Gallery Exhibition

Our distinguished juror

H&BN thanks Tony White for joining us as this year’s outside juror for Familiar Relics.  Mr. White is the Director of the Decker Library at the Maryland Institute College of Art.  He is the first Field Editor for Artist’s Books and Books for Artists for the College Art Association’s online reviews journal caareviews.org.  Prior to that he was on the editorial board for the Journal of Artist’s Books.  He is a Founding board member of the College Book Art Association.  He is also a founder and continuing member of the organizing committee for the Contemporary Artist’s Book Conference held each fall in NYC in conjunction with the New York Art Book Fair.  He is an independent curator with over 10 years of experience. He has curated exhibitions at the Center for Book Arts in Manhattan, the Lilly Library for Rare Books, Sterling Library at Yale University, Art Space New Haven, Columbia College’s Center for Book and Paper Arts, and the Museum of Printing History, to note a few.  In addition he has been making artist’s books for over 20 years.  Mr. White has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MLS from Indiana University.  He is on the board of trustees for the Kinsey Institute, and is a Fellow at the Center for Integrative Photographic Studies at Indiana University.

Submissions deadline extended to August 1

June couldn’t hold them all so we have extended our deadline to August 1.  H&BN has already received some exciting entries.  We want more!

Familiar Relics

As part of Handmade & Bound Nashville, Vol. 2, a juried gallery exhibition of handmade artists’ books titled Familiar Relics will be on display in the Currey Gallery at Watkins College of Art, Design & Film.

Book artists occupy a distinct place in the evolution of print. In questioning the very concept of the book—its form, its intention—artists’ books have the power to mediate the relationship between reader and vessel, content and form. As the notion of the book rapidly changes, book artists take on an increasingly important and challenging role. Books are no longer bound by paper substrate; digital books, downloadable print, and electronic media have all permeated our cultural landscape, altering the delivery of images and written words. This is a massive shift, one that has happened quickly, and through which a new paradigm of artistic communication has been formed. What was once familiar has been transformed into the mysterious, at once contiguous with antiquity and emblematic of a bold future. Books are relics, yet constantly changing and with that change come new possibilities.

Communication theorist Marshall McLuhan presciently wrote that “as the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.” This begs the question; how do we, as artists, use our techniques to define these new relationships? How do we envision the future of artists’ books? How do we reconcile the past and future of the book?

For Familiar Relics, we invite artists to submit works that speak both to the familiarity and the evolution of the book.

Familiar Relics
Apply here

Artists will submit images of their work using the CaFÉ (Call for Entries) online artists’ submission system. Artists may submit up to three (3) original artists’ books for juried exhibition. For each original work, artists must submit at least one (1) and no more than three (3) images.

The deadline for submitting an application is July 1.