Course Details

Unlike printed books filled with text, artists’ books are made of unconventional materials: cloth, old maps, pressed soda cans, glass, folded carboard, wood cubes, wax, and many more surprising materials. Their designs, even more than their minimalistic texts, tell stories, create meanings, and impact the lives of those who handle them. Reading with both our minds and bodies while handling some of them, students will unfold or unpack them, bend or move around them in order to follow the journeys their creators have conceived for us. During our visits to the UW Special Collections, students will handle the most extraordinary objects: Julie Chen’s Accretion of Identity, a box containing 4 levels of paper folded boxes that share her coming-of-age as a Chinese American; Maureen Cummins’ Crazy Quilt, which challenges us to unfold the quilt-shaped “book” and feel the suffering of Black enslaved women; and, among other artefacts, Beth Thielen’s The Tower, a small replica of a prison tower, inside which there are powerful testimonials written by San Quentin Prison inmates. Students will thus approach their powerful political, social, ecological, and personal statements through direct experience, guided by fundamental texts on artists books written by Stefan Kilma, Elaine Speight & Charles Quick, and Johanna Drucker. The class will also have the opportunity to design their own artists’ books in two workshops run by the local artist Becky Johnston, who will teach us how to make a flag book and a triangle book, for which we will write a short text.