Corina Reynolds
Interview realised in winter 2024
Founded in 1974, Center for Book Arts (CBA) is the oldest nonprofit organization dedicated to artists’ books. Could we please go back in history and talk a bit about CBA’s origins? I was curious to know a little more about who created CBA? How? Why?
Center for Book Arts was founded by the artist Richard Minsky in the early 1970’s—a time when many artists were beginning to take an interest in the book as an artistic medium. The idea for a book art center came to Minsky after a conversation with the then Director of the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington D.C., Abram Lerner. In 1970, Minsky had been hired to
photograph artworks in the Museum’s collections and, after documenting more than 2000 works, he asked why there were no artists’ books included among them and how that could be changed. Lerner suggested that an organization promoting the book as art was the only way to gain the attention of museum curators and validation for the medium.
When Minsky returned to New York, he saw the need for a space where artists, bookbinders, designers, printers, and writers could share studios and equipment, collaborate, and exhibit books as art and, in 1974 he started the first Center for Book Arts on Bleeker Street in New York City. Almost 50 years later, artists continue to find support in this center through access to specialized studios and equipment, artist residencies, exhibitions of artists’ books, a collection of reference books and artworks, a diverse array of workshops promoting a broader understanding of the medium, and a community.
At CBA, one of your missions is to collect and preserve artists’ books, but also to make exhibitions of them. To me, there is always something tricky about showing books as they have been made in a way that requires the viewer to open and manipulate them, but at the same time, as they are art works, part of your responsibility is also to preserve them, to create a sort of memory or repertoire of the different forms that have been created. How do you deal with those questions in the way you curate shows? Is the public allowed to manipulate books?
This is one of the most important and interesting aspects of the book as an artistic medium. On the one hand, they are meant to be intimately experienced—touched, smelled, listened to—and on the other they are meant for a public—publication means to make public which implies that they are intended to be passed from person to person, sold in shops, and discussed by the masses. Book art exists all along this spectrum from the unique object to the multiple which is one of the reasons it has captivated my attention. In a way, book art is one of the most accessible mediums an artist can participate in. An artists’ book could be made out of almost anything (ex. Dieter Roth’s daily mirror book, 1961 an edition of 220 books made completely out of used newspapers), in any quantity (ex. Pet Book, 1988 by James Prez which is a hand drawn unique book, approximately one centimeter squared, bound with a single staple), and can communicate through a multitude of languages, be completely visual, or even be completely devoid of visual or linguistic content (our collection even includes an edition that communicates completely through scent, ind.must.y, 2021 by Augustine Zegers).
The broad range of formats and editions does present a unique challenge for exhibiting book art. Nearly everyone has heard the phrase, ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover,’ but with artists’ books that is often the case. Artists that work in the book form often pay special attention to pacing, the visual relationship of image to text which requires the viewer to turn through the whole book before fully understanding the artwork. Yet many of the museum exhibitions we see of artists’ books don’t do the medium justice because of the need to protect rare and limited editions. It is not uncommon to be presented with only the cover or one spread of an open book. Even further, they are often presented in vitrines among archival ephemera including correspondence, ticket stubs, or newspaper clippings which further diminishes the viewer’s ability to understand the book as a work of art. Back in 2020, I had a conversation with the then Chief Curator of Photography at MoMA, Clément Chéroux, about ideas of how to present photobooks at the museum to an audience so large (each day MoMA commands an audience of nearly 4,000 people). Since turning the pages of a book 4000 times a day would surely ruin it, one of our ideas was to either commission a special in-museum handling edition that could accommodate the large number of readers (museums often pay photographers to make exhibition prints, so why should a photobook be any different?)
At Center for Book Arts our audience is much more manageable. For durable or easily replaced artists’ books we encourage handling the way the artist originally intended. And for items that are rare or too delicate to handle we often make a handling facsimile. Our recent exhibition Off-Register: Publishing Experiments by Women in Latin American, 1960-1990 curated by Méla Davila Freire, offered visitors the opportunity to turn the pages of facsimiles of artists’ publications from the early 1960’s—a rare opportunity for the public to be able to read the entirety of some of these books.
