.
Call Number: SMFA: N7433.3 .F74 2018
The JAB Anthology by
This anthology of articles selected from The Journal of Artists' Books contains some of the best critical writing on artists' books produced in the last quarter of a century. Driven by the editorial vision of artist Brad Freeman, JAB began as a provocative pamphlet and expanded to become a significant journal documenting artists' books from multiple perspectives. With its range of participants and approaches, JAB provided a unique venue for sustained critical writing in the field and developed a broad subscriber base among institutional and private collectors and readers. More than two hundred writers and artists from nearly two dozen countries around the globe were published in its pages. The JAB Anthology contains contributions by many renowned figures in the field including: Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, Janet Zweig, Monica Carroll, Adam Dickerson, Alisa Scudamore, Mary Jo Pauly, April Sheridan, Doro Boehme, Gerrit Jan de Rook, Océane Delleaux, Brandon Graham, Jérôme Dupeyrat, Ward Tietz, Paulo Silveira, Philip Cabau, Leszek Brogowski, Lyn Ashby, Tim Mosely, Debra Parr, Pedro Moura, Levi Sherman, Catarina Figueiredo Cardoso, Isabel Baraona, and the editors.
Call Number: SMFA: N7433.3 .J33 2023
Publishing Manifestos by
Manifestos by artists, authors, editors, publishers, designers, zinesters explore publishing as artistic practice.Independent publishing, art publishing, publishing as artistic practice, publishing counterculture, and the zine, DIY, and POD scenes have proliferated over the last two decades. So too have art book fairs, an increasingly important venue-or even medium-for art. Art publishing experienced a similar boom in the 1960s and 1970s, in response to the culture's "linguistic turn." Today, art publishing confronts the internet and the avalanche of language and images that it enables. The printed book offers artists both visibility and tangibility. Publishing Manifestos gathers texts by artists, authors, editors, publishers, designers, zinesters, and activists to explore this rapidly expanding terrain for art practice.The book begins in the last century, with texts by Gertrude Stein, El Lissitsky, Oswald de Andrade, and Jorge-Luis Borges. But the bulk of the contributions are from the twenty-first century, with an emphasis on diversity, including contributions from Tauba Auerbach, Mariana Castillo Deball, Ntone Edjabe, Girls Like Us, Karl Holmqvist, Temporary Services, and zubaan. Some contributors take on new forms of production and distribution; others examine the political potential of publishing and the power of collectivity inherent in bookmaking. They explore among other topics, artists' books, appropriation, conceptual writing, non-Western communities, queer identities, and post-digital publishing. Many texts are reproduced in facsimile-including a handwritten "speculative, future-forward newspaper" from South Africa. Some are proclamatory mission statements, others are polemical self-positioning; some are playful, others explicitly push the boundaries. All help lay the conceptual foundations of a growing field of practice and theory.Contributors AND Publishing, Oswald de Andrade, Archive Books, Art-Rite, Rasheed Araeen, Tauba Auerbach, Michael Baers, Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, Ricardo Basbaum, Derek Beaulieu, Bernadette Corporation, Riccardo Boglione, Bombay Underground, Jorge Luis Borges, bpNichol, Kate Briggs, Broken Dimanche Press, Eleanor Vonne Brown, Urvashi Butalia, Ulises Carri n, Mariana Castillo Deball, Paul Chan, Chimurenga, Arpita Das, Anita Di Bianco, Guy Debord, Constant Dullaart, Craig Dworkin, Ntone Edjabe, Zenon Fajfer, Marina Fokidis, General Idea, Annette Gilbert, Girls Like Us, Gloria Glitzer, Marianne Groulez, Alex Hamburger, Karl Holmqvist, Lisa Holzer, Mahmood Jamal, Tom Jennings, Ray Johnson, David Jourdan, Sharon Kivland, Kione Kochi, Kwani?, Bruce LaBruce, Tan Lin, El Lissitzky, Alessandro Ludovico, Sara MacKillop, Steve McCaffery, Jonathan Monk, Simon Morris, Mosireen, Le n Munoz Santini, Takashi Murakami, Deke Nihilson, Aurelie Noury, Johnny Noxzema, Clive Phillpot, Michalis Pichler, Seth Price, Riot Grrrl, Carlos Soto Roman, Allen Ruppersberg, Joachim Schmid, Oliver Sieber, Paul Soulellis, Matthew Stadler, Gertrude Stein, Paul Stephens, Hito Steyerl, Mladen Stilinovic, Katja Stuke, Temporary Services, Nick Thurston, TIQQUN, Elisabeth Tonnard, V. Vale, Eric Watier, Erik van der Weijde, Lawrence Weiner, Eva Weinmayr, Jan Wenzel, Stephen Willats, Gil J Wolman, zubaanCopublished with Miss Read- The Berlin Art Book Fair
Call Number: Tisch: PN6071.A83 P83 2019
Open Access
Book Fairs
Community is an essential part of Ulises’ ethos as an artist and artist book space, and book fairs are a crucial gathering point for the larger printing community, giving publishers and artists a chance to show their work and meet colleagues in the field. The sources below provide examples of books from book fairs, as well as information on local book fairs.
