artists' books

Right now the display cases at the Brooklyn Museum Libraries contain a selection of our holdings of artists’ books from the Women’s Studio Workshop. These books complement the exhibition entitled “Hand, Voice & Vision: Artists’ Books from Women’s Studio Workshop” being held at the Grolier Club from December 8, 2010 through February 5, 2011.

Several MoMA Library staff members are heavily involved in an exciting upcoming event, the 3rd annual Contemporary Artists' Books Conference, to be held at PS1 on November 5-6. The conference is sponsored by Printed Matter, and held in conjunction with the NY Art Book Fair.  The program will include speakers, panels, artists' presentations, and receptions.

Since its conscious decision in 1970 to begin actively collecting artists’ books, the Brooklyn Museum Library has amassed a varied and substantial collection comprised of over 2,500 titles, and further supported by numerous artists’ files, and related exhibition catalogues and relevant publications.  Now, with the recently acquired Smoller Gift, generously donated to the Brooklyn Museum from Arnold Smoller, the collection has been further enriched and expanded by the inclusion of over 40 artists’ books and livres d’artiste.

We are thrilled to receive Thea Westreich and Ethan Wagner’s library. These books will enhance the Brooklyn Museum’s Library especially in the areas of modern and contemporary art. For more information about this donation, please view the press release.

Over the past twenty years Arnold Smoller, and his wife Nancy, have been donors to the Brooklyn Museum presenting us with prints from their personal collection and helping us acquire artists’ books when we had the Artists' Book exhibition on view here back in 2000. We are now thrilled to announce that over 40 books from Arnold’s collection have been given to the Brooklyn Museum to enhance its collection of artists’ books and livres d’artiste!

In 2009, The Museum of Modern Art’s Library Council published one of its most important efforts to date: a hand-printed scroll (the ancient "book form" of Asia) by the artist Yun-Fei Ji titled The Three Gorges Dam Migration.  The eight-foot-long image, at first glance resembling a traditional Chinese landscape, depicts the flooded landscapes of the Three Gorges area in contemporary China; it reproduces, in the artist's calligraphy, historic and contemporary accounts of the Yangtze River and the upheaval caused by the construction of the world’s largest dam.

Barack Obama's first hundred days are over but artists are just getting started responding to his administration. While Shepard Fairey's Hope is now iconic, did you know that Obama has teamed up with the Youngblood superhero team? That in comic-land he got drafted to save the post-apocolyptic future? Or that he joined forces with Lycra-clad Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton to vanquish demonized versions of George Bush and Dick Cheney?