Because not all museums are able to be as accommodating as Center for Book Arts is with its collections, we are excited to be convening a workshop this year (2024) for early and mid-career Drawings and Prints Curators, generously funded by The Getty Foundation’s Paper Project, that will develop new best practices for exhibiting artists’ books in the museum context. The week-long event will provide curators with the opportunity to make, handle, and discuss a variety of book forms while also involving senior professionals from art museums in New York to look back into the history of how this medium has been exhibited and develop something that better meets the needs of the viewing public.
One aspect of Center for Book Arts is that you provide a space dedicated to production for bookbinding and printing, you have a Riso printer, letterpress, etc. Is this also part of your educational program?
Yes! Since its founding, studio access and education have been core to the mission of Center for Book Arts. We have a roster of about 55 Artist Instructors who teach specialized techniques in book making and printing. These workshops often take place in our Manhattan studios, but certain classes are also offered online so that a broader range of people can learn from these incredible artists and scholars. One of my favorite workshops is taught by our Founder Richard Minsky—a Book Art Critique Workshop that is focused on helping participants learn how to develop a critical framework for speaking about a piece of book art (whether their own or someone else’s). These types of courses that aim to expand the participant’s understanding of the book art landscape are just as important as the technique based workshops that are offered in our studios because they aim to balance the weight of process/material and concept/metaphor.
Center for Book Arts collection is very large, either it is in terms of time range, or in terms of forms. The collection is indeed made of what we call artists editions, but also art books about books, ephemera, posters, etc. How would you describe your collection and what would be the guiding lines?
That is a great question! Because of how our collection developed, the collecting guidelines and priorities have changed over the years. In the early years, many of the items in our collection were practical. Books about bookbinding and printing processes were an important resource for artists who were developing the field. Today we have over 2,400 reference books cataloged ranging from how-to books, to book art exhibition catalogues, to artists monographs focused on the book form, critical source books, and of my favorite collecting areas right now is around the theory of artists’ publishing. Our fine art collection developed out of our exhibitions program and the artists who have made work in our studios. We have books from our early exhibitions like Stories your Mother Never Told You which included the 1979 artwork A Modern-Day Cowboy by Stephanie Brody Lederman (CBA Collections Identifier FA.B20.0092) and It’s a Dog Eat Dog World made in 1982 by Karen Fredericks (CBA Collections Identifier FA.SA3.0038).
Today we grow our Fine Art and Reference collections through donations from private collectors and artists—we maintain a wish list of items that instructors and artists who use our studios request in case a special angel wants to support by donating an item we have already identified for acquisition. Our Librarian Gillian Lee describes our collections as ‘‘the best ever’’ and constantly emphasizes that, ‘‘we are proudly open to the public for walk-in research in our Reference Collection and flexible with research appointments that use our Fine Art Collection.’’ They are always very happy to consult with researchers about their fields of interest and to help with navigating the collections beyond the scope of our fully illustrated online database.
I would also like to talk about you and your experience, as you ran, with Kimberly McClure, Small Editions, a publishing house with which you sought to bring book arts into the realm of contemporary. You produced many programs, workshops, exhibitions, and other projects through Small Editions. Then in 2018 you became the Executive Director of Center for Book Arts. How did you come to working with artists’ books / book arts?
Artists’ books found me at a young age. In college I audited a letterpress class as a way to avoid taking a textile arts class with a syllabus focused on potholders. The course was with a book maker named Bill Kelly and quickly became involved with Brighton Press of San Diego. Bill and his partner Michele Burges (another undergraduate teacher of mine) ran the press with a group of artists and poets and I became their print devil. They introduced me to the idea of artists’ publishing, bookbinding, and printing which led me to where I am now. It wasn’t until shortly after moving to New York that books really became a part of my professional career.