Tufts Resource
Materialia Lumina by
Published in conjunction with an exhibition at Stanford University Libraries and the Boston Athenaeum, this volume shows how contemporary artists books integrate concept, materials, and technique in a way that allows high craft to converge with high concept and result in a book art object. The selection appears as part of an archival enterprise geared towards a cultural record of this moment in which we live. Each artists book has been diligently presented on the initiative of the CODEX Foundation, which aims to preserve and promote the handmade book as a work of art, bringing public recognition to the artists, craftsmanship, and rich history of the civilisation of the book.
Call Number: SMFA: N7433.3 .M394 2022
Open Access
Similar artists/collectives
Artists never truly work alone, and their work is always situated within larger patterns, both drawing inspiration from and giving inspiration to others. The sources compiled in this section detail other collections and spaces similar to Ulises and offer valuable insight into the wider scope of artists books, publishing, and space-making.
Tufts Resources
Artist-Run Spaces by
This volume was developed in collaboration with founders of important and exemplary artist-run spaces of the 1960s-1970s.It represents the first extensive research on this subject and introduces spaces such as Art Metropole in Toronto, Artpool in Budapest, Ecart in Geneva, Franklin Furnace in New York, MOCA in San Francisco, La Mamelle in San Francisco, Printed Matter in New York, Western Front in Vancouver, and Zona in Florence.The founders of these artist-run spaces include Carl Andre, John Armleder, AA Bronson, Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard, Tom Marioni, and Maurizio Nannucci. At a time of transition to new aesthetic approaches, these artists promoted community spirit and organizational skills, pioneering a revaluation of traditional art concepts.The book documents not only the activities of these spaces, but also maps the artistic strategies and positions that took currency during this period. It thus shows how the inner life of collective self-organization and the exchange between like-minded artist-run spaces developed dynamically.The book is part of the Documents series and is co-published with Zona Archives.
Call Number: SMFA: N8520 .A785 2012
Artists' Magazines by
During the 1960s and 1970s, magazines became an important new site of artistic practice, functioning as an alternative exhibition space for the dematerialized practices of conceptual art. Artists created works expressly for these mass-produced, hand-editioned pages, using the ephemerality and the materiality of the magazine to challenge the conventions of both artistic medium and gallery. In Artists' Magazines, Gwen Allen looks at the most important of these magazines in their heyday (the 1960s to the 1980s) and compiles a comprehensive, illustrated directory of hundreds of others. Among the magazines Allen examines are Aspen (1965--1971), a multimedia magazine in a box -- issues included Super-8 films, flexi-disc records, critical writings, artists' postage stamps, and collectible chapbooks; Avalanche (1970-1976), which expressed the countercultural character of the emerging SoHo art community through its interviews and artist-designed contributions; and Real Life (1979-1994), published by Thomas Lawson and Susan Morgan as a forum for the Pictures generation. These and the other magazines Allen examines expressed their differences from mainstream media in both form and content: they cast their homemade, do-it-yourself quality against the slickness of an Artforum, and they created work that defied the formalist orthodoxy of the day. Artists' Magazines, featuring abundant color illustrations of magazine covers and content, offers an essential guide to a little-explored medium.