In 2012 Kimberly and I started Small Editions as a way to support ourselves as artists and to have access to the tools an equipment we wanted to use. Kimberly had just finished a residency at Center for Book Arts and we started Small Editions by volunteering in exchange for studio access as we picked up odd bookbinding jobs. Within a year we were able to afford to start our own book studio which quickly also allowed us to start publishing and use the studio as an exhibition space. It was exciting to be able to introduce emerging artists to the medium of the book for art. One of my favorite publications was Please Enjoy, 2017 by the artist Sun You in which Sun used her sculpey sculptures directly on the scanner bed of our risograph printer in order to create colorful flower-like print arrangements. The book pokes fun at the miss-identification of people from the greater Asian diaspora as being from China or Japan through color and form. Not only is the book beautiful and witty, it was also incredibly fun to work with Sun throughout the project.
Around 2014 we began hosting contemporary art exhibitions in the studio. It was a lot of work because we wanted to present the artworks professionally but had limited space. So, before every event, we moved all the furniture and bookmaking equipment into the closet (shout out to Sarah Smith for all the tetris work) which turned the space into a slightly more traditional artist run gallery space. We showed the artists’ books we published alongside other artforms (painting, sculpture, video etc.) as a way of connecting more people to the idea that books could be art too.
That entire time, Small Editions became my artistic practice—I stopped making installation and video in favor of building the community of artists and publishers in New York. I think that’s what lead me to take on my current role at Center for Book Arts.
In 2021, with two collaborators you founded Book Art Review, a series of publication that propose a new critical discourse in the field, could you please tell us a bit more about this new project and its origins?
Book Art Review (BAR) was founded during the pandemic with two close friends and collaborators Megan N. Liberty and David Solo, but the conversations that led to the publication started way before that. It was really born out of conversations during the New York Art Book Fair about how there didn’t seem to be any real critical dialogue happening in and around the community. Each year we would come to the fair, see hundreds of new books, talk to new and old friends, but no one was really talking about why they were making or buying these artists’ books. It seemed like a market for artists’ books had been created without any criticism to support it. As collectors of books about artists’ books, the three of us knew this wasn’t the case, but many of our peers seemed to lack a framework needed for assessing what they were seeing and doing.
This same problem can is endemic throughout the arts writing sphere. Reviewers are underpaid or not paid at all. Many writers err on the side of promotional positivity leaving artists, collectors, and scholars in a critical vacuum. BAR sets out to raise the bar for book art criticism. We called for new writing that considers the artists’ book’s bookness (asked how the paper, binding, printing, and design affected the artwork), that connected the work to a larger history of artists’ books, art, and culture, and that was easy to read.
Today we are working on our third issue (when we launched, we had ambitions of two issues per year, it’s really turned out to be closer to one) as volunteer editors. We are always looking for new writers (we pay!) and people interested in getting involved in an editorial capacity. We are also always looking for new book recommendations.
You have been publishing books, you lead workshops and talks, you are now executive director of CBA, you founded Book Art Review, I was curious to know your thoughts on contemporary publishing practices.
I think artists have it tough right now—materials and shipping are getting more expensive, normal people are spending less on art, and book stores continue to take a 50% consignment fee. To me this points to a greater need for collective resource sharing, alternative distribution models, and some serious creative thinking. Not surprisingly this is exactly what we are seeing. Artists are forming collectives to publish and support their communities. A great example of this is Black Mass who uses their publishing as a platform for collaboration community uplifting. We can expect to see more and more focus on collective publishing models as artistic practice instead of a focus on the individual artist publisher. Also, as in previous generations, we are seeing artistic publishing being used in service of the artists’ goals for social and environmental change. Just as artists of the 1960’s used zines to spread ideas of radical feminism, today we see a focus on transgender rights among many other causes.