Call Number: SMFA and Tisch: N6490 .A58 2011
Open Access
Copy of Hardworking Goodlooking_Mosquito Press
Bookmaking and Printing Processes
Understanding of the materiality of books is key to appreciating books as an art form and grasping the specificities of artist books. The sources in this section outline the various processes used in bookmaking, both historically and currently, as well as provide step-by-step guides for readers to create their own artist books.
Tufts Resource
Creating Artists' Books by
- Cutting-edge idea - Titles on altered books are topping sales charts - Packed with valuable artists' resources--galleries, bookstores, Web sites, book fairs, exhibitions Famous artists from David Hockney and Andy Warhol to Gilbert and George have created their own books--distinctive bound collections of work, sometimes variations on the popular altered-book craze. Now any artist can follow in the booksteps of these well-known muses, with the help of Creating Artists' Books. Author Sarah Bodman, an expert on artists' books, gives wonderful inspiration and practical guidance on printmaking processes for making books, digital output and computer-based books, assembling books with limited resources, and creating altered books. An invaluable appendix lists bookstores and galleries that sell and exhibit artists' book; book arts collections, archives, and organizations; book fairs; related Web sites; and more. Creating Artists' Books is packed with ideas, inspiration, and information from cover to cover.
Call Number: SMFA: N7433.3 .B63 2005
Open Access
Context: Artist Collectives and Artist-Run Spaces
When we think of artists, we often think of great individuals, toiling away in their studies. Artist collectives present another way of working that is inherently collaborative and that challenges dominant art world assumptions. Artist-run-spaces similarly embody a new paradigm of artistic spaces outside of galleries and museums that are often more experimental in nature. The sources in this section provide useful context and history for understanding how Ulises operates, what makes it novel, and how it is situated in the larger art ecosystem.
Tufts Resources
- Artist-Run Spaces by
This volume was developed in collaboration with founders of important and exemplary artist-run spaces of the 1960s-1970s.It represents the first extensive research on this subject and introduces spaces such as Art Metropole in Toronto, Artpool in Budapest, Ecart in Geneva, Franklin Furnace in New York, MOCA in San Francisco, La Mamelle in San Francisco, Printed Matter in New York, Western Front in Vancouver, and Zona in Florence.The founders of these artist-run spaces include Carl Andre, John Armleder, AA Bronson, Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard, Tom Marioni, and Maurizio Nannucci. At a time of transition to new aesthetic approaches, these artists promoted community spirit and organizational skills, pioneering a revaluation of traditional art concepts.The book documents not only the activities of these spaces, but also maps the artistic strategies and positions that took currency during this period. It thus shows how the inner life of collective self-organization and the exchange between like-minded artist-run spaces developed dynamically.The book is part of the Documents series and is co-published with Zona Archives.
Call Number: SMFA: N8520 .A785 2012
The One and the Many by
Collaborative and collective art practices have proliferated around the world over the past fifteen years. In The One and the Many, Grant H. Kester provides an overview of the broader continuum of collaborative art, ranging from the work of artists and groups widely celebrated in the mainstream art world, such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Superflex, Francis Alÿs, and Santiago Sierra, to the less-publicized projects of groups, such as Park Fiction in Hamburg, Networking and Initiatives for Culture and the Arts in Myanmar, Ala Plastica in Argentina, Huit Facettes in Senegal, and Dialogue in central India. The work of these groups often overlaps with the activities of NGOs, activists, and urban planners. Kester argues that these parallels are symptomatic of an important transition in contemporary art practice, as conventional notions of aesthetic autonomy are being redefined and renegotiated. He describes a shift from a concept of art as something envisioned beforehand by the artist and placed before the viewer, to the concept of art as a process of reciprocal creative labor. The One and the Many presents a critical framework that addresses the new forms of agency and identity mobilized by the process of collaborative production.
Call Number: SMFA and Tisch: BH301.C84 K478 2011
Open